Saving Lucas Biggs

by Marisa de los Santos

  “Still, it’s a place to start,” I said, because all this felt alive to me, even if it was a long time ago, and I knew Walter Mendenhall, although he was surely dead by now, would help us, if only I could figure out how.

  Margaret

  2014

  THIS TIME, IT WASN’T THE GREAT, WHEELING, dancing stars in the sky we put our trust in, but a single star, pink and gray, eight-pointed, and not beautiful, or beautiful only because it had been precious, for whatever reason, to Aristotle.

  Our internet search turned up more Mendenhalls than Charlie and I knew what to do with, and after many awkward emails and two mortifying phone calls, just when we were starting to seriously feel like stalkers, we found a Mendenhall family in West Virginia with their own web page and everything: Mendenhall & Sons & Daughters Roofing Company. Right away, I liked them. They’d been around since 1868. They included “& Daughters” in their company name. They specialized in slate and tile, two solid, high-quality materials. I had a good feeling about these Mendenhalls.

  “I bet these are our Mendenhalls,” I said to Charlie, because that’s the point we’d gotten to: Aristotle was part of us; he belonged to us and so did his Mendenhalls.

  “Yeah,” said Charlie, “I bet so, too.”

  One of these Mendenhalls—Edith, who I assumed was one of the “& Daughters” daughters (or more likely great-great-great granddaughters)—answered our email within three hours, and she not only didn’t act like we were totally insane or possible creepers but offered enthusiastically to help us in any way she could.

  It turned out that Edith’s family, Walter Mendenhall’s family, had taken Aristotle in when he had just arrived from Greece and was dirt-poor, still battle-weary from World War I, and totally alone in the world. Which seemed to me like an extremely nice thing to do, but Edith acted like it was nothing special. In fact, she acted like her family members were the ones who got lucky in finding Aristotle, instead of the other way around.

  Aristotle Agrippa is still a beloved figure in our family, wrote Edith Mendenhall-Smith. His loss still haunts us. We know what he tried to do for the miners of Victory, and how hard he worked for justice. I’d call him a family legend, except that sounds so impersonal. He’s more like just plain family. How wonderful that you’re researching him. We’ve got a letter from him, one my great-grandfather saved. I’d be happy to scan it and send it to you, if you think it might help.

  Oh, yeah, we thought it just might, and within the hour, there they were, pieces of the past sliding page by page out of the printer in my mom’s home office and into our hot little hands. Charlie and I were so excited we were goofy, laughing and jostling to see who could get to the printer first. But as soon as we got a look at the top page, we got quiet because we understood that the letter was a sacred thing. Not in a church way. In a human being way. I sat staring at the page, not even reading, just taking it in, and maybe Charlie was doing the same thing, because after a few seconds, he said, “You know what? We should wait.”

  “For Grandpa Joshua, you mean,” I said.

  “Yeah. It only seems right.”

  Grandpa Joshua had taken Charlie’s little brothers to a movie, so we had to wait hours until he got back. It almost killed us. When they finally got home, even before he had quite made it across the threshold of Charlie’s house, we each grabbed one of Grandpa Joshua’s arms and pulled him through the hallway and the kitchen and out into the backyard.

  When we were all outside, I stood there for a moment, with Charlie’s yard spread out before me. It was ordinary, littered with balls and toys, Charlie’s dad’s big old grill hunkered down like a rusty spaceship at one end, the splintery seesaw his mom had built when Charlie and I were little cutting a sharp diagonal against the pearly, streaky, almost-evening sky. The yard looked like it had looked for as long as I could remember, and yet it was different because now it was the place where it had all started, where Grandpa Joshua had sprung the idea of time travel on me like a guy pulling a rabbit out of a hat. It felt right to be there now, to walk over to the picnic table and sit down, with the giant, stern oak tree as witness, and to hand Grandpa Joshua Aristotle’s letter.

