“Really? What was her name?”
“Elsa.”
Jenny stopped flipping through the book and looked at me.
“Not Elsa Morrow,” she said.
“I don’t know her last name.”
“Do you know where in Philadelphia she lived?”
“No.”
Jenny nodded, obviously taken by the notion of a possible connection. “Well, Elsa Morrow, my teacher, was about ten years older than me,” she said. “She was a lovely girl, I recall. Very beautiful. With a hearty laugh. I would go to her house twice a week for my lessons. We lived next door to her family until I was about nine, which is when we moved to Columbus. I don’t actually know what became of Elsa Morrow. I remember once hearing that she had left Philadelphia, though her parents remained.”
“My mother left her family when she married my pa,” I said. “Her parents didn’t like him. Thought him too lowborn for her.”
“It would be a rather unbelievable coincidence, wouldn’t it?” Jenny pointed out. “Elsa is not that common a name.”
“It’s not that uncommon a name, either,” Desimonde chimed in, the voice of reason.
“But an Elsa who played the violin in Philadelphia?” she insisted.
“What young ladies from those circles don’t learn the violin?” Desimonde countered mischievously. “Violin or harpsichord, c’est de rigueur on Society Hill, n’est-ce pas?”
“You’re terrible, Monsieur Chalfont,” she teased, going back to flipping through the pages.
“Her father set his deerhounds on my pa once,” I said, for it occurred to me.
This stopped Jenny cold.
“Oh my goodness,” she whispered, bringing her fingers to her lips.
“Don’t tell me Elsa Morrow’s family had deerhounds!” Desimonde asked, somewhat dumbfounded himself.
Jenny’s eyes were opened wide.
“They did,” she answered slowly, looking at me as if mesmerized. “Oh, Desimonde, it can’t be….”
He had already taken his ledger out to jot down some notes.
“I’ll telegraph a lawyer I know in Philadelphia tomorrow,” he said. “He should be able to look up the county court records. Don’t worry, darling, we shall get to the bottom of this.”
“And here you had just said you didn’t want another mystery,” she answered, still looking at me with wonder.
Four days later, Desimonde came home from his office in the middle of the day, a big smile across his face as he jumped down from his buggy. He was waving a telegram, which he could barely restrain himself from reading aloud to me while we waited for Jenny to come running down the stairs.
“This just came from my lawyer friend,” he said, almost breathlessly, when she arrived. And then he read the telegram aloud.
Dear Desimonde. Stop. I have found a marriage certificate for Elsa Jane Morrow and Martin Bird. Stop. It was signed by a justice of the peace in the county clerk’s office on May 11, 1847. Stop.
Jenny covered her mouth with both her hands.
“Will wonders never cease!” she cried as tears started flowing from her eyes.
I could not quite comprehend it all myself, until she cupped her hands on my stunned face.
“Silas, you are Elsa’s boy!” she said joyfully. “You sweet, darling child! You’re Elsa Morrow’s son! And here you are, with us, out of all the places in the world you might have ended up! Don’t you see? Surely, it was Elsa who guided you here! So that I could take care of you! You will let me do that, won’t you? You will stay and live with us, yes? Please say you will?”
I was too bewildered to understand everything she was saying, but her happiness filled me with something I had not felt for a long time. Not since the moment those riders had come out of the night and upended the world I had known. It was a sense that, somehow, I had come home. Maybe not to the place I’d left, but to the place I was meant to be.
I smiled at Jenny, somewhat bashfully, as I was feeling overwhelmed by emotion, and then she hugged me tightly. For a little while, as I closed my eyes, it was like Mama’s arms were reaching down to me from heaven knows where.
For I was home.
2
THERE WAS ONE LAST MYSTERY, but it is not one I ever disclosed to any living person, though I share it here now.
I spent the next six years with Desimonde and Jenny Chalfont, who showed me every sort of familial kindness imaginable. I never wanted for anything while under their care. I ate like I had never eaten before. I had never thought of myself as poor, but I realized now that we had been poor, Pa and me. Not destitute, for we had something to eat every day, but we were poor by many people’s standards. Unless you could eat books. By that measure, we were rich. When Old Havelock packed up the contents of our little house in Boneville, it was only books that filled the cart. And Pa’s camera and telescope. Mule and Moo stayed with him. I don’t know what happened to the chickens.
The Chalfonts sent me to the school in Rosasharon, where no one knew of my eccentricities, or thought I was “addled.” I flourished there. I had a wonderful teacher, who did not belittle me for the things I did not know and praised me for the things I did know. I took to school with an eagerness and hunger I would not have thought possible after my time in Widow Barnes’s classroom. Also, I had absorbed, by then, the wisdom of not revealing to people what they would not understand. I kept Mittenwool to myself. He approved of this, of course. We kept our world together a secret.
When Desimonde and Jenny had their two little girls, I became a big brother to them. This is how much a part of their family I had become. The older daughter was named Marianne. The younger was Elsa, who we called Elsie. For a while, when she was very little, it looked like Elsie could see Mittenwool herself. He would coo at her in her cradle, and she would beam and laugh as he made comical faces at her. I liked seeing him as he used to be with me, when I was little. But as she learned to walk and talk, he began fading from her vision, and then even from her memory.
