The Trouble with Tom

by Paul Collins

  "What," I start, "is, uh—"

  There is a saddle atop the obelisk.

  "—does someone ride this?" I finish my thought, as a howling dog bangs his muzzle several inches from my head. Josie begins to answer, but I have to strain to hear her over the baying. So her answer goes something like:

  Dog 1: Art-am-am-aw . . ."

  "Oh, that saddle

  Dog 2: ooohhwooo

  "I keep that there . . ."

  Dog 3: RRRRRRwRRRRR

  "just to store it"

  Dog 4: Ufl Ufl Ufl Uh-uh-uFF

  "but I've been meaning to move it."

  The dogs' sentiments, as best I can tell, may be translated loosely into English as: "Come closer, that I may separate you from your extremities."

  "So, umm . . ."

  "Look at both sides of that stone," Josie orders me. "Both sides. There's inscriptions on both sides. See them?"

  Yes, there are two sets of inscriptions on this tombstone, for two different men altogether, and they are on opposite sides of the obelisk shaft. I kneel down, resting my hand lightly against the stone. The Paine inscription is still as clear as ever. Then I look at the other side. (Rw-Grrrrrr.) Then I move back several inches from that cage. Then I look again.

  John G. Lasher

  born Mar. 5, 1797

  died Mar. 9, 1877

  aged 80 years 4 days

  Why, the man barely had time to digest his birthday cake.

  "Now," Josie says, "what do you think? You look too, um . . ."

  "Olivia."

  "Olivia. You look too. Doesn't the writing look different? The Paine looks a lot older, doesn't it?"

  We look back and forth, from side to side, comparing, and . . . I can't tell. It's an old inscription on a tombstone, one that was buried and hit with a backhoe. The difference is a very, well . . . I mean, really, if Adobe doesn't provide it on a pull-down menu, then I don't know those fonts.

  "So," I start. Josie is clearly waiting for my answer. "Uh. Yeah, I guess that could be different."

  "Yeah," Olivia adds vaguely. "It could be."

  "'That's what I said." Josie nods. "Now why would they do that? Why would there be two kinds of writing, unless the Paine was a lot older?"

  Ahhh. And there is the problem.

  On July 19, 1976, the Thomas Paine story ran everywhere. Readers of both the New York and London Times could see Jack McNeil, shirtless and burly, gazing at his newfound tombstone. So could readers of the Times Recorder of Zanesville, Ohio, and subscribers to the Walla Walla Union Bulletin, Nebraskans who picked up a rolled-up Lincoln Star from their front step, and innumerable other newspaper readers and TV watchers across America. But on July 20,1976—the day after that exciting Thomas Paine story hit the AP and UP1 wires—a very different story ran back in New York.

  THOMAS PAINE MYSTERY AT TIVOLI, N.Y., SOLVED, the paper announced. "The tombstone," the Times reported, "was a token of admiration ordered by a local resident." Looking through records, even as media were descending upon the McNeil residence, a local historian found a newspaper article, this one dated September 9, 1874, about the mysterious Mr. John Lasher. He was a former owner of the McNeil property—"an eccentric individual," as the old paper put it—and "a staunch follower of Thomas Paine." He had, apparently, simply ordered the obelisk as a monument to his hero. When Lasher himself died a few years later, the wonderfully nickel-grubbing shortcut was taken of putting his own inscription into the other side of the monument already sitting in his front yard. John Lasher was the man buried underneath that stone. His descendants still lived nearby, even. But nobody remembered him now, or where he had been buried.

  But that's what happens, isn't it? Even the remains of Thomas Paine are half remembered and half forgotten at odd intervals over the centuries. There are true stories of his travels and just as many untrue ones. Some claimed that he had never been moved at all; others that Cobbett had lost him overboard on the way to Britain. That there were a number of witnesses to what Cobbett had done, not to mention a depression left in the ground on Paine's farm, didn't stop such idle speculation. The evidence gathered by Paine's biographers didn't keep ministers from entertaining children with fables of how Paine had recanted on his deathbed, or that he'd been turned into buttons and doomed to roam the world scattered into little pieces on men's shirts. And so it's little surprise that one woman in Brighton who claimed to own Paine's jaw never actually produced it: she didn't need to for such stories to become part of his hazy legend. Perhaps inevitably, another murmur arose a few years ago, along with talk of DNA testing, that Paine's skull had been found in an antiques store in London. But the buyers seem to have lapsed into silence. The hopeful shouts get heard: the disappointing facts are always strangely muted.

