HIDDEN MEANINGS
January 20.
Sitting at home, warming the air with music, R.J. struggled with the feeling that tonight was special: a birthday? some kind of anniversary? And then she had it, a message from Keats that she had had to memorize for sophomore English Lit.
St. Agnes’ Eve—Ah, bitter chill it was!
The owl, for all his feathers, was a-cold;
The hare limp’d trembling through the frozen grass,
And silent was the flock in woolly fold.
R.J. had no idea how the flocks were doing, but she knew that the creatures who couldn’t be in a barn must be doing miserably. On several mornings a pair of large wild turkeys, females, had moved slowly over the snow-covered fields. Each successive snowfall had frozen with an icy crust, forming a series of impermeable layers. The turkeys and the deer couldn’t dig through them in order to reach the grass and plants they needed for survival. The turkeys made their way across the mowing like a pair of arthritic dowagers.
R.J. wondered if the Gift worked with animals. But she didn’t have to touch them to know the turkeys were close to death. In the orchard they gathered themselves and made weak and unsuccessful efforts to flutter up into the apple trees to get at the frozen buds.
She could stand it no longer. At the farm store in Amherst she bought a large sack of cracked corn and threw handfuls of the feed over the snow in several places where she had seen the turkeys.
Jan Smith was disgusted with her. “Nature managed nicely without human beings for millennia. So long as man doesn’t destroy the animals they do fine without our help. The fittest will survive,” he said. He was even scornful of bird feeders. “All they do is allow a lot of people to see their favorite songbirds up close. If the feeders weren’t there, the birds would have to move their asses a little in order to live, and it would do them good to work harder.”
She didn’t care. She watched with satisfaction as the turkeys and other birds ate her largesse. Doves and pheasants came, and crows and jays, and smaller birds she couldn’t identify from a distance. Whenever they had eaten all the cracked corn, or when it snowed and covered what she had last thrown, she went outside and threw some more.
Cold January became frigid February. People ventured outside wrapped in a variety of protective layers, knit sweaters, down-filled coats, old fleece-lined bomber jackets. R.J. wore heavy long underwear and a woolen stocking cap that she kept pulled over her ears.
The lousy weather brought out the pioneering spirit that had drawn people into the mountains in the first place. One morning during a blizzard R.J. staggered through drifts to make her way into the office, where she stood, covered with white. “What a day,” she gasped.
“I know!” Toby said, her face glowing. “Isn’t it marvelous?”
It was a month for warm and hearty meals shared with friends and neighbors, because winter stayed forever in the hills and cabin fever was ubiquitous. Over bowls of chili at Toby and Jan’s house, R.J. talked about American artifacts with Lucy Gotelli, a curator in the museum at Williams College. Lucy said her lab had the ability to date objects with comfortable accuracy, and R.J. found herself describing the plate found with the baby’s bones in her pasture.
“I’d like to see it,” Lucy said. “There was a Woodfield Pottery here in the eighteen hundreds that turned out serviceable, unglazed dishware. Perhaps they made your piece.”
A few weeks later, R.J. brought the plate to Lucy’s house.
Lucy examined it with a magnifying glass. “Hey, looks to me like a Woodfield Pottery product, all right. Of course, we can’t be certain. They had a distinctive marking, a merged T and R in black paint on the bottom of every piece. If this plate ever had the marking, it’s been worn away.” She looked curiously at the seven surviving rusty letters on the face of the plate—ah and od, and o, and again od, and picked with a fingernail at the h. “Funny color. Is that ink, do you think?”
“I don’t know. It looks like blood,” R.J. ventured, and Lucy grinned.
“Nah. I guarantee it ain’t blood. Look, why not let me take this to work with me and see what I can come up with?”
“Sure.” So R.J. left it with Lucy, even though she was curiously reluctant to give up the plate even for a short time.
