were still stretches of wilderness where the pines grew thick and the way resembled nothing more than a tunnel with sky. Imagine this on a dirt road at night, I thought: imagine 120 miles of it. As we traveled upcountry I followed the odyssey of Richard Francis Burton and Charles Edward Warren in my head. As I slumped in the backseat reading Burton’s words, I could almost see them coming down from the north, and I could still get some faint, faraway sense of what it had been.
We reached Florence in the early afternoon. From then on our journey was charmed. If anything, it was too easy.
A librarian knew right away what we were looking for. That junction where the roads had intersected was still called Wheeler’s Crossing. It was out of town a stretch and there was nothing there now. A roadside sign would show us where it had been.
The library had a number of Wheeler papers: letters, some of the old man’s ledgers, even a few menus in Marion’s hand. The Wheelers had all been buried in an old graveyard near the crossroad. Marion Wheeler’s mother had been put there before her; her father, who had outlived them both, died in 1881. “Look at this,” Koko said. “She died in childbirth, just like her mother…exactly nine months after Burton and Charlie would’ve been there. Her father made no attempt to cover it up.”
Her son had lived. Her father had honored her deathbed wish, named him Richard, and raised him as his own.
Richard Wheeler. One sketchy account existed of his youth: no more than a few lines in a letter written near the end of the old man’s life. His schooling, three years in a classroom, was probably average for the time. He was fair with numbers but brilliant with language. He had learned Latin on his own, becoming fluent in six months, and had been studying Spanish. He was a good and energetic dancer and girls loved him. In that passage he was described as tall and dark with a keen sense of honor.
A lady killer.
He went to sea at sixteen and that was all that was known of him.
We arrived at the site of Wheeler’s inn late that afternoon. It was a bend in the road now, marked by a simple state highway sign that said wheeler’s crossing. The graveyard was on a dirt road not far away. It was dusk when we found the Wheeler plots: the father and mother side by side, Marion a few feet away. The simple stone said, here lies marion wheeler, beloved daughter, who departed this earth january 30, l86l, aged twenty-four years, eleven months, fourteen days. Koko took notes and in the waning light tried desperately to take pictures.
I had to pry her away.
Now for the first time she asked my opinion of Burton’s journal. It looked real, I said. By then I didn’t need to add the line about my own lack of expertise. Most impressive were the scores of Negro spirituals and slave songs that Burton had written down, word for word, in dialect, as he and Charlie had traveled through the South. He had rilled page after page with them, adding extensive notes on where he had heard them and what he suspected their African roots might be.
There was a full account of Burton’s first meeting with Charlie. It jibed with what we knew and added color to Charlie’s tale. There was a detailed description of the day they went walking in Charleston. Burton had made a sketch of Fort Sumter from the Battery, and had written with fond amusement of Charlie’s outrage at the slave auction. Best of all, he told of having their picture taken outside a dentist’s office on East Bay Street.
We headed west into the night.
At Camden we turned north, picking up Interstate
“Lee is ecstatic,” she said.
“That’s good,” I said flatly.
“What’s wrong with you? In case you hadn’t noticed, we won.”
I made the obvious excuse: I was tired after last night. But there was something else and she sensed it.
“It’s Denise, isn’t it? She’s been forgotten in all this fuss.”
“Not by me.”
“What are you going to do about it?”
“I don’t know yet. Something.”
“You had your chance at Dante and let him go. Is that what’s bothering you?”
“No. I told you, I’m just tired.”
But it was more than that.
We turned in but I still couldn’t sleep. At midnight I thought of Dean Treadwell, and for the hundredth time about his strange friendship with Archer. Again I thought the unthinkable, pushing it away at once, but it was there now and it kept me awake. I must’ve slept at least a few hours because I opened my eyes suddenly and knew I had been dreaming. I had dreamed of Archer and his mother Betts, and it took me a while to remember that Betts hadn’t been Archer’s mother at all.
