When he got off the phone, I asked him if he thought he could keep the media away. He couldn’t make any promises, he said. He’d urge his people to be as discreet as possible, but if the paper or the TV news people got wind of the investigation, he wouldn’t be able to withhold information from them. “I think you better brace yourself, Caelum,” he said. “Some of my guys are pretty chummy with the reporters. And I won’t be able to control what does or doesn’t come out of the coroner’s mouth. Let’s face it: hidden remains, a mummified baby—it’s pretty sexy stuff for Live at Five and ‘Eyewitness News, details at eleven.’ I wouldn’t be surprised if you got some national media sniffing around out here. Maybe not. Maybe I’m wrong. I hope I am.”
I looked at him and sighed.
When I went outside to retrieve Ulysses, I found him leaning against the side of the house, looking exhausted and sick. “You all right?” I asked. He shook his head. All he wanted to do, he said, was go back to his place, get a few drinks in him, maybe, and go to sleep. “Well,” I said. “Come on in, then. Let’s get this thing finished, and then I’ll drive you home.”
“Yeah, okay,” he said. “You’re not mad, then?” The answer to that one was pretty complicated, but I told him no, I was weary but not mad—not at him, anyway. He was one of the few people in my life who had told me the truth. I put my hand on the small of his back and led him back inside.
“Okay,” Jerry said. “So if Alden wouldn’t tell you what was in the footlocker the day you buried it, when did he tell you?”
Ulysses turned to me. “What year was it that train hit him?”
“Nineteen sixty-five,” I said. “May the twenty-second.”
He nodded. “That’d be about right. It was springtime, I remember. He told me maybe a week or two before he got killed. Right at that same spot, too.”
“The same spot?” I said. “What do you mean?”
“Me and him were fishing for buckies off the trestle bridge. I was on the wagon at the time; I’d been sober for the better part of that year. Minister and his wife at the Lutheran church had kinda tooken me on as a project. But Alden, he was drinking pretty heavy that day. And outa the blue, he starts spilling his guts about Mary Agnes. It was kinda unusual, see? Alden could be a happy drunk, and he could be a mean one, but that was the only time I ever seen him get weepy when he was cocked.”
Ulysses said my father started pouring out his heart about how he should have listened to his grandmother when she’d warned him all those years earlier that Mary Agnes was bad news, same as her mother, and that she would ruin him. “The way he put it was, that she was a disease he picked up when he was a kid and hadn’t ever been able to shake. Alden had a way with words, you know—a way of saying something so’s you’d remember it. Back in grammar school—we were in the same class together, him and me—the teacher’d be cracking the ruler against his knuckles one minute because of something bad he done, and the next minute she’d be handing him a gold star and having him stand next to his desk and read his paper out loud because it was the best one in the class.”
I had never heard anything about my father’s having had a gift for words and would have liked Ulysses to tell me more, but Jerry said he needed to get back to that day at the trestle bridge.
Ulysses nodded. “Alden said he thought he’d finally got himself free of her after she moved away—went after bigger fish down there in New York. But then she come back and ‘reinfected’ him all over again. She’d gotten herself pregnant, see? By some guy who hadn’t done right by her. Alden was in the navy by then, but this was before they sent him to Korea. He was home on leave from Portsmouth, waiting for his orders. And Mary, she come back with her tail between her legs and a bump in her belly. She was renting a room up in Jewett City—one of those places where they let you pay by the day and nobody bothers you with questions. What she done was, she tracked Alden down at the Cheery-O and begged him to help her. She had no money, she told him, and no future, either, if she was gonna get stuck raising that kid.” Ulysses leaned in and whispered the next. “See, it was a colored fella who’d knocked her up, so that complicated things even worse.”
