I knelt down, gathering the jelly beans, wishing I could put them back in some order that would make sense. But I couldn’t, so I just dropped them in the jar, one after another after another, and screwed the lid back on.
I found Early on the porch steps, tears streaking his dirty face. He had papers and news articles from his journal strewn about. Early must have realized that the woodsman wasn’t Fisher. I opened my mouth to say what he’d already figured out. That his brother wasn’t coming back. That he was gone, lost forever near a bridge in France. But instead, I kept quiet, because I didn’t want it to be true. Besides, who was I to tell Early anything? He said we could build a boat, and we did. He said that Martin Johannsen’s death was an accident, and it was. He said there were timber rattlesnakes in Maine, and even with the swelling and redness gone from my arm, I knew that there were. Of course, he could be wrong about some things. He had thought I was Mrs. Johannsen’s son. He had thought there was no color in Kansas. He had thought he could trust me before the regatta. There were times when Early was wrong.
But I of all people understood the need to believe that a loved one is alive, standing in front of you, loving you.
Early was surrounded by his array of articles and notes. His arsenal of reasons why Fisher was still alive. He stared at a particular newspaper clipping as if he were looking right through it. It was the picture of the bear hunter from Early’s bulletin board at school—the bear hunter I now recognized as Archibald MacScott when he still had two eyes. He was standing proudly by his prize, smiling a big smile, thinking he had killed the Great Appalachian Bear and won the bounty.
Seeing the picture made me wonder.
“He must have been a good hunter—a good shot, I mean. How is it that he missed the real Great Appalachian Bear yesterday, at point-blank range?”
“He wasn’t trying to hit her,” said Early.
“That’s crazy. I don’t know that much about hunting bear, but I do know that if you go shooting at a bear like that, not trying to hit it, you’re asking for whatever you get.”
Early just nodded.
“What?” I said. “You think MacScott wanted that bear to kill him?” Even as I said it, it made sense. MacScott had lived a long time carrying the guilt and shame of what he’d done.
“Didn’t you see it in his face?” Early asked. “He was asking that bear to put an end to his pain.”
I looked back at the picture from just a few months ago. “I wonder how long it took for him to find out that he had killed the wrong bear back then,” I said. “Do you think he had to read it in the paper?”
“I don’t know, but Fisher knew it right away.”
“What do you mean? What does Fisher have to do with it?”
“Look at his eyes. He knows there’s a big fuss being made over the wrong bear.”
I looked at the picture more closely.
“What are you talking about, Early? There’s nobody in the picture except MacScott, the bear, and that”—my voice caught in my throat—“bearded lumberjack.” I stared at the face and, strangely, I recognized it. Not as the face in the trophy case, but as the bearded face of the man who had helped Early during his seizure yesterday.
“You think this is Fisher? So you saw this picture and thought Fisher was in these woods, and that’s why you set off on this wild-goose chase?”
“It is Fisher!” said Early, clearly frustrated that he’d been telling me the same thing over and over and I still didn’t seem to understand. “I’ve shown you!” he yelled. “It says it right here”—he grabbed a loose piece of notepaper—“and here and here and here.” He held a stack of crumpled articles and pages with notes in his clenched fist. “But you won’t listen.” Then he hunched his head down into a green jacket that he must have borrowed from Martin’s closet, looking for all the world like a turtle in an oversized shell.
I had no words left to argue with him. And they wouldn’t have helped, anyway.
“Fine,” I said. “You keep looking for your dead brother. But for now, we’ve got to bury Mrs. Johannsen.” I grabbed the shovel that was propped up against the porch and set off to finish digging Mrs. Johannsen’s grave. “And then I’m done. I’m going back to Morton Hill. And I’m going to sleep in a bed. And I’m going to stay dry. And I’m going to mess up my sock drawer. And I’m going to listen to Billie Holiday when it’s not raining. Better yet, I won’t listen to Billie Holiday at all. I’ll listen to—”
I stopped short as I reached the clearing where I’d expected to find Mrs. Johannsen’s mostly dug and empty grave. Instead, where there was supposed to be a hole in the ground, all the empty space had been filled in with the dirt we’d set off to the side, and there was a cross made out of wooden planks positioned as a grave marker.
I took a tentative step forward, half wondering if Mrs. Johannsen had buried herself.
Early came up behind me. “You can’t listen to Billie Holiday when it’s not raining, and your socks—Hey.” He looked at the grave. “How’d she get buried so fast?”
“Good question.” I walked toward the cross to see the name that had been carved into the wood.
It was as if all the jelly beans in Early’s jar had exploded all over the place. This made no sense at all. And on the tree stump just beside the newly filled grave was a red tartan jacket, folded up and placed just so. I looked back at Early. He was wearing a different jacket, because he had left his back in the cave behind the waterfall, covering Martin Johannsen’s bones. That was why he had been shivering during the night.
