Quinn's Book

by William Kennedy

  Will was at work in his office, coatless with shirtsleeves rolled, writing one of the editorials about the abduction of Dirck Staats that would bring him national attention. He finished writing on a page of foolscap, tossed it into a box marked “copy,” and then he saw me, his face registering genuine surprise.

  “Back so soon?” he said.

  I told him straightaway of being put off the canalboat.

  “Who would do such a thing?”

  “It must have been John the Brawn.”

  “The man’s a villain.”

  “I think I will have trouble forgiving him.”

  “And I as well,” said Will. “But more important than that is what do we do with you? If you want to peddle the Chronicle you’re welcome to live with our other orphan newsboys on the third floor,” and his finger pointed to the ceiling.

  “That would be good,” I said, and already I felt rescued. “But I think I am interested in a life of the mind. Would I get that as a newsboy?”

  “A life of the mind?” said Will, much amused. “In that case we’d better make a reporter of you.”

  “On what would I report?”

  “On the nature of things,” said Will. “Does that seem a fit subject?”

  “On the nature of what things?”

  “All things.”

  “It sounds a bit more than I can handle.”

  “Nonsense. Before you know it you’ll be as expert on everything under the sun as all the other reporters in this world.”

  “When shall I begin?”

  “Now is as good a time as any. Do you have something in mind to report on?”

  “I could report on my platter,” I said, and I fished in my sack for it and told Will my story. I’ve recounted his response about the potatoes, but I was thinking of my parents’ stories about bad times in Ireland, and of the presence on their table of very small potatoes, when there were any potatoes at all, while Will, I suspect, had the superabundance of the American potato in mind. Will stroked the platter with his fingertips. “It seems to be bronze,” he said. “Very old, and very handsome at that. Did your parents get it in Ireland?”

  “I suppose so,” I said. “Except for Albany that’s the only place they ever lived.”

  “It’s possible this is the work of the Vikings, or even the Romans. In any case I suspect it’s worth considerable money.”

  “Is bronze worth money?”

  “When it’s shaped this way it is.”

  “Who would buy an old platter?”

  “A museum curator, or someone who values relics from another age.”

  “My parents wouldn’t want me to sell it. They said it would take care of me.”

  “Yes,” said Will, smiling one of his patient smiles of forbearance in the face of idiocy. “But I suggest that money may be a way in which one is taken care of.”

  “Then why didn’t my parents sell it themselves? They never had any money.”

  “A good question,” said Will, a bit vexed, “and one you must answer for yourself. Rest easy, Daniel. We’ll not sell your relic against your will. But you must protect it. You can’t carry it around in that sack.”

  “I could bury it again.”

  “There are tidier ways to protect things,” said Will. “For the moment you may put it in our safe, if you find that agreeable.”

  “Very agreeable,” I said. “But I think I would not want to live upstairs. I’ve lived with orphans on the canal, and they stole from me and fought over everything. I’d rather live with Mrs. Staats, if it’s all the same to you.”

  “It’s all the same to me,” said Will, amused again, “but I can’t say how it will sit with Mrs. Staats.”

  “I’d work for my keep,” I said.

  “Work for me and work for your keep both?” said Will.

  “I don’t need much sleep,” I said.

  Will forbore, then said he’d take me to see Hillegond. He put my platter in his safe, told me to stop calling it a platter, then gave me a file of Chronicles to read while he finished his work. He pointed out what he and others had written about Dirck. “If you are going to live with Mrs. Staats,” he said, “you had better understand what is happening to her son.”

  Dirck’s abduction appeared under Local Events at first mention in Will’s newspaper, written straightforwardly, not unlike the way I have already recounted it. But Will also took the liberty of charging the sheriff with provocative behavior, said he intended to follow the case with intensive fidelity to the facts and would pursue “the deeper darkness that lies beyond this black deed.” He also said Dirck never reached Utica, that his arrest was a fraud, and that Aaron Plum was a felon thrice-accused (always for grievous assault with a weapon), after which Plum became a wanted man. The sheriff was relieved of his duties but charged with no crimes, and vanished from his home. In all, the case of Dirck Staats overnight became synonymous with violence, collusion, and mystery.

