Trouble (26 page)

"I'm going up with Black Dog. Me and two others."

Henry was startled by what he had just said. When had he figured that Chay would be climbing the mountain with them?

"You picked the wrong day for it," said the man.

"I did?"

"Yup, you did. You want to share the trails with four hundred other folks climbing right next to you, stopping to eat salami sandwiches and pickles and throwing beer bottles all over the trail afterward? This your first time up?"

Henry nodded.

"This isn't how your first time on Katahdin should be. Three is fine—and a good old dog is fine, too," he said, smiling because Black Dog was smiling. "One is better, but three will do. But not four hundred." The man leaned back against one of the long tables. "There should be quiet, and some high clouds that you can walk up into, and then through."

Henry and Black Dog watched the man. The eyes over the enormous mustache were almost closed.

"And the sky is bluer than you can ever hope to see on the ground. And above you, the mountain is all bright stone, looking like God hasn't gotten around to putting the trees on it yet. And then you get to the top, and you realize why the Abenaki thought it was a sacred place." He leaned forward. "You realize they were right."

Henry let out his breath.

"That's what your first trip to Katahdin should be like," said the man. "Not with tourists carrying pickles. You only go up for the first time once. And that's the climb you remember best."

"Maybe we should wait a day," said Henry.

"Maybe you should. Stay tonight and see the fireworks. Millinocket goes all out with its fireworks—for seven days, starting tonight. The last night is the grandest night of them all."

"Black Dog will hate fireworks," said Henry.

"All dogs hate fireworks."

"My name's Henry."

The man smiled and nodded. "A good name for someone about to climb Katahdin. I'm Thaddeus Baxter of the good old Baxter clan that gave the land in this park to the state of Maine forever. And this"—he waved his arms over the collection—"this is what I've done for the first eighty years of my life."

"Since your first climb?"

Thaddeus Baxter laughed. "Look at this."

Henry and Black Dog followed Thaddeus Baxter along the exhibit tables, which were filled with ... well, stuff. Stuff that, Henry figured, people had thrown away on the mountain. Stuff that people had thrown away for good reasons, almost all of which probably began with "It's broken." Most were artifacts from the old lumbering camps: a fry pan with its handle snapped off, a pulley system lacking one of its wheels, a two-handled saw missing both of its handles and something close to all of the teeth along its blade, and tin plates and pans and mugs rusted through in five or six places. Another table held a post from the old Hersey Dam, part of a trestle that held the suspension bridge over the Penobscot River, and more two-handled saws from the logging days—still without handles and teeth. They must have been pretty hard on them, thought Henry.

"And this," said Thaddeus Baxter, "this is my pride and joy."

It was a bicycle wheel, without a tire, mounted on the wall.

Thaddeus Baxter reached up and spun the wheel. It revolved slowly, its spokes going around and around, spinning over an exhibit of faded red flannel long johns used by the loggers—which wasn't a pretty sight.

"Impressed?"

Henry nodded. It never hurt to be polite.

"This is the wheel that Myron Avery used way back in 1933 to measure the trails up the mountain. This very wheel. Here's where he held it, right here." He put his hand reverently on the handle that angled out from the hub. His face looked as though he was touching a relic. Then he looked at Henry. "You don't think it's all that much, do you?"

Henry decided that being polite and lying were about the same thing here. "No, no. I think it's amazing."

Thaddeus Baxter laughed again. "Never kid a kidder, son. You think it's a bunch of junk some good old coot dragged down from the mountain and put under some lights."

Henry smiled and reached down to scratch Black Dog's ears. She was trying to lick some cotton candy fluff off her snout.

"But let me tell you something: Everything here's got a story. See that saw? It doesn't look like much now, sure. But there was a day when two men climbed a pine tree seventy-five feet off the ground—maybe eighty, maybe more—and they strapped themselves to that tree and to each other, and they sawed through until they topped it, and two hundred feet of pine board tipped over about six inches away from their chests and crashed down, and they looked at each other and laughed while the sun came down on them in the new hole they made in the sky. And see that fry pan? That there? That's cooked twenty thousand pancakes and spilled five hundred gallons of grease to feed the men who topped the trees. And that pulley? That helped to drag logs all the way down the mountain to the river so they could be floated out, and if you were good and knew what you were doing, you could get on top of one of those logs and ride it like you were on a bronco, except no good old western bronco was ever that fast. Or ever that dangerous, come to think of it."

