The Four Corners Of The Sky (64 page)

The star ruby had been appraised at $12.6 million. Divers immediately returned to the site. There on the fourth day of diving, they uncovered beneath the seabed a few rotted ribs of the Spanish ship
La Madre del Salvador
. Over the next week, teams of divers recovered cannon balls, an astrolabe, an ivory comb, a steel mirror. Most importantly, under an enormous bronze cannon, they came upon a crushed chest with rusted and barnacled ironwork, bearing the escutcheon of Don Carlos de Tormes. Tormes was believed by scholars to have been traveling to Spain in
La Madre
in order to give a statue known as
La Reina Coronada del Mar
, the Queen of the Sea, to his sovereign Philip II.

Under a rusted anchor nearby, divers in fact found a crushed gold statue. But it was so smashed that it took a while to identify it as the Virgin Mary holding a baby. Salt water had seeped into the leather chest for centuries. The wood had mostly dissolved into nothing but ocean. On the other hand, the broken pieces of gold glistened as luminously as they had the day the Inca artist had fashioned them to fit the head and heart of the Mother of God.

The newspaper article said that the Cuban government was claiming ownership of the broken artifact and of the star ruby. They would be added to La Reina’s relics already in the Museo Habana: the statue of the Virgin Mary (both the Cuban government and the
FBI
had kept very quiet about the fact that the “gold” statue was a gold-plated reproduction and the “sixteenth-century” casket allegedly containing a “Holy Thorn”—while real silver—was not sixteenth-century silver), and the very real two emeralds, three rubies, six sapphires, and two diamonds.

Museo Habana officials said the discovery raised questions about the authenticity of the so-called
Reina Coronada del Mar
“relic” that was currently on display in the Church of the Sacred Heart in Miami. Archbishop de Uloa had accepted the “relic” on behalf of his Catholic diocese when Miami business leader Feliz Diaz had so generously and with much publicity donated it and Museo officials claimed he’d either been taken for a ride or was in the driver’s seat of a scam.

Rebutting the Cuban announcement, the archbishop issued a statement that the relic currently on display in the Church of the Sacred Heart was absolutely genuine, no matter what the Castro regime claimed. He even let a jeweler look at it and then testify that the gold statue was real gold and the five very large emeralds in her crown were real emeralds. More to the Catholic point, said the archbishop, was the measureless value of the holy statue as once the vessel of a silver casket (admittedly now missing) that once had held a Thorn from Christ’s Crown of Thorns.

The Danish salvage company filed suit for half the profits from the sale of the star ruby found in the conch shell.

As Dan folded the paper, Annie grinned. “Dad did it. He pulled the big con!”

She said that while it was possible that back in the sixteenth century someone had removed the statue before the Spanish ship sank and that it was possible that this statue had been found by her ancestor Joseph “Boss” Peregrine and had been brought, as her dad claimed, all the way from Cuba to Emerald, North Carolina, she thought it more likely that Boss had found a few emeralds and rubies in the rubble of the monastery, or even that he had sluiced them out of the Appalachian mountains. In either case, her father had found those jewels at Pilgrim’s Rest and out of them had created this whole story about a golden relic of the past that he’d somewhere read about. “Remember how Raffy kept telling us that his family had been goldsmiths and silversmiths in Havana for hundreds of years? His mother made both copies of the Queen. And she made the silver casket.”

“Mrs. Ramirez has a lot of talent.” Dan kissed Annie’s hand that wore the Ramirez engagement and wedding rings.

Annie repacked their picnic leftovers. “Dad was working with her all along. First, Raffy’s mother made the fake
La Reina Coronada del Mar
for Dad to sell to Diaz. And then when they got in trouble and Ruthie cut Dad a deal with the
FBI
, Mrs. Ramirez made the gold-plate copy for the switch.” Annie speculated that Raffy’s whole sob story about how his mother had shut the door in his face had been part of the con. She grew thoughtful. “Maybe the whole setup, sending me to St. Louis and to Miami, maybe it was all part of the sting. Digging up the silver box at Hialeah was the seed; the gold statue was the payoff. I was the perfect accomplice because I was a complete skeptic. And then I fell for it. Who would doubt
me
? I said it’s real. That’s what Dad and Raffy planned—for me to believe it. For Ruthie to believe it. Another skeptic. They said, ‘Look here!’ and we looked.”

