Requiem for the Bone Man (12 page)

But they continued for almost an hour without result. Though the foliage was thick at this time of year, enough sunlight penetrated to make them build up a sweat. Fortunately the competing lake breezes served to moderate the effect.

Suddenly Nancy caught a glimpse of something moving off the path to the left.

“There he is! That’s him!”

She tugged at Bob who followed her off the path into the deeper woods.

Then she saw him, her ghost soldier. He was standing by a tall Michigan Pawpaw tree. He looked at her with a piercing stare then smiled and disappeared.

She grabbed Edison and pulled him along in pursuit.

“Bob, did you see that?”

“I see a big Pawpaw tree that we’re going to crash into if you don’t slow down.”

“He’s here! I mean it must be where his remains are. Help me check the ground.”

Both got down on their knees and used branches and hands to push away the forest surface cover of decaying leaves and twigs. They kept at it until Bob cried out, “What’s that?”

Nancy reached over and pulled an object from the dirt. It was old, a corroded metal button. Could it be from Angus’s uniform?

“Bob, go get the park rangers, quick! I think we found him!”

She waited in the forest stillness while he ran back toward the park offices.

Good thing he’s so thin. He’ll get through the woods fast.

The forest noises suddenly ceased and she looked up from where she was sitting. The apparition stood before her, smiling again.

In her mind she heard him.

God bless ye, lassie! Ah’ve lain here al’ this time and nay un has helped. Ye mus’ do a thing fer me so ah can rest easy. Do ye ken?

Nancy nodded.

Tell me what to do, Angus
.

He pointed at the ground in front of her with his right hand.

Ye mus’ remove tha’ which hols me here
.

He now pointed to the left side of his chest.

She didn’t quite know what to make of those words, but she dug with her hands in the soft forest loam and suddenly felt something. She scooped more dirt away and the outline of a skeletal rib cage appeared. Gently she moved the soft soil away from it and saw the spear point lodged between the fourth and fifth ribs.

She looked up at Angus. He appeared pleased, nodding his spectral head up and down. Slowly she reached in and tugged and twisted until the point dislodged from the remains.

She heard heavy running footsteps approaching. Bob appeared first, followed by two park rangers. She was standing by the Pawpaw tree, humming to herself.

“Nancy, are you okay?” Bob asked, regarding her with a worried gaze.

“I’m fine and so is Angus,” she replied.

The two park rangers looked at her smiling face, then at each other.

“Ma’am, the mister here says you found something important.”

“Yes, very important,” she heard herself say. “A lost soldier has been found.”

They stood and watched while the remains of Angus Urquhart of the clan Urquhart, Sergeant U.S. Army, were buried with full military honors on the grounds of Fort Mackinac. As the rifles fired off, she heard that familiar voice once more.

Lassie, I kenna leave less ah warn ye. Ye and yer laddie mus’ go now! Ye have stirred up pow’rful forces, the same uns thet held me here
.

“But Nancy, we have two more days here.”

He didn’t want to go back to work.

She couldn’t give him the real reason, but she knew they had to leave.

“Bob, I’m worried about my mother. She wasn’t feeling well before we left.”

She crossed her fingers behind her back, so it wasn’t a lie.

“Okay, today’s last ferry leaves in three hours. That should give us enough time to pack and check out.

She knew he was upset, so she added the sugar coating.

“By the way, the State Park Authorities have picked up our tab because of what happened. Isn’t that great, Bob? We can put the money toward the wedding!”

It was a while before their embrace ended. He smiled at her, looked at the big four-poster bed and whispered, “We still have three hours.”

They boarded the ferry and settled down. The peaceful voyage to the island was now replaced by wind-chopped water, roiling the boat back and forth.

They reached the mainland dock and returned to their car just as the sky darkened with storm clouds.

“Strange, I checked the 2 Meter Net and there was no storm indicator.”

Even here he can’t be without his Ham radio
.

“Good thing we left when we did,” she replied.

She turned on the car radio and listened to the local station newsman proclaim sunny good weather for the next two days just as the heavy storm-driven rain began to ricochet off the windshield.