  Will did not, at first, write of Dirck’s secret ledgers, though they loomed large; and I began to understand the power of the word to transform this simple abduction of a man into an event that alters the trajectory of history’s arrow. I asked Will about Dirck’s book and when he would publish it.

  “I would publish it tomorrow,” he said, “but no one can read it without the key to Dirck’s code, and we haven’t yet found that.”

  The search for the code had been ongoing at the newspaper, also among Dirck’s friends, in the places he frequented, in the rooms he kept, and at the mansion. Nothing had turned up.

  I ended my reading when Will appeared in coat and hat, saying it was time to visit Hillegond, and on the street he hailed a passing carriage. I anticipated the mansion with excitement and affection, as if I were going home, the complacent impoverishment of my former self now thoroughly transformed by the vision of luxury.

  As we rode up the gravel driveway I thought that the house’s splendor was probably unmatched in this world, and though I have since seen greater monuments, such as Versailles and the Alhambra, I have not changed my mind about the Staats house’s singular beauty, or its wondrously eclectic sprawl.

  Capricorn answered our knock, told us Hillegond was with a visitor in the east parlor, then announced us to her. Out she came, devoid of the bright colors that were her style, and wrapped instead in a slate-colored dress and black lace shawl, her uniform of mourning for lost kin. Her face was a mask of gravity, but she brightened when she saw me, and she hugged me.

  “Master Daniel,” she said, and smothered me in her abundantly dark bosom. “Why are you here, and where are the others?”

  “Gone,” I said. “John the Brawn put me off the canalboat while I slept, and I walked back to Albany.”

  “A dreadful deed,” said Hillegond, but I knew she was of two minds about John and his deeds.

  “The boy wants to stay here with you,” Will said.

  “Well, he surely can,” said Hillegond, and my future exploded with rainbows. Only hours out of my family’s tumbledown house of death, now I was to become a dweller in this grand villa of life.

  “You’re both just in time to see me magnetized,” Hillegond said with a verve that reversed her bleak mood. “It’s a very daring thing to do.”

  She led us into the parlor and I saw that Dirck’s two portraits, face out, were draped with bright red ribbon—red the color of protection in Hillegond’s spiritual spectrum. A man in his thirties, wearing a hemisphere of whiskers along his total jawline, the rest of his face clean-shaven, rose to greet us.

  “And this is Maximilian Schiffer,” said Hillegond. “He’s a wonderful animal magnetist. He’s helping me to find Dirck.”

  Maximilian shook hands stiffly with both of us, then inquired grimly of Hillegond, “Are these visitors to be present during experiment? Witnesses can be distraction.”

  “They won’t be a distraction,” said Hillegond. “My son worked for this man, and this boy was one of the last to see him before his abduction.”

>   Max nodded at that, which ended the sociable aspect of our visit. He then picked up a single piece of paper from the table in front of Hillegond and handed it to her.

  “Put this alongside head. You will read it with ear when I tell you.”

  “With her ear?” said Will.

  “Correct,” said Max testily.

  “Maximilian is a world-renowned phrenomagnetist,” said Hillegond. “He’s examined the bumps on my skull and he says the one behind my ear gives me the gift of vision. He’s certain I’ll be able to see Dirck by reading his scrawlings through my ear bump.”

  “Do you really think your bumps are so special?” asked Will with a small smile.

  “I have always thought so,” said Hillegond.

  “Please, no talking,” said Max, and he guided Hillegond’s hand with the paper, on which I was able to see some marks. Max positioned it behind Hillegond’s left ear, then moved both his hands over her head, arms, and lap, humming like the lowest note on an organ. In time I recognized the word “sleep,” by which moment Hillegond was deep in her magnetic trance.

  “Now tell about son Dirck,” said Max.