Ulysses said my father promised he’d help her out, but he refused to marry her. “That’s what she wanted, see? For them to get hitched on the quick. Have him make her an honest woman, and if they sent him over and he got killed, she’d be a widow entitled to some benefits. She’d always had a kind of power over him, everyone knew that, but this time he stuck to his guns. See, if he did what she wanted, he’d end up with a half-colored baby. And, you know, back then…”
What my father had offered Mary Agnes instead of marriage, Ulysses said, was money: for an operation, if that was what she wanted to do and could find someone who’d do it, or money to help her and the kid get by, once she had it. “But she was holding out for a wedding ring, see? And she got mad as hell when he wouldn’t budge. Started hitting him, throwing things at him. Scratched his face up pretty bad, too, he said. So Alden said the hell with her. Borrowed his sister’s car and took off for a few days. And when he come back, he said, he walked in the door and seen a telegram sitting on the front table. His orders had come. But then the phone started ringing, so he picks it up and who is it but her.”
“Mary Agnes?”
“That’s right.” She’d taken some kind of concoction, Ulysses said—tincture of something or another that she’d mixed with Coca-Cola and drunk to terminate her unwanted pregnancy. “That girl brung her troubles on herself, always did, but she was pinning everything on Alden. Told him that, thanks to him, her baby’d be dead in a few hours and she was probably going to die along with it. And that, later on, he could go to the cemetery and find her grave and spit on it.” Ulysses turned to me. “She could play your father like a fiddle, see? She was a pro at that.”
Ulysses said my father told him he jumped back into Lolly’s car and broke every speed limit between here and Jewett City. And sure enough, by the time he got to her, Mary Agnes was vomiting and convulsing. And the baby was coming.
“’Course, Alden had helped birth plenty of calves, so he knew the basics about what to do. How to get a baby out of its mother. Or he thought he did, anyway. But things got complicated, he said. It was coming out wrong, or trying to, I guess, and it tore her up pretty bad. Alden said she lost so much blood that he got scared. He was worried that she was going to die, see? Same as his mother when she had him.
“Baby was dead by the time he got it out of her, he told me. It was a boy, or woulda been. Alden said he didn’t know what to do with it, where to put it, so he wiped it off a little and put it in a dresser drawer. He cleaned up the mess as best as he could—the blood and such. Cleaned her up a little. Then he just sat there with her, holding her hand. It was one hell of a long night, he said. Mary Agnes was sick as a dog—burning up with fever and rambling wild, thrashing back and forth. He said he kept making her drink water, lots of it, because he figured whatever that stuff was that she’d taken, she’d be better off if she could flush it out of her system. He was scared to bring her to the hospital, see? Because they’d start asking questions. But he was scared to not bring her, too. After a while, he tried convincing her that that was what they better do, but she carried on so bad that he give it up.”
By midmorning the following day, my father had told Ulysses, Mary Agnes had come around a little. She was weak, still, but lucid—improved enough so that he could leave her for a few hours—get Lolly’s car back to her, grab a little sleep, and then head back there. Before he left, she asked him what he’d done with the baby, and he told her. He offered to take it with him, but she told him no. He should leave it for the time being, in case she wanted to look at it.
“And then, wouldn’t you know it?” Ulysses said. “He gets back here to the farmhouse and there’s that telegram. With everything else happening, he’d forgotten about it. And sure enough, it was his orders. The United States Navy wanted him to get to San Diego inside of a week. And
you know what San Diego meant, don’t you?”
“Korea,” Jerry said.