They headed north and then east, Nancy encouraging Bob to travel as quickly as possible. She knew there was something out of the ordinary about the change in the weather. The radio continued guaranteeing fair weather as the winds picked up in intensity. Then she saw the funnel … no, funnels! Tornadoes! Here and at this time of year!

They raced along the highway, finally crossing back into the United States at Buffalo. As they did so the weather seemed to break, the clouds thinning out to admit the sunlight once more.

Ye made it, lassie. God be wit’ ye and yer laddie. Sa’day Ah’ll pipe fer ye
.

...

They were still peering down at her, those people in the masks and gowns. Where was she?

Then she saw him, in their midst. He was wearing his kilts and holding his bagpipes over his left shoulder.

Angus, are you here to pipe for me?

Nay, lassie, ah play fer the wee-un
.

“She’s coming out of it. Get her over to Recovery. I’ll go talk to her husband.”

“June, let me help. I’ll talk to him.”

She looked at her old classmate from medical school.

“Thanks, Bill.”

Time is a one-way street. We are born in a scream of life, not realizing that birth is the overture of death. Meanwhile Fate permits us the conceit that we have some sort of control over our brief existence, then laughs as our best intentions go south, tragedy strikes out of a clear blue sky, and our most foolish endeavors produce wonderment.

Galen was older now. He had begun cutting back on the more strenuous activities in his career—less hospital work; no more traveling to present papers to colleagues. He even found himself entertaining thoughts of what had seemed an anathema to him in the past: retirement.

As usual, he rose at 4 a.m. and took his morning walk before the first rays of the sun appeared in the east. He completed his two-mile jaunt, returned home and examined the appointment book. A light schedule so far, he thought, as he glanced out the window.

The fourth crescent of summer began brilliantly that day. Azure blue skies lit by a poached-egg sun raised the thought of flying. Maybe, just maybe, he could get out to the airport for the afternoon.

Flying always seemed to bring him closer to Leni and Cathy, just as gardening did. Air and dirt, sky and earth, they were the only activities he truly enjoyed.

He ate his usual light breakfast of blueberries covered with wheat germ in a bowl of milk.

Yes, maybe some time in the Piper
.

He washed down breakfast with a cup of Bi Lo Chun tea. Savoring its flower-bud aroma, he carried the cup into the waiting room and turned on the radio to WBJC, Baltimore’s classical station, as he scanned the morning papers. Then, as always, he paid homage to the gods of continuing medical education by spending two nice solid hours reading through the research journals.

Mirabile dictu, no early calls. In retirement, every morning could be like this
.

Just before 8, right on schedule, he heard Virginia, his secretary, pull into the parking lot behind the modest suburban home that also served as his office. She had become a fixture there, beginning part-time over twenty years ago after her husband died of cancer. She also was something of a fixture in the D.C. area, where she had lived and worked since before World War II. Many times she talked about the days when the city still was a sleepy town, when you could walk up to a president who was strolling boldly down the city’s sidewalks and shake his hand. And she remembered when many of the landmarks were erected, including National Airport and the Pentagon on the Potomac’s marshes.

“You ought to take the day off,” she said as she efficiently began re-arranging the stack of leftover papers on her desk.

“Why, do you want a day off, too?” he laughed.

“It would do you some good to get out of here more often. You’re not getting any younger.”

Ouch!

She didn’t speak her unspoken thought.

You ought to start planning for retirement.

But he felt it, nevertheless, that arrow sting of truth. Maybe he should cut back on his government consulting and just do aviation medicine. What would it be like to have free time, to work only when he wanted and not worry about the rest?

By 9, he already had seen three scheduled patients plus three walk-ins when another came running up the walk, shouting as he entered.

“An airplane’s hit the World Trade Center!”

Galen noticed the music had stopped on the radio. He turned it off and turned on the small television in the waiting room. Every channel was showing the same image: New York City’s World Trade Center North Tower wrapped in flames and smoke. And then he gasped as the TV cameras showed another plane smash into the South Tower.

Before anyone could even begin to fathom the magnitude of the event that was unfolding, the news arrived that a third aircraft apparently had crashed into the Pentagon.

By then, the Federal Aviation Administration had ordered every aircraft flying over U.S. airspace to land, and thousands of air traffic controllers across the land watched nervously as one by one the blips on their radar screens disappeared. For the first time in many decades, America’s skies were empty.

