Death on a Vineyard Beach (27 page)

“What is it you know?” she asked. “Tell me.”

“I'm not Solomon,” I said. “You'll get no great wisdom from me.”

“Try.”

I thought awhile. Then I said, “What I know is that Zee was born to be loved and protected, and that I was born to love and protect her.”

Toni looked at me. Then she shook her head and smiled. “You men. You're all hopeless romantics.”

I needed to change the subject, so I turned to the shaman. “Maybe you can tell me something.”

“Maybe. Ask me. If I can, I will.”

“Yesterday up in Luciano's office, you gave Vinnie Cecilio
an odd look when you left. What was that all about?”

“Ah,” he said. “Vinnie. The young man who escorted me off of the property.” He looked thoughtful. “Vinnie has an odd aura. He's not like us. He has no heart.”

  
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No heart. Not like us. Vinnie, Luciano's eldest grandchild, the apple of Angela's eye, had no heart.

I stared at Vanderbeck. “What do you mean by that?”

He frowned. “Some people have heart. Others don't. How shall I say this? If you have heart, you face the world. If you have great heart, you face it very well. If you have little heart, you face it badly. If you have no heart…” He shrugged.

“And Vinnie has no heart?”

He looked sad. “I saw none.”

“He's a shaman,” said Toni to me.

Vanderbeck smiled his enigmatic smile and shook his head. “Shamans are like everyone else. There are good ones and bad ones, strong ones and weak ones. If I am a shaman at all, I'm a very imperfect one whose readings of auras should be taken with salt. I am no Passaconnaway.”

I didn't know who Passaconnaway was, and I was inclined to take what most people said with salt. But I wasn't sure what I believed about Bill Vanderbeck.

“Who else around here has no heart?” I asked.

“Why, very few people,” said Vanderbeck. “Some tourists. No one who lives in this town.”

“Not anyone else up at Luciano Marcus's place?”

He shook his head. “No one that I saw. All others I saw there have heart.”

I tried another angle. “Are the heartless people the evil ones?”

“Many people you would call evil have strong hearts.”

There was something missing in his words, and I wanted to know what it was. “What are you saying? Why do you say they're people I would call evil?”

His eyes revealed nothing. “Sometimes I try to imagine that I am God, and I try to see things as God must see them. When I do that, I seem to understand that much of what men call good and evil is not that at all. I seem to see that good and evil are human notions that mean nothing.” Then he laughed, ironic and full of humor. “But as soon as I stop playing God, I see good and evil everywhere once again, as usual.”

Actually, I didn't see it everywhere. But I did see it sometimes.

“And you,” I said. “Do you have heart?”

“I hope so,” he smiled. “But it's probably true that no one really knows himself. We are all good at self-deception.”

“Even shamans?”

Again the laugher. “Especially shamans, I would think!”

I drove to the Edgartown library, on North Water Street. It being yet another fine summer day with most people at the beaches, I found a parking place no more than three blocks away, up near the Harborview Hotel, and walked back. On my right, the great white houses that lined the street, making it Edgartown's loveliest, towered over me, and their gardens were bright with flowers. To my left, yachts swung at their moorings, and I could see the buildings and pier of the Chappaquiddick Beach Club, one of many Vineyard places I had never been. For so small an island, there were many such places. In fact, when I thought about it, I hadn't been most places on the island.

I had, however, been in most of its libraries. I am fond of libraries because they're full of information and people who actually like to help you find it. Just as there is no bad beer, there are no bad libraries, although some are better than others. Edgartown's is one of the island's best.

Inside, I looked up Passaconnaway. He, according to the books I found, turned out to have been no Wampanoag at all, but the great sachem of the Pennacooks, who lived up around Lowell. And he had been not only a sachem but a powahee, capable of incantations and visionary ecstasy. The English of the 1600s had called him a prophet and
magic maker, and his reputation had made the Pennacooks the only people feared by the Tarentines of Maine, who, in 1618, had attacked and decimated the Agawams and other Massachusetts tribes before going back north for a while.

Passaconnaway could make fire in the snow, could cuddle poisonous snakes, and could predict the future. A comet he saw led him to predict the plague of 1616, which wiped out two thirds of the Massachusetts coastal tribes, before the Tarentines pretty much finished the job two years later. When a group of Boston riflemen came to arrest him for troublemaking in 1642, he stopped them with a storm, and escaped.

Passaconnaway's magic had been considerable, but not strong enough, finally, to hold back the English.

“They fought me with fire and thunder,” he was quoted as saying. “I tried sorcery against them, but still they increased and prevailed. I am powerless and must bend before the storm.”

Passaconnaway had lived to be a hundred and twenty years old. He had died in 1666 after converting to Christianity and warning his people not to quarrel with the English lest they be “destroyed and rooted off of the earth.” Old Passaconnaway, a prophet to the last, had seen the future clearly, I thought. His people had been, in the end, pretty much rooted off of the earth.

And now Linda Vanderbeck was set on getting at least some of that earth back.

