The Fisher Boy (16 page)
Authors: Stephen Anable
Someone was investigating my life. “Your silence will not protect you,” the AIDS activists’ bumper stickers say. Waiting for the authorities to act wouldn’t either. I knew Thomas Royall was somehow associated with this summer’s horror through the title of his painting,
The
Golden One
. So I went to the Provincetown Public Library to do some research.
The Provincetown Public Library reminded me of an old-fashioned house. Despite the fluorescent lighting and linoleum floors, it still seems domestic with its narrow wooden stairs and gingerbread flourishes. There’s something homey and small-town about the staff there too: eager to help, grateful for your interest, glad you haven’t stopped by just to use the rest rooms.
The one Royall biography had been published during the Fifties, when there’d been a brief flurry of interest surrounding the fortieth anniversary of his disappearance. The book’s plastic cover crackled as I opened it. Some pieces of angel food cake, pressed flat like flowers in a Victorian’s Bible, fell from one chapter, the contribution of the book’s last, messy reader.
Some of the book’s photographs duplicated what I’d seen in the museum: six year-old Royall in velvet breeches and curls; as a youth, arm-in-arm with Edward Carpenter; in robes, with gilded horns in his hair…There were some photographs of Gilbert Dyer, the model, the text claimed, for
The Fisher Boy
and
The Golden One.
In one photograph, Dyer was posed in the branches of a tree, all but naked amid the apple blossoms. The caption read, “Gilbert Dyer: Unwholesome Adonis.”
“Is this the only book on Royall you have?” I asked the librarian.
“Where did you find that? You know, I’ve been looking for that all morning.”
“It was on the shelf, in the art section. I was browsing.”
“Misfiled.” She was wearing a small ceramic pin, a cartoon stereotype of the spinster librarian: hair in bun, Ben Franklin glasses. “There are some people in Truro who’ve asked us to hold this book for them. There’s been so much interest in Royall since that horrible stabbing at the museum.”
“Oh, I always appreciated his work.” I must have spoken too loud because a man who was all belly, like a clam, put down his
USA Today
and hissed, “Sssssh!”
“You may read this book here,” the librarian said, “but I’m sorry, I can’t let you borrow it.”
I couldn’t even skim its entire 375 pages, so I chose the last chapters, about the collapse of the Cape Cod colony and the events preceding Royall’s disappearance.
“Chapter 22: The Pamet Colony—Prelude to Disaster
“Thomas Edgar Royall had been attracted to the lower Cape by the light and ambiance of Provincetown. How he loved the little hamlet, its fishing shacks and dunes, its churches and shops selling nautical gear. He loved the old salts and their wives and families. He loved the actors and playwrights and poets and labor activists: those refugees from the Greenwich Village heat who gave the town a bohemian flair.
“He loved to paint his adoptive home: ships, steeples, masses of lilacs in May rain. The sensuousness of Provincetown enthralled him: the Portuguese boys, dusky as Samoans, diving for pennies tossed by passengers from the ferries; the muscles of young fisherman; the fish, bright as swords, being shoveled from boats onto the piers. Royall painted it all, in his unique style that seemed somehow to trap sunlight onto canvas.
“But Royall dreamt of something more, more than a way of painting: a way of life. He longed for a community, a community of artists, with all of its possibilities of peace yet cross-fertilization. And this new colony would benefit from the mistakes, from the bickering and bitterness of his previous efforts elsewhere.
“He had always been intrigued by the sagas of the Vikings, by the possibility that those strong blond pagans had reached his beloved New England centuries prior to the Genoese captain dropping anchor at San Salvador. He was enthralled by the old tower in Newport that some said was Norse and others, a colonial mill. When he heard of the rune stone by the pond near the Pamet, his pulse quickened and he hired a car to see it for himself.
“Royall was bewitched. The gray granite boulder with its mysterious markings, zigzags that might have been dug by Leif Ericson, spoke to his very soul. Its surroundings—the woods of birch and pitch pine and oak, the salt marsh, the kettle pond, the Bay side beach with its shell middens left by ancient Indians—called him to his New Home.
“Here, he was convinced, he could build his community of men, his home for artists, in this place that was somehow sacred. How wrong, how tragically wrong, he was.”
I glanced up. The librarian was circulating around the room, neatening the shelves of books, pushing some that patrons had disturbed back flush with their neighbors. I skipped ahead in the biography.