To be truthful, as I became older myself, and my world became more and more occupied with the living among us, including new friends and teachers and acquaintances everywhere around me, I found myself spending less and less time with Mittenwool. At least, it was not the way it used to be between us. My earliest memories had always involved him being everywhere I was, playing hide-and-seek, or racing each other across the field behind the barn. Games of marbles and hop-skip, and spinning until we were dizzy in front of the house.
But nowadays, he would visit me less often. Once in a while, I would come back from a long day at school and find him reading in my room, and we would joke together and have a quiet laugh. Sometimes, I would see him walking near me on the street, and he would catch my eye and smile his loopy smile at me. But there were times when many days would come and go without my seeing him, or even thinking of him. There came a point when I got to be as tall as he was, which was strange. Even stranger was when I became older. For he would always remain sixteen, and I would become a man.
Mittenwool came with me when I went north for my college education. So, too, did Pony. I had not grown into a tall man, like Pa, but stayed of medium height and build. I sometimes wonder if my body had remained compact simply so I would never become too big to ride Pony. Marianne and Elsie had pleaded for me to leave Pony for them to ride, since they loved nothing more than bouncing on him as he glided around the pretty fields behind their house on the hill. But I could not leave Pony behind.
Instead, I left the girls my black charger, the same one that Pa had ridden off on all those years ago. The horse had technically become the property of the American Bank Note Company upon the arrest of Roscoe Ollerenshaw, but they bequeathed him to me as a reward for having helped in the capture of the notorious counterfeiter. I named the steed Telemachus, and he proved to be a gentle giant. The gir
ls were delighted by him.
3
THE DAY I RODE OFF on the next big adventure of my life was harder than I thought it would be. Unlike the last time I had left my home, I had months to prepare and organize myself for the journey. I was older, and presumably wiser, with the proper clothes, a good education, and a real sense of finally belonging in the world. Still, with all that, when the day came to leave for my college studies, I was unexpectedly fragile. Like a child, I felt. Which was not a bad thing, for, despite all my privations and solitude, my childhood had had its enchantments. But it was the feeling of being at the whim of the world that brought me back to being twelve years old again, about to enter the Woods for the first time.
We said our good-byes at the train station. I stabled Pony in the horse car, then went back to the platform where the people who had become my family were tearfully waiting to say their farewells. The girls wept and squeezed me and begged me not to go away. I promised I would be home for Christmas.
Sheriff Chalfont, who now sported a big mustache and muttonchops that covered his boyish dimples, hugged me and patted my back. He told me that I should write often, with any needs I had, and that he would miss me and our many excellent conversations.
Jenny kissed both my cheeks tenderly, and blessed me. She whispered in my ear, “Your mother would be so proud of you, Silas. So proud of the man you’ve become. I know I am.”
“Thank you, Jenny. For all your many, many kindnesses.”
She turned away before I could see her tears. She did not want to make me cry.
The person who did succeed in doing that, however, was Deputy Beautyman. Of all people. We had become close friends over the years. He still called me Runt and occasionally stuck his tongue out at me, but I had learned, as Sheriff Chalfont had told me years ago, that he was nicer than he acted and much smarter than he looked. He had grown his hair long to cover his mangled left ear, which he tried his best to keep tucked under a kepi hat.
This cap he now removed from his head, revealing the large scar on his forehead from a wound he’d sustained a few years before on the battlefield. Both he and Desimonde had joined the Forty-Third Ohio at the start of the War, and both were injured in the Battle of Corinth in ’62. Desimonde’s leg wounds healed quickly. Jack’s head wounds did not. It took him almost a year in the hospital to recuperate, but he suffered from debilitating melancholia afterward, which the doctors put down to soldier’s heart. I knew there was more to it than that, though.
I had met Peter, Jack’s beloved, in the hospital when I’d gone for a visit one night, early on in his recovery. Peter was sitting vigil at Jack’s bedside, holding his hand with great tenderness. He told me he was a cavalry officer, though he couldn’t remember the details of his death, or where he was from, or even when he’d known Jack. But what he knew with absolute clarity was that Jack had been the love of his life, and he wanted Jack to know that. It took me a few months to tell Jack all this, after he was better, as I wasn’t sure how he would react. I was actually surprised by how unsurprised he was by my revelation.
“I always knew there was something strange about you, Runt” was all he said, but I knew he was glad I had told him. We never talked of it again.
Now, as he stood on the platform, he handed me the cap he had taken off his head.
“I want you to have this,” he croaked in his gruff way.
“No, Jack, you keep it. I have a hat already,” I answered, pointing to the dapper Continental derby I had just acquired for my travels.
“It was Peter’s,” he whispered in my ear. “His sister sent it to me, after he died. I want you to have it. As a keepsake.”
I took the cap and turned it over in my hands. “Thank you, Jack.”