“That’s right. But when he got back to Mary Agnes’s and told her he had to shove off, she got hysterical. Begged him to ignore his orders—go AWOL and stay with her. She didn’t care that he’d get in trouble, get himself thrown in the brig, long as she got what she wanted. That’s the way she was. But Alden said no, he had to get down to New York, get on a train, and go. That made her furious, Alden said. Didn’t matter that he’d sat up all night with her—got the baby out of her and probably saved her life. When he went to kiss her good-bye, Alden said, she wouldn’t let him. Told him to just get the hell out and take the baby with him. Alden said he opened that dresser drawer, but it wasn’t in there. ‘It’s in there,’ she said, and she was pointing to her suitcase—the one you found inside the trunk, I guess. Alden told me he couldn’t risk walking out of there carrying a lady’s suitcase. Didn’t want to draw people’s attention to it, you see? Not with what was inside of it. So he took his coat off and put that over it. And just before he left, he told me, he asked Mary Agnes to wish him good luck, tell him she hoped he’d come back in one piece. She wouldn’t do it, though, he said. Wouldn’t even look at him. He hadn’t done what she wanted, see. So as far as she was concerned, he could go pound sand.”
Ulysses said my father told him there’d been no time to bury the baby—not with Grandpa and Lolly around. So he’d snuck it up to the attic and hidden it away in the crawl space. The next morning, he packed his sea bag and said his good-byes to his father and grandmother, and Lolly drove him down to Grand Central Station. “And I still remember this, because Alden was crying to beat the band when he said it: he said that, when him and his sister got to the station and it was time to board his train, Lolly give him the kind of send-off that he’d wanted from Mary Agnes—held on to him so tight, and for so long, that he thought he was going to miss his train. And he says to me, he says, ‘You know something, U? That sister of mine’s the only person in my life who ever really loved me.’ And it was kinda sad, you know? Because it was true, I guess.”
Mary Agnes recovered, Ulysses said. Got a little money together and hightailed it out to California. “Got there a week or so before Alden shipped off for Korea. You’re the proof of that, Caelum. Your father told me that’s where you got made.”
It suddenly made sense to me—why he’d sometimes called me his “California kid.”
“She made her way back here after he shipped out. And after she had you, she went to Alden’s father and hit him up for money. But the old man wouldn’t budge. Then Mary Agnes did something stupid. You were only a month old or so, and she left you with a neighbor lady. Just for the evening, it was supposed to be, but what she done was, she went off on a toot with some fella and didn’t come back for a week. By the time she did, Alden’s father and his grandmother had filed the complaint, gone down to see the judge, and gotten custody of you. And after Alden come back and got himself right again, they convinced him to find someone else—someone who’d make you a good mother. The grandmother couldn’t have raised you, like she raised your father and Lolly, see? She was starting to fail. And Lolly, well, your grandpa needed her on the farm. She might have been working over at the prison by then, too. I can’t remember. But that’s when Rosemary come into the picture. Alden met her at a dance hall, I think it was, and they got hitched pretty quick. But it never really took, Alden said; he just married her to give you a mother, and to try and get on his father’s good side. But Mary Agnes still had a hold on him. He’d go off and meet her on the sneak. If his family’d gotten wind of what he was doing, they’d have raised holy hell. See, they meant well, the Quirks. But one way or another, they’d never let Alden get out from under their thumb.”
For a minute or so, no one spoke. Then Jerry broke the silence. “How you doing?” I’d assumed he was asking Ulysses, but when I looked over at him, I realized he was talking to me. Realized, too, that I’d been holding on to myself and rocking back and forth in my chair.
“Me? I’m okay,” I said. “I’m fine.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. Yes. Or I will be.”
Jerry turned back to Ulysses. “So do I have the sequence right? She aborts the baby in 1950. He stashes it up in the attic here, then takes off for California. She follows him out there, gets pregnant with Caelum, and he ships out to Korea. Gets his medical discharge, then he marries the woman they pass off as Caelum’s mother. And then in September of 1953, you get out of the navy. The two of you take the trunk out of hiding, bring it out to that field on the other side of the orchard, and bury it.”
Ulysses nodded. “Sounds about right.”
“And you’re telling me that you had no idea whatsoever until 1965 that what you two buried inside that footlocker was the baby she’d aborted?”
He nodded. “That’s right, too. I didn’t know until that day him and me were fishing off of the bridge.”
