Judgment of the Grave (16 page)

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 17

Sweeney and Pres were standing in the South Burying Ground, looking at George Whiting’s list of likely Josiah Whiting gravestones.

“So, your grandfather says that he did that one, but I’m really not sure,” Sweeney said. “See, the borders aren’t the same. And look at the lettering. Josiah Whiting tended to use those rounded o’s, and these ones are different. We’ll keep it on a maybe list, but I’m not convinced.”

“Why couldn’t he just make them different one day?” Pres asked. “I write different sometimes. Like, I used to put smiley faces over my i’s but then I realized that was stupid.”

“Good point. Okay, we’ll hang on to it.”

They spent another thirty minutes checking stones against the list, and Sweeney put down three more stones as definite Josiah Whitings and another two as possibilities.

The definites, once she was able to focus on them, offered lots of possibility. She took photographs of the stones and sketched their shapes, noting the dimensions, as well as some of the more interesting features. She would have to make prints and lay all the photographs out to get a good sense of what was going on here, but even from photographing them, she had the distinct sense that Josiah Whiting’s style had indeed evolved over time. The face on the Abner Fall stone started out as a fairly straightforward death’s-head, the skull shaped like a lightbulb, the eyes round and hollow, similar to the other death’s-heads you saw on eighteenth-century stones. But as with his stones in the Hill Cemetery, Josiah Whiting’s skulls on these stones had changed. As time went on, the eyes became more expressive, the pupils larger and more finely carved, and the hair became wilder, more Medusa-like.

“This is really interesting,” she told Pres, scrolling through the photographs in her digital camera. “Check this out. The first stone we have here was made for someone who died in 1762. It’s pretty close to other death’s-heads from the period. But then things start to change. His faces become much more expressive and more human.”

“And crazier,” Pres said.

“You’re right, they get crazier. The question is why. Was it symbolic of his own mental state? Was he trying to say something about the political situation? Or was it a reflection of his own evolving theology?”

Pres gave a little shrug, then looked down at the ground as though he was embarrassed that he couldn’t answer her question.

“Anyway, that was a good day’s work,” she said. “Do you want to go get some ice cream or something?”

He looked pleased at that. “Okay. Yeah, that would be good.”

They walked back to Main Street and found a little café that served ice cream sundaes. Pres ordered a banana split and Sweeney got a strawberry concoction—strawberry ice cream, strawberry syrup, and strawberries and whipped cream. They found a table by the window and Pres shrugged out of his coat, then put down his ice cream. Sweeney saw his hands shake a little as he set it down, slopping whipped cream onto the table. He mopped it up with a napkin while Sweeney pretended to be unzipping her jacket.

“They never found out who that man was,” Pres said after a minute, through a mouthful of ice cream. “I asked my mom to find out and she called the police and they still don’t know.”

Sweeney watched him for a moment. “Yeah. I was at the encampment yesterday and they were asking around, but as far as I could tell, no one there knew him.”

“Wouldn’t his family miss him? Don’t you think he has a family?”

“I don’t know. Some people have lost touch with their families, or they don’t want to see them. He could have been homeless.”

“But why was he wearing that uniform?” Pres seemed troubled. “Why was he in the woods?”

“I don’t know. I wish I knew, but I don’t.”

Pres looked down at the table for a minute. “But he…” Sweeney saw something very adult cross his face—caution, maybe. She was positive that what he said next was not what he’d been about to say. “He was in the woods. Why was he in the woods? What was he doing in my grandparents’ woods?”

Sweeney put down her spoon and looked at him. “Pres, why do I feel like there’s something you’re not telling me?”

He looked up and she almost thought he was going to smile. But then he looked down and mumbled miserably, “There’s not.”

“Okay.” They ate in silence for a few minutes and then Sweeney said, “Did your mom tell you I came by the museum?”

“Yeah. She said she told you about Josiah and April nineteenth.”

“She did. What do you think happened to him that day?”

“I don’t know. He probably got killed by the Redcoats. What else could have happened to him?”

That was the question, Sweeney told herself. What else could have happened to him?

Pres pushed away his ice cream and looked up at her. “Do you have a husband?”