  The Tivoli discovery—but not its retraction—was the greatest media exposure the story of Tom Paine's missing body has had in nearly two centuries. Most papers didn't bother with the second wire story, which inconveniently refuted the first. And so to the millions who thought of it, if they'd even bothered to think of it at all, as they flipped past the weather, past the sports, and past the CARLTON IS LOWEST ads, they all went along with their lives believing that Thomas Paine had been found after all. And so they forgot him once again.

  Why do we forget?

  I don't remember much of 1976. But here's the funny thing: I do remember the particular day they found that tombstone. I was seven years old, hundreds of miles away, and never heard the news, but I do remember the Day. In fact, I remember every day during and surrounding that weekend. The day Jack McNeil dug up his tombstone, police in California were digging a bus out of a California quarry with twenty-six abducted schoolchildren in it. The next day, as TV crews arrived in Tivoli, everyone else in America was glued to the TVs in their living rooms: there, to the swelling of a weepy piano and string accompaniment, a young Romanian gymnast received the first perfect Olympic score. And then, the day afler, as the Paine story became yesterday's news, the Times had a huge photo and headline across its fiont page: VIKING ROBOT SETS DOWN SAFELY ON MARS AND SENDS BACK PICTURES OF ROCKY PLAIN.

  I can even remember, I think, the cereal I was eating back then—it was called Grins & Smiles & Giggles & Laughs. ('The first cereal that smiles back at you.") It was comprised entirely of iconic yellow smiley faces; it was like eating the seventies in a cereal bowl. I can remember by proxy, through movies that I was not yet allowed to go see, and would not be able to see for many years. But if you read the movie listings for that weekend, here's what was playing: All the President's Men. The Man Who Fell to Earth. The Omen. Mother, Jugs & Speed Midway. Murder by Death. Logan's Run . . . you might as well stick a red pushpin into it, and announce: there. That is where our culture was at this precise moment. And yet, for periods of months, years, before and after that weekend—nothing. I can't remember a thing.

  We forget all the time. We forget very nearly every single impression that passes through our minds. What we ate for lunch: who our roommate was ten years ago: what we paid for a soda in 1982: what we just came from the living room to the kitchen for. It is constant and vital, and we only notice it if everyday useful things go missing. Every moment gets thrown out like so much garbag—which, in a sense, is what the past is. Memory is a toxin, and its overretention—the constant replaying of the past—is the hallmark of stress disorders and clinical depression. The elimination of memory is a bodily function, like the elimination of urine. Stop urinating and you have renal failure: stop forgetting and you go mad. And so it is that the details of nearly every single day that we have lived, nearly every single moment of each day, nearly every person that we have met and spoken to, the exact wording of the paragraph that you have just read . . .

  Gone.

  (RrrrrRRR-mm.)

  "Okay!" Josie reassures the dog nearest me. "Calm down."

  My ears are ringing from the guard-dog chorus gnashing within inches of us, and I notice Elena clinging tightly to the hem of her mother's shirt. We'd
better get out.

  "By the way," I ask Josie as we back gingerly out of the shed, and the door slaps shut on the infernal din. 'Where did the top of the obelisk go?"

  "Oh, the broken-off bit? It's behind the garage. It's just sitting in the grass. Sometimes I think of putting it together and putting the whole thing back up. I think that would look nice, don't you? See that little hill over there? Actually, right there—" She points at a neighboring house a few hundred yards away, with an unhitched big rig parked out front. "That's my brother's place. Anyway, I've thought of putting it on that hill. Wouldn't that be a good place for it? It'd be like the . . . oh, what is that, the guys with the flag . . . like the Iwo Jima monument."

  "Oh." I nod.

  Josie goes back into the garage a moment to quiet her dogs.