While I was there, I read more of New England history. About the European explorers and settlers, and the people they found waiting for them when they landed. About Champlain and Block, John Smith and Cotton Mather, Gosnold, Standish, and Bradford, and their adventures and misadventures with the native folk. And about Winepoykin of the Nahumkeikes, who had his nose cut off while fighting the Tarentines and who was afterward known to the English as “No-nose George”; and about Samoset, and Squanto, and Coneconum; and about Massasoit of the Pokanokets, who were also known as the Wampanoags, and who, after the Tarentines had devastated the Massachusetts tribes in 1618, became the most powerful people in southern New England.

I read about the conflicts between the Wampanoags and the Narragansetts, the wars between the Algonquins and the Iroquois, especially those between the Mohawks and the Mohegans, and about the torture and mutilations that seem to go with all wars, particularly those between relatives. I read about Massasoit's sons, Wamsutta and Metacomet, called Alexander and Philip by the English, and of “King Philip's War” between the native peoples and the Europeans that ended only with the death of Metacomet, King Philip, in 1676.

It was a bloody history of betrayals, killings, and brutality, and its ending all but guaranteed that Passaconnaway's last, dark prophecy of doom for his people would come true.

I thought about Linda Vanderbeck. In the seventeenth century, there had been women leaders of some of the native peoples in New England, squaw-sachems, who were tribal commanders. A phrase appeared in my mind: Queen Linda's War. I put aside my books, and thought awhile, then got up and left the library, wondering what I had learned, if anything, that might be useful to me or make me wise. Outside, the sun was bright and the wind was sweet, and King Philip was a long time dead.

It was past noon, and I was suddenly conscious of being hungry and in need of a beer, so I walked down to the Navigator Room for a sandwich and something to wash it down. When I came outside afterward, I looked up the street and saw the chief standing at the four corners, where Main Street crosses Water Street. He was talking to a summer cop. I walked up, arriving just as the summer cop left.

In spite of the fine beach weather, there were, as usual, a lot of people in town. A mixture of tanned July people and pale August people.

“What brings you downtown?” asked the chief. “You're usually hanging out in the woods, or off fishing someplace this time of day.”

“Scholarship,” I said. “My never-ending quest for wisdom has brought me to the library.”

“I didn't know they had a library in the Navigator Room,” said the chief.

“Ha, ha. That was my after-library lunch.”

“It must be nice to have a job that lets you drink beer all day.” His eyes were roving here and there, as usual.

“What do you hear from Boston?” I asked.

“You mean about your notion that Fred Souza stole that shotgun and is behind that attack on your boss, Luciano Marcus? Well, as a matter of fact, I talked with Gordon Sullivan, up in Boston, an hour or so ago. He's talked with Fred Souza and some people who know him, and so far, at least, it looks like your theory will fly about as well as a lead kite. Freddy is working for the summer at UMass Boston, he's going to summer school, and he's got another job flipping burgers at night in a diner. In his spare time, he studies and sleeps, and that's about all. He doesn't hang around with any hard cases, and he doesn't seem to have the time or money or energy to date girls or to party. He's broke, and he's unhappy about his father, but Sullivan thinks he's too busy and tired to be involved with anything but his work and his classes.”

“Sullivan could be wrong, of course.”

“Sure, he could.”

“But if Freddy didn't steal that shotgun, who did?”

“There are two hundred million other people living in the United States,” said the chief. “If it wasn't him, I'd guess that it was one of them. See you later.” He walked up Main Street.

I looked at my watch, then walked up Water Street, thinking. At home, still running things through my mind, I found Zee washing her long black hair. I wondered if she'd like to go fishing.

“No. I don't need to get my hair all salted up before it's even dry.”

I repeated my theory that the reason women don't rule the world is because they don't have time to do that and wash their hair, too.

“Get out of here,” said Zee.

I put both regular and light rods on the roof rack, my tackle box and a five-gallon bucket in the back of the Land Cruiser, some beer in a cooler, and headed for the Jetties. Fishing is good for the soul, and mine felt like it needed some TLC right at the moment.

FWD's lined the Norton's Point Beach, and there were kites flying above them. Swimmers, sunbathers, and picnickers were enjoying the bright blue afternoon. At Wasque, there were more Jeeps and four-by-fours and more sunbathers, mixed with fishermen who were not catching any fish, but who didn't seem unhappy about it. I saw someone in an inner tube floating west in the falling tide, right in front of the surf casters. Had fish been there, that person would have been the subject of furious abuse and maybe even more, but today the warm and lazy fishermen simply held their casts until he sailed by.

I drove up East Beach, then cut inside to the Dike Bridge and went on north past the narrows to Cape Pogue Pond. I drove along the pond's east side until I could cut back outside to Arruda's Point, where, perhaps, a Spanish mackerel or maybe a bonito might be waiting for my Swedish Pimple.

There were a couple of trucks there already, but there was still room for me, so I got down my light rod and went to work.

While I fished, and felt the soul release that I get from casting for the fruits of the sea, I thought some more about the stolen shotgun.

After a while, I got back into the truck and drove on to the Jetties, over the soft sands that lie between there and Arruda's. There were more trucks at the Jetties, but room for me again, so I tried my luck there for a while. Nobody was catching anything, but that was all right. If bringing home a fish is the only reason you go fishing, you should get one at the A & P instead of trying to catch one.