Sweeney was slightly taken aback. “No. I’m not married.”

“Well, are you going to get a husband?”

“I don’t know,” she said, trying not to smile. “Husbands aren’t the kind of thing you go out and get.”

“So, you don’t even have a boyfriend?”

“Well, there’s a guy, a man I know who’s kind of my boyfriend, but I don’t know if he really is. He lives in London, so it’s kind of hard for him to be my boyfriend, but if anyone was, it would be him. I guess. I don’t really know.” She was babbling and Pres looked at her as though she’d disappointed him.

“Wouldn’t you know if he was your boyfriend?” It was as though he had been looking forward to some kind of romantic certainty in his adult life and was horrified to discover that it might not exist.

“I don’t know, Pres. It’s complicated. I almost got married once, to a guy I really, really loved a lot. And then he died and it’s kind of hard to feel like I’ll ever want to get married now. But it’s not this guy’s fault, you know. And I like him too. It’s just that…Does any of this make any sense to you?”

“That’s how my mom is,” Pres said sadly. “I think my dad was like that guy. She never really wanted to have any other husband.”

“Did she ever have any other boyfriends?” Sweeney asked innocently. She couldn’t come right out and ask Pres if he knew that his mother had been seeing Kenneth Churchill, but maybe this was a way to find out.

“Yeah, maybe,” he said vaguely. “A couple of guys.”

“What about you?” she asked.

“Me?” He looked up at her incredulously. “No way. All the girls at school think I’m weird. Because I’m sick and everything.”

“Well, they’re just stupid.”

“Yeah.” But he didn’t sound convinced. “I went to this math camp last summer, before I got sick. And I met this girl there. She was really cool. We could just talk about stuff. That was the cool thing about her, you could just talk to her, like she wasn’t even a girl or anything. And she liked the same stuff I like.”

She flinched. That kind of pain was no less real because you were twelve. If anything, it was worse, she remembered. “That’s the best,” she said. “When you like the same stuff.”

As they were walking out of the café, Pres said, “I was thinking that maybe people saw that man go into the woods. People who live around my grandparents’ house. Maybe they would know why he went in there and why he…why he went in there.”

“Maybe.” Sweeney wasn’t sure what he was getting at.

“Well, maybe we could go ask them, you know, like, interview them and find out. They probably wouldn’t talk to me because I’m a kid, but they might talk to you, like, if you said that you’re a professor.”

Sweeney turned to look at him. “Pres, I know it was horrible finding that body, but you have to let the police do their job. I’m sure they’ve already asked everyone who lives nearby about what they saw around the time when the guy probably died. I don’t think we should get involved.”

“But they don’t know…”

“What don’t they know?”

It was a crisp, breezy fall day and out on the sidewalk, Sweeney’s hair blew across her face. Blinded for a moment, she missed whatever expression it was that Pres’s face held as he said, “Nothing. I’m walking home,” and he turned and left her there, watching his retreating figure.

Back at the inn, she found Will Baker in the foyer, arranging red and white dahlias in a pewter pitcher. She had been standing there for a few seconds before he became aware of her presence and turned around to say, “Hello. How are you today?”

“I’m fine,” Sweeney said. “Do you have a few minutes to talk?”

He was wary all of a sudden, but politeness won out. “Of course,” he said, turning away from the half-finished flowers. “Is everything okay with your room?”

“Everything’s fine. Actually, I was wondering if I could ask you about Josiah Whiting and your ancestor John Baker.”

The effect of her words was quietly explosive. He had been holding five or six blooms in one hand and suddenly they fluttered to the carpeted floor. Sweeney bent down and picked them up, handing them back to him.

“S-S-Sorry about that,” he stammered. “These gloves…What did you want to know about them?”

“Well, I think I told you that I’m doing some research on Josiah Whiting. I was talking to Cecily Whiting at the Minuteman Museum and she explained that everything we know about what happened to Josiah Whiting on April nineteenth comes from John Baker’s account. So I was hoping you could tell me a little bit more about him.”

