2 March 2004 | Vol. 4, No. 1

Humboldt Haven

by TOM SHEEHAN

The problems with the house project and a good stiff drink seem to go together. A good pair, Wiggles thinks. A half snicker comes up through his throat even as his stomach makes loud noises. Consciously Francis Pikethorn, known as Wiggles to everyone, licks his lower lip and his fingers roll against each other in an expression of suspense. There is, of course, the long wait and the dry throat. The hours since the last drink he quickly counts at the back of his mind. Brushing the thick sandy-colored hair out of his eyes with a flick of his thumb, he thinks that controls are easy this morning. He flicks the thumb again and sees no momentary twitching, no delay in his commands. A day dried out sits well on him, as the saw would if he had wood to rip cut, a wall to erect.

Or if his wife Jenny had not gone off like that.

"It's got to be the house," offers his partner and brother-in-law Abel Damfort. "We have to create something provocative, interesting, damn different about that old house. Make the place shine if we can. Or spout ghosts or break out in a case of the crabs for all I care. It needs a transfusion. Hell, it could burn down in five minutes if we let it. Even most of the drunks have shied away from it over the years. Ever since the Carringtons, both of them, died in there."

He continues, his face showing concern for the old couple. "Oh, the shame of it all, the very damn shame. I hear they were nice folk, decent folk." When he says "decent" it sounds like "dacent."

Wiggles leans over the planning table. He nods at "dacent." He feels drawn and tired to his last bone but speaks more about their troubles. "If we don't get the loan and don't get the house, Abel, we might as well fold up this old two-man company and blow it away. I admit I've blown a few bucks. But I never missed a minute's work. Always gave it all I had. But we need this damn loan or we're history. There's nothing else out there for us."

Pressing his hands down on the tabletop, he stares at them for a long time. His hands are the tapering, long but gnarled hands of the laborer, as if a violinist has encountered other rude tools in life. Scars are as proud as badges on their backsides. One thumb has been found by a three-pound hammer in an errant swing. An arthritic-looking knuckle sits toad-like on the left hand. It has been a long time since the hand has made a tight fist. Not that Wiggles has gone without the need.

Blue-eyed, pasty-faced Wiggles looks at his partner Abel Damfort. Abel is early-forties neat, high forehead, green eyes under woolly dark brows, thick against the short sleeves of his shirt. He has a remnant brogue Wiggles thinks should have long disappeared.

Able listens closely as Wiggles continues. "Before we know it, we'll be as much history as the house. Something's tied to that place like a disease. That's all I can say. Almost cancerous. Something out of the past. Nobody lets on about it from where I sit, but it's there. Our future, for all we know, is tied up in that old house." He makes a half fist with each hand.

Wiggles again finds himself caught in a new kind of trap, can feel it squeezing on him. Words keep coming out of a dark tunnel. At times they come out of someplace he swears he does not know, has never been to. And then there is the little sense of pain that rides in him. He wants to say discomforts but knows he'd be lying to cover his ass. He keeps thinking: That one harsh pain is a stupid little pain, though agonizing at times. It's kind of brittle, like chunks of metal or sparks behind my eyes, squinting now all the time, or thinking I'm squinting. I'm not sure. Jeezus, I must be some kind of mausoleum. A walking museum of crap and crap shoots, booze and broadsides. Jenny'd know.

"Think the bank is holding something back?" Abel's voice matches his face, somewhat masked, reserved, asking for surprises all the time, and not getting them. Not with Wiggles. Without doubt he thinks that he, Abel Damfort, is the rock in this tenuous partnership.

Wiggles Pikethorn shakes his head, thinking he is coming out of a fog. "Look, Abel, honest injun, I'm not hung over as usual. But I spent a sleepless night looking at things. Old reality has come a stop sign on my nightly reveries. I'm not sure if I was caught up in self-incrimination or lost opportunity. Balancing one on the other gets a moment of ease. Doubts keep bugging me, too. Jennie haunts me, her gone off like that, without a true word it seems."

