Summer of Pearls (24 page)

Authors: Mike Blakely

BOOK: Summer of Pearls

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Then it happened. The thing that ended all my torturous questions about Kelso, Carol Anne, Billy, and Trevor Brigginshaw. Proof came to my fishing camp, for only my eyes to see, and my ears to hear.

EPILOGUE

Goose Prairie Cove, 1944

I AM AN OLD MAN NOW. I ALONE REMEMBER THE SUMMER OF PEARLS. I HAVE
told everything I saw with my own eyes as it happened to me. The parts I didn't witness personally, I have told as a story, but I know those parts as if I
had
been there, and I can prove them through documents, statements, and interviews.

This last part I cannot prove, however, because the proof came to visit only me. And it is the final, clinching evidence. This incident I am about to tell you happened thirty years ago. I never told it to anyone else, because I was protecting someone. But those I sought to protect were older than I was, and so must have died years ago. There is no longer anyone to protect. You wanted to know about the summer of pearls, and here is the final chapter.

It happened a couple of years after the government dam raised the lake level, and exactly forty years after the summer of pearls. It was 1914. One day, a Cadillac automobile drove down to my fishing camp. The sun was just rising on a summer morning, warm and humid. There was a thunderhead in the west, and I was hoping we might get some rain, but the dark cloud didn't take up much of the sky.

I was trying to decide whether or not I should water the vegetable garden when I heard the Cadillac coming down the old Port Caddo Road to my fishing camp.

Thinking a rich sportsman had come to hire me to guide him at hunting and fishing, I walked to the front gate to greet the automobile. The driver's door opened and an old man stepped out. He was a good seventy years at least, but he stood straight as a pine. Instantly, I felt that I recognized him, yet couldn't quite place him.

“Mornin',” I said. “Can I help you?”

He looked me up and down. “Mind if we look around?”

“Not at all. Can I show you a cabin?”

“No, thanks. We just want to look around.”

“Feel free,” I said.

The moment I saw him walk, I remembered Billy Treat. Some things about people don't change, even with age. It could be him, I thought. But I had made that mistake before. I was always looking for Billy wherever I went, and never finding him.

The door on the passenger side opened, and an old woman got out. The old man met her at the front of the car and they came through the gate. As she walked by me, she looked at me, smiled, and pulled her collar together at her throat, as if against some kind of chill.

I had to wonder if it was Carol Anne. Of course there was no way I could have recognized her, even if it was her. The Carol Anne I remembered was the peerless beauty of my fourteenth year who would never grow old, never wrinkle, never die.

I watched them walk to the lakeshore. They seemed like something from a dream to me. The old man found the place where Esau's shack had once stood. He took the woman's hand and they walked along the shore, pointing at landmarks, talking, even laughing. They spent about fifteen minutes on the shore. Then they walked back to the gate.

I intercepted them at the car. “Sure you don't want to stay?” I asked.

“No, thanks,” the old man said. “But we appreciate you letting us look around.”

I caught the old woman's eyes and raced to her side of the car to
open the door for her. “Come back any time,” I told her. “Fishing's been good.”

“Thank you,” she said. When she bent forward to crouch into the car, a gold chain swung like a pendulum from under her collar. I only got a glimpse of it before she grabbed it and tucked it back in at her throat, but I swore I recognized it. The Treat Pearl. The perfect orb that had launched that wonderful summer, long ago.

Two doors shut me out and the car started. That Cadillac was the first automobile I ever saw that had an electric starter, and it caught me by surprise when it cranked itself up.

“Wait!” I shouted, over the engine noise. The car backed away. “Wait!” I waved like a madman and ran to the driver's side. I banged on the window until the old man stopped. “Let the glass down!” I yelled, making motions with my hand.

The old man lowered the window and looked at me. “Well?” he said, in a demanding tone of voice.

No, I wasn't absolutely sure. It could have been another pearl. But I had to know, even if it meant making a fool out of myself. “I was wondering â¦” I began. “Whatever happened â¦”

The old man swallowed and gripped the steering wheel tighter.

“Whatever happened to Captain Trevor Brigginshaw?”

He tensed in the driver's seat and faked a look of ignorance. “Sir, I don't know what you're talking about.”

Then the handsome old woman put her hand on his arm and leaned over him to look at me through the car window. “He died, Ben,” she said. “About ten years ago on the island of Mangareva. He went there to live after he sent back all the money he had taken from that gemstone company. He sent us a photograph once of his wife and three beautiful little dark-skinned children. He was dressed like an island native. Can you believe that?”

I stared at her in awe and felt years of sorrow wash away from me. “Yes,” I said. “I believe it.”

The old man was still staring. “Ben?” he said. “Ben â¦ Crowell! My goodness, boy, you're an old man!”

I laughed, and felt tears of gratitude filling my eyes, but I held them back.

“We had to leave, Ben,” Carol Anne said. “If they ever found out we helped Trevor escape â¦ . Then there was the Kelso clan â¦ . We
had
to leave.”

I nodded. “I know. I've missed you both, but I understand.”

Billy Treat flashed the biggest smile I had ever seen him wear. “I'm glad it's you, Ben. I'm glad you're here.”

I smiled back at them until I could no longer keep the tears from coming down my old weathered cheeks.

Carol Anne stroked a few tears away from her eyes as well. “We have to go now, Ben.”

I nodded and stepped away from the car. Billy put it in gear. He smiled at me and drove away. I didn't wave as they left. I just watched until the Cadillac disappeared over the hill toward the ghost town of Port Caddo.