  “He’s a nuisance and a most foolish child,” said Hillegond, her eyes closed. “He won’t go to church, and he talks back to his mother. He won’t play with other children, for all he wants to do is draw pictures and read books, which isn’t healthy in a young boy. I tell him he’ll turn into an idiot from being alone so much, and I only allow him to wear clothing that doesn’t fit him so he’ll look even more foolish than he is. ‘When you behave properly you shall have proper clothing,’ I tell him, but he doesn’t change. I would have my husband whip him if I had a husband. I had such hopes for the boy. I thought he would grow up to make us proud of the Staats name again. I thought he would make new money for us and preserve our mansion, but he can’t button his own shoes.”

  “Please tell of Dirck, and where is,” said Max.

  Hillegond pressed the paper closer to her ear, opened her eyes in a gaze at nothing in particular, and then in a voice several tones higher than her previous pronouncements, spoke with the articulation of a masterful actress.

  “My son is a splendid man. He is tied to a chair and watched by a man with a mustache and an old woman in a plaid dress. My son is unhappy to an immoderate degree. People are cruel to him but he is strong and healthy. My son worries about his work and his books, and they are not feeding him. My son will not let these inferior people destroy his will to persevere on behalf of rectitude. My son is a grand citizen of the republic and serves his country with the same nobility that marked the careers of his ancestors. My son is in a black state of mind. My son is vomiting. My son—”

  “Where is son?” asked Max.

  “I don’t know the place.”

  “Talk about place.”

  “The place is . . . on a road. I can’t see the place. The place is in the country? I don’t know. By a hill? I can’t see the place. I can’t, I can’t—” and Hillegond swooned in her chair, the paper fluttering to the floor at my feet. I picked it up and saw it to be two very short lines of runic writing comparable to the script in Dirck’s ledger. I handed the paper to Will as Max spoke urgently into Hillegond’s ear and brought her out of her swoon. She awoke from the trance complaining of a severe headache, and Max immediately lowered her head between her knees, passed his hands over the back of her neck, raised her up, and poof, her headache was gone.

  “That was quite fascinating what you said,” Will told her.

  “What did I say?”

  “You were talking about Dirck. You said he might be on a country road. Which road?”

  “I have no idea,” said Hillegond. “I don’t even remember saying it.”

  “She will remember if I tell her remember,” said Max.

  “Then you should tell her.”

  “In time.”

  “Where’d you get this paper?” Will asked her.

  “Dirck’s room,” she said. “I found it in an old envelope. It’s those crazy drawings he’s been doing all his life.”

  “Do you know what they mean?” asked Will.

  “Of course not. They don’t mean anything.”

  Will nodded and stuffed the paper into his pocket.

  “You mentioned a man with a mustache,” Will said. “Do you remember him?”

  “Nothing,” said Hillegond.

  “Make her remember,” Will said to Max.

  “Is too soon,” said Max with a defiant lip.

  “Can’t be soon enough if there’s anything genuine in all this hocus-pocus,” said Will. “You make her remember right now or I might forget I’m a gentleman.”

  Max paused long enough to suggest his imperviousness to threat, then turned to Hillegond. “You will remember everything you tell about son,” he said.

  “I remember the man had a long, drooping mustache and a bald head and very shifty eyes,” said Hillegond immediately.

  “Was it Aaron Plum?” said Will.

  “Yes, I think it was. How could you know that, Will?”

  “I have special bumps of my own,” said Will.

  Hillegond continued recalling all she’d told us and Will quizzed her further on the Plum family. She knew them, but not well. I told Will then for the first time about how John the Brawn and I had carried what were probably stolen harnesses for Aaron Plum and his brother Peaches, and I also added the story of Peaches’s theft of my broken spade.

  “I think we should pay another visit to the Plums,” Will said. He had gone to the Plum farm immediately after the kidnapping but found only a handyman, and no family.

  “You must be careful,” Hillegond said. “They’re dangerous people.”

  “It will only be a social call,” said Will. “We’ll inquire about Daniel’s spade.”

  “It’s worthless,” I said.

  “Maybe so, but that worthlessness is yours, not theirs.”

  We excused ourselves from Hillegond and she said she would have Matty get my old room ready for when I returned. I thought of Maud and how we had lived under this same roof for months, and I grew sad and vowed we would live together again one day. But of course that was an empty wish and Maud was God knows where.