  Aristotle had written it during the miners’ strike but before the Canvasburg Massacre, back when it looked like reason and justice would peacefully win out and the four Martinelli kids would all live to adulthood, back before anyone knew just how truly cruel and twisted Elijah Biggs could be. The hope shining in every line of that letter was enough to break your heart. It’s funny—you could tell from the writing that Aristotle didn’t grow up speaking English, but the broken sentence structure and odd word choices couldn’t hide Aristotle’s braininess or his sense of humor. The letter had a quirky, honest gracefulness to it. Grandpa Joshua’s voice only cracked once, when he read the lines: Always my boy there watching. My boy the fighter, his strong arm ready to throw. He watch how peace is powerful. This thing, he needs to see.

  Out of the jangly music of the letter, one sentence floated like a gorgeous white bird: I lived in the virtue of that life and power that took away the occasion of all wars.

  “I remember you telling us about these words before,” said Charlie, “or some of them, anyway. Such a cool sentence.”

  “What do you think it means?” I asked.

  “Aristotle said it a lot,” said Grandpa Joshua, “whenever we got down and needed our spirits raised. He’d tell us we were taking away the occasion of all wars. Even when I wasn’t quite sure what he meant, it made me stand up straighter.”

  “Can you read that sentence again?” I asked.

  Grandpa Joshua did.

  Slowly, I said, “So is he saying there’s something more powerful than war, something that makes war unnecessary?”

  “I think so,” said Grandpa Joshua.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  We all sat, thinking.

  “Virtue means goodness, right?” said Charlie, finally. “So maybe that.”

  I thought about what my dad had said about all the small goodnesses adding up to amazing. I thought about Grandpa Joshua’s voice shaking, even after all these years, at the part in the letter where Aristotle talked about Luke. Goodness. Yes, that was right. The kind that connects one person to another person and never goes away.

  “Love,” I blurted out.

  As soon as I said it, I felt embarrassed, not because I didn’t mean it, but because it was just not a word I said that often, even to myself. I could feel Charlie not looking at me. But then Grandpa Joshua was smiling right straight into my eyes.

  “Atta girl,” he said.

  “Hey,” said Charlie. “That sentence. It’s not how Aristotle talked all the time, is it? All formal and poetic-sounding?”

  “No,” said Grandpa Joshua. “He was an eloquent man, a gifted speaker, but no, he wasn’t fancy like that. Mostly, he sounded more or less like he does in the other parts of the letter.”

  “It sounds like a quote,” said Charlie.

  “It does!” I said.

  Charlie’s eyes met mine for a split second, and then we were off, knocking into each other and tripping over baseballs and grass clumps on a mad dash to the computer. Charlie’s mile-long legs got him to the kitchen door first, and before I went in after him, I turned around to call Grandpa Joshua, but then I stopped. He was still sitting where we’d left him, reading Aristotle’s letter again in the light of the setting sun.

  George Fox, 1624–1691. That’s who’d written Aristotle’s fancy sentence the first time.

  We’d never heard of him, but apparently he’d started something called the Religious Society of Friends, which we’d also never heard of.

  “The Religious Society of Friends people are also called Quakers,” said Charlie, reading from the computer screen.

  We looked at each other, puzzled.

  “Oatmeal?” I said.

  “Motor oil?” said Charlie.

  “Hold on!” I said. “The beard-around-the-edges people!”
r />   “Uh, what?”

  “You know! The horse and buggy people. From, like, Pennsylvania.”

  “Those would be the Amish, genius.”

  His superior tone of voice demanded an elbow in the ribs, which I dutifully gave him. He elbowed me back, and it was on the edge of becoming a real occasion of war when Charlie’s mom called out, “Dinner! Now! Electronic devices of all kinds off. Now, people!”

  “Am I people, too?” I called back. I hoped so. Mrs. Garrett was making chicken and dumplings. I’d been smelling it for an hour.

  “Of course!” called Mrs. Garrett. “Who else would you be?”

