Читать книгу Buried Treasure - Jack B. Downs - Страница 9

2 / Dylan

Crane Ridge, Maryland 1962

The ride back from the courthouse was quiet. From the deep back seat, Dylan Paxton stared at the stubble springing from Mr. Thompson’s head beneath the hat brim. The same color as the sky, sponged and sturdy gray.

The boy sighed and bounced his new shoes. Once, Mr. Thompson jerked at a kick against the back of his seat. Next to him, Nana turned and dropped her chin to her chest, her eyes narrowing. Dylan stilled under her gaze.

He turned to stare at the landscape out the Dodge’s window. A sign loomed and whooshed past. Now Leaving Salisbury, Maryland. Jewel of the State’s Youngest County, courtesy of the Rotary. As far as Dylan could see, hoary stumps of corn stalks stood sentry in neat rows. Flocks of geese mashed the edges of feed ponds dotting the fields. Winter wasn’t much to fuss about here. Today though, a close sky framed a landscape drizzled with a white icing of snow from last night.

Fallow late-winter fields yielded to farm spreads, silos, and clusters of one-story frame houses. Welcome to Crane Ridge. Poor sister to Salisbury, to the west on the Wicomico River. Salisbury straddled the placid waterway, while Crane Ridge hugged the southeastern bank, upriver from Salisbury five miles or so as the geese fly.

Dylan slid across the seat to gaze at the river as they drove along deserted East Ferry Street, near the War Memorial at the center of town. He was surprised the stone abutment marking the old ferry landing was deserted. Usually it would swarm with kids he knew pelting the thin river ice with rocks. Then he remembered school was still in session today. Last evening his friend Billy Bergin had been busting to skip Miss Marsden’s class and travel to the courthouse with him, but Nana just tssked and shooed him home. Dylan had been surprised his brother James wasn’t going too.

“Why is it just me going to the-” he’d struggled for the word.

“Disposition,” his grandmother said. “It’s called a disposition.”

Dylan had waited, as the front door whooshed closed in Billy’s wake. Nana busied herself over a pan of corn bread muffins.

“James,” he repeated. “Isn’t he going tomorrow too?”

Nana had turned and said abruptly, “You are eight years old. Your brother is thirteen, and can’t be made to…” her voice trailed off. She had turned the pan to slide the steaming muffins into a wicker basket. “He’s old enough to make his choice, and he chose not to go. That’s the end of that.”

Mr. Thompson eased the car onto Nash Street. Dylan listened for the dog as Mr. Thompson slowed to ease into Nana’s drive. Dylan heard Buster barking from the roof of the garage. Whenever Nana drove somewhere, Buster would bound onto the woodbox at the end of the porch, and then up to the slanted roof of the garage, pacing the peak, gaze fixed on the driveway. Nana didn’t pay any mind to the old dog, but Buster was devoted to her. Dylan was sure he could hear Buster barking a welcome long before he could see the car and Nana. The Dart crunched up the driveway and eased to a stop in front of the garage. The snow had melted on the drive, but a thin white sheen still glazed the grass.

“Here we go,” Mr. Thompson said. He shoved the shifter into first, and pulled at the parking brake. “Just let me get the door now.”

Mr. Thompson’s car lived in Nana’s garage. Nana didn’t have a car. Mr. Thompson had a car, but no garage. Sometime back before Dylan and James had come to live with Nana, a deal had been struck. On weekly trips for groceries, or on infrequent occasions Nana needed to go over to Salisbury, Mr. Thompson would drive her. In return, he garaged his car here.

Dylan and Nana climbed out and stepped onto the walk. Buster greeted Nana, head lifted as if to bay, then sweeping the grass with his huge tail, dousing Dylan’s good pants at the knees. Mr. Thompson strode to the solid garage door and bent low, his white socks gleaming from his trouser legs and his shirt cuffs telescoping from his sleeves. Dylan thought it was a funny sight, but when he giggled, Nana gave him a glance to set geese to flight.

The compact man pressed the garage door high, his arms rising like a preacher exhorting his flock. He turned, shot his cuffs back into his dusty black coat, and marched to the car. He eased the Dodge carefully into the opening, and cut the engine. Nana rested a hand on Dylan’s shoulder as their neighbor lowered the door and clap-wiped his hands. Mr. Thompson tipped his hat and limped down the driveway toward his home across the street. He lurched a bit, and Dylan thought one leg might be shorter. They both gave a slight wave to his back.

“Dylan, mind you don’t step in that puddle. Step ‘round, look where you go.” The sidewalk up to the front steps was cracked and canted. Years of runoff, freezing and thawing, had lifted and split the slabs.

Dylan clicked up the sidewalk behind Buster. His nostrils tickled with the inhale of sharp cold air, and the welcome smell of wood smoke from houses along the street. The smell would thicken in the later afternoon, as children clattered in from school, and wives warmed homes for their husbands.

“Hold up at the stoop, son.”

Dylan turned, offering his shoulder to his grandmother. But she gestured for him to take a seat. He glanced up, surprised. On warmer days, she would often settle on the stoop watching the street and snapping her beans, or reading a Harlequin romance. She wasn’t partial to cold though. Even in summer, she’d move inside when the sun went down. She looked tired, and something else too. Dylan sat down at the top stoop, feet out, heels together, liking the weight of the new shoes when he wasn’t standing in them. He was surprised his feet now stretched over the edge of the third step down. All summer his bare toes had hung over the second step, not quite touching the third.