“Okay, one more thing. Whether you realized it at the time or not, you guys put two babies in the ground that day. So eleven years later, when your buddy was letting it all hang out at the bridge, did he happen to say anything about who the second one was?”
“Well, that’s the screwiest part of it, if you ask me,” Ulysses said. “See, that’s what give him the idea to hide Mary Agnes’s baby up in the crawl space. He said it had always bothered him that the other one up there was lonely. Said he wanted to give it some company.”
Ulysses said my father had confided something else to him that day: that he had discovered the remains of the mummy-baby when he was a boy of nine or ten—that he’d come upon the little iron chest hidden at the back of the crawl space one afternoon when he was poking around where his grandmother had forbidden him to go. That he’d pulled out the chest, opened it up, and there it was. He told Ulysses that, until that day on the bridge, he had never confided to another living soul the secret about what he’d found up there in that attic. “Kinda peculiar, ain’t it? Alden said he used to sneak up there from time to time and pull it out of its hiding place. Take the lid off and visit with it, like, talk to it, even, so’s it wouldn’t be so lonely up there. He said he had no idea whose baby it was or how it got there. The only thing he was sure of was that it had been hiding up there for a long, long time.”
Jerry closed his notepad and hooked his pen onto his shirt pocket. He told Ulysses he’d done a good job.
“We’re done, then?” Ulysses asked.
“We’re done. No more questions.”
“I have one more for you, U,” I said. “You could have gone to your grave without saying a word about what was under there. Why didn’t you? Why were you so bent on bringing those two babies into the light?”
“Because of you,” he said. “They kept you in the dark about so much, and when you started asking me all those questions about Mary Agnes…But the thing is, I kept going back and forth about it, see? Because it’s not a very pretty story. It’s an ugly story, is what it is. Doesn’t put either one of them in a very good light. Her or him. But Alden…your father…hey, he fucked up plenty. I’m not saying he didn’t. But he was my friend, see? And Lolly was my friend. And you’re my friend, too. So I said to myself, I said, Ulysses, why don’t you have some guts for once in your life? Ugly story or not, why don’t you let the poor guy know the truth?”
“Thank you,” I said. He nodded.
Jerry left the room. Left Ulysses and me to our tears.
I DROVE ULYSSES HOME, THANKED him again, and declined his request for “a little bit of booze money.” I told him he needed rest more than alcohol.
“Yeah, okay,” he said. “Well, don’t be a stranger.”
Driving home again, I realized it was a visiting day. But when I checked my watch, I realized, too, that there was only thirty minutes left. Sometimes it took that long just to get them past the walk gate and up to the visiting room. But I figured I’d try to see her anyway.
For once, there we
ren’t the usual delays. By the time she was seated and I was allowed in, we had twelve minutes together. “Oh, my God, Caelum,” she kept saying. “Oh, my God.” She said she’d need time for it all to sink in, but that she was going to help me through it. Help me sort it all out.
When the CO called time, I stood. Gave her one of those awkward across-the-table embraces. Kissed her once. Again. I didn’t want to let her go.
When I was halfway between the exit door and the table where she was seated, she called my name. I stopped, turned, and looked back at her. “Love you,” she said.
“Love you, too.”
BY THE TIME I GOT back to the farmhouse, there were several vehicles in the driveway: cruisers, unmarked sedans, a crime lab van. When I walked in, Jerry was all business. “Mr. Quirk, this is Officer Tanaka. He has a few things he needs to ask you.”
“Anyone else living here?” Tanaka asked.
I nodded. “Upstairs tenants. A married couple and a young woman who lives with them. She works for the husband. They’re all away for the weekend.”
“Beautiful,” he said. “Let’s head on up to the attic, okay? I’d like you to show me that crawl space.”
When I came back down again, Jerry pulled me aside. “You know something? You should get the hell away from here for a few days. At least for an overnight. We’ll be here for most of the evening, and probably a good part of tomorrow.”