  The next day was Saturday. Saturday morning was pancake morning at my house. On this particular morning there were two kinds: caramelized banana with maple syrup and peach with crème fraîche. It definitely did not stink having a pastry chef mom. Charlie agreed and showed up the way he did almost every Saturday morning, but sadly, we were in too much of a hurry to get to the library and research George Fox and the Quakers to give the pancakes the attention they deserved. Still, Charlie managed to gobble a truly disgusting number of them, and I wasn’t far behind. We were still chewing when we jumped on our bikes and headed to the Victory Public Library.

  Sure, we could’ve just researched online, but full disclosure (and we didn’t exactly go around broadcasting this, not that anyone would’ve been that surprised, since our nerdiness was a fairly well-established fact): Charlie and I flat-out loved the library. It was the first place we’d ever walked to alone together, without any adults, so maybe we got used to it feeling like an adventure. What I think we loved best about it was the sense of possibility: the sight of all those books just lined up, one after the other after the other, with whole worlds clapped between their covers.

  When we found the section with books on Quakerism, we did what we always did: plopped down at the end of the aisle, onto the old, worn, sand-colored library rug, our backs against the wall and with stacks of books on either side of us. More than once, when we were a lot younger, we’d stayed so long that the librarian, Mrs. Goldshine, had found us slumped against each other, fast asleep.

  Our only plan—mainly because we couldn’t think of anything else to do—was to read about George Fox and his Religious Society of Friends and see where it took us. So we read, and every now and then, we’d library-voice each other bits and pieces of information, anything that seemed useful or just plain interesting.

  As far as Charlie and I could tell, most of what George and the Friends believed seemed to stem from one idea: God was everywhere and lived like a light inside every single person. So if a person wanted to hear God, all they had to do was listen to what was right there inside them.

  What this also meant, at least to Fox and many other Friends, was that you couldn’t justify killing, hurting, or mistreating other people, because they had just as much light in them as you did. So most of the Quakers ended up being pacifists, meaning they refused to fight in wars because they didn’t believe in killing other people no matter what.

  What I liked best, though, was that “pacifist” didn’t mean passive. It wasn’t enough to just refuse to hurt people; you had to get out there and work, do whatever you could think of to make the world a better place, not just for yourself or people like you, but for everyone. So there was a bunch of Quakers who spent their lives trying to help people, feed them, heal them, give them rights.

  “Susan B. Anthony!” I whispered to Charlie, “And Lucretia Mott.”

  “William Penn, the guy who founded Pennsylvania,” whispered Charlie. “Listen to what he said, ‘Force may subdue, but love gains, and he that forgives first wins the laurel.’”

  There it was again, that word, right there between me and Charlie. Love. I tried to will myself not to blush, which is obviously impossible, so I settled for blushing and then feeling really stupid about it.

  “Oh yeah. That’s right up Aristotle’s alley,” I said.

  And a few minutes later, Charlie said, “The Society of Friends was the first group in the country to officially call for abolishing slavery.”

  “Yeah, I just read that, too. A lot of the families who worked the Underground Railroad were Quakers,” I said. “Like Nathan and Polly Johnson, who helped Frederick Douglass get free.”

  “Peaceful activism. Fighting injustice without literally fighting. That’s total Aristotle. No wonder his motto was from a Quaker guy,” said Charlie.

  Then we made two big discoveries. Actually, it was kind of nice, how we each got to make one. Charlie’s was first. He found it in a book about prominent Quaker families.

  “Look!” he almost yelled.

  From somewhere nearby, an invisible person hissed, “Shh!”

  “Look,” he whispered.

  He was pointing to something in the book. A name: Mendenhall.

  “They were Friends!” I said. “That’s how he learned all that stuff.”

  “It says here that the family was part of a big Quaker settlement that did a bunch of good things, including feeding the kids of coal miners in West Virginia when they were starving, and making sure they had medicine.”