  "Mommy?" Elena retrieves an animal quiz book from the car.

  "Mommy, I have a question."

  "Yes?"

  "What-do-horses-eat,'" she reads from the book in a single breath. " 'Steaks-ice-cream-apples-pickles-oats-pineapples-hot-dogs-or-pizza?' "

  "Apples," Olivia says. "And oats."

  This satisfies Elena for the moment. I look at her, and then back at the garage.

  "You ever have a childhood memory that you simply cannot place?" I finally ask Olivia. "Some random thing or place that makes no sense, that you can't figure why you'd possess in that place?"

  "I do have memories like that."

  "I wonder if Elena will remember this. Because it will make no sense."

  "'I went to thisfarm,'" Olivia muses, " with this strange man, and we went to a shed full of barking dogs, and there was a lady with a funny white hat, and a tombstone with T6omas Paine's name on it' "

  "And it had a saddle on it."

  "Right," she laughs. "Right."

  "Well, who knows what she'll remember."

  Mrs. McNeil comes back out and explains that she has to get back to her puppies, who will now be merrily shredding the inside of her ranch home.

  "They get into so much trouble at this age," she says, and adds abruptly: 'Think about what I said about the writing on that stone."

  "I will," I promise.

  I get into the car and look over my papers while Olivia checks Elena's child seat in the back.

  "Are we okay on time to make your train?"

  "Sure."

  "So"—Olivia snaps the buckle again—"do you know where Paine is?"

  "Maybe." I drum a newspaper article under my fingers. "I've got one clue left."

  I'm still tapping my finger against the date 1905 when Josephine dashes out of her house, struck by a final thought about the tombstone.

  "You find anyone who's interested," she calls down the driveway as Olivia's car starts, "tell them I'll sell it."

  Eternity in a Box

  THEY WERE AN unlucky bunch. Well, they should have been unlucky: thirteen men apiece at thirteen tables, all seated themselves for a dinner at Mills Hotel on February 13, at 7:13 sharp in the evening. A flag with the original thirteen states hung above them, and as they dined upon a thirteen-course meal that cost them thirteen cents each—Irish stew, boiled potatoes, and rice pudding all being wolfed down with gusto—the master of ceremonies addressed the doomed crowd.

  "Thirteen!" he bellowed. 'This banquet is held at M i s Hotel No. 1, because there are thirteen letters in the name. This will be the most prosperous year in history. Reason: 1898 is divisible by thirteen."

  "Hurrah!" yelled the crowd, puffing vigorously on thirteen-cent stogies. "Bravo!"

  He was followed by the landlord of the hotel.

  "We furnish you tonight," he said, "with a dinner for thirteen cents which you could not get at the Waldorf-Astoria, the New Netherlands, or the Holland House for thirteen dollars."

  "Hurrah! Hurrah!" they yelled, and walked under ladders and spilled some salt for good measure. But just to keep things from getting too uproarious, there was also a policeman at hand—Captain O'Reilly, badge number 13 from Brooklyn's Thirteenth Precinct.

  Presiding grandly over this latest meeting of the Thirteen Club, dedicated one and all to laughing at superstition, was the eccentric and appropriately named train promoter George Francis Train. After running disastrously for President, he'd famously set a record by traveling around the world in eighty days. He still hadn't forgiven Jules Verne for immediately swiping his story—"I'm Phileas Fogg!" he'd say, banging the table—but at least here Train was in good company. Joining him at the head table were Manhattan's greatest rationalists, all dedicated to banishing superstitious fears and traditions. Most prominent among them was an elderly man that any liberal in Manhattan would immediately recognize: the good doctor himself, Edward Bliss Foote.

  Times were changing as the century came to a close, and Foote had changed along with them. His books were still selling as well as ever, but a careful reader would notice that his love of phrenology was much diminished—it didn't seem very rational anymore, and surely not a fit subject for a member of the Thirteen Club.

