Please Remember This (21 page)

That was so Phil. Did he always sound exactly like himself? “It’s not a game, Phil. And maybe sometimes you don’t move on so super-duper fast. Maybe sometimes you just sit on a stump and feel crappy.”

“All right.” Phil was speaking slowly and carefully. He wasn’t mad. He was puzzled. “But you and I don’t come from an emotionally self-indulgent culture. We are expected to accomplish things.”

“But that doesn’t mean we can’t take a breath now and then. That doesn’t mean we have to be doing something all the time. We don’t always have to be making everything better. Why can’t we sometimes wallow in it being worse?”

“I’m not completely following you here, Ned.”

Ned wasn’t sure that he was following himself. It just bugged him how Phil could never do nothing. It was like he didn’t exist if he wasn’t trying to fix something.

But what was new about that? This was Phil. This was how he had always been. “Do you want a drink?” Ned asked suddenly.

Phil blinked. Neither of them drank during the week. “Sure.”

That was probably a lie, but Ned didn’t care. He went inside. He remembered having seen the tops of liquor bottles in the back of one of the kitchen cabinets. He opened the cabinets and starting groping through Great-uncle Bob’s various jars and bottles, the garlic salt and white vinegar. He found some vanilla extract. That had alcohol in it. Then he pulled out an after-dinner liqueur with a picture of a pineapple on it. He passed the bottle to Phil, who had followed him inside.

“You aren’t expecting us to drink this, are you?” Phil asked.

“God, no. Put it in the recycling.”

Phil unscrewed the top and poured the bottle’s contents down the drain. A cloyingly sweet smell fumigated the kitchen.

Ned found some Scotch. He had never heard of
the brand. “Do you want ice? It might help kill the flavor.”

Phil looked at the bottle. “Ice, definitely ice.”

Of course, Ned’s ice had its own little dead-freezer odor, but it didn’t smell as bad as the Scotch. Phil swirled the drinks for a moment, but even so, Ned could feel himself grimace at the first swallow. They should have tried the vanilla extract. “Do you remember Nana and Grandfather telling you about our parents dying?”

Phil had not expected that question. He looked at his glass. “Yes and no.”

“What does that mean? “

“It’s one of those memories where you don’t remember the actual event. The memories kick in a couple seconds later.”

Ned leaned back against the counter. “And?”

“I was on the swings in back of the house on Grace Street. They must have picked me up at school and taken me home. I really liked the swing set, so they must have taken me out there. I don’t remember hearing what they said; I just remember starting to pump really hard. I guess I thought that if I could swing high enough and fast enough, our parents would come back.”

This was probably the most personal thing Phil had ever said in his life. Ned took another drink. “Are you still trying to do that? Trying to swing high enough and fast enough?”

Phil shrugged. “I don’t think that way. Keeping busy suits me.”

So that was what Phil had been doing, “keeping
busy.” Rather than let himself mind about Tess spurning him, Phil had immediately begun promoting a relationship between her and Ned.

As long as they were having this brotherly chat, Ned figured he’d go all the way. “You know, don’t you, that our father didn’t have a prayer of saving the little farms.”

Phil was again watching the ice cubes move around in his glass. “If anyone could have done it, he could have.”

That was certainly the town mythology. “But no one could. There were powerful economic forces at work.”

Phil shrugged again, acting as if he couldn’t be sure. But that was crazy. He had to know. He had to understand economic forces far better than Ned did. He just didn’t want to admit the truth. He didn’t want to admit that their father would have failed. “ ‘What if’ doesn’t get us anywhere.” Phil had his head tilted back. He was looking at the overhead light fixture. “It sounds like I acted too hastily in regard to you and Tess. I’m sorry.”

Ned believed him. “It probably doesn’t matter one way or the other. She thinks it’s a marvelous joke.”

“Is it?”

“Probably. We are completely wrong for each other.”

“You are?” Phil sounded surprised. “Yeah. Trust me on this one. We are.”

Ned was not so completely lacking in self-esteem as to view his nonromance with Tess as a Beauty and
the Beast tale. But even if it were, didn’t anyone ever stop and look at things from the Beast’s point of view? Why was everyone so sure that Beauty was going to make him happy? Yes, at the end of the story, he shed his fur and horns, but for what? Powder-blue satin pants. That was a happy ending?

Tess Lanier was light and air. She was the sunshine that bleached old stains out of vintage linens. She made things orderly and quiet. She brought peace and beauty.

And none of that was important to Ned. He got his energy from earth and muck, from mystery and dampness. He didn’t need things to be peaceful, he needed them to mean something, and he would, he knew, eventually find life with her to be empty and unsatisfying.

That was why she was right for Phil. It was true that she adored beauty in a way that Phil didn’t, but ultimately she was as utilitarian as he was, as able to master systems, as concerned with getting things to work. Her love for beauty was about surfaces, about what you could see.

But Ned found beauty in what lurked underneath the surfaces of things. Eyes weren’t enough for him. They were enough for Tess.

So why wasn’t he laughing this off? Why wasn’t he enjoying the joke?

Because he knew that she didn’t have to be this way. He knew, as surely as he knew anything, that there was a bed of fiery coals shut behind an air-tight furnace door. There was an underground river surging through her soul, its dark current searching for the fissure that would allow it to geyser forth.

How did he know this about her? He had no proof, no evidence. There wasn’t a cornfield he could walk with a magnetometer. There was nowhere to plant orange surveyor’s flags. There was no reason to believe this about her.

Except for one thing. She was Nina Lane’s daughter.

Chapter 14

 

I
n February it turned cold. The Kansas wind was wet and heavy, burrowing its way through coats and gloves. Ned and his guys were miserable. Dressed in long underwear and insulated coveralls, heavy wool socks and chest-high fisherman’s waders, hooded water-resistant parkas and eye goggles, they slogged through the frozen mud, covered with icy slime. At the end of each day they had to disassemble the wash-water pumps and drain the hundreds of feet of four-inch wash hoses. Otherwise the water in the pumps and hoses would freeze, and the equipment would burst. Then each morning they had to reassemble the pumps and unroll the hoses.

They were in the bow of the boat now. The cargo was different here. Much of it was still intended for merchants along the river, but unlike the Ravenal brothers, who were opening a new store, these merchants were restocking. So a single barrel would have a far greater variety of supplies: two dozen pewter spoons, six brass powder flasks, two steel-toothed beaver traps, and a couple of tin candle molds, all of which represented a merchant’s entire order.

Ned found more of the settlers’ belongings, boxes
packed with frying pans, shovels, and ironstone plates. He found a wooden box that almost certainly belonged to the Lanier family. A silver backgammon set, an ivory chessboard, at least twenty books—many of them in French—and a cut-crystal inkwell that nestled into a footed silver tray were arranged among some silk and wool shawls. But he couldn’t be sure because the box had been near where the walnut log had pierced the hull. The water that had rushed in and sunk the boat had worn away any paint that might have identified it.

He found Mrs. Gaithers’s beloved blue-and-white china, the dishes that would have rescued her from appearing to be a “poor relation” when she moved in with her husband’s family in Nebraska Territory.

She had packed the dishes so carefully that even after one hundred fifty years of being underground, not one was even chipped. At first Ned thought that there was something wrong with them because the pattern was blurred, but the blurring was underneath the glaze. He called Mrs. Ballard, who owned the antique teacup shop in town, and as soon as he used the word “blurry,” she ordered him not to move. “Don’t even breathe on them. I’ll be right out.”

“It’s below zero. I—” But she had already hung up.

Mrs. Gaithers’s dishes were, Mrs. Ballard said, mid-Victorian flow blue, currently a very popular collectible. “This is a complete set that’s never been used,” she said. “You have no idea how valuable these are.”

“Then tell me.” Ned wasn’t planning on selling the dishes, but he certainly liked the sound of “valuable.”

“I don’t know,” Mrs. Ballard admitted. “Things like this don’t come on the market. They just don’t. And with the history … that we know how important they were to the original owner and her sense of herself as a lady … that adds even more to the value. You’d have to put them up for auction to get a price. There’s no telling how high some people might go. Some flow blue collectors are truly obsessed.”

Poor Mrs. Gaithers. Apparently she really would have had the finest dishes in Nebraska Territory. Ned had tried to trace what had happened to her, but had learned nothing. Eveline Lanier’s paragraphs were all they would ever know about her.

But flow blue china had its own collectors’ society. Phil called the organization, suggesting that its members take a block of rooms at the Best Western for a weekend in March. They could come to the courthouse and examine the dishes as carefully as they wanted. Oh, no, said the president of the organization, the board couldn’t publicize this to its membership unless someone had authenticated the find. Would the dishes be available this weekend?

“The guy I was talking to couldn’t wait until March,” Phil reported. “He and his wife are flying out this weekend.”

Ned shrugged and went back to work.

The strong river current had twisted the bow of the boat slightly, and the boxes wedged into its vee had splintered open. One box seemed intact, but when Ned and Dylan Pierce attempted to raise it, its bottom split, a goulash of pebbly mud oozing outward.

The pebbles were buttons. However they had once been stored, whether on cards or in small cotton
bags, they were now loose, floating in the murky pools of wash water. Ned called for the wash hoses to be turned off, and using sieves, he and Dylan scooped up the buttons, dumping them into five-gallon buckets and then emptying those into the washtubs. There were thousands of buttons, still coated in gray mud. They would have to be taken up to the schoolhouse and rinsed so that the wood and rubber ones could be sorted out and put into stable storage. What a chore that was going to be. Ned would store the buckets and washtubs in the schoolhouse overnight and worry about what to do with them in the morning.

Except he couldn’t resist looking at a few of the buttons. He switched on the schoolhouse’s outside lights and dumped one bucket out onto a mesh tray positioned in the center of a rinsing table. Hundreds of buttons cascaded out. Ned directed a stream of water on them.

As the mud washed away, an amazing variety emerged. There were brass buttons with raised patterns of stars or eagles, and china buttons with patterns, designed to adorn calico dresses. Some of the china buttons were dark: burgundy with an ivory honeycomb, navy with a green leaf, maroon with a pink sprig. Others had a white or ivory background with a colored design—wavy red lines, pale green starbursts, a tan scallop design, a periwinkle-blue dot, a green cloverlike cluster, a brown gingham check, a mustard-dotted stripe, a rose squiggle. Ned picked out the wood and rubber ones, set the mesh tray aside, and picked up another bucket, another mesh tray.

Once again he lost track of time. Only the sound of his brother’s Jeep made him look up.

Phil had heard about the buttons from someone in the crew. He lifted up one of the trays, looking at it in the light. “We need to get this into the museum for the weekend.”

It was Thursday. Eight-thirty on Thursday evening. “You’ll have to do it. I’m too tired.”

“Okay.” Phil started scooping the metal and china buttons into a big Ziploc bag. “But stop with this bucket. It’s too cold to be working with water, and this is the sort of thing that the weekend people will love to do.”

That was certainly true. Midwesterners weren’t the type who just wanted to stand around and watch. They wanted to get right in there and help. And one of the joys of visiting the
Western Settler
excavation was that if you didn’t mind getting muddy, if you didn’t mind taking orders, you got involved.

Phil drove off. Ned closed up things around the schoolhouse, draining the hose there, and then checked back at the site to be sure that those hoses were all drained too. He went home to shower, but instead of going to bed, he drove over to the Old Courthouse to see what kind of display Phil had created with the buttons.

None. A display case had been cleared out, a few computer-generated descriptive labels were neatly stacked on one of the glass shelves, but there was no sign of the buttons. On Phil’s desk was a press release which Ned read with interest. On the Sunday of the long Presidents’ Day weekend, The Western Settler Salvage Corporation, which was another name for
Ned, was hosting “The Great American Button Sort.” The text was lighthearted and informative. People from all over the Midwest were being invited to Fleur-de-lis to sort buttons salvaged from the boat.

You had to hand it to Phil. He did know what he was doing.

On Ned’s desk was another copy of the press release and a note. “Check this. If you can live with the idea, I’ll send it out tomorrow. Tess has the buttons.”

Why did Tess have the buttons? Ned went around into the front stairwell and looked out one of the windows that faced Main Street. Although it was nearly eleven, the lights of the Lanier Building were still on.

Halfway across the street, he wished he hadn’t left his coat at the courthouse, but when he knocked, Tess unlocked the door quickly.

“I have been thinking for the past two hours that I was a complete idiot,” she said. She was laughing, pushing her hair off her face with the air of someone who had been doing something. “But at least I would have put my coat on if I were going outdoors. You must be freezing. Did you come for the buttons? I’m not done with them.”

“What are you doing with them? Did Phil ask you to figure out how to display them?”

“Yes, and to try to come up with a good system for sorting them when you have a whole bunch of untrained people working. And once I got started, I couldn’t stop.” She shook her head, laughing at herself. Ned couldn’t recall when he had heard her talk like this. “Here I think of myself as the queen of self-restraint and deferred gratification, but get me
started on something like this, and I am as obsessed as you. But come look. I have found fifty-seven different patterns.”

She had pushed together two of the long tables, and their surfaces were covered with her small glass cake plates. Many of the plates had a single button on them; some, as many as thirty. “Phil didn’t ask me to do the actual sorting,” she assured Ned. “I don’t think it occurred to him that I would.”

No, it wouldn’t have occurred to him. Phil was certainly capable of working long hours if a job needed to be completed, but it was the goal that kept him going, not the process. He didn’t know what it was like to be mesmerized. He didn’t know what it was like to love doing something so much that you couldn’t make yourself stop.

But Tess clearly did. Ned had to wonder why he had ever thought that she was like Phil. There was an undercurrent of fervor and intensity in her soul. It probably didn’t surface very often, but when it did, it left her as she was now, a little puzzled with herself, but feeling alive and full of energy.

“I probably shouldn’t have started,” she continued, “but as long as I have, I need to finish so we can put them away.” She scooped up a button, glanced at it, and, without even needing to look at the glass plates, put it on the correct one.

“Then let me help.”

Of course Ned wasn’t familiar with any of the patterns, so he had to search the table for each match. Then he would finally find the right cake plate, and his arm would bump into Tess’s. He did
two buttons in the time she did fifteen. And if he hadn’t been there, she probably could have done eighteen.

“You aren’t much help,” she pointed out. “So unless you’ve having as much fun as I am, maybe you should quit.”

He dropped the button he was trying to match. “It did occur to me that I was just getting in your way.”

“You could sit over there and pick out the metal and the metal-rimmed buttons. That’s going to be the volunteers’ first step.”

He could do that, but he wasn’t going to. He was going to sit by her and watch Tess. She really was good at this. She never hesitated. She seemed to remember what was on each of the fifty-seven glass cake plates and exactly where that plate was.

“Do you have a photographic memory?” he asked.

“It’s probably something like that,” she answered, picking up another button, glancing at it, putting it on the right plate with a single gesture. “My grandparents weren’t the type to make a big deal over your abilities, and for the longest time I assumed everyone remembered things the way I did. But that’s why I know so much about lace. I remember almost every piece I’ve ever seen.”

He supposed it made sense that her memory was so visual. Sight clearly mattered more to her than sound, taste, or smell.

It was also no surprise that she did have at least one truly exceptional ability. Look at who her parents were.

And it was also no surprise that she didn’t make
much of her exceptional ability. Look at what her mother had done.

She must have been taught to hate the unusual, the exceptional, the passionate, the obsessive. Thank God he had had Carolyn always telling him to be falling-to-his-knees grateful that he was the sort of person who had such strong interests and dreams.
It’s a gift,
Carolyn had said.

“You like these buttons, don’t you?” he said.

“Yes. I’ve certainly seen more beautiful ones, more interesting ones, but these are special.”

“But it’s different from how you reacted when we unpacked Eveline Lanier’s sewing things?”

“I suppose.” She kept on working. “That was personal. Those things belonged to someone who must have missed them.”

“But your reaction to her sewing box was very strong, wasn’t it? I thought you were going to faint.”

“I don’t remember that,” she protested. “In fact—” Then she stopped talking. Even if she didn’t remember her initial reaction, she was remembering something, something she was uncomfortable with. “What are you getting at, Ned? What’s your point?

He wondered why he was doing this. “Hear me out on this one. I have to wonder if, when you were holding the sewing things, that wasn’t you reacting, but Eveline.”

She clenched the button in her hand. “I beg your pardon?”

A sensible man would stop right now. Stop, apologize, cough politely, blow his nose loudly, anything. “Just listen to me. Would you be willing to consider that in that moment Eveline might have been reaching
out to you? That those were her feelings you were experiencing?”

“Reaching out to
me?
What are you talking about? She’s dead. She’s been dead more than a hundred years. Have you lost your mind?”

“No. I can’t say that I believe it for sure. But I’m not willing to rule it out. People have intuitions. It’s another way of knowing things. All I’m saying is that we don’t necessarily know what is the source for that kind of knowledge.”

“Ned.” She was horrified. “You’re saying that intuitions come from the dead? This isn’t why you are digging up the boat, is it? In hopes of having a séance?”

“No. This isn’t going to happen to me. I know that. I don’t know why I know it, but I do. Perhaps it happened to my grandfather, but it won’t happen to me.”

“Well, it’s certainly not going to happen to me either. I have to be the last person on earth whom something like that would happen to.”