  My discovery came maybe half an hour later. I was reading about how during World War I, Quakers formed a group that didn’t go to battle but that worked for the country in other ways: driving ambulances, nursing the injured, and staying in Europe after the war to help people rebuild their towns. And there it was, at the bottom of the page. For a few seconds, I didn’t even recognize it because it was so sharp-edged and clear, with bold black and red points: Aristotle’s talisman, a symbol of serving your community without using violence.

  I’m almost positive I stopped breathing; it’s also possible that my heart stopped beating. But as soon as everything clicked back on, I turned the book to face Charlie, who also froze for a moment, then touched the picture with one finger.

  “There it is,” he whispered.

  He scooted over until our shoulders were touching, and we sat like that for a while, staring at the star. Then something happened.

  “Do you feel it?” asked Charlie slowly, his voice full of wonderment.

  “Maybe,” I said. “What do you mean?”

  “The tug,” said Charlie. “Pieces of the past and pieces of the present pulling toward each other and stitching themselves together.”

  There was something wonderful about Charlie just then, wonderful and almost spooky, and you know what? As soon as he’d said that strange thing, I did feel it.

  “Like a quilt?” I said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Can you see what the pieces are making?” I asked, carefully. “The pattern?”

  Charlie shook his head.

  “But I know what it is,” he said, looking up from the book and right at me with intense eyes. “So do you. It’s history. Not the past, not the kind that resists. I mean it’s the history we’re making right now.”

  I shut the book with a bang and stood up.

  “Let’s go get the talisman,” I said. “And Grandpa Joshua!”

  Charlie

  2014

  WE COULDN’T WAIT TO TELL Grandpa Joshua everything we’d found out, so I called him from the library and blurted, “We know what the talisman is and we’ll tell you when we get home.”

  And I guess he was as impatient as we were, so he said, “How about if I meet you halfway. At The Octagon?”

  As Margaret and I rode, I realized that even though it felt like The Octagon had been mine and hers forever, it must mean something special to Grandpa Joshua, too. Back when it was a whole gazebo, it had brought Margaret to him, and it had taken her away. Before long, we were all three kneeling on the smooth old boards staring at Aristotle’s talisman in the stark, water-clear afternoon sunlight.

  And maybe because I knew now that the star stood for so much, and I looked at it with new eyes and deeper expectations, I saw something I’d missed: marks in three of the pink points.

  “A number?” I whispered. “I
n the bottom point. A number ten. And a dash.”

  “And a two,” added Margaret right away. “And a seven. Twenty-seven.”

  “Ten twenty-seven nineteen thirty-eight,” said Grandpa Joshua. He was sitting up, not even looking at the square.

  “The date of the meeting in the hunting lodge!” Margaret said.

  “Aristotle always did like to be precise about things,” replied Grandpa Joshua.

  “About what, though?” I wondered.

  “AA,” Margaret said, her eyes on the square. “And the writing on this other point is really hard to read, but I bet it says—”

  “TR,” said Grandpa Joshua, finally looking at the square again. “Theodore Ratliff. Aristotle brought his old pen to that meeting. It would write on anything. Aristotle and Mr. Ratliff used it to sign Aristotle’s talisman.”

  “And date it,” I said, feeling all the pieces of history fall together with a clunk like a drawbridge dropping into place. “Aristotle brought the talisman to commemorate the moment!”

  “The moment when his ideals, the Quaker star ideals, worked,” said Margaret, “when words and respect beat out armored cars and guns.”

  “And don’t forget the ‘For Luke’ on the back,” I said.

  “He was going to give the star to Luke,” said Grandpa Joshua, “to show him how powerful peace can be. Because that’s what he’d been trying to show Luke all along. And this would’ve been the proof. His memento.”

  “His ideals did work!” I shouted, surprised at how angry I felt. “Theodore Ratliff was going to do the right thing! He signed the agreement and initialed the star. But then . . .” I pointed to the remaining points, all blank.

  “There’s no EB. Elijah Biggs never signed the star,” Margaret said, bitterly.

  “Because of this,” said Grandpa Joshua sadly, pointing to the big, brown stain.