Despite the cold and the deep snow, there was a scratching at the door early one evening. And another scratching. To R.J.’s relief, when she opened the door, instead of a wolf or a bear, the cat walked in and ambled from room to room.
“I’m sorry, Agunah. They’re not here,” R.J. told her.
Agunah stayed less than an hour, and then she stood before the door until R.J. opened it and let her out.
Twice more that week she came and scratched on the door, searched the house disbelievingly, and then departed without deigning to look at R.J.
It was ten days before Lucy Gotelli telephoned, apologizing for the delay. “I’ve done your plate. Nothing to it, really, but we’ve had one minor crisis after another at the museum, and I wasn’t able to deal with it until day before yesterday.”
“And?”
“It is made by Woodfield Pottery, I detected the latent mark very plainly. And I analyzed a bit of the substance that formed the letters on the top surface. It’s casein paint.”
“All I remember about casein is that it’s a milk component,” R.J. said.
“Right. Casein is the chief protein in milk, the part that curdles when the milk sours. Most of the dairy farmers around here made their own paint in the early days. They had plenty of skimmed milk, and they let the curds dry and ground them between stones. They used the casein as a binder, mixing it with pigment and milk and egg white and a little water. In this case, the pigment used was red lead. The letters are printed in red barn paint. A very bright red, actually. Turned into rust by time and the chemical action of the soil.”
All she’d had to do was place the plate under ultraviolet radiation, Lucy said. The porous clay had absorbed paint, which fluoresced under the ultraviolet, absorbing energy and remitting it right back.
“So … were you able to detect the other letters?”
“Yes, certainly. Got a pencil handy? I’ll read them back to you.”
She spelled them out slowly, and R.J. wrote them on her prescription pad, and when Lucy had finished talking she sat and looked without blinking, almost without breathing, at what she had written:
ISAIAH NORMAN GOODHUE
GO IN INNOCENCE TO GOD
Nov 12, 1915
So Harry Crawford’s family had had nothing to do with the skeletal discovery. R.J. had been barking up the wrong family tree.
She checked the town history to make certain Isaiah Norman Goodhue was indeed the brother Norm with whom Eva had lived alone for most of her life. When she saw that he was, instead of solutions she was left with questions and assumptions, each more disturbing than the last.
Eva would have been a fourteen-year-old girl in 1915, of childbearing age but in important ways still a child. She and her older brother had lived alone in the remote farmhouse on Laurel Hill Road.
If the child had been Eva’s, had Eva been impregnated by some unknown male, or by her brother?
The answer seemed to be implicit in the crude name marker.
Isaiah Norman Goodhue had been thirteen years older than the girl. He never married; he spent his life in isolation, working the farm alone. He would have depended on his sister to cook, to tend the house, to help with the animals and the fields.
And his other needs?
If the brother and sister had been the parents, had Eva been forced? Or had there been an incestuous love affair?
The terror and bewilderment the girl must have felt over the pregnancy!
And afterward. R.J. could imagine Eva—frightened, guiltridden because her infant was buried in unconsecrated earth, pained by the birthing and what must have been crude or nonexistent aftercare.
Clearly, their neighbor’s marshy pasture would have been chosen as burial site because it was wet and worthless and never would be turned over by a plow. Had the brother and sister done the burying together? The clay plate had been buried shallower than the baby. R.J. thought it likely that Eva had marked it to record her dead son’s name and birth date—the only memorial available to her—and then had stolen down to bury it above her infant.
Eva had spent most of her life looking down the hill at that marsh; what must she have felt, seeing Harry Crawford’s cows wading there, adding their piss and manure to the muck?
Dear God, had the child been born alive?
Only Eva would have been able to answer the dark questions, so R.J. would never really know, which was just as well. She no longer wished to display the plate. It spoke to her too loudly of tragedy, too plainly of the unhappiness of a rural girl caught in deep despair, and when she got it back from Lucy, she wrapped it in brown paper and placed it away in the bottom drawer of her breakfront.