  Will and I walked to Will’s house through the open fields, the sky cloudy bright. In his barn he hitched one of his three horses to a wagon and gave me my first lesson in Plum history, about which he had written much.

  The first Plum in the New World was Ezra, who came to Albany from England in 1759 at age eighteen and hired on as the city’s official whipper. In 1786 he was promoted to city hangman, expediting into the beyond numerous robbers, counterfeiters, and forgers until 1796, when whipping posts and execution, except for murder, were abolished. In 1801, when Ezra was sixty, an unknown assailant cut off his head with an ax—the assailant widely believed to be his grandson, Jeremiah.

  Jeremiah was the son of Ezra’s only child, Bliss, who first proved that murder ran in the family. At age twenty, married only three weeks, Bliss informally executed two of his young cousins, newly arrived from England, clubbing one, hanging the other, thus removing them as competition for an inheritance Bliss coveted. Bliss feigned innocence but in time confessed and was hanged before he turned twenty-one.

  Bliss’s son, Jeremiah, was conceived during Bliss’s three-week marriage to a woman named Blessed Benson. Jeremiah, born the year his father swung, inherited all Plum property and became family patriarch in our time-present, 1850.

  Jeremiah married Priscilla Swett of Vermont, who, at a later moment, was convicted of almost eviscerating a woman neighbor with a carving knife in an argument over the neighbor’s fur hat, which Priscilla, called Priss, had stolen. Priss was sentenced to twenty years in jail but that was reversed in higher court through the influence of her son, Mason Plum, a lawyer who earned fame for keeping his family out of jail.

  Other Plums: Aaron, a blond hunter thrice charged with near murders; Hanna, a beauty; and Eli (Peaches), whom Priscill
a claimed as her own in order to cap a scandal, for Peaches was actually the offspring of his own sister, Hanna, when Hanna was fifteen. And the sire was Hanna’s father, Jeremiah. There was also Fletcher Plum, a cousin, whose talent for stealing horses and altering their color and markings with charcoal and dye was so well developed that even the owners of the horses were deceived. There were other Plums, but enough.

  Will put a pistol in his belt, and another under a blanket on the seat between us as we drove toward the Plum farm. Will assured me there would be no violence, that the pistols were only to fend off highwaymen, but I didn’t quite believe that.

  “All I want you to do when we get to the Plums’,” Will said to me, “is to identify that spade if we come across it. Otherwise let me do the talking.”

  The Plum estate—house, barns, and outbuildings—sat on a knoll about two miles from Will’s house, back in the woods on a road that was all but uninhabited except by the Plum family and their poor cousins, who lived in shacks and worked the land for the Plums. Cows grazed in a low meadow, goats on a hillside, and in the corral you could count two dozen horses.

  Will pulled up in front of the house and handed me the reins. He mounted the steps but before he could knock, Priss Plum came to the door in what some people might have taken for a plaid housedress. Her hair was a flaming, unnatural red, and she was a bit of a looker, even at sixty.

  “Who are you? Whataya want?” she asked Will.

  “Canaday is my name,” said Will. “I’d like to speak with Jeremiah.”

  “He ain’t here.”

  “Is Peaches here?”

  “What’s anybody wanna see him for?”

  “It’s about a piece of personal property,” said Will.

  “You claimin’ he stole somethin’?”

  “Not at all. Is Aaron here?”

  “He don’t live here no more.”

  “When did he move out?” Will asked.

  “That ain’t none of your business.”

  “You wouldn’t know the whereabouts by any chance of a man named Dirck Staats? Last time I saw him he was with Aaron.”

  “Never heard of no Dirck Staats.”

  In the doorway of the barn I could see a man with a heavily waxed black handlebar mustache, and with slick, ridiculously black hair, watching us. This was Jeremiah Plum, his hair dyed the way the Plums dyed spots on horseflesh. I also saw my spade leaning against the barn door. Then from around behind Jeremiah came Peaches, and I called out, “Hey, Peaches, I want my spade back. That’s my spade.” I wanted all my worthlessness in my possession, now that Will had told me that’s how it should be.