The Deed (20 page)

“Pretty well,” Jason replied mechanically, bit by bit dragging himself back to her world. “Real well, actually. I supposedly have his eyes and her nose. I know I have his work ethic, his attention to detail. His manners, maybe. He used to pull some wacky shit, but he was charming enough to get away with it. I got a little of that from him, I hope. What else? He was a pretty conservative guy; he wanted to be more liberal than he really was. He always tried to be fair, but I think deep down he preferred order to justice.”

“Mmm,” she nodded. “And Mom?”

“Well…I have her sense of humor,” Jason continued. “Mom was one of those late-sixties bedroom feminists. She did the dishes and the laundry, and brought Dad a beer whenever he snapped his fingers. But she always knew how to get exactly what she wanted. I mean, from day one, he completely worshiped her.”

“That’s sweet,” said Amanda softly.

“They were really fantastic, you know.” He paused, remembering. “So much in love.”

“You’re lucky,” she said simply.

He put his hand out the window again, felt the breeze ripple across the fine hairs. “I really had no idea just how abnormal it was,” he replied dreamily, snaking his hand in and out of the slipstream.

They crossed the Hudson just after one, beetling around the lazy curves of the mighty Tappan Zee, where a blustery crosswind compelled them to close the windows. Amanda was by now enjoying herself immensely. She seemed enormously energized, and kept drawing his attention to this or that roadside attraction in a hyperactive, touristy way. Encouraged and well-rested, Jason swung into full courtship mode, doing his best to crack her up at every turn and succeeding more often than not. If he was being uncomfortably aggressive, she didn’t let on.

On the far side of the bridge, they found a town with a tree-lined main street and an agreeably quaint diner and stopped for lunch. Jason performed his smooth urbanity for the parochial waitress, who frowned in confusion at all the right spots. The Hallmark moment came when his “burger with the works” arrived looking suspiciously thin, and he lifted the top bun to reveal a single, pitiful, quarter-size disk of onion.

“I’d better not eat that,” he deadpanned. “I might get
a
bad breath.” It was a throwaway line, but it tickled the hell out of Amanda, for whatever reason, and she smiled a broad, sly, indescribably intimate smile that kicked the rest of the world out of focus. Basking, Jason caught a knowing look from the old cashier, then a waitress, and it occurred to him suddenly that everyone in the place was rooting for him. He returned a few smiles, nodding in a neighborly way, as if to say:
Don’t look at me—I don’t know what’s going on here any better than you.

“Left of that barn,” said Amanda, pointing ahead, through the windshield. “See it?”

“Nope.”

“Up on top of the hill?”

“Got it,” said Jason. “But your pal at the Amoco said the
third
right.”

“But it’s
there,
” she countered, tapping the glass in the direction of a scattered Stonehenge of gray markers atop a modest little hill, girded by a rambling wrought-iron fence. “How many hilltop graveyards you think there are in this one-horse town?”

With his nod of assent, she nosed the car onto the hardscrabble un-paved road that climbed toward the cemetery gates. Deep, rocky ruts slowed their progress to a frustrating crawl; as they slowly crested the summit, the cemetery gradually revealed itself to be much larger than it had appeared from the valley below, a great circle comprising perhaps two acres of tombstones ringed around a squat brick cottage at the yard’s center. Outside the black iron fence that encircled the whole, a handful of actual sheep, startling in their nonchalance, munched peacefully. The road, such as it was, continued right on through the massive gates standing open before them, but Amanda pulled off just outside the fence and shut the engine down.

Jason was suddenly conscious of a large and awesome rural silence, the wind in the grass, some scattered insects buzzing. He could practically hear the chewing of cud.

“Quiet as the grave,” he murmured.

Amanda turned to face him. “So, you excited?” she asked, grinning, in a tone that would brook no disagreement. Infected, he returned the smile.

“Maybe.”

She shrugged. “Stay in the car, then.”

Jason rolled his eyes and unlatched his door, and Amanda needed no further encouragement.

The weedy grass grew thick and high inside the spidery iron fence, beyond the reach of ovine maws, rippled with veins of blue and yellow wildflowers, a pretty pastoral picture framed by the impressively ornate gates.

Armed with her camera and his sketchpad, they stepped into the ring and looked around at the boneyard. Beginning ten or twelve feet inside the fence, stone grave markers in grays and browns filled the yard in roughly concentric rings that converged on the cottage at the yard’s center, the circles broken only by the single spoke of the road, which led straight up to the cottage, at the absolute peak of the hill. The grass, shorn close in the spiraling six-foot lanes that separated rings of stones, had been left standing between individual graves in each ring, thriving on its unspeakable fertilizer.

