Zack (8 page)
Authors: William Bell
As he sat in his cabin door gazing over the grey frozen river at fields of snow, how could he not dream of the hot steamy Gambia, of his village and family and friends? I wonder if he recalled stories and songs, if he even
remembered his language. He came to North America alone, and he died alone eleven years after he cleared his land. He was more than ninety years old.
Some time before he died he took his leather-covered document box and inside it he placed his old Butler’s Ranger shoulder straps. He must have been proud to be a Ranger. He wrapped his slave’s collar in greased leather and put it into the box, too. Why had he kept the collar? Because it was a link to his boyhood? He then added his bit of gold and buried the box where my mother’s lilac bushes now grow.
Ms. Song, whenever we finish a unit, you always give us a test. You want to know what we learned.
Although he spent his life in a strange land, I’m certain that in his own mind Pawpine was always an African. He never gave up, never bowed his head to anyone, and never, never forgot who he was or where he came from.
I wasn’t born in Africa, but my mother’s ancestors were. They were taken from their homes, they survived the middle passage, they lived and died, had families, worked hard.
I know it sounds crazy, Ms. Song, but I feel linked to Pawpine, as if he was part of my
family. He gave me something I never thought I had. And his bit of gold is like a gift that was waiting all those years for me to find it.
I have a plan that I haven’t told anyone about yet, and the gold will help me carry it out. I think he would have been pleased.
THE END
Chapter 1
I
did have a plan. But I also had a few problems. The scheme came to mind after Mom told me that she had a ten-day gig in Montreal at the Maple Leaf Blues Festival, and that Dad was going too. He hated it when she was away for more than a couple of days. When Mom asked if I’d like to go along, it hit me: while they were gone I could take a trip of my own. So I told her no thanks.
Since my visit to the Wellington County Museum, I had done a lot of heavy thinking. Probably nothing looked different on the outside, but inside I felt myself changing. It sounds strange, but when Knox gave me the news about the half-rings I felt ashamed and humiliated, as if I had been diminished somehow. I had never given much thought to the fact that my ancestors on Mom’s side had been slaves not many generations ago.
For the next few days I had been pretty confused. I’d feel low, then get mad at myself—why should I feel bad? I’d ask—then get angry at everyone. Dad thought I was worried about school. Mom raised her eyebrows at me when I grouched at her and gave me one of her patented understanding looks that drove
me nuts. Jen told me more than once that she was the only female in the county that would put up with me.
But by the time I had finished my research on Pawpine I was proud of my African forebears. Maybe they didn’t have a coat of arms, maybe there were no towns named after them, but, like Grandpa had said about the Lazarovitches, they had made a place to stand on.
I wanted to get to know my maternal grandfather and meet my American relatives, and the only way I could hook up with them was to go to Natchez, Mississippi.
But I couldn’t tell my parents. Any hint to Mom that I wanted to contact my grandfather would be like throwing a bucket of water on a gasoline fire. Not to mention the fact that my parents would never agree to let me take a trip alone in the family pickup truck.
It took a lot of persuasion, with many reminders that I wasn’t a kindergarten kid incapable of taking care of myself for a week or so, before Mom and Dad agreed that it wasn’t necessary to send me to live with my grandparents during their absence. I pretended that I didn’t want to be away from Jen—which was true, except I didn’t tell them that Jen was flying with her parents to Calgary for two weeks.
My last problem was a biggie—money. I had maybe sixty or seventy bucks in a bank account saved from cash birthday gifts and odd jobs, but I would need a lot more than that for gas and food and
stuff. I didn’t have to think very hard before I came up with the solution.
When I entered the jewellery store Mr. Piffard was in his chair behind the counter reading a newspaper, glasses perched on the end of his prominent nose. A cup with a tea-bag string hanging out of it sat on the glass beside the oblong of red velvet.
He looked up when the bell tinkled and his cigar migrated in jumps from one corner of his mouth to the other.
“Afternoon,” he said.
“Hi, Mr. Piffard.”
“Nice day.”
“Er, yeah,” I agreed, fingering the gold nugget in my pocket. “Really nice. Sunny. Nice and sunny.”
I would have gone on with more of the same babble and made a bigger fool of myself but he interrupted.
“What can I do for you?”
I placed the gold on the velvet. “I came to take you up on your offer to buy this from me.”
Beside it I laid a forged letter. Jen had written the note giving me permission to sell Pawpine’s gold and signed it with my father’s name.
“It’s too neat,” I had told her when she had presented me with the first version. “Dad’s a university prof. You can hardly read his writing.”
Jen had tossed her hair in agitation. “Then why
not do it on the word-processor and I’ll just sign his name?”
“Because it has to look as if he jotted it down quickly, like it’s not that big a deal.”
“Then why don’t you write it?”
“What, and do something dishonest?”
Jen had balled up the letter and bounced it off my nose. It had taken two more drafts to get it right.