"How about the long johns?" said Henry.

"Those long johns, son, are what kept many a good logger out of the Millinocket graveyard. They were the only thing that stood between him and Katahdin's cold. And let me tell you, if you weren't wearing these—and I mean, getting sewed in come late August and staying in them all the way through late April—you'd be found out in a drift some morning, and you wouldn't be moving."

Henry raised his eyebrows. He wasn't sure that not being found in a drift was worth wearing the same underwear for eight months.

"So all this is about surviving on the mountain," said Henry, waving his arm across the tables of stuff.

"More than surviving. You don't go up the mountain just to survive. You go up the mountain for a whole lot more. Why are you going up?"

"Just to climb."

"Oh, good God, boy, you're not just another tourist, are you?"

"I'm going up for my brother."

"And what the heck does that mean?"

"What does what mean?"

"That you're going up for your brother."

But Henry wasn't sure exactly what it meant. "We were going to go up together, but then he died. Now I'm going up in his memory."

"Sort of like a eulogy, you mean."

"I guess."

"That's a fool reason to climb Katahdin." Henry stared at him. "What?"

"You don't climb the mountain for a eulogy. You don't climb it to take photographs with fancy cameras. And you don't—you really don't—climb it for someone else."

"So why did you climb it the first time?"

"Because I was seventy-five feet up in a pine when the top we'd just cut through sheered off and took the fellow sawing with me down with it, screaming all the way." Thaddeus Baxter looked out the window, far away through it. "Makes you think it could be you. That's when I first climbed Katahdin."

Henry looked at Thaddeus Baxter. "Did it help?" he whispered.

Now Thaddeus Baxter looked at Henry. "Did it help? Jehoshaphat, if these old bandy legs of mine still worked, I would take you up onto Katahdin and show you places that no one knows about except God and me. I would show you places so beautiful, it's where angels linger on a July afternoon, because there isn't anything in heaven to touch it." He reached up and spun the bicycle wheel. "It helped." The wheel spun slowly, as though it were ticking off time.

Henry leaned against one of the tables.

"Maybe I know why I'm going up," he said.

Thaddeus Baxter spun the wheel again. "That so?"

"To find out how to live with trouble."

Henry turned and set his back against the exhibit table. He looked across to the old engravings on the other wall.

And then, he was looking at one engraving.

The print of an old two-masted ship. Drawn up on the shore. Aflame. Beside an old house. With a sea captain looking out the bay window.

Henry knew the house.

He knew the black boulders that circled the burning ship.

Salvage Cove.

And beneath the print, a caption in bold letters read, "Captain Smith and the Burning of the
Seaflower.
"

"S
HE WAS A BEAUTY
in her time," said Thaddeus Baxter, "a sight for sore eyes when she sailed into a harbor."

"The
Seaflower,
" said Henry.

"Isn't she elegant? Even when she's burning, her lines are still pretty."

Henry moved closer to the print.

"You know her?" Thaddeus Baxter asked.

Henry nodded. "A little."

"Then maybe you know more than I do. She's one of the local stories that gets forgotten until someone digs up a print that's been stuck away in somebody's attic for two hundred years. Someone like me. Then I find out what I can about it. That's so of every one of the prints on that wall." He waved his hand at them. "I collect what I can."

"She was taken ashore and burned," said Henry.

"By her captain."

Henry looked at Thaddeus Baxter. "Her captain?"

He pointed. "That's him watching her, out of his own house."

Henry looked at his own house in the print. At Captain Smith, standing in the bay window of the library. Henry leaned in closer. It looked as if the captain's hands were up to his face.

"Why would a captain burn his own ship?"

"Maybe because of what he'd done with her after King Philip's War. You know what cargo she carried?"

Henry thought of the chains and manacles. He thought of the swords and flintlocks. He put his hand up to his neck and rubbed the sudden hurt.

"Slaves," he said. "Slaves from Africa."

"Slaves is right," said Thaddeus Baxter, "and you might think it'd be slaves from Africa. That's what I thought first. But you'd be wrong. The slaves were from here. Indians. Indians who lost the war and got arrested by the good governors of Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay. They said that the Indians committed 'notorious and execrable murders, killings, and outrages,' and condemned them to slavery for the rest of their lives. One hundred and eighty people. Men, women, children."

"And they used the
Seaflower.
"

Thaddeus Baxter nodded. "They did. Captain Thomas Smith took them away from New England forever. That's how he made some of his fortune. He chained those Indians below decks and shipped them down to the Caribbean. But no one in the Caribbean wanted to buy them, because no one wanted troublemakers. So he sailed across the Atlantic and took them to West Africa, but no one wanted to buy them there, either. You didn't know any of this, did you? That's what comes of finding an old print like that."

"What happened to them?"

"Thomas Smith left them in Morocco. Sold them off in a place about as far away and different from New England as you can get. And there they stayed."

"That doesn't explain why the ship was burned."

"Doesn't it? Suppose you was Captain Thomas Smith and you left one hundred and eighty people on a foreign shore with nothing. Slaves. And then you sailed away, back to the only home they knew, the home that you'd helped take from them. God only knows what happened to them." Thaddeus Baxter paused, and together they looked at the old print. "What do you think you'd feel if you looked out on that ship day after day, sitting pretty in your harbor?"

"So he burned her."

"Maybe. Or maybe the
Seaflower
slipped her cable in a storm and drove up on the rocks, and he burned her because she was wrecked. No one knows. But if you look at the print, he isn't trying to salvage her, is he?"

"And that's how the cove got its name. Salvage Cove."

Thaddeus Baxter shook his head. "Not Salvage Cove—not then, at least. Back when the
Seaflower
was burned, 'salvage' was the spelling for 'savage.' The
Seaflower
was beached and burned in
Savage
Cove."

The palm of Henry's hand suddenly sprang into pain.

Trouble. It was there in the flames leaping off the bow of the
Seaflower,
as high as the masts, coming out of the hold that had once held one hundred and eighty slaves bound for Africa. It was there in the face of Captain Thomas Smith, standing in the library and looking out over the cove, his hands up to his face, his mouth open in horror at what he had done. It was there in Savage Cove.

"They say he never left his house after that," said Thaddeus Baxter. "He died there, alone, all shriveled up, afraid to come out into the kind of world he'd helped to make."

Henry shivered, even though the air in the museum was hot and still. Black Dog looked up at him and gently licked his throbbing hand. Then she rubbed her snout along his leg to get a little more of the cotton candy off.

"How do you know about the
Seaflower?
" asked Thaddeus Baxter.

"I picked up bits and pieces of it," Henry said.

Thaddeus Baxter waved his arm over his collection. "That's just what I do," he said.

Henry nodded and held out his hand. "Thanks," he said.

"Glad to have you. You take care of yourself up on the mountain—and the good old dog. But if I was to give advice, I'd tell you to wait a day."

Henry grabbed his belt, and he and Black Dog headed out. The sound of the tinkling bell followed them. Henry was still shivering a little.

How can you ever hope to build your house far from Trouble if Trouble is there already?

Henry felt shaky, but the first thing he decided after he got back onto the main street of Millinocket was to find Sanborn and Chay.

The second thing he decided was to start looking for them on the side streets. He decided this mostly because—completely because—some of the members of the percussion section of the Millinocket Junior High School Marching Band were still roaming up and down, peering into alleys and the now-open stores.

So Henry ducked down the first street he found, walked a couple of blocks, and then headed in the direction he had left the pickup. Black Dog, who had finally gotten all of the pink cotton candy off her snout, strained at the belt beside him, pretty unhappy about having to walk on a leash because there were all these gray squirrels that were running up into trees and laughing at her from the branches. But Henry wasn't going to let her get into any more trouble.