Abel Damfort says, offhandedly, "We don't mention her at home though we hope she's getting along. But no matter what we do, we don't get to change the mind of the bank. Against us since the start they've been, the lot of them. It ain't just your drinking, Wiggles, 'cause they know nobody with a saw and a day dried out is any better than you are. Hell, you about put all their houses together and in order, and all of them needing the mend to boot. Shankhill shitty enough of them were, right here in old Humboldt." He tosses his head in salute of a distant memory crossing his mind.

"What do we do?" Wiggles says, his face looking like the used end of a cork, his eyes in a state of sadness that people notice early about him. He adds, "I wish I had a cool one in my hands right now. Makes thinking so much easier. Finds real words for me I couldn't find otherwise. Not a hint of them."

Wiggles, partly musing, looks over Abel's head as if he were looking into a mirror back of a friendly bar. He says, "We have to keep it historical, even if it's over 150 years old. Them damn historical buffs keep saying that over and over. It's like they got the bank hypnotized, but hell, that's always been part of our plan. So what can we do to make that historical house more attractive? Make people sit up and look at it kind of different. The old couple, the Carringtons, going within a day of each other, carried it for a while, but the old die everyday. It wears off. Just crowds the cemetery."

Abel's face warms as if it has relaxed its guard. "It's marvelous that old man Carrington lived in the house all his 93 years. And her not much behind him at that. That's about all I know, 'cept the house has always had some mystery tied to it, like a tail on a lost kite. Must be something I don't know." Abel's brogue rolls in on itself. "What did his nibs Verikjon have to say at the bank? That one's an odd lot if I have the say on him." He looks down and studies his fingernails.

"Oh, Victor's okay in his own way," says Wiggles. "I tossed down a pint or two with him at the alleys a few times. Said it straight out to me: 'We know how good you are with the hammer and the saw, but you're always on the edge, Wiggles.' He's one of those always using the nicknames, warming your ass for you before they kick it, know what I mean? 'Some of us think when you fall we'll be left holding the bag. That's how simple some prospects can be looked at. There has to be another dimension besides you and your partner to make this house project at least seem bigger than what it is.' I appreciated he didn't dodge me like old man Shillings always did."

They talk and muse a while longer and Abel leaves to do errands. Wiggles Pikethorn, passing Calder Murphy's Bar, the day heavy on him, lets his thirst and dry throat have their way. Long before the day is over, Jennie floats in the mirror behind the bar. She floats beside the front elevation of the Carrington house. She won't let go, no matter where she is, where she ends up.

And he is damn sure he is not going to let go the opportunity with the Carrington house. He is on the griddle and he knows it.

—

It is after midnight, the stars hammered in place over Humboldt and the whole valley as if bright nails have been slammed with a six-pound peen onto the dark sky. Somehow, in a comfortable stupor, as he might call it, Wiggles finds his way to the house against the side of the hill. The two huge double-trunk maples out front are catching the breeze and bouncing it like chunks of sherbet. It had been said old man Carrington had split them as saplings with a keen knife in prospects of having four children. The idea of eternity strikes Wiggles, seeing an image of the young Carrington full of hope. Life sucks, Wiggles thinks, thinking about the Carringtons subsequently spending almost a century here without any kids. It makes him lonely, desperately lonely, and he can go no farther in thought than half eyeing Jennie down the line someplace hosting someone else with her goodness. And minor retribution for his own lifestyle piles on its weight in its own way.

Through the leaf clusters and fractured-hand limbs of the maples, he sees a dozen stars in their nightly revolutions. A minor glimmer of a shooting star comes in sight and he hears himself say, "They always come back." It is his one stand in life. He is not sure he says it in response to the revolution of the nightly stars, or his thinking about people nearing the point of no return. He further acknowledges that man and stars are in some mix of existence whose solution is a mere grasp away from him. It is a glare of light that fast retreats.

Myriad thoughts notwithstanding, before long he finds himself in the keeping room of the Carrington place, a room that runs the whole back end of the house. The huge walk-in fireplace is cold looking, monstrous, out of place, as if to say it will be the last surviving part of the structure. The house-wide landing above the fireplace, on the second floor level, still holds a worn rail with oddly thick balusters. No doubt it has prophesied children for years on end; company for the split maples out front, he affirms. But it is the silence of the keeping room that guns down Wiggles and he sits in a lone chair left in a corner, sweet as an afterthought, a condition of hope, and a place for at least one more visitor. Eternity bounces around him, with a sense of time that few men can measure. He is sure of this.