“Where’d you get that jacket?” I asked.
“I’m not going to tell you. You don’t believe anything I say, anyway.”
“Mrs. Johannsen probably gave it to you. It’s Martin Johannsen’s jacket.”
“Is not.”
“Is too.”
“Is not.”
“Then where’d you get it?”
“I’m not telling you.”
There was something familiar about the jacket. That drab olive-green canvas—very functional, very durable. Very military. I tugged at Early’s arms to see the front of the jacket where a name would have been sewn. At first he resisted, but then he let his arms go slack. There were capital letters, lined up neat and clear. Five letters.
My dream from the night before came to mind. Suddenly it seemed important. Early and the bear had been talking. What did they say?
Early had put his arm around the bear’s sagging shoulders. He’d said something to the bear, and his voice was small and sad. What was it? I struggled to recall. It was like trying to find the words of a song, guessing where to place the needle on the record.
Slowly the dream replayed itself in my mind.
You can come back, Early had said. Just like Superman did after the kryptonite almost got him. And like Pi did when he kept his eyes on the bright star named for him.
I remembered the bear speaking back. I moved the needle forward in my mind.
The bear had lifted his sad face and said, “I’m not a superhero. And I don’t look at stars anymore.”
The needle skipped ahead, and Early was crying. Then the bear got up, took off his heavy coat, and placed it on Early’s shivering shoulders. “Go home,” he said, and walked away, leaving Early alone. And the dream in my mind moved into the empty space, whirring and crackling, with no more words and no more images.
I realized it wasn’t a dream. It was a scene I had witnessed playing out through the bedroom window, only there hadn’t been a bear. It had been a man. And that man was Fisher Auden.
In that moment, it was as if all the fallen jelly beans had lined up in neat, colorful rows, just like those letters on the olive-green jacket. The bearded onlooker from the newspaper clipping. The woodsman covering Early’s skinny shoulders with his jacket. The dream that wasn’t a dream. Even the walnut shells that I saw scattered at my feet near the newly dug grave. Fisher Auden was alive. He had been following us, keeping watch over us in those woods. And he had buried the bones of Martin Johannsen.
And now the silence. The painful, absolute quiet.
Again, in that moment of strained silence, I was reminded that Early was not just a strange oddity of nature who counted jelly beans and read numbers as if they were a story. I knew he could feel hurt and disappointment, but before he had been fairly quick to bounce back. This time, something was different. During this whole long journey, Early had known his brother was alive, because in his mind, Fisher was a superhero. And superheroes never die. But now, tears streamed down Early’s face because his brother had come back. Only it wasn’t the brother he remembered.
I had grown accustomed to Early being in the coxswain seat. He had been the one calling the commands, adjusting our course, directing, guiding. Now, strangely, our roles were reversed. I was the one who had traveled down this road before. I knew its twists and turns, its rocks and pitfalls. I knew what it felt like to be lost. But I didn’t know if I could guide us out.
Early took off his brother’s jacket and put on his own. There was only one thing I could think of to say.
“Tell me how you knew.”
“You won’t listen.”
“Yes, I will.”
“No, you won’t.”
I took Early by the shoulders. “I’m listening. Tell me.”
Early set his backpack on the leafy ground and took out his crumpled stack of notes. “The explosives had a detonator. The German tank hit the shed where Fisher’s men were hiding. Then the tank was destroyed on the bridge. That means someone had to still be alive to push the detonator. Fisher would have been the one in the water, placing the charges, when the German tank blew up the shed. Fisher was still alive. He pushed the detonator. He was a hero.”
“But his dog tags. They were found among the dead.”
“He would have given them to another soldier to hold. He swam with his shirt off, and he didn’t want the dog tags to reflect in the moonlight.”
That’s the way it was with Early. He could have the same information as everyone else, but it all meant something different to him. He saw what everyone else missed.
“I see” was all I could say. And I did see. More than I wished I did.
Yes, Fisher was alive. But he’d been wounded. Probably on the outside at first, back in France, but now, even more, on the inside. I didn’t know what had happened to Fisher between France and the woods of Maine, but the brother, the hero, that Early knew and idolized was gone. I knew what that was like. Poor Early. He was only now realizing that there are no such things as superheroes. But then, we both should have known. Superman doesn’t have a son. And Captain America doesn’t have a brother.
“He was sitting right next to me,” said Early, “but it was like he wasn’t really here. I told him to come back with me. That he would be all right. He was raining inside and there was no Billie Holiday. No music at all. He told me to go home. And he left.”
I searched for the right words to say, but they didn’t come. So I just took up Fisher’s jacket, folded it with the care and precision I would use to fold a flag, and put it in my backpack.
Early wiped his eyes and said, “Let’s bury Mrs. Johannsen and go home.”
For the second time that week, I put shovel to earth and began digging a grave.