He had never thought himself the hero of any story. He was the janitor, the handyman, a mechanical. Perhaps it was a matter of assuming the center of the story. You cannot smash your life around the way you like it but you might step into somebody else’s carefully made life. Step into it, like a pair of pants.
Unlike Jeptha he had no inconvenient parents to disprove him. Joe Wear’s folks has crossed the ocean with their baby, caught TB, and died in Boston Harbor, or so he’d been told. He had once seen photos. His so-called parents were a pair of playing cards in his memory, visible only from one angle, and even then outlandish. A man who looked twelve years old, bad freckled, with burnt eyes; a woman apparently fifty, ruined by life, with a crude hairdo that seemed carved of wood. They had died long ago, they had been born in a country Joe didn’t remember. Perhaps they had been the frauds. Perhaps he himself had never drawn breath in Ireland.
What he knew: he had been raised in the Dolbeer Home for Destitute Children. He’d been lonely all his remembered life. He had an aunt Rose—but maybe she was no relative, which was why she so easily renounced him once she had a family of her own. (He thought in a searing moment: What if he was on the right track but the wrong pony? Who was that lady who said he was his aunt? She could be—
—No, Joe. Claim one woman at a time. But he knew, and the pain it caused him made him believe he deserved anything he claimed.)
He’d keep Jeptha if it suited him, Mother Arrison.
After seven months a man who said he was Nahum Truitt arrived in Salford, holding on to an old newspaper as though it were proof of identity. The Providence Journal, not the Orono Messenger. “Live on Vinalhaven, you hear of it?” the man said. “Island off Rockland. How this thing got over there I do not know. Ferry? In the belly of a whale? I minister at the Church of the Woods. You hear of it? Not all my life. I were a fisher of fish before I were a fisher of men. How I ended up on the island. The real fish drew me there. But then I had an experience. You see? Came to know. Came to understand. I can see as I look at you,” he said, “you’ve had some hard times your ownself.”
“Listen,” said Joe Wear. “How—do you mind—how old a man are you?”
“Not so young as you think. The salt air’s preserved me!”
Preserved, thought Joe Wear, in the way of beef jerky. He was a tall gray-bearded fellow in a minister’s collar, weathered as old clapboard. A feral man, as though he’d been found in the woods and cleaned up, beard pruned, burrs combed from his sideburns, forced into a suit and pushed into society. He blinked like a circus bear; his hands were brown as paws. The only youthful thing about him was the pure density of his gray hair.
The godliness was beyond belief, but not so beyond as everything else: his height, his tiny yellow brown eyes, the pink beneath the leather of his cheeks, and the fact—so far as Joe Wear could tell—that he was a good ten years older than Bertha Truitt. One thing for sure: Dr. Sprague was not his father. He was a big unruly white man.
“You got kids?” the man who said he was Nahum Truitt asked Joe Wear.
“Bachelor. You?”
“Grown and gone, much to the unhappiness of their ma.”
“Who raised you?”
“My ma.”
“And—well, who was that?”
Nahum quirked his head. “Your lady employer. Bertha Truitt. Till I were grown. Well, I thought so. We had an argument. Had I been less stubborn we would have spent our lives together. Had she been less stubborn. She would have known the love of her grandchildren, and the love of a daughter in the form of my wife. But I were fifteen and thought I could look after myself. And you know what?”
“Tell me,” said Joe Wear.
“I could! More’s the sorrow. I regret it, I do. I regret the reason.” He leaned across the wood of the counter. “The Negro,” he said. “She intended to marry him. She said, ‘He will be your father.’ Well, sir, my mother herself raised me without a bit of God. She raised me hard-hearted and hardheaded and hateful, may she rest in her peace. I found the family Bible propping open a window and I took it out of spite. So I were a sinner when I walked away and I am now as you find me.” He touched his collar. “Now I would forgive her. I do forgive her. God has forgiven her, too.”
“He was a fine man,” said Joe Wear, who felt grieved to realize this was true. “None better.” That might not have been. Joe himself: he was not a good man, he was looking in a mirror and it was awful.
“Drank,” said Nahum.
“Well.”
“I partook myself before I found my way. I forgive him for that. I realize now indeed the brotherhood of all men, and that it is a sin to despise a person for the color of his skin. God made us all. Nossir, I realize now, I disliked that fellow for other reasons entire.”
“What about your father?”
The man was silent. Finally he said, “I’ll leave Our Lord God to judge him. Bertha Truitt raised me, named me Nahum. About a year in there she thought she were a Mormon.”
“Truitt did?”
“Our Bertha. Had me baptized through a hole in the ice in Joeson City, Michigan. Plunged in herself right after. Didn’t take except I do believe the cold got in my veins. Therefore Maine. You’ve been to the state of Maine?”
“You have a sister,” said Joe Wear.
“Been told so,” said Nahum, narrowing his narrow eyes. “But I don’t know about that. I am here to know our Bertha. I am here to know who she knew, to shake the hands she shook. I come down to give the place a lookover before we decide to up and move. See if this place needs Nahum Truitt, you understand.”
Joe Wear was doing the math and it didn’t seem possible, not any of it. He picked up a pencil; he didn’t write the numbers down but it helped to doodle as he added in his head. Minna was fifteen now, or thereabouts. No, not possible that she and this fellow had the same mother. There had to be forty years between them.
No God, Mormon God: he couldn’t even keep his story straight. Some con man come down from Maine in a fake dog collar to seem respectable. Saw the ad. Figured there was money in it. Amazing, really, there was only one fraud.
There had almost been two, Joe reminded himself.
“She were terrible young, she had me,” said Nahum. “If you’re doing the math. She were fifteen and a sinner. God has forgiven her. And as I am now fifty years of age, she were sixty-four at her untimely demise three years ago.”
“She never was,” said Joe Wear.
“But she were,” said Nahum.
He pulled from some drawer or cabinet in his greatcoat a book clad in dark green leather, gilt at the edges. “Look here.” HOLY BIBLE said the cover. Joe Wear had always thought the actual title must be something longer, and HOLY BIBLE just a nickname, but there it was. Nahum opened the cover. There, in Truitt’s inimitable handwriting, was her own name. Flourishes and serifs, a rehearsed signature, ready for contracts and admirers. Bertha Truitt, born 1855 at—
But the place of her birth had been scratched out. Indeed, the entire family tree had been bowdlerized. That she had parents was inarguable, but they were listed only as Mother and Daddy. Daddy had died in 1861. Neither had birth dates. Beneath the blue of Bertha’s pen you could see the faded loops of somebody else’s. Joe took the book and flipped through, to see whether Bertha had likewise corrected the Bible, or had inserted herself into some of the more thrilling stories, but she hadn’t.
“Where’s your name?” Joe asked, looking again at the back, Bertha Truitt, a few other names at the edges of the family tree, Sissy and Bachman and Anthony. A forgery? No, nobody else could draw such a B, with such vigorous ringlets.
“Lost interest,” said Nahum Truitt. “Far as I know she never did read the good book. Propping up a window, as I said. Luckiest break I ever got. So,” he said. “I am most ignorant of bowling. You’ll enlighten me?”