I stood in the road for a while, then walked down to the lake. My wife came to the back door of the house. “Who was that, Ben?” she shouted. I waved her off. She wouldn't understand. Nobody would.

I took off my shoes and waded in, feeling for mussels with my toes. I had suffered bouts of nostalgia before, but never one like this. As I found the mussels, I opened them with my pocket knife and probed carefully at the unfortunate little animals. I heard the rumble of thunder again to the west, but didn't even look at the sky.

A couple of my cabin guests rowed out to the lake in one of my boats to do some fishing. “Going to bait a trotline, Ben?” one of them asked.

“Nope,” I replied. “I'm pearl-hunting.”

They laughed and floated over the stumps of cypress trees that had been cut down during the years of low water.

I had left my hat in the garden, and when the morning sun rose over the treetops, I felt it beating down on the bald spot on the back of my head, so I waded out. The summer of pearls was long ago.

About that time, my son, Ben, Jr., drove up in his Model T and
dropped his three kids off at the gate. I was expecting them. Junior waved at me, and drove on.

The thunder spoke to me againâa long grumble. This time, I looked. The dark cloud had come closer, but was drifting north. It would not rain on me today. I should water the garden. A light-gray curtain of rain was slanting from the cloud, and the morning sun was striking it. A rainbow was beginning to form.

Just as I looked down for the garden hose on the ground, something white bulged from the side of the dark, drifting thunderhead. I glanced back up to the west and saw a chalky moon, almost perfectly round, peeking out from behind the cloud as it moved north. The moon was falling fast, nothing between it and the horizon but a rainbow. It would be gone in a minute.

“Hi, Pop,” Ben the Third yelled. He was seven, and his little sisters were five and four.

“Come here, kids!” I called, waving them toward the garden. They met me at the garden gate. “You kids remember me telling you about the summer of pearls?” I

“Yeah, all the time, Pop,” Ben the Third said. “You're not gonna tell us again, are you?”

“No, but remember how I told you that someday I'd show you a pearl?”

The girls got more excited than their brother. “You found a pearl?” Vickie shrieked. “Where is it? Let me see!”

“Let me see!” Connie said, hopping like her older sister.

I glanced to the west. The moon was diving like a kingfisher. And the rainbowâwhy, it was waiting there, its colors growing deeper and richer. The moon and the rainbow were just about to touch. “I don't have a real pearl,” I said, “but I'm going to show you exactly what one looks like.”

I lined them up and turned them westward. “See the moon?” I said.

“I see it,” Ben the Third answered.

“And a rainbow!” Connie squealed.

“Watch!”

The moon slipped behind that rainbow as a little wind came from somewhere and whipped the shower into a light mist, heightening the hues in the arching bands of color. The moon seemed to slide along inside the curve of that rainbow, all the way to the horizon, like a South Seas god riding to Earth.

The girls clutched at my arms, and Ben the Third bear-hugged my waist. Their little gasps told me they knew how rare a moment it was.

Billy Treat was right. It was one in ten thousand. It was just like a pearl.

AUTHOR'S NOTE

Between 1850 and 1910, a series of “pearl rushes” occurred from New Jersey to Texas and from Florida to Wisconsin. In some isolated areas, for mysterious reasons, freshwater mussels produced unusually high numbers of pearls. These local discoveries led to small-scale economic booms for some rural communities as working families enjoyed the treasure-hunting aspects of opening mussels in search of pearls. Most pearl rushes lasted for a year or two at best, as local mussel populations were depleted.

One of the last pearl rushes occurred in 1910 at Caddo Lake, on the Texas-Louisiana border. For this novel, however, I have created a fictitious pearl boom set in 1874 in the dying riverboat town of Port Caddo, Texas, on Caddo Lake. Port Caddo, now a ghost town, was a viable community until railroads preempted the riverboat trade in East Texas.

The Great Caddo Lake Pearl Rush did not occur in 1874, as this novel suggests. All characters in this story are fictitious, and none is based on any particular historical figure. I have, however, attempted
historical accuracy in all else, including the riverboat trade, the freshwater pearl industry, life in Port Caddo, and the clearing of the Great Raft by government snag boats. If the Caddo Lake pearl boom had started in 1874 instead of 1910, it might have happened this way â¦ .

Forge Books by Mike Blakely

The Last Chance
Shortgrass Song
Too Long at the Dance
Spanish Blood
Dead Reckoning
The Snowy Range Gang
Comanche Dawn
Come Sundown
Forever Texas
Moon Medicine

Praise for Mike Blakely

“One of America's best writers of the Western.”

âThe Dallas Morning News

“Besides a fine spinner of tales, Mike Blakely is a poet and a musician at heart, which makes his narrative sing and his unusual characters dance their way through the epic story of the changing West.”

âElmer Kelton, seven-time Spur Award and
three-time Western Heritage Award winner

“Painstakingly researched and carefully written, the novel is an .obvious labor of love that merits comparison with such established classics as
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, Little Big Man, and Hanta Yo.”

âBooklist on Comanche Dawn

“A well-made novel can sometimes inform a reader far better than documents of history.
Comanche Dawn
is such a novel.”

âDee Brown, author of
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee

“Funny, suspenseful, and affecting.”

âPublishers Weekly on Come Sundown

“Come Sundown is
a marvelous book, full of action, color, and meaning â¦ . Read it for its insightâ
and
for its gripping story.”

âDavid Nevin, author of
Dream West

“Come Sundown
is great fun, witty, and highly believable â¦ . Blakely is deservedly among the top Western authors working today.”

âTrue West