“You’ll come with me,” said Roy Truitt in a pleading voice. He caught Joe Wear by the elbow. The man was in his eighties, Roy should have left him alone, but he knew he needed him, and for the first time in his life, maybe, he thought he could ask another person for what he needed. “We’ll look together.”
Joe Wear patted Roy’s hand. “All right. I can do that.”
The cellar stairs were the same, board risers, a splintery banister.
“Can you make it?” said Roy.
“I can make it yet,” said Joe Wear, clinging to the banister. Splinters dug into his hand.
The basement smelled mineral and ancient, like its dirt floor. There was a slope of empty liquor bottles in one corner, and the enormous safe, black, funereal, a hearse, a mausoleum, painted with flowers and the words EXCELSIOR SAFE & LOCK CO., SALFORD MASS.
Joe Wear said again, “Seventy-six; thirty-three; two.”
It was empty. “I thought it would be,” said Roy.
“There’ll be a false bottom. Bertha loved a false bottom. You got something? Here—” Joe handed over his penknife. It was important that Roy Truitt do the work himself.
“Oh,” Roy said. “I see.”
It took some prying up, but there it was. No ham sandwiches, but nestled below a thin steel plate: twelve pounds of gold, not in bars—not in big bars, as Roy imagined, despite himself—but little ones. “Ingots,” he said. “Bullion. These can’t be real.”
“Believe they are,” said Joe Wear. He knew it for a fact. When he’d left decades ago, he’d taken two of them. “Bertha put her faith in gold all her life.”
Roy Truitt was panting, sitting in the dirt by the safe. He said, in a heartbroken voice, “Well, they’re yours, then.”
“Nope. It ain’t bowling related, even.”
“‘And all contents,’” said Roy.
“You couldn’t pay me to take it,” said Joe Wear. “I don’t need it and even if I did—no.”
“There a curse on it?”
Joe Wear laughed.
Roy said, “Might explain some things. Well, we’ll give it to the widow Truitt.” Roy was shocked at how mocking that sounded. “My sister-in-law. Betty. Cracker.”
Now that he was on the ground, Roy wasn’t sure how he was going to stand up. He was old now, stiff and stout, concerned all of a sudden with stepping off curbs, standing up, crossing one leg over the other. Worse to do it in front of an audience.
“Let’s see if my legs’ll hold me,” he said.
“You got a limp there, I noticed.”
“Once upon a time my mother broke my ankle,” said Roy, which sounded so awful he laughed.
“Margaret did? She drop you as a baby?”
He shook his head. “With a bowling ball. Mother of the Year. I was eighteen.”
“Margaret Vanetten!” said Joe Wear. “Though somehow—no, I believe she would. It fits.” He offered a hand to Roy Truitt, who shook his head and pulled himself up on the safe. “Me, I have a birth injury. If you wondered.”
Roy nodded. Then he said, with some pleasure in his voice, “The old man used to talk about you.”
“Christ,” said Joe Wear. “Really? I hate to think what he said.”
“He cursed you,” said Roy cheerfully.
“No surprise there.”
“For your absence.”
“He liked an absence himself.”
“I guess he did.”
“Do you—” said Joe Wear, and then he stopped, he wasn’t sure what he was going to ask.
He had thought over the years of Dr. Sprague, Jeptha Arrison, even Margaret. Bertha Truitt, of course. But the person who troubled him decades later was Nahum. He could make no sense of the man, the strange compelling heat at the heart of him, the meanness that could kick in, the way he would abruptly turn and tease. Hurry up, Joe Wear, stop dancing. The way he might come back with a box of maple long johns from the bakery and offer one, fine, and then a second, all right, here comes the third, well it’s yours now you’ve touched it—he would badger and insult until Joe had somehow eaten five just to shut him up.
How old would he have been? Ancient, but he was a con man, he might have conned death.
“Your father’s not still alive?”
“No matter how you do the math,” said Roy. “Let’s go up.”
Genealogy says that things happen in chronological order, but also all at once: we wouldn’t be interested in this nineteenth-century cobbler from Salem, North Carolina, if he were somebody else’s dead. While your quiet life is occurring over here, in Eastham, Massachusetts—a yearly vacation with another family in a rented house by Coast Guard Beach—you are surrounded by sixth cousins. One of them is vacationing in a time-share in Provincetown, minutes away, and another is in Foxbury, Ohio, tending to his dying wife, who as it happens is also your twelfth cousin—this will be discovered not by you, but by his great-granddaughter, in another twenty years—and your other sixth cousins are spending their money wisely, and are going bankrupt, and are converting to the Bahá’í Faith, and are having their pubic hair removed (for surgery in one case; for aesthetics in another), and are attempting to donate a box of old books to the public library book sale. The ordinary person understands a handful of relatives: parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, the more palatable first cousins. People look into genealogy to find ancestors, but ancestors beget descendants in all directions, until the little boat of your family is swamped with cousins of every degree and removal. It’s possible that one or two will be interesting but mostly the study of genealogy will make you believe that being one of your people is common as dirt. Well, it is.
Upstairs, Roy Truitt turned on the rest of the lights, lit up the wooden Bertha who had been looking down at them all along, a crick in her fabric neck. She’d been wired up on the iron column since LuEtta Mood Arrison had brought her back. The two men didn’t see her yet.
“I’m sorry about your brother,” said Joe Wear. “I’ve heard that’s bad, to lose a brother.”
Roy Truitt rubbed his face. “There’s no word for it.”
“Heartbreaking,” said Joe Wear.
“No actual word. Like widow or orphan, what I meant, for something that happens all the time. You got a brother, one of you will outlive the other. Or a sister, I guess.”
“There’s not a word for a lot of things,” said Joe Wear.
“Sure,” said Roy Truitt.
Joe Wear put his arms out like divining rods and breathed in. He shut his eyes. “Here’s where my counter was,” he said.
“I remember that counter. How’s it feel?”
“Can’t tell. Like nothing. Like I was never here.”
“Story of my life,” said Roy Truitt.
“Yours? Take the alley but leave me that. It was my story. This place! Hey,” said Joe Wear, looking up, and he saw her. “Well. Well, Bertha now.”
“That unholy object.”
“Careful. I made her. Can we—you got something to take her down.”
“Probably. Let me look. You made her? Guess I heard you were an artist.”
“Her arms and legs. Your grandfather—your step-grandfather—he made the rest.”
“He wasn’t an artist.”
“No,” said Joe Wear. “A doctor. Minna’s father. Dr. Sprague. An educated man, like yourself. Surely your mother—”
“My family wasn’t much for stories. I mean, Arch was. He was the one.”
Years later Roy Truitt’s niece would go looking: there was DNA to test, and databases full of genealogies. You could discover amazing things about who you were without leaving the house. Roy was an old man by then and had outgrown the genealogical urge. “I wish to remain a mystery.” To yourself? “Particularly.” What Arch had liked about the unseen world: you could think about it but you could never solve it. Mysteries were full of promise, were a pleasure to contemplate. Facts were disappointing, and Roy had put all his stock in facts and had been, all his life, disappointed. “Leave me out of it,” he said to Brenda.
“You want her?” Roy Truitt asked Joe Wear now, gesturing at Wooden Bertha on her column, and that nearly made Joe Wear roar that he would see the Widow Truitt and any so-called Truitt descendants in court, he would take the whole place so as not to have to ask for this, which was his: he would not ask permission. “Of course,” said Roy. “I can mail it for you.”