The group in his waiting room stood in stunned silence, unable to speak or move, their eyes glued to the small screen.

In apparent slow motion they saw the South Tower of the Trade Center collapse, followed soon by the North Tower, each disgorging a giant plume of smoke and dust that forced its way through the narrow corridors between the buildings of Lower Manhattan as bystanders on the ground fled for their lives.

They all could feel the skin-crawling fear rise within, and Galen realized that the country had just entered a new and uncertain phase of its existence, one that had not been experienced even at Pearl Harbor. The homeland itself had been attacked. Maybe tens of thousands had just died. The United States was at war.

He looked out his front window and could see the smoke cloud rising in the southeast in the direction of the Pentagon.

No, no flying today. And suddenly retirement again seemed like a far-away dream.

“Bob, am I starting to look older?”

He watched admiringly as she stood in front of the bedroom mirror, running her fingers through her still gorgeous long red hair.

What do I say? If I agree, it’ll upset her. If I disagree, she’ll know I’m lying.

He looked at her again, the woman who meant so much to him: wife, lover … no, something more … best friend! And that thought prompted the solution Edison desperately needed.

“Honey, you’ve never looked more beautiful to me.”

What a smoothie,
Nancy thought, as she put her arms around him and they stood there embracing.

Sometimes he knows just what I need to hear!

The young desperately seek to grow up quickly and gain the freedom they envy of adults. They put on makeup, dress provocatively, take amino acid protein shakes to bulk up, constantly stare at themselves in the mirror, and incessantly ask: Are we there yet?

The old look at their younger counterparts as reminders of bygone times while they suffer the realization of their encroaching mortality. They also look in the mirror, but with trepidation instead of admiration, and they seek out plastic surgeons, age-reversing nostrums, and exercise programs, longing to return to the temple of youth that will no longer grant them admittance.

Then, there is the middle.

Middle age, that is, or Middle Earth, that flat-footed, more-hair-on-the-ears-than-scalp, Hobbit-infested stage between youth and senility. It means the onset of backaches, headaches, and reflux, a time when most human beings enter a phase of consolidation and nesting. Those who have moved well into their careers, marriages or equivalents as a result are held captive by the palpable chains of responsibility.

For some, it is a time of achievement and satisfaction. But for most, it is the breeding ground for second guesses and thoughts about what they have not accomplished so far, for worrying about the ever-shortening future, and for calculating the amount of work time left and the amount of money needed for retirement. The gremlins of age go merrily about their vanity-robbing work: thinning the hair, widening the waist, and rendering the eyesight no longer eagle keen. Erectile dysfunction emerges big time in men and menopause begins to erase the essences of womanhood.

Time marches and Fate watches.

“Nancy, I’m going to be away again. The company wants me to take charge of the Olympic Torch Bearer Run sponsorship. The participants will go from New York to Washington on their way to Atlanta.”

“Why you, Bob? You’re not a PR man. You’re their top R&D guy. What does that have to do with the Olympics?”

“Seems they think my reputation will carry some weight.”

He sat down wearily on the couch in their New Jersey suburban home. Yes, he was tired, tired of the daily commute to New York, tired of putting his life at risk every day on Route 22, tired of arguing with science-ignorant managers who wouldn’t recognize an electrical circuit if it bit them, and tired of non-stop, non-productive meetings that repeated the obvious day after day—and now this.

Why him? Probably because nobody in marketing wanted to handle it and so they called on one of the nerds.

At least he could demand first-class travel arrangements.

“Dr. Galen, here are your phone messages.”

The list his secretary handed him ran five pages, on which most of the items were non-urgent, but he would answer them all as was his habit. And he would perform two house calls—for two of the sickest.

He sat down and, number by number, called and spoke with and crossed off the names until he had finished. Then he picked up his bag and headed out to his twenty-year-old Jeep in the parking lot. First stop, Rosie’s place, then Mrs. Falcon’s.

Rosie Washington was the daughter of slaves. She and her extended family lived on a fifteen-acre farm just outside town. It fronted a highway now on two sides, but the old split-log house, without electricity or inside plumbing, had served Rosie and her late husband, Abraham, for more than seventy years. She was one hundred five now, waiting to meet her Creator and be reunited with Abraham, who had died some twenty years before.