  Well, maybe it was all Tom Paine's fault: in his posthumous "memoir" Light From the Spirit World, as popular as it was, one could glimpse the downfall of the House of Fowler. Even as phrenology overran a credulous public, it fought a rearguard action with increasingly doubtful medical professionals. "Its professors do not pursue a course calculated to elevate it to the public esteem," the Brooklyn Daily Eagle had warned as the Thomas Paine memoirs first emerged. "Unless Phrenology is speedily rescued from its present position, it soon will take its place beside spirit rapping, mesmerism and the other follies of the day." And that is indeed what had happened. Its idealism soon curdled; it turned from prescriptive medicine to descriptive ethnology, from a progressive vision of brain improvement to a conservative assumption of racial and genetic predestination. Phrenology became the province of carnies and charlatans, of eugenicists and racists, and by the 1890s Foote was warning that phrenology needed to shed its "crude teachings."

  The host of the dinner stood up again.

  "We have with us tonight," Train noted grandly, "Mr. Charles A. Montgomery, president of the Vegetarian Club."

  There were approving nods. Not only were there vegetarians in attendance, but the dinner itself was a teetotaling one. These were men dedicated to rationality and progress.

  Ah, Orson should have been here! But he never would be, nor could be. If Foote's old friends at Fowler &Wells seemed to have wandered far from their moral bearings, it was in no small part because Orson Fowler himself was no longer around. Aging, perpetually broke, and hopelessly idealistic, Foote's hero had enthusiastically taken up what he believed was the next stage in bodily reform and healthy families: sex education. But where Foote succeeded, Fowler failed. The phrenologist's Private Lectures sold well, but his controversial lecture tours on the subject were an embarrassment to the Fowler clan: portraits of Fowler circulated with the caption "The Foulest Man on Earth." Orson was nudged out of the running of Fowler &Wells, left to wander the U.S. on his lonely crusade: at one point, he was spotted mournfully clambering around the abandoned ruins of his Octagon House. When he died in 1887, the relieved family buried him in an unmarked Brooklyn grave. The man who had spent a lifetime studying human bodies now had his own buried and lost, never to be found again.

  Well, that was the past. But as he dined on the thirteenth course of stewed prunes, Foote could sit back and look over the room with some satisfaction at a new generation of liberals. He'd been cajoling them into raising a couple thousand dollars to place a commemorative bronze bust at Paine's long-emptied gravesite up in New Rochelle. It was a project he was reminded of nearly every day, for though he still kept his offices on Lexington Avenue, his son Edward Jr. was doing much of the work now; the old man liked to relax at the mansion they'd built right next to Paine's old farm. When guests came up to visit, he and Junior would immediately take them on a jaunt around the property, showing off Paine's old cottage and the long-emptied grave.

  There. They'd point. Some
day we'llget him back.

  North Avenue begins as a dreary succession of hair salons, KFCs, and broken pay phones. It was along here that General Gage and British troops once marched; and after the war, it's where a seventy-year-old man used to make the long and painful walk into town from his farm. But I don't think Paine would recognize a single block of the New Rochelle of today.

  The avenue curves and the houses slowly begin to fall away eventually bare trees and a lake appear, and the air itself starts becoming a little cleaner as I watch my breath whiten the cold air before me.

  Blam!

  What?

  A cloud of blue smoke disperses as a couple of kids whoop and laugh hysterically their beagle is jumping and barking wildly at a Minuteman in full uniform as he reloads. Ah, I see. They're firing off muskets by Tom Paine's cottage again. The rifleman nods and smiles at me as I walk past.

  "Loud, isn't it?" He beams.

  "Yeah! Yeah!" the boys yell. "Louder!''

  Aside from the occasional musket blast, and the cars shushing by on North Avenue, it's actually pretty quiet around here. There are no other tourists in sight; in fact, you could drive right past this tilly shingle-sided home with its bright blue shutters without realizing it. Many people do. The old cottage has always been a little bit overlooked; until about a hundred years ago it wasn't even in this spot, but much farther back from the road, and so neglected that at one point the property's owner was going to demolish it for firewood. He was just barely stopped by the local Huguenot society—not because it was Tom Paine's house, but because when it was built in 1720 it was one of the earliest Huguenot refugee homes in the area. If it had been a little less unique, and built a few years later, Paine's old home would have gone up the chimneys of New Rochelle, reduced to Colonial soot.