“…By the spring of 1911, the little colony was ready. Both the Cox farmhouse and the old Robbins mansion had been refurbished, and Royall had completed many buildings of his own—Quincy granite “sleeping halls” with rows of beds (a bit like dormitories in orphanages!), saunas, barns, and an eating hall with a dais for Royall. Royall was adamantly against men of his colony owning personal property, except, of course, their art. While their studios, situated throughout the woodland and marsh, were private—with ateliers, kilns, looms, and so forth—their lives were to be shared.
“They would sleep, eat, and bathe together. In this way, solitude was reserved for creativity, yet the isolation of the artist, suffering in his garret, alone at his table at the cafe, penniless, misunderstood, all this was banished. The electricity of intercourse, the healthy outdoor communal life Royall so admired in the German
Wandervogel movement (those troops of sunny Bavarians with their walking sticks and lederhosen, trekking through the Alps and Black Forest, singing songs, swimming in cold streams, living on honey and peasant breads) could be brought to Truro…”
I stopped. Of course. The Pamet was a river that flowed through
Truro
. There was a sign referring to it on Route 6: “Pamet Roads.” I’d always sped past it, eagerly gunning for P-town. Royall’s colony had been right next door, one town away, not in Brewster or Barnstable, as I’d imagined. I resumed reading.
“…The men slept nude, like people during the Middle Ages, and bathed in the pond first thing in the morning, from May through October
.
Before breakfast, year-round, the men did calisthenics, naked, outside in the sun. They worked with barbells and weights to strengthen the bodies that Royall considered Temples of the Soul…”
“Sir?”
I looked up. The librarian was acting chagrined. “I’m sorry, but the girl who put that book on reserve just phoned and she’s coming right over.”
“I was just getting to the good part.”
“Yes, and everything on Royall has been checked out, for weeks at a time. And with these budget cuts, we can’t buy—”
“Has it been checked out since before the museum stabbings?” I asked.
She leafed through the book, discovered more fossilized pieces of angel cake, and picked them out. “Now that you mention it, yes, I believe it has. Of course, the exhibit, the retrospective, was bound to generate interest.”
The big-bellied man had abandoned the
USA Today,
so I read the headlines from around the country. The heat wave persisted. There was a water crisis in New York, what with children opening hydrants to cool off in their spray. Four people had died of heatstroke in their sweltering Newark tenement. A forest fire was scorching the Adirondacks, the sort you associate with Idaho or California; towns were being evacuated and three firefighters had been killed when a sort of flaming tornado had torn through a valley north of Rhinebeck. Ants and hornets were swarming, doing courting dances out of season. Even sea creatures were being affected. Several dolphins had beached themselves in Hyannis. “They’re mad with the heat,” one biologist believed.
Then I heard her at the counter. “Do you have the Royall book we put on reserve?”
She was a girl, a teenager, skinny in a long calico dress. Her frizzy blond hair fell below her shoulders. She wore rings on every finger, on both thumbs, even on her toes. She was barefoot and her feet were filthy.
“I’ll bet it’s hot out there,” the librarian said.
The girl nodded.
“Have you seen the Royall exhibit? Or have your parents?”
The girl giggled as the librarian checked out the book.
As I passed her, I could smell her, a smell of patchouli fighting the odor of unwashed flesh. Without a thank-you, she seized the book from the librarian with the quick, practiced gesture of a purse snatcher.
Truro Center was a lie. The road sign on Route 6 fooled you into expecting something like Welfleet: chaste white houses, a church with a white spire and gilt cod weathervane. But Truro Center that summer consisted of a strip mall with a gift shop, a grocery store, and an office where you could buy stickers for beach parking. There was a town hall and a post office, each the size of a prefabricated woodshed. There was little else. It was not a place to linger or converse.
“The old Royall community? Where the painter lived?” I asked. People shook their heads, then ducked back into their station wagons. From the library book, I’d memorized a few landmarks in the vicinity of Royall’s colony, now, seemingly lost as old Roanoke and Virginia Dare.
Everything abutted the Pamet River, so that was of little help, but the author cited Old Barn Road and Deep Pond. Consulting my battered book of maps of Massachusetts towns, I could not locate Old Barn Road, but saw Deep Pond toward the Massachusetts Bay side of Truro, which agreed with Royall’s biography alluding to ancient shell middens on his land. I was determined to find Royall’s lost community because I felt it was no coincidence that Edward’s warning and Royall’s painting both alluded to a Golden One. It was no coincidence that the museum assailant went berserk in the Royall exhibit, near that painting. I believed that Edward’s warning and Royall’s colony and Ian’s murder—all the perverse events plaguing the summer—were somehow related, tangled together like cat briar.