Galen always enjoyed seeing her when she had come to his office. Mahogany skin glistening, the four-foot-eight-inch Rosie would tell riveting stories about the days when she and Abraham had first married and started to farm in the upper reaches of the old South.

Now she was dying. She knew it and her family knew it. But it was, strangely enough, a celebration of life’s passage rather than an anticipated time of grief. She had done so much in her century-plus-five of living, and now all she wanted was heavenly rest with her mate. Her family cared for her better than any hospital could as her tired heart muscle slowly failed. Galen had anticipated her passing at any time, but he hoped for one last visit with her.

He parked the old Jeep on the side of the highway and began the half-mile walk up to the house. There was no driveway, no road, just the fading marks of wagon wheels from a time when Rosie and Abraham took their produce to market in the city by horse-drawn cart. Now, any vehicle would have trouble making it up that path. Finally he arrived at the open farmhouse door and saw Rosie’s great-great-granddaughter standing there.

“C’mon in, Doctor, I think she knows you’re here.”

He entered the spotless small bedroom where Rosie, the family matriarch, lay propped up on hand-made down-filled pillows. He could see her shortness of breath, only partly relieved by the medications he had provided. A small oxygen tank ran its trickle through her nosepiece as she opened her eyes and smiled at him.

“Goin’ ta see Abe t’day, docta,” she gasped. “He tol’ me las’ night he’d be a-comin’ fer me.”

Galen knelt down by the old four-poster bed and held the hand of a living legend. He felt the thready, irregular pulse and, using his stethoscope, listened to the labored breathing. He looked up at the old sepia-tinted photograph mounted on tin and framed on the wall showing two serious but smiling young people holding hands, dressed in their Sunday best. He knew it was the wedding picture of Abe and Rosie, taken long-ago by some itinerant tinker/peddler traveling through the farm area by wagon.

As he continued his examination, he thought of himself, no longer the altruistic young doctor, older now but still learning from his patients. Then he was struck by what he did not see: The Darkness.   He had sensed it so many times over the deathbeds of his patients, but not here.

He heard sounds and turned to see members of Rosie’s family crowding into the small room—from sons and daughters in their eighties all the way to small children. Then he noticed a tall man, youngish with mahogany skin, moving toward the other side of Rosie’s bed.

He saw Rosie’s eyes open, taking in the sight of her family, her immortality. She smiled, and when she saw the young man standing beside her, she smiled even more broadly.

Galen rose from his kneeling position and stared, first at the man and then at the old photo.

No, it couldn’t be! It must be a great-grandson
.

Then he heard what was no longer there. Rosie had stopped breathing. He felt for her pulse, listened again with his stethoscope and turned toward the family, but they already knew and began singing, not mournfully but joyously.

Galen repacked his medical bag and walked through the house. He looked around for the young man but couldn’t find him.

As he made his way slowly down the hillside back to the Jeep and climbed in, he wondered: ghost or coincidence?

He shrugged to himself.

Can’t take any more time. Still have to visit the Falcon home
.

The young maitre d’ of the swank D.C. hotel almost bowed and scraped as he pored over the courses of the banquet meal Edison had specified for his Olympics-bound torchbearers. It was going to be one big publicity show, with him as the centerpiece representing the company. He couldn’t afford for anything to go wrong—not this night. He already had called Nancy twice just to hear her voice, to know that she was still there for him.

Back in town, Galen drove through a series of neighborhoods, each one more elaborate than the last, until he reached the suburban castles of The Neighborhood. That’s how the rest of the area referred to the enclave of mansions along the Potomac River. Here lived the richest and most influential, powerbrokers to the nation and the world.

Marilyn Falcon was a self-effacing country girl at heart who still had not understood the trappings of power that surrounded her. She lived with her daughter and son-in-law and had enjoyed all of the perks he could provide. But nothing could prevent the inner destruction, the eating away by the cancer that was killing her.

Galen drove past the gate and up the long driveway to the coach-style turnaround in front of the Georgian mansion. The maid already had opened the door to let him in and Anne Creding, the dying woman’s daughter, stood waiting for him in the large antiques-filled anteroom.