Mr. Piffard scanned the paper. “This is your father’s phone number?”
“He can be reached there during office hours.”
That was only half a lie. It was the modem number, in use most of the day. If the jeweller called he’d get a busy signal—that was what I was counting on.
“You’re sure you want to sell this thing?”
“Well, er, pretty sure. No, yes I do.”
“All right, then.”
I left the shop with almost four hundred dollars in my pocket. As soon as the door clicked shut behind me I knew I’d made a colossal mistake. I had sold off a precious piece of history, a link with the man I had come to admire so much I felt that I knew him. The gold would be melted and made into a trinket, forever lost.
I turned back, put my hand on the door handle. The bell sounded once more. Mr. Piffard was not in the shop. Thoughts flashed in my mind. Get the nugget back, now! No, keep the money. The nugget is priceless. But I needed the cash. The gold was a
gift so I could do what I had to do.
The curtain at the back moved. A hand appeared, pushing it aside. I turned and ran from the shop.
O
n the last Friday of June, I hoped my eagerness to get Mom and Dad out of my hair didn’t show. Although their plane didn’t leave until eleven o’clock, Dad was up at six, clanging and banging around, over-organizing things and tripping over his own feet.
The night before, Mom had packed three guitars into their hard cases—the electric, her favourite six-string and, “in case some old-timers want to jam folksy,” her twelve-string—and one suitcase for clothes. Her toiletries she stuffed into a backpack at the last minute, along with a few novels and her sunglasses. She was a veteran traveller.
You’d never have known it by Dad’s peppering her with questions. Should we bring this? Did you pack that? He, who was basically a groupie after all, had two suitcases containing everything from his laptop to exams to mark, to journals he wanted to catch up on, along with enough clothes to outfit a platoon for a month.
The last thing he did really burned me. Without even making a secret of it, he copied down the odometer reading from the pickup. He wanted me to know I wasn’t to use the truck too much. Get
ready for a big surprise when you come home, Dad, I thought.
We loaded the whole catastrophe into the back of the truck and headed for the airport. An hour and a half later Dad pulled up to the curb on the departure deck under the watchful eye of a Mountie who looked at us as if we were shipping bags of cocaine back to Colombia for a refund.
“Be careful,” was all Dad said as he loaded the gear onto a cart.
“Now, we’re trusting you to act sensibly while we’re gone, Zack,” Mom told me for the tenth time. “Don’t let us down.”
“Yes, Mom.”
“Remember to turn out all the lights and lock the doors when you leave the house. And don’t leave dirty dishes around.”
“Yes, Mom.”
“And water the plants. Give the lilacs and the flowers in the yard a good soaking.”
“Yes, Mom.”
She kissed me and laughed. “I’ll bet you wish I’d shut up and get on the plane.”
“Yes, Mom.”
“All right. We’re leaving. Bye, dear.”
“Bye, Mom. Bye, Dad.”
I watched them push the cart through the automatic doors and heaved a sigh of relief. As I drove off I even waved to the Mountie.
The first thing I did when I got back to town was hit the supermarket, where I bought two cases of apple juice in small bottles and a case of tonic water—sue me, I don’t like cola—three boxes of soda crackers, a big jar of crunchy peanut butter, three blocks of cheddar cheese, half a dozen packs of sliced meat and two bags of ice cubes for the cooler. At the Canadian Tire store I picked up a Canada/U.S. road atlas, a plastic rain poncho, some bug lotion and sun block. Next stop, the bank, to buy American dollars.
Back home, I packed the food into the fridge and tossed the cubes into the freezer chest. In a trunk in the cellar I located Dad’s old sleeping bag and took it out into the yard to air out in the sun. I removed the thick foam mattress from one of the chaise longues on the patio and retrieved a pillow from my room. Sleeping accommodations done.
I stuffed enough clothes for a week into a flight bag Mom never used, threw in a couple of detective novels from the bookshelves in the living room, added my portable CD player and some discs and headed for the garage.
Suspended from the rafters by a series of pulleys and ropes that only my father could have devised was a truck cap he had bought at a garage sale and used once—on the way home from the garage sale. It took
half an hour and a lot of cursing and knuckle-skinning to get the cap onto the Toyota and locked in place. The truck’s box was now a weather-proof compartment accessed by a tiny door at the back.
I realized afterwards that it would have been a good idea to pack my gear into the Toyota before I installed the cap. Grumbling at my own stupidity, I swept out the compartment and put in the mattress and bedding. The rest of the stuff could wait until morning.
In the kitchen I put the kettle on while I made a list, then assembled more stuff—the cooler, a flashlight, Mom’s extra long-distance calling card (she kept it in a kitchen drawer) — and last but most important, I rummaged through my desk for a Christmas card sent to us years before. I had retrieved it from the garbage when Mom wasn’t looking. My uncle had written my grandfather’s address inside it, hoping, I guess, that Mom would relent and write to him. Fat chance.