Truro, unlike Provincetown, is very wooded and spread out. Forests of oak and pine and birch suddenly break open to reveal a marsh fanning out toward the horizon, the greenest grass imaginable cut by a shallow meandering river. But in all this expanse, the buildings are few, and there’s nothing as urban as Commercial Street. A good number of the buildings in Truro are old, many farmhouses built before the Revolution, with broad chimneys and small-paned windows, glass being precious back then. There is less Victorian whimsy than in Provincetown, and that’s appropriate because Truro has always been more conservative than Provincetown, very straight, full of journalists from New York and Harvard professors and an occasional famous novelist or photographer. It’s the sort of place where you can drive for a mile and not see a house, just rolling hills and trees, then you’ll notice a small stand selling fresh fruit or vegetables, a place where they weigh your produce on a creaky old scale and pack it in brown paper bags.
I stopped at just such a stand to ask directions. I should’ve bought a little something, but the drought had diminished the supply of native produce, and what was available had a stunted, dulled look. “I’m looking for Old Barn Road,” I began.
An old man whose skin was leathery and cured-looking from many profound sunburns, wearing a flannel shirt in all this heat, went back to reading the local paper. “There’s no Old Barn Road, not that’s public.”
“Well, do you know where Deep Pond is?”
“That’s private too.” He shooed away a bee cruising a carton of berries. “Can’t help you. Better move along.”
Using my mime skills, I pretended to be interested in some peppers that were sunken like the hollows of the old man’s face.
“Better move along,” he said, sharper. “Just move along.”
The staff at the Christian Soldiers’ office had been friendlier, and I had a Massachusetts license plate: I wasn’t some Yankees fan from Westchester.
I kept driving, down the winding roads with generous soft shoulders that sent clouds of dust and grit to coat the foliage at their sides. Some of the road signs were missing, leaving just metal poles, and all of the landscape looked alike, the trees, the undergrowth vivid with poison ivy. There was virtually no traffic, no one else to ask for directions, but, eventually, if I kept driving. I figured I’d reach Massachusetts Bay, stumble upon a beach and there would be people there, families swimming or at least parking lot attendants.
Eventually, the asphalt gave way to dirt. The car buckled as it hit potholes and gullies washed by rain. As the road narrowed, bushes groped the sides of the car like brushes in a car wash.
Suddenly, a stout woman was in front of my car. “This is private property,” she said.
“I’m lost.”
“Back out until you hit the tar, then turn around by the white post.”
“I’m looking for Deep Pond—”
“Back up.”
“I’m interested in the old Royall place—”
“This is private property.” The woman was local, not summering gentry. You could tell by her accent and her apron, stitched with Dutch windmills, and by her blunt hands, toughened by hoeing and weeding.
“I’m visiting from Boston.”
“Are you looking for relatives?”
“I’m just curious—”
“Then go back to Boston.”
Obeying, I backed the car out as she watched me like my driving instructor. I had nothing to offend the locals on my car, no rainbow decals or “Hatred Is Not A Family Value” bumper stickers. So why were the people of Truro so hostile? Did Royall still have a bad reputation, eighty years after his death?
Some locals get sick of the summer people, but not this early in the season. In Provincetown they call this attitude Augustitis, and it usually hits year-rounders three weeks or so before Labor Day, when the crowds, the jostling, the bumper-to-bumper traffic inching along Commercial Street slower than lichens growing on old tombstones makes residents overtly territorial. But this was late-July and that man selling vegetables owed his living to summer people, or part of it.
Back on the asphalt, I found myself at a fork in the road. I had three choices, according to a white post with signs every which way, like a weathervane: Corn Hollow Road, Standish Street, and Deep Road.
I opted for the last. It didn’t say Deep Pond, but, a few hundred yards further, I found a sign reading Pond Road.
Again, the landscape was a Xerox of other bits of Truro: woods, dry in this blazing heat, full of briars and the rustling of chipmunks and squirrels in the incendiary detritus. Again, the tar gave way to dirt and my car swooped down into bowls and ruts then slowly climbed out, scraping its bottom and making me anxious about my muffler.