“Of course. Yes. Why don’t we sit down in the lounge. It should be fairly quiet this time of day.” They sat down, Sweeney in one of the big, comfortable chairs by the fire and Will Baker on the couch across from her. He was wearing an open-necked oxford shirt, showing his skinny Ichabod Crane neck and oversize Adam’s apple. Sweeney tried to put him at ease by smiling and relaxing in her chair. But he leaned forward and his hands played nervously with the sofa cushions.

“Why are you interested in Josiah Whiting again?” he asked.

“I’ve gotten really interested in his work, particularly his death masks. I was hoping to find out a little bit more about him, about his life, in order to figure out where the death masks came from. I kind of have this theory that they may correspond to his interest in politics, that in fact they may reflect the growth of democracy in the colonies.”

“Interesting,” Will Baker said. “I hadn’t ever thought of it, but, of course, that’s right, to some extent the gravestones must have reflected the personal lives of the men who made them.”

“What do you know about him?”

“Probably the same sorts of things that Cecily told you. His family was from the Plymouth area and he moved up here with them when he was in his teens, I believe. His father was a stonecutter as well and he apprenticed until he was eighteen or so, when he began making his own stones. He knew my ancestor John Baker quite well, and of course everything we know about Whiting’s heroism on April nineteenth comes from Baker’s narrative. What are you looking for in particular?”

“I don’t know exactly. How did Whiting get involved in Revolutionary politics?”

“Well, we don’t know much about him, but we can infer a lot from what we know about John Baker. Baker was a member of a local Sons of Liberty group. Do you know about the Sons of Liberty?” Sweeney shook her head. “They were the men responsible for the Boston Tea Party. The British called them the Sons of Violence and they certainly were violent. They saw violence as the only way of overcoming the power of the British administration in Boston. My ancestor was one of the leaders of the local Sons of Liberty. He was also involved with the Boston group; he knew Sam Adams and Paul Revere and he was responsible for a lot of the planning for the local Minuteman companies.

“We know that Whiting was also involved in the Sons of Liberty because Baker wrote about their friendship later in his life, when he was reflecting on his own role in Lexington and Concord. But if his path progressed the way Baker’s did, he would have started out being fairly apolitical and then gradually becoming politicized with the passage of the Intolerable Acts.”

“Would it make sense to you that his newly radical political leanings started around, say, 1770?” Sweeney asked, checking her notes for the date when Whiting’s stones really started to change.

“Yes, I would say that’s about right.”

“I got a lot of good information from George Whiting, and Cecily too,” Sweeney said. “You must have known them most of your life, growing up here in Concord.”

“That’s right,” Will Baker said, looking away. Sweeney glanced down at his hands again and found them furiously twisting the edge of the cushion. “Bruce and I are of an age. We went to high school together.” He blushed slightly and Sweeney watched the Adam’s apple bob quickly up and down.

“Did you go to Vietnam too?” Sweeney asked him.

“No, no, I didn’t.” He sat up straight in his chair. “Was there anything else you wanted to know about?”

Sweeney, ignoring his obvious desire to finish the conversation, said, “George told me that Kenneth Churchill was looking into Josiah Whiting’s stones too. He was staying here. Did you ever talk to him about it?”

Baker stared at her levelly, but she saw him swallow hard a couple of times. “Yes, he stayed here quite frequently and so he did come talk to me. He interviewed me about John Baker and I knew him from the hobby, of course.” She must have looked confused because he explained, “That’s what those of us who are members of regiments and militia companies call it. I’ve never liked ‘reenactor’ myself. Kenneth joined the Concord Minuteman company last year.”

“What did he want to know about?”

“Well, I remember he was very interested in Baker and in the account that he gave later of April nineteenth. It’s one of the most well known accounts of the day, because he was literate, you see, so it’s very well written. But Mr. Churchill was very interested in that account and in whether there were any other accounts that might give him some more information about Josiah Whiting’s death.”

“And are there?”

“Not that I know of. I have some family papers and I even looked through them for him, but I didn’t find anything else that referenced Whiting.”

“Well, thanks for all your help,” Sweeney said. “I really appreciate it.”

“You’re very welcome.” He stood up quickly.