Within himself he is, for a long time, bouncing ideas, himself being bounced around. What eventually drove him to such an odd errand he has no idea, but he is dynamically pushed and pulled by powers other than his own. In short order he is in the cellar of the old house.

In one corner of the vacant cellar that ran halfway under the house, the other half a sort of crawl space beneath one half of the keeping room, he finds a construction of wood. It is an immovable box of sorts. To it he takes an old pry bar that hangs on a wall remnant of an old coal bin. The air has kept its coal smell as sharp as ever, like a taste of kerosene touching his tongue. After much effort, some teasing of nail and wood, squeaks and screeches becoming part of night, he uncovers a deep-throated, fully constructed well.

He has no idea the well is there. No moisture smell comes to him and he goes back to his truck and grabs a strong flashlight and a droplight. The lack of moisture bothers him. Has a well been dug, stone-throated down to nothing on the side of the hill? Is it a loss to match the split maple hopes? Is it another sign of hapless times? Another seed buried forever? Watermarks should be everywhere, he says to himself in rationalization.

Under the light Wiggles sees no residue or remnant of water signs. No ground water. No stains on fieldstone sides. No harsh alga dressage climbing the circular rock wall. Nothing down there but what looks like a clump of rope more than thirty feet down, piled like a long-dead hemp snake on the floor of the well. The flashlight shows little else. He lowers the droplight and sees no more evidence of water. At length he notices a break in the wall under a large lintel-type stone more than halfway down the throat of the well. It all rushes at him, the mystery of the house, the clump of rope at the foot of the well, the lack of water evidence, and the break in the wall of the well.

Suddenly Jennie comes to him again. He wonders about her and then about the Carringtons. Finally he wonders about the strange pressures and powers working his poor soul. He imagines some stars in strange orbits.

Aloud, to the bare cellar, to the house in general and to no one in particular, he says, "A bit more suds in me and I'd be down there exploring." Then, all of it coming down on top of him, the house, the Carringtons, Jennie, himself, he goes back to his truck and gets the tow rope and a wheel of pulley ropes and a single construction pulley. Hanging the rope-fall from an overhead beam that was directly over the well, he notes how worn and round the beam is.

While his construction mind was trying to fathom the latest discovery, Francis Parkinson Pikethorn, known as Wiggles to a thousand people, lowers himself into the Carringtons' dry well. The droplight, now connected to a long extension cord, goes down with him. There is, he keeps noting as he lowers himself into the earth, absolutely no signs of moisture. But he can feel the presence of time. With each release of his weight on the lead rope, with each foot captured in his descent into the well, he feels the presence of time. "Wiggles Pikethorn," he says loudly, his voice bouncing in the tight stone constriction, "is going back in time." There is no doubt about it. Oh, now's the time for a cold one, he thinks.

—

In the morning the banker Victor Verikjon looks out his window. To his associate he says, "Here comes that Wiggles Pikethorn again. Man, he looks like a load of crap this morning. Another night on the town, I suppose. But now he's got his damn lawyer, Garson Caruthers, with him. Slippery Lou they call him. What the hell have they got going this morning? This might give a kick start to our day." He puts away the paper he had been scanning, sips his coffee, and sits waiting for something new for the new day.

The outlandish pair, the seedy-looking part-time drunk and the carefully clad lawyer, in a suit an embalmer could be caught in, is ushered into the banker's office. The secretary, with a raise of her eyebrows, says, "Mr. Pikethorn and Mr. Caruthers to see you, Mr. Verikjon." When the door is closed behind her Victor Verikjon thinks he can smell pure applejack floating on the air. It is as much signature as Wiggles Pikethorn usually could offer on either side of the dotted line.

"Good morning, gentlemen. I would assume this is a surprise visit to all parties." Verikjon says it directly to Caruthers who smiles back, understanding partners of commerce at two points of view.

Wiggles speaks to the banker even as Caruthers starts to say something. "The last time we talked, you said we could move on with this deal if there was something new to add to the pie. You said we had to have an extra edge. I guess it is your way of saying I can't get done what I want to do unless I get help from someone or something besides you and the bank."