Nana was stocky, made more squat by painful rheumatism that lent her a bowlegged waddle. She rested a hand again on his shoulder and eased down next to Dylan, smoothing the fabric of her dress. Dylan didn’t think she owned a pair of pants. Slacks, his grandma called them, with a look reserved for a knotted sack bound for the garbage pail.

They sat in silence, the river’s far bank visible in the distance beyond Mr. Thompson’s drive. Barely lunchtime on a school day. It felt weird to be home, like a dream where he and his friends are in the middle of a baseball game at Mass. He reached down and worried the fur under Buster’s upraised chin.

“Dylan.” Nana rocked back and forth on her bottom. “You understand what happened in the courthouse today?” She looked up at the distant scraping sound as Mr. Thompson dragged his empty trashcan from the curb.

“Well, is James still my brother?”

Nana started, staring at the boy. “What a question. Yes, of course he’s still your brother.”

“Why was daddy crying? Is he still my father?”

Nana sighed, lightly smoothing her dress in a gesture familiar. “You know your father’s been through a bad time. Like a long sickness with no end. Or more like an amputation than being just sick. When you’re ill a long time, you get well, or..” She plucked at an invisible thread on her knee. “He did not deserve such a thing, in a hundred hundred years. Neither of your parents did,” she rushed. Nana stopped, and Dylan wondered what today had to do with that old knot of pain.

“It just broke him,” Nana sighed, as if he’d asked aloud. “And after, when your mother saw your father, she only saw the brokenness, I guess. It wasn’t right for him to leave, but then it wasn’t right to suffer such a thing. Your father maybe hurt deeper, with the blaming. He loves you and James. But it just gets crowded out by the other. Not knowing. That’s unnatural. I wonder some he hasn’t just blown up like a bad bottle of moonshine and drifted away on a hard wind.”

Nana picked at her Sunday dress, her mouth creased.

“Sometimes I think that’d be more the blessing.” Nana spoke to the middle distance, her voice soft and bare. “He’s my own, and I will always love him. I just hope he can make his way back somehow. Blaming himself for something nobody ever could’ve imagined. He loved that boy…well, like he loves you. Like he loved air. Little David went off somewhere, along with your father’s peace.”

Dylan pressed close to his grandma’s bosom, wishing she’d talk about something else. Buster too looped in a tight circle on the bottom step, ready for a change of subject.

“His precious son. All these years. It would’ve been more charitable to just shoot Sam, that is the truth!” Nana’s tight hair bun bobbed up and down beneath her floral pillbox hat.

Dylan felt the hurt rising up. He was eight, but he felt older sometimes, trying to understand the sorrow around him. He never knew David. The second of Sam’s three sons had vanished without a trace the year Dylan was born. David was two years old then. He’d just be turning 10. But James was the only brother he’d known. As long as Dylan could remember, he had lived here with James and Nana. His father had lived here too, until a couple of years ago. Dylan couldn’t recall his mother’s face. He could not remember the house in Berlin, Maryland where he’d been born. He’d been two when Maureen left, and three or four when they’d moved in with Nana.

No one ever talked about his mother. Dylan suspected Nana viewed her poorly for leaving her other two sons. Not because of anything that was said. It was just this unseemly quiet around the subject of her. James would up and leave the room if someone asked after her. Of course, he did the same when someone mentioned his father, Sam. Seems James was leaving a lot.

Nana plucked at a thread on Dylan’s shoulder and smoothed the spot with weathered hands, gnarled fingers accustomed to hard work and no shortcuts.

“Your father did something for you today that he thought needed doing. He understands that he is too sad to raise you proper right now, and he knows how important…”

When Sam had lived here too, after David disappeared, Dylan felt like he lived in the front parlor of a funeral home. He had been to one once, for Mrs. O’Driscoll down the block. He remembered the way people nodded very somber, faces set and heads slowly shaking, edged up on the front of their chairs. If they spoke standing, they stood close, voices hushed like church.

Dylan sensed immense sorrow about the past, all the important stuff never spoken. It had to do with his brother David being gone. He never did seem like an older brother. He just stayed two years old. Dylan stared ahead, feeling the strong hand close tight on his shoulder, and hearing the quiet catch in her voice.

“…how important it is to have someone to care for you. So he and I went to the courthouse today to make sure everybody knows that for now, you are in my care. You will always be safe here. Do you understand, Dylan?”

“Yes’m. Does that mean he’s not my dad anymore?” He turned on the stoop, breath clutched, knees drawn up and pressed to his chest.

“Come closer. Keep your Nana warm, child. Your daddy will always be your daddy, ’til the day you die. Lots of things change in this world. Some of the change makes no sense if you muddle it a hundred lifetimes. But one thing can’t ever change—Sam Paxton is your daddy. Will be. Always.”

Nana squeezed him tight to her side, kissing him atop his head. “Time for another trim, already,” she mused, tousling his thick brown crew cut hair. He made a face.

“Today was just to make sure everybody knows, for now, I am your guardian.”

“Like an angel?” Dylan slipped under Nana’s arm, and watched a squirrel clamber across a snow-flecked branch in the front elm.

Nana’s mouth formed a happy Oh, her eyes shining.

“Yes, young Master Paxton. Like an angel. Your guardian angel. We will make do. And we sure do hope,” she said, now talking to the top branches of the naked elm, “that someday soon my son will be fit to be a father again. Make him well, if you’re awake up there, would you please?”

Nana and Dylan rose, turning to the door. She kept her eyes aloft for another moment. “Seems like you owe him that much,” she muttered.

“Sorry?”

Nana looked down at her grandson.

“Let’s go get us some cocoa, and maybe a cookie for you. And a biscuit for that silly dog.”