‘Gold Rush?’ Jack said tentatively.
‘Exactly.’
Jack was perplexed. ‘So my great-great-great-grandfather, James Jacklin was born in Pennsylvania but travelled to California for the Gold Rush?’
‘That’s right.’
‘So…’
Mr Chipman flipped the page over to reveal a hand-drawn family tree. ‘There’s you at the bottom here.’ His finger traced from Jack up to his dad. ‘And here’s your dad. He was born in San Francisco. Just like his father, George and George’s father and his father and his father.’
Jack’s mom and dad’s version of events was a lie. His mom’s cover of his dad’s version of events was a lie. The unpalatable truth was documented here. Unassailable history.
‘There’s something else, too,’ Mr Chipman added. ‘Take a look at your grandfather on the tree.’
Jack scrutinised the family tree. ‘George Jacklin. Born 1900. Married Lucy Bradford.’ He looked at Mr Chipman for further direction.
‘When did he die?’ Mr Chipman asked.
‘It doesn’t say.’
‘That’s because he’s still alive, Jack.’
‘What?’
‘He and your grandmother, Lucy and your uncle David—they’re all alive and living in San Francisco.’ He took something—a scrap of paper—from his pocket and handed it to Jack. ‘Here’s their address—quite a wealthy part of town, so I’m told.’
‘But I just can’t believe this…’ Jack’s sentence was jerked into the collision of thoughts ricocheting around his mind. His grandparents were still alive. He heard Mr Chipman talking—saying something about the need to discuss things with his parents.
‘Oh, and one other thing,’ Mr Chipman said. ‘What you were told about your mom’s parents—that was true. Her father died in 1932 and her mother in 1945.’
The way that Mr Chipman relayed the news of his maternal grandparents was as though it might have been of some consolation that at least some part of their past had been true. It wasn’t; it just made everything more complex, somehow.
‘Thank you,’ Jack heard himself saying. ‘I’d better get packed up and off to school.’
‘Ask them to teach you about the Gold Rush,’ Mr Chipman joked.
Jack smiled absentmindedly and watched as Mr Chipman strolled through the cemetery towards the gates, his mind in freefall.
‘I would have looked at the papers, too, by the way!’ Mr Chipman called back down.
Jack pulled up on the drive and killed the engine. He stared at his parents’ house in a detached way, as if seeing it for the first time. Through the thin bands of the horizontal blinds, he saw his dad reading, silhouetted against the vanilla dining-room lights. The astute businessman from humble Bostonian beginnings, now living in one of the nicest neighbourhoods on Cape Cod. The epitome of the American Dream.
Jack’s gaze dropped to the passenger seat beside him to the evidence that annihilated everything he knew. A mild rage rose inside him.
Stuffing the sheet into his class folder, Jack climbed from the car and entered the house. He closed the door, hung up his coat and wandered casually into the dining room. He tried to behave normally, but it didn’t come easily. ‘Hi,’ he said.
His dad looked up from the newspaper. ‘Hi. How did school go tonight?’
‘Good thanks. I learned quite a lot today about the California Gold Rush.’
‘Interesting period,’ his dad mumbled, turning back to his newspaper.
‘Ever go?’ Jack asked.
‘To California? No, too hot.’
Jack placed his folder on the table and turned to get something to drink.
‘What’s this?’ his dad asked. His face was ashen, drained. His jaw was clenched and the hand that was holding the paper on which was drawn the Jacklin family tree trembled.
His dad had taken the bait.
‘What have you done, Jack?’ The tremor that Jack had glimpsed in his dad’s hand was progressively engulfing him. It squeezed his voice box, pinched his eyes and crushed his breath.
In that instance, Jack knew that he had gone too far. He had opened a hidden window onto the past, a window that offered a view of the ugly chasm between his dad’s two lives. A window that could never again be closed.
His dad pushed back his chair, rushed over to Jack and, with an animalistic roar, shoved Jack backwards, pinning him against the wall by his throat.
‘Please!’ Jack begged.
‘Who do you think you are?’ his dad seethed.
‘That’s just what I want to know,’ Jack tried to argue, but the pressure on his throat was increasing and he was struggling to breathe. He had no choice and drove his right knee up into his dad’s stomach.
It worked. His dad let him go but, giving him no chance to blink, he heaved his fist into Jack’s face. There was the sound akin to a stick being snapped, as his knuckles met with Jack’s nose.
Jack fell to the floor in agony and curled himself up in the foetal position. ‘Please! I just want to understand…’ he began to say, but the sharp jolt of his dad’s foot into his stomach thrust the breath from his lungs and tore the words apart.
Chapter Twelve
20th August 2016, Wellfleet, Massachusetts, USA
‘It’s kind of how I imagined it,’ Morton said. He was standing beside Juliette in the car park adjacent to the First Congregational Church in Wellfleet: the place of his grandparents’ 1953 marriage. It was a large colonial-style building cladded in the typical New England white boarding. He slowly walked around to the front of the church, up the three red-brick steps to the double doors and tried the handle. Locked. With his back to the doors and his hands slung in his pockets, he pictured his grandfather standing on this very spot, looking down a street that had changed little in the intervening sixty years. Old, white homes interspersed with thick trees; just as it had always been.
The raft of unanswered questions began to resurface in his thoughts. Questions that he might just get some answers to today. They were on their way