He gave me a big bear hug, and then pushed me away rather brusquely. I felt my throat tighten, and tried to smile through the tears that flowed, but by then he had whisked Elsie up onto his shoulders and was spinning her around. He didn’t look my way again.
I boarded the train. I leaned outside the window to wave at them as the train pulled away. I was headed to Philadelphia first. From there I would take the train to Boston, and then a carriage to Portland.
The nation had only just emerged from the bloody carnage of its civil war, and the scars were still everywhere. As the train wound its way through the Pennsylvania countryside, I passed fields that had been ravaged by cannon fire, and houses pockmarked by bullets, standing crooked, skeletal, on the hills. One town had been completely burned to the ground, with nothing but the charred husks of buildings left here and there, and trees rising from the barren land like tall black spikes.
I had been too young to fight in the war myself, but everywhere I looked, I saw men who were as young as me on the platforms and in the streets. They seemed lost and weary, and murmured to themselves in that way I have come to know. The ghosts of soldiers traveling back home.
By now I’ve accepted that it is my lot in life to see these people, those who are caught between this world and the next, or are not quite prepared to move on. Although they often wear the wounds of their demises, and such things can be frightening to behold, I have become accustomed to the seeing of them. These souls look for nothing from me but recognition, perhaps a remembrance that they were here once, breathing the same air, not to be forgotten. It is a small price to pay that I can honor them this way, and occasionally talk to them, or pass on soothing messages to the loved ones they left behind. I wish I had known this back in the Bog. When I returned there years later, to find the woman and perhaps bring her some solace, she was gone. They move on when they’re ready, Mittenwool had told me. He was right.
Several of the dead soldiers came to sit with me in the train car when I was alone, and told me of their wounds, or their regrets, their sorrows, their joys. Some asked me to send word to their mothers and fathers. Their friends. Their loves. Even when they didn’t remember their own names, they always remembered who they loved. That, I’ve learned, is what we cling to forever. Love. It transcends. It leads. It follows. Love is a journey without end. One fellow, who had been bayoneted between the eyes, kept wiping the blood that ran down his cheeks like tears as he sang me the lullaby I was to sing to his baby girl, if ever I had the chance to meet her.
4
WHEN I ARRIVED IN PHILADELPHIA, I stayed at the house of Desimonde’s lawyer friend, the same fellow who had searched out the marriage certificate confirming the nuptials of my mother and father. He lived just three blocks away from my mother’s childhood home. I waited a few days before going.
I rode Pony to a house on Spruce Street, where a stableboy met me and took Pony to the stables. I climbed the stairs to a large paneled front door, flanked by tall marble columns. A butler showed me into the foyer after I told him I had business with the lady of the house.
“Tell her I am Silas Bird,” I said quietly, taking off my hat.
I was told to wait in the parlor, a large room with full-length paintings in ornate gold frames. I sat on the red velvet sofa, and opposite me was a green silk chaise with yellow orchids. I had with me Mama’s Bavarian violin.
An old woman came into the room with a nurse attending to her. She needed help to walk, and her eyes were gray and foggy, but she seemed well enough for her age. I judged her to be around seventy or so. I got up from the sofa and bowed my head politely.
She looked at me intently, and then pointed at me with her cane.
“Did you come for money?” she asked, her voice gravelly.
“No, ma’am,” I answered. I felt absolutely nothing toward her, so I was not hurt, or surprised. I expected nothing from her. “I just thought you’d want to know I live. I am your daughter’s son, Silas Bird.”
She nodded, and for a second she held my gaze. “Where is she? Where is my Elsa?”
“She died on the day I was born.”
&
nbsp; The old woman then looked down, and seemed to shrink in size. The nurse’s arm kept her from falling. “I knew it, I suppose,” she said, her eyes welling with tears. “But I thought maybe…someday I would see her again.”
You will see her again, I thought, but I did not say it.
“And you are fine?” she asked, recovering. “You look fine. You look taken care of.”
I nodded. “Yes. I am off to college in Maine. My pa raised me until his death, when I was twelve. I have been living with a family in Rosasharon since then. The wife was a friend of my mother’s when she was little.”
“Oh? Who?”
“Jenny Chalfont. She was born Jenny Cornwall.”
“Oh yes, the Cornwalls. They lived here a long time ago. I remember them.”
“They have been quite kind to me.”
“Good. Good. So what do you want?”
“Nothing.”
“Is that Elsa’s violin?” she asked tremulously.
“Yes, it is.”
“Did you bring it for me?”
“No. It is all I have of her.”
“So why did you bring it?”
“It is all I have of her,” I answered.
Her mouth twitched, and perhaps something in my reply made her soften, for she said quietly, “Let me give you a daguerreotype of Elsa. Molly, will you get it for me? The one on the dresser upstairs?”
The nurse attending her, a young woman with bright red hair, helped her to sit down on the green chaise, and then left the room. I sat down again on the red velvet sofa.
We waited silently. I once thought there would be a million questions I would ask, if ever I was in this position, but none came to me.
“It’s a Mittenwald violin, you know,” she finally said, looking at the violin case on my lap.
I nodded politely. Then glanced up quickly. “I beg your pardon. What did you say?”
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