Then it rose from the greenery, blocking the road—a chain-link fence bright as the edge of a new knife. It was of very fine mesh, like medieval chain mail, difficult to climb because you couldn’t get a foothold, and crowned with spirals of razor-like wire like so much vicious tumbleweed. The gate in the fence was locked, and burdened with enough chains to defeat Houdini.
I jumped when something pounded my car. Where had the sound come from? Not from under my car, from behind it! I stamped on the brake and turned my head around to look.
A young girl—skinny and blond, in a long dress like a hippie or a pioneer matron—glared at me. She rapped on my trunk with her hand.
“Excuse me?” I yelled, in a combination of anger and bewilderment, then I realized she couldn’t hear me, with the windows shut tight and the air-conditioning blasting.
She rapped on the trunk with her knuckles. As I reached to switch off the air-conditioning, I leaned forward and accidentally let go of my foot on the brake, just a bit, so the car lunged ahead, and the girl, who must have been leaning on my bumper, lost her balance.
I cut the engine and tried to open the car door, but some bushes encroaching on the road kept me pinned in my seat. I couldn’t get the door fully ajar, but I could hear the girl, swearing, cursing me, using every expletive in the English language permits.
“I’m sorry!”
“Bastard! You tried to run me over!”
“The car was moving forward
,
I’m sorry if I startled you!”
“Why are you here?”
“You shouldn’t be leaning—”
“Why are you here?”
I wasn’t trying to be witty, or ironic. There wasn’t any motive behind what I said next. It just came out of my mouth, spontaneously: “I’m on a quest.”
The anger left her expression. I realized then that I’d seen her before. She was the girl from the Provincetown Public Library, the one who’d borrowed the book about Thomas Royall. Or was she? It could be her, it could be her sister—or any of the young girls panhandling through Provincetown this year.
“Do you work with Jason?” she asked.
I almost said yes out of daring. I said, “I’m looking for Deep Pond,” without answering her.
She acted as if she expected me to say some kind of password. I was tempted to try saying “the Golden One” because that’s what struck me about her, there in the sunlight filtering through the forest—her flaxen hair, long as Rapunzel’s. She was like a princess in a fairy tale, this girl from the woods.
She tugged at her hair. “Who are you?”
Something made me hold back. “I think I saw you at the library in Provincetown.”
She moved toward my side of the car, by the bumper. Craning my neck, I could see that she was barefoot, like the girl in the library. She’d come out of those woods barefoot, through the poison ivy, through the briars. Her feet had to be tough with calluses. And there was something tough about her manner, in spite of her Little Match Girl thinness. I remembered the girl at the library, snatching the Royall biography, pickpocket-quick, from the librarian.
“I’m interested in a man called Thomas Royall.”
“Go away!” The anger had returned to her voice.
“He was an artist in the early nineteen-hundreds. He built a community in this part of Truro.”
“Are you a reporter?”
“I’m an actor.” Although she was small, the intensity of her fury was threatening.
“Sigrid?” The man’s voice came from the woods. “Sigrid? Who’s there?”
“An actor,” the girl answered. “From Provincetown.” She’d noticed the beach parking sticker on my window.
From the woods, a man stepped into the road next to Sigrid. He was tall enough to qualify for the Boston Celtics, with a body any gym rat would envy. He’d shaved his head, but had a beard the color of burrs and antiquated clothing—pants and a shirt—that Royall’s followers might have woven.
“Who are you?” This Giant’s voice was soft.
The girl became angry again. “I tried to stop him, he tried to run me over.”
“Be quiet,” the Giant said, which seemed to devastate her. She put her hands over her mouth and her expression crumpled. It took me a few seconds to realize she was crying.
“I’m…in the arts…I’m interested in an artist named Thomas Royall. I’m looking for the site of his community, for the ruins.”
“Runes?” the Giant asked.
“Thomas Royall’s community.”
“There’s nothing to see.”
I wanted to prolong the conversation, but the questions I longed to ask would be perceived as intrusive, and we were alone in these woods, and I was lost. “You’re in danger,” I remembered Edward warning me.
“There’s nothing left,” the Giant said. “This is private property.”
Indeed. All of Truro was private property, at least today.
“Sorry to bother you. I’ll be off.”
When I turned my head back to face the steering wheel, three more girls—young, underweight, with light hair—had materialized in front of the car. Gaunt and as otherworldly as figures in a daguerreotype, they might have been sisters from a sod house in frontier Nebraska.
“I’m leaving.” I shifted into reverse, and, in an instant, the girls and the Giant, like phantoms, like swamp gas, were gone.