Wiggles has his hand up in front of Caruthers so he cannot interrupt. "Hold on, Garson. I want to make sure we agree on the promise Victor made the other day." He pauses, looks at Verikjon and then at Caruthers. "I just want it squared away right up front so we know where we're starting from."

"Is there any specific requirement for it?" Wiggles continues. "Extra value? Greater promise? A matter of publicity for the bank? A conditional or promised buyer for the project once finished? Do they all fit or does any one fit more than another?"

Both Garson Caruthers and Victor Verikjon are somewhat caught by the force of Wiggles's introduction to the day and to the project. The part-time drunk seems, even in his evident misery, well in control of himself and the situation.

Verikjon replies, "Like I said, Wiggles, some aspect of any one of those would throw additional weight behind our decision and in your favor, but it must be something concrete and promising. We know you've done excellent work elsewhere, but the threat of your daily activities weighs on us. I am sure you can understand that. I know you're like a jackhammer when you work. It's the chances that bother us."

He pauses like all bankers pause, a mark of punctuation, and rises from his seat. His hair is thin, his eyes are deep, and he looks his age. "In banking we don't like chances that are not in our favor. It's the nature of the beast that we are. And we're always using other people's money. It's our role in life. That compounds our watchfulness. It controls us." He pauses, looks at Caruthers who shakes his head, and then says to Wiggles, "What have you got to add to the pie?"

"Well," Wiggles says, "if I told you we had a gold mine on the property, that would set you off, wouldn't it? But I won't say that, nor can I say we have a grip on something concrete." For a brief second Verikjon sees a smile on Wiggles' face. "But I can tell you that if you agree it's enough to get the deal done, with what I'll tell you, have we got an agreement? Have we got a deal? That's all I want to know, and Garson here is judge and witness."

Verikjon leans over his desk, his jowls hanging a bit, a bit of color now in his face, thick eyebrow hairs in varied directions. "How far do we have to extend ourselves, Wiggles? You speak a chunk of mystery here, far as I'm concerned. You haven't said anything yet I can hang my hat on. What's going on? Put yourself in my shoes, me with more than half the valley giving me their money to take care of. If you don't come up with something pretty quick, I'm afraid I'll have to go back to some real work." He smiles at Wiggles and then at Caruthers. "Not as hard as you guys work, but I still get tired at the end of my day." The full business pose is there for the banker; the locked fingers, the hardened eyes, the chameleon smile.

Wiggles knows it was coming down to the brass tacks. Put up or shut up. What if it all comes apart, all around him? Falls in a heap at his feet? Again? He wonders what Jennie is doing this morning. Is this the kind of thing that drove her off that morning in a fatal huff? Jeezus, is there any lingering justice in this world for a man who never wanted to hurt a soul in his entire life?

He wonders what Abel had gotten himself into this morning on his list of favors to do for people, taking up as much time as he himself did with the booze. All the ideas are popping up around him, all the balances and imbalances, all the just and unjust things. They come the way they did when he sits alone at a bar, the noise moving around him, doubts coming like the rounds of drinks, the slipping away of some element of resolve, of character. Jeez, he could write a book about it.

He has to bring it all back. He takes a breath and lets it go. "What if we, here in old quiet Humboldt, were one of 58 or 60 particular sites in the country? Very special sites. Would it mean something to you? What if we could prove, without a doubt, that history had walked right under our goddamn feet, what would you say to that?" He lets it all go out of him, the energy coming from somewhere else. If he had a hammer in his hand he could drive a sixteen-penny nail with one smashing swing. He knows it in his sudden fists even as the arthritis answers back.

"What if we were on the golden path, not gold mines, but something else, what would you say?" The old-time energy is creeping and crawling at the back of his neck. Jennie once said to him, "There was a time you could be near lethal with that energy, with whole sides of houses and barns going up in a fantastic hurry, the adrenaline running at fever pitch for you." Jennie, oh Jennie, could be witness to all of this, if only if she were here.