The place was deserted, apart from a couple of cars and a single pair of visitors: an old man towing a little boy by one arm and squinting with ancient eyes at the weathered gravestones. The boy, forlorn or just restless, gripped a small novelty American flag by its wooden stick and followed the old man from grave to grave.

In respectfully hushed tones, Jason and Amanda agreed to start their search for Hansvoort graves at the road near the entrance, splitting up to cover parallel rows and gradually working their way side by side counter-clockwise around the yard, behind the chapel, and back around to the entrance.

“This is awfully big,” Jason noted in a whisper, taking the very outside row. “It’s obviously not just Hansvoorts here. But any of these other names could be aunts or uncles.”

“Doesn’t matter,” said Amanda absently, eyes fixed on the old man and the boy, only a few rows off. “The vertical bloodline’s all we need, strictly speaking. Let’s just look for Hansvoorts and see where that leads us. But if you see anything that strikes a chord with you, by all means jot it down. Might help us fill in the gaps later.”

He eyed her ass appreciatively as she turned back to her work. It was just past three o’clock now, and the sun was hot on the back of his neck; as his eyes wandered across the ancient stones, drinking in the weathered record of their dead, he slowly began to relax and lose himself in the experience.

The stones were spaced far enough apart that even a normal strolling pace permitted a meticulous check of each. Jason read the brief histories, where they were legible, with growing interest, the minute chronicles of death and disease, of sundered relationships, of love and loss. Subtracting death dates from birth dates, he lingered, half consciously, whenever a life span was interestingly large or small. He became quite engrossed by the thumbnail dramas, and Amanda began to outdistance him in the tortoise race around the perimeter.

At one point, Jason found an entire row of graves whose occupants had shared a common demise: cholera.
What’s
that
like?
he wondered, walking on. He imagined the scene hundreds of years in the future, when generations might gawk at graves bearing then-unfamiliar words like “AIDS” and “Ebola.”

“Oh,
yes!
” yelped Amanda, twenty yards away.

Jason felt his heart leap into his throat; sidestepping between adjacent graves, he rushed to her side.

“‘Jon Parker Hansvoort,’” Amanda was reading aloud, with positive glee, as he approached. “Born 1812, died 1856. Forty-four years old,” she calculated. “One
a.
”

“Ho-ly shit,” Jason murmured slowly, unable to tear his eyes away from his ancestor’s chiseled name. The stone was immense, a heavy white marble number with shallow inset letters darkened by some helpful species of mold. He felt a palpable shift in his mind as, suddenly, the game became undeniably
real.
A car’s engine banged into life behind them, and he turned, startled, to see the old man and the child in a battered station wagon, slowly backing out of the yard.

“Jason, meet your ancestor,” said Amanda, removing the lens cap from the camera and dropping to one knee.

Their search was more fruitful than they’d dared to hope. Before long they were coming across a Hansvoort grave every few minutes or so, and, already conscious of the declining sun, paused just long enough to take photos and jot down the pertinent information. None of the names sounded familiar to Jason, but he welcomed them all, trying, on the fly, to stretch the scant information available into a working mental picture of each, as if doing so might breathe some measure of life back into them.

As they slowly wound their way around the circle, Jason marveled at the remarkable wrought-iron perimeter fence. Eight feet high, black and barbed and baroquely ornate, it locked death in with a fearsome mesh of spears and tulips, a testament to some long-dead ironsmith’s otherworldly dedication. Back where they’d parked, the fence rose alone from the grass, but everywhere else it was choked solid from the outside by thick, weedy shrubbery trying to crowd into the yard. Jason mentally sped up geological time and watched the wave of green crash against the fence, which shuddered and held as the grass sprouted unchecked inside, and the gravestones turned bright green with moss, fell over, and sank into the earth.

At the back of the yard, where the hedge was higher than the iron bars and quite overwhelmed it, a large section of the perimeter fence bulged into the graveyard at ninety-degree angles, as if the sheer weight of the hedge had driven a square wedge right into the concentric circles of stones, forcing new walking strategies. It was in one of the inside corners thus formed that Jason found Amanda, after her overjoyed “Bingo!” brought him running.

She knelt happily in the dirt before the last grave in a row, just two feet from the fence, pointing at the name. “‘Mary Elizabeth Ha-a-ansvoort,’” she read aloud, elongating the long-awaited double
a
with a satisfied air as Jason crouched by her side. “First of the old guard.”

“Amazing,” said Jason, shaking his head. “I’m completely fucking blown away.”

“Right?” said Amanda, smiling. “Stick with me, kid. I’m going to make you a bazillionaire.”

Composed of a reddish stone they hadn’t encountered before, Mary’s marker tipped forward slightly, and read: