Saving Lucas Biggs (25 page)

“But there are the birthday cards he sent me,” said Charlotte.

“There’s also the way he looked at you the other day, Charlie,” Margaret reminded me. “For like two seconds there, he seemed almost human. I bet it was because you look so much like his old friend Josh.”

“That didn’t buy me much slack in his office,” I reminded her.

“You might be right, Charlie,” said Grandpa Joshua. “Even if the real Luke Agrippa is still in there somewhere, Lucas Biggs might figure change is too hard. We’re old, the judge and I. Sometimes being old can make you want to give yourself one last chance to be better, but sometimes it can make you bone-deep scared of anything new. So he might not come. But you know what?”

“What?” we all three asked.

What Grandpa Joshua said next wasn’t exactly comforting, but not one of us could deny it. “If he doesn’t show up, he was never going to listen to his father’s message, not in this lifetime. If he doesn’t come, none of this was ever going to work anyway.”

Margaret

2014

THE PLACE GRANDPA JOSHUA chose for the meeting with Lucas Biggs was a park on the edge of town, a rectangle of green and trees, redwood picnic tables and benches, a swing set, a few barbecue grills and volleyball nets, everything painted and kept up, but nothing fancy.

Charlie and I had been there when we were smaller, had played hide-and-seek among those very trees, without having any idea of what used to be there. How could we? There was no bronze statue, no historical marker commemorating the four Martinelli children’s beautiful black eyes or Preston Garrett’s fingers flying over a piano keyboard. No one ever took an educational field trip there to hear a guide tell the story of bullets tearing apart the lives of innocents or of a man who wouldn’t stop talking about fair play and peace.

But as I walked across the grass with Grandpa Joshua and Charlie, it occurred to me that someone somewhere had cared enough to make sure it hadn’t been paved over, turned into a strip mall or a parking lot. Someone had planted trees.

Canvasburg.

Canvasburg, now full of kids’ games and family cookouts, cupcake icing melting in the sun; some of the adults banging around a volleyball with the kids; some of them sitting at picnic tables or under trees, talking, with babies against their shoulders or with little ones asleep in their laps. A safe place. A family place. Maybe this was okay after all. Maybe it was even a kind of justice.

We didn’t hide. The place was so busy that we didn’t have to. Grandpa Joshua, Charlie, and I were just another family under a tree, soaking up the sound of laughter and the late-spring sun. Charlotte sat at a picnic table by herself, reading a book, waiting for Lucas Biggs. We were all waiting for him, with our hearts in our throats, waiting for Lucas Biggs, inside whom there was at least a tiny bit of Luke Agrippa, shining like a light, or so we hoped.

Charlotte had told him five o’clock. He hadn’t said yes or no or much of anything at all. Five o’clock came and went. So did 5:10. Then 5:15 crept up and slipped past. By 5:30, Charlie, Grandpa Joshua, and I had given up on our forced conversation. By 5:40, I was fighting back tears.

Then, at 5:41, there he was, wearing a suit and tie in the evening, making his way across the grass. He moved slowly but steadily, with long strides, and for a second, I could glimpse the athlete he used to be. I saw Charlotte stand up. I saw him walk toward her and stop, a few feet away. I started to walk, too, the quilt square in my hand, but Grandpa Joshua caught me gently by the elbow, pulling me back.

“Wait,” he said. “Let’s give them a little more time.”

They didn’t hug, but I saw Judge Biggs lift his hand toward Charlotte’s hair, like he was thinking about touching it, and then he changed his mind. They talked.

“Now,” said Grandpa Joshua.

I walked quickly across the grass, keeping Charlotte between me and the judge, and at the last second, I stepped out from behind her, holding the Quaker star. I saw Judge Biggs’s face begin to go from open to shut, but before he could actually slam the door and hang a Closed sign in the window, I was stretching out my arm, handing him the cloth square.

“Your father was always going to come back to you,” I said, as fast as I could get the words out.

Lucas Biggs took a step back, and my heart sank, but then he reached out his broad hand, the hand that had thrown a football almost to the moon, that had pounded the gavel to quiet the courtroom at my father’s trial, and he took the Quaker star.

Then Charlie was handing him my dad’s magnifying glass, and the two of us were talking at once, pointing out the star shape, the initials, the date.

“‘For Luke,’” read the judge. Then again, “‘For Luke.’”

A change came over Lucas Biggs. He crumpled, got smaller inside his gray business suit, and then Charlotte moved so that she was next to him, her arm steadying him, leading him to the picnic bench, where he sat down, put his father’s talisman on the table in front of him, and stared at it, his fingers pressing down the four corners so he could see the whole thing.

When he looked up, it wasn’t at me or at his granddaughter, but at Grandpa Joshua.

“Josh?” he said. “It’s true?”

“It’s true, Luke,” said Grandpa Joshua. “He loved you. Even when he was up in that hunting lodge trying to make history and change the world, he was thinking mostly about you and what he’d bring back to you.”

Luke stared back down at the Quaker star, and to my amazement, there was the ghost of a smile on his face, not a sneer or a smirk, but a real smile.

“My mother and I made this. I must’ve been about four. The big, zigzag stitches in this corner are mine. It was going to be a whole quilt for my father, but my mother died before we could finish.”

Luke folded his hands into two fists, set them down on top of the square, and rested his forehead against them. He sat like that, his shoulders shaking with silent sobs, as kids ran past and the smell of barbecue filled the air. Grandpa Joshua, Charlotte, Charlie, and I stood by, not talking, not comforting him or even looking at him, just staying, for as long as it took.

Josh

2014

BRIDEY’S HOUSE WAS NOTHING but a ruin. The walls had fallen outward and the roof had fallen inward and her garden had blown, seed by seed, through its fence and taken root where her kitchen used to be. Pumpkins had snaked through the plumbing and spread their leaves in her sink. Carrots had sprouted among the soles of decaying shoes in what was left of her closet. Pea vines had washed over her back porch like a green tide.

Visiting was Margaret’s idea. I wasn’t so sure. I knew the place would be a wreck, and maybe a little sad. But Margaret said, “I’m sure Aunt Bridey would be delighted to have us.”

I thought back to the very strange day when Bridey had told me that friendship stands the test of time, and I figured I owed her a chance to say, “I told you so,” so I agreed to go.

Up the mountain we hiked, two happy families: My grandson Charlie and his mom and dad and brothers and sister. And Margaret and her mother and her newly freed father. The kids swarmed all over everything, looking for treasure—a rotted wooden drawer full of silverware, the spoons still shiny under the tarnish. The translucent golden knobs of an antique radio. A small safe that nobody would ever open, though I somehow knew that inside it lay, safe and dry, an ancient picture of a Confederate Army lieutenant. Margaret had been right. Bridey, wherever she happened to be, was surely thrilled at this spectacle.

I gazed over my shoulder at the peak of Mount Hosta. Two days before, I’d visited it with Lucas Biggs. Not a bad day’s hike for two old men. We didn’t talk about old times, because they were too far gone. But he did tell me that since he’d vacated John O’Malley’s sentence and overturned the guilty verdict, he’d decided to go ahead and finish the job. He’d called the governor and alerted him to the piles of evidence that’d gone unexamined in that trial.

Which meant that Victory Fuels was on the run. Their crimes would come to light. Their hydrofracking plans were wrecked. And to top it all off, Judge Biggs’s granddaughter Charlotte, the environmentalist, was busy starting her own company, which, among other things, might build a few windmills to catch that wind blowing off the mountain all day and night. As long as she could figure out how to do it without clonking too many birds on the head.

I had a thousand things to say to Luke, too, but when we got to the top of Mount Hosta and saw the world spread out below us, looking not much different than it had when we were thirteen, the thought of all the things we’d done and all the things we’d left undone was too much. I couldn’t speak.

“Our grandchildren will do better than we did,” declared Luke, and I heard something in his voice I hadn’t heard in seventy-six years: hope. I felt it, too, and I remembered everything I ever loved about Luke Agrippa.

I found my voice and said, “I never stopped being your friend.”

“Thank you,” said Luke. “Thank you so much, Josh.”

We stood quietly for a bit, and I gave him his father’s old fountain pen. “I thought you’d like to have it,” I said.

“I would, very much,” he’d replied with a faint smile on his face, and tucked it into his pocket as we turned for home.

“John!” I called to Margaret’s father, who was standing near the edge of Aunt Bridey’s old orchard gazing at the horizon, wondering how he would put his life back together. Even if he was worried, I wasn’t. I knew he’d think of something. He was an O’Malley. “Let me show you something,” I said. “A little secret of your aunt Bridey’s.”

“She had a lot of them, didn’t she?” asked John, his green eyes twinkling behind his glasses.

“This one you’re going to like,” I replied, rummaging through the vines on the face of the cliff for the entrance to her old dugout pantry. Inside, sure enough, on a wooden shelf that hadn’t crumbled yet, there was one bottle. Aunt Bridey’s Honey Brook Nectar. I brought it out into the sunlight, offered John O’Malley a seat on the nearest boulder, uncorked the bottle (the cork was a little stiff, but I had all the time in the world), and took a nip. “Here’s to the past,” I said, offering him the bottle. He took it.

After a thoughtful silence, I worked up the nerve to ask, “Margaret told you the whole story?”

“That she did,” John O’Malley replied softly.

“And?” I prodded.

“I wasn’t a bit happy,” he declared, “although I
was
very proud.”

“You know,” I ventured after another silence, “it’s true that history resists, and it’s true that the present is the best place to make things happen. And
maybe
, if Margaret hadn’t traveled to 1938, she somehow would’ve ended up with the Quaker star anyway, and we’d all be right here just the way we are. But . . .”

“Maybe not?” said John O’Malley. “Are you saying that maybe history has a lot to keep track of, a lot bigger things than a little, faded scrap of cloth? Are you saying that maybe sometimes, when history’s not paying attention, things slip through? Are you saying the time travel worked?”

“I’m not saying it,” I said, with a grin, “and I’m not
not
saying it. But if I
were
saying it, I sure wouldn’t say it to Margaret or Charlie.”

John laughed, took another swig of the Honey Brook Nectar, and said, “I think not saying it is an excellent idea.”

Scrambling through Bridey’s spectacular, fallen-down old life, laughing like kids, just kids, kids who hadn’t been through more of history than many old men nearing ninety, my tall grandson and his friend Margaret O’Malley made their way toward us.

Margaret’s hair was as red and her eyes were as green as they’d been on the day I first met her, back when I was thirteen and she was, too. But she’d been to the optometrist since her dad had been freed, so now she wore glasses. Not too thick, not yet, though I knew they would look like the windows of an armored car before many years passed. That was how it was bound to play out. Those glorious eyes were changing, becoming weaker. Soon they’d be no more special than anybody else’s, and in some ways, Margaret herself was becoming just like anybody else, though not completely, because the knowledge living inside her of time and history was a secret only a handful of humans has ever possessed.