He feels himself sliding off, running off at the mouth, breaking away from the target. How can he tell what he has seen? What he has found? It had been so crystal clear last night and this morning when he first woke up, everything in bright focus, all the angles and the shadows coming alive. The whole scene had been at once almost exhilarating in its revelation. The whole breadth of it all, the marvelous extent of it all. Now, it has retreated to a small distance, some shambles of shadows falling with it. Would it up and leave him again? Has it already done so? Oh, sweet Jeezus, he thinks, the hammer or the shot glass! What a choice! What a choice!

Victor Vickjon saves him. The banker saves him! Of all people, it was the banker who pulls him up from that runaway he felt he was becoming. "What the hell are you talking about, Wiggles? Slow down, man, and tell us what you're at." To Caruthers Vickjon sends a quick look of doubt or question. Perhaps he is not sure what it is. "What have you come up with now?" The long hairs in his eyebrows hang like obscuring lines over his eyes. He squints. His thin hair is thinner, but his eyes are darker, in a study.

Like the North Star, like the beltline at Orion's middle, like the cluster of the Seven Little Sisters weeping directly over his head last night, down through the clutter of the split maples, Wiggles knows Jennie will be back. She will revolve through him again. Like the stars, he knows she will come home again. It is the ultimate chance for him. The only chance. Chance plays its tune for him. But the stars, being forever, come back on him.

"Last night, late last night, I went back to the house. Down in the cellar there's a phony well." Victor Vickjon is staring at him. Caruthers is shaking his head. Out there, has Jennie stopped and turned around? "Halfway down the well I found an opening. I had a drop line with me, and a flashlight. It's a big opening, a big time opening. A chunk of it pushes in and you go through a wide a tunnel and there's a huge room, a cave back in there. A big cave, big as this room, I swear to God." His voice has deepened. At the back of his head the energy is recouping itself. The possibilities are back. Jennie will make that turnaround, they will have the loan, the project. Maybe he has taken his last drink.

"Is it a goldmine, Wiggles? An old goldmine?" Vickjon is standing beside his chair, his face a solid mark of interest. "My god, man, what is it?" He brushes the bushy hairs out of his eyes.

All the energy, all the possibilities, comes back for Wiggles in one sweet surge. "It's going to be the new historical site for the Underground Railroad. Right here in our own backyard. There'll be a sign announcing it, in gold letters. Letters as bright as the sun. I looked on the Internet. I think there are only about fifty some places listed now. This one will be different, I swear! This one has Harriet Tubman's mark all over it. There are a couple of letters there in perfect shape. They were written to her by some guy named Thomas Garrett from Wilmington, Delaware. He was part of the whole thing. And there's a map with some Safe Houses or Safe Stations marked on it. I tell you it's like the goddamn Freedom Trail itself."

He has to catch his breath. They are staring at him. "There's a small leather bag might prove to be hers. There's sleeping places and blankets and still some canisters of bread from the Army of the Republic during the Civil War. There's an old Johnny Reb uniform in a canvas bag. I swear to God you'd think they just left out of there last night and headed for Canada. All of them, whoever was there who knows how many nights. Harriet Tubman herself. Or Frederick Douglass. Old man Carrington's people must have dug that place up, built a house on it. Who knows. But now we have it. I tell you the shivers went popping through me like they never went through me before."

He pauses again, the rush still in place. "We're sitting here, in the Empire State, less than an hour out of Canada. Hell, freedom's ringing all around us. Can't you hear the damn echoes of it?"

And Wiggles Pikethorn thinks that out there somewhere, not too far, Jennie has halted under the morning star. She will be looking back this way over her shoulder, in the same exact, offhanded but loaded way that she could tease him with no end in the old days. It was as if every room she left the bedroom was next upcoming. He can also remember the energy that had been transferred to his body and brain as he lay down in the Harriet Tubman's cave to get a nap in on history's deeply imbedded rack of memories. And an unknown voice, a faraway voice, comes to the back of his mind singing about going down to the river to pray.

Victor Vickjon, upright like a statue, the banker's smile frozen on his face, thrusts his hand across the desk toward Francis Parkinson Pikethorn, otherwise know as Wiggles. "You have your loan, Mr. Pikethorn. It'll be a distinct pleasure to do business with you." His brows go electric with expression.