“I looked too,” Dan admitted. “I still want to believe.”

Annie smiled. “They fooled me, you, Diaz, Ruthie, and most of all, McAllister Fierson and company. Dad and Raffy’s only big con. I kind of like that.”

Shouldering their backpacks, the young couple headed down into the ruins of the great lost city of the fallen Incan empire, Machu Picchu, which, on some mysterious horrible day five hundred years earlier, had been destroyed by soldiers of the Spanish empire, which had also long since fallen into ruin.

Eight months later, Sam folded Annie’s satin wedding gown and carried it to the cedar closet in the attic where she would keep it, not because she thought there was a chance that Annie would ever marry anyone else but because the dress was from Ruthie and it was a reminder, a memory, of so happy a day in Annie’s life that Annie’s children might someday like to see it, a daughter might even want to wear it.

In the attic, Sam came across a box neatly packed with Annie’s Halloween costumes; many of them, Sam herself had haphazardly made. The smallest costume she found was a little witch’s outfit with a high black cone hat and a black satin cape tied with a black ribbon.

Headed back downstairs, on the second-floor landing, Sam had to sit on the step, holding the wedding dress and the child-size witch’s cape, leaning her head against the stair rails, because she couldn’t stop crying.

Coming home from the hospital, Clark heard her and ran quickly up the stairs from the hallway. “Sam? Sam?”

“I’m fine.”

He sat beside her, his long legs bent to his chest. They sat there a while. Finally Clark said, “She’ll be okay. Nothing will happen to her in Iraq.”

“It’s a war, Clark.”

He looped his arm around his friend. “I sure did think we’d leave her a better world.”

Sam kept crying.

“You know what, Sam?” Clark hugged her next to him, held up the laced satin sleeve of the wedding dress in her lap. “You know what? You’re just crying because mothers in movies always cry.”

“Oh Clark, stop it.” She rested her head on his shoulder, her hand patting the small black cape. “Mothers cry in movies because mothers cry.”

They sat at home, on the porch at Pilgrim’s Rest, hoping, waiting.

I
n January in North Carolina between the Piedmont and the coast, by late afternoon the sky gathers darkness and dreams of night.

The old cemetery of St. Mark’s Church in Emerald had new graves this winter. The newest was the red-mounded earth where Anne Peregrine Goode-Hart now stood quietly. She wore a dark-blue winter uniform, with the badges and ribbons and insignia of a Lt. Commander of the United States Navy.

There was no tombstone yet on the new grave because Sam could not yet bring herself to choose what the marker should say. Maybe, she told Annie, they should put a pun on it. The whole idea of the final choice of what to say was going to be, Sam worried, too much of an ending for her.

Annie’s six-year-old daughter, impatient, ran up and down the gravel path among the gravestones. She wore a wool Florida Marlins baseball jacket that her father had given her. Tripping on an old uneven stone, she fell, bracing her fat pink gloves in the gravel.

“Samantha, be careful.”

The child ignored her. “Is it going to snow? Daddy says it’s going to snow. We never get snow in Florida.”

Annie studied how the clouds were rolling over the corner of the sky. “Maybe,” she conceded.

“Mom!” Samantha shouted. She stood near a large bush of browned rhododendron blossoms. “Is this Grandpa Jack’s grave?”

Annie walked over to her and looked at the sunken small gray marker.

John Ingersoll Peregrine

1946–1948

Taken From Me

Kneeling, she brushed dry leaves from the gray curve of the little carved wings. “No, that’s his brother’s grave. Grandpa Jack’s not dead.”

“Then he ought to come see us,” the child solemnly said. “If he does, I’m going to thank him for all my money. Daddy said Grandpa Jack gave me a lot of money and I ought to give it to you and him when you’re old. But I don’t want you to get old.”

“We won’t for a long time.” Her mother smiled but was preoccupied, turning sadly back to the red upheaval of earth.

Her daughter ran after her, reached for her hand. “I’m sorry Uncle Clark died. He was nice.”

Annie agreed that Clark was very nice.

Samantha frowned. “Aunt Sam is so sad. She says she misses Clark’s stupid jokes.” The little girl looked up at her mother, hoping for confirmation. “She misses her dog Teddy too. But Sam’ll be okay, right?”

Annie squeezed her daughter’s hand. “She’ll be okay. She’s got Sarah and us and the Destin family and Malpy and all her friends. Your daddy’s her good friend.”

The child found the large number of Sam’s acquaintances consoling. “Daddy says his name is Hart because he’s got a big heart. Is that true?”

“He does have a big heart.”

“He says his heart hurts because you’re sad about Clark. He wants Sam to take all the crap out of Pilgrim’s Rest and put it in the yard and sell it. He says she should make one of her big signs that says “Crap for Sale,” because you don’t sell your garage when you have a ‘garage sale’ and you don’t sell your ‘yard’ when you have a ‘yard sale,’ but Sam sure would be having a ‘crap sale’ if she sold all that junk in her attic.” Samantha glanced quickly at Annie’s face, hoping to see shock at the word ‘crap.’

But all her mother said was, “Sam’s not going to sell that junk. And besides you never know when you might find something you really like up in Sam’s attic. Like how about that pink baseball cap Sam gave you with all the jewels on it?”

“Sam said they’re really real jewels.”

Annie fastened the strap on one of Samantha’s gloves. “They are real.”

Her daughter was distracted by the appearance of a family, a young mother and father with a little girl of about her age. They were walking up the hill to the graves. Their voices carried through the bare winter trees. They were talking about something they’d heard today on the news. The young man said, “Did you ever think they’d indict McAllister Fierson?”

The young woman said, “See, there’s hope.”

Annie smiled wryly. Fierson was one story of many that the news reported on, casually and with an ephemeral interest in its truth. Ruth Nickerson’s part in the story would never be told.

Samantha ran down the path and stared at the other little girl from behind a large gray, pitted obelisk, the tomb of some Emerald soldier named Peregrine, long dead in some long ago American war fought for some reason or other.

“Come back here, Samantha.”

Annie saw the couple noticing her Navy uniform and the braided cap she held in her hands. Instinctively she braced herself for a certain look from them, suspicious, distrustful. But instead they politely waved.

Only a month earlier she had worn this braided cap at the funeral in Arlington Cemetery of her former husband, Brad Hopper. Brad had died in a car bombing, on the road from the military airport into Baghdad. For his actions in rescuing a fellow officer, he had received posthumously the Navy Cross, accepted at the ceremony by his mother. After the service, Annie made her way to Mama Spring while Brad’s sister was helping the trembling woman into the limousine. Annie said that Brad’s family must be very proud of him, and rightly so. He was the hero he had always wanted to be.

Annie was thinking gratefully about Brad and the last time she’d seen him. At her request, he’d flown one of the new Hopper jets to Emerald so that she could take her uncle, Clark, up for a ride.

While they knew Clark was dying, they didn’t think the cancer would take him so quickly, only six months after he’d diagnosed himself. He had hypothesized that the source of the malignancy might be the damage caused by particles of the incendiary weapon white phosphorous, used by the Army against enemy insurgents in Vietnam.

“But please don’t ever mention this to Sam,” he asked Annie. “It’ll just drive her nuts. And smoking didn’t help.”

Clark waited until Annie’s visit on her birthday so he could tell her face-to-face. He told her it was the last of her birthdays that they’d share, “at least on this side of the grave, which is not to be taken as a grave matter, Annie.”

Inside the house, Dan and Samantha sat watching
The Wizard of Oz
with Sam. Clark sat with Annie on the porch. They watched the sun fall, reddening the river that the Indians had named Aquene, peace. He told her the news he’d confirmed only a few weeks earlier. “Now, is this fair?” he joked. “Your dad gets pretend cancer and I get the real thing?”

Annie reached to Clark’s rocking chair beside her to touch his thin knobby hand. “No, it isn’t fair. But isn’t that always the way it is with you?” He looked at her, puzzled. She smiled at him. “You’re the real thing. Cancer. The real Ruthie, the real me. At least that’s what Ruthie told me in Havana six years ago. She was still mad that you went back to Vietnam, when she loved you so much.”

“…Hmmm.” He rocked slowly, three taps of his foot on the floor. Then he slowly smiled back at her. “Thank you for telling me that.”

She held his hand.

“Well,” he said, “Your dad was a real flyer and I’m sure not that.”

And so at Christmas, Annie asked Brad to lend her a jet and she took Clark up for a ride from Destin Airworks. “We’re going to go fast,” she told him. “Faster than sound.”