There’s no adequate measure of the human spirit, no scale to weigh the courage of the human heart. Just when you think you’ve plumbed the depth, dredged the last bucketful from the well, you discover how wrong you are. Once, when I was a cop in Chicago, I was the first to respond to the report of a shooting in an apartment building on Hyde Street. I arrived at the scene, the third-floor hallway, to find a wounded man propped against a hissing radiator. He had a bullet in his heart. Two more had shattered bone in his chest and lodged somewhere deep in his internal organs. The bare floor under him was slick with his blood. A dead man lay at his feet, a. 38 Ruger near his outstretched hand. The dead man’s windpipe had been crushed. A small boy peeked from the doorway of the nearest apartment.
“Daddy?” he whispered toward the wounded man.
Somehow, from somewhere unimaginable, that father found the strength to smile. “’S okay, Boo,” he said. “He won’t hurt you.”
And if that weren’t miracle enough, he managed to reach out and hug his son, who ran to him before I could prevent it.
It had been about drugs, about threatening the boy, and finally about what a father would do to protect his son. The wounded man died. The truth was that he was dead even as he crushed his killer’s windpipe to keep his son safe, but he’d tapped the deep reservoir of strength that lay behind his love for his child, and he’d done what, as a father, he needed to do.
I watched Meloux haul his ninety-year-old body up the ridge, and I knew that at that moment there was more to his strength than could be accounted for by those long walks from Crow Point to Allouette. It was possible, I supposed, that he might kill himself in this effort, but I understood there was no way any of us could stop him.
We climbed out of the shadow of the ridge and into the sunlight of early evening. It was seven thirty P.M. So far north, the sun would still be around for quite a while. Meloux led us down the other side, into shade again, and onto a trail that ran along a rushing stream.
Ten minutes later, we entered a clearing grown over with fire-weed and lupine. On the far side stood an old log structure, five feet wide and twice as long. The roof had collapsed decades before, but the four walls were still solid. The smokehouse, I thought.
We were in a deep trough between two hills. Sunlight hit the higher slopes and the pine trees there burned yellow and I heard crows arguing in the branches. Where we stood, everything was shadow and silence.
Meloux walked ahead slowly, parting the deep weed cover, peering carefully. Finally he stopped and turned back to us. “Here,” he said, indicating the ground at his feet. “Here, I cut the throat of the man who was my friend. And here, I put a bullet in the heart of a man who was not.” He turned to his right and went a couple of dozen paces, then walked in a slow circle. Finally he signaled for us to come.
As I neared him, I saw, deep in the tangle of undergrowth, the long black bones of burned timbers half buried in the earth.
“Dig here,” he instructed. “It should not be deep.”
Schanno and I pulled the weeds, then got on our knees and began to dig with our hands. Three or four inches down, we hit solid wood. We scraped the dirt away, revealing rotted floorboards. Because I knew his story, I knew what Meloux expected to find, and we kept scraping at the dirt until we uncovered the thing.
“Here it is, Henry,” I said. I took the knife from my day pack and ran the blade along the slits that outlined the trapdoor. I poked until I located the hole where a strand of rope had once served as a handle, and I cleaned it out. I glanced up at Meloux.
“Open it,” he said.
I jabbed my index finger into the hole and lifted. The door resisted at first, then gave. The cool, earthy smell of trapped air escaped. The light in the clearing was waning, and the pit below the trapdoor was too dark to see into clearly.
“In the pack,” I said to Schanno. “My flashlight.”
He dug it out and handed it over. I flicked it on and shot the beam through the opening of the trapdoor. The pit appeared to be a cube three feet wide and deep. It was filled with deer-hide bags gone brittle with time, each as large as a softball. A quick count gave me a dozen.
I stood back. “Care to take a look, Mr. Wellington?”
I held the flashlight while he knelt and reached into the pit. The bag he grasped fell apart as he lifted it and dull yellow sand spilled out.
“I’ve never seen gold dust,” I said, “but I imagine it looks pretty much like that, doesn’t it?”
Wellington stood up. “Put the trapdoor back.” He studied the sky. “We should start home. It’ll be dark soon.”
He didn’t look at Meloux, just turned and headed toward the trail along the stream.
I lowered the door back into place. Quiet as a congregation leaving a church, we abandoned the clearing.
FORTY-SIX
We moved more slowly on the return and didn’t make it back to the log home before nightfall. Wellington pulled a powerful light out of his pack and led the way. I brought up the rear with mine. Wellington had no trouble following the trail, faint as it was, and I figured this wasn’t the first time he’d been to the burned ruins in the little clearing. We stopped often for Meloux to rest. He’d proved his point, and now he was feeling the physical cost of the journey. I shared the bottles of water in my pack. Wellington had brought his own. He also had trail mix, which he offered around. We didn’t speak except for the necessity of safety: “Careful of that log,” or “Watch your step.” When I finally saw the lights of Wellington’s place ahead of us, I felt a deep relief.
We crossed the yard, mounted the front porch, and went inside. I smelled food cooking and realized I was starved.
Wellington said, “It’s too late for you to return tonight. You’re welcome to stay here. There are plenty of rooms upstairs. I asked Benning to prepare dinner for us. As soon as you’re settled, we can eat.”
We brought our bags in from the Bronco, and Wellington himself showed us to our rooms.
“I’m going to wash up, and I’ll see you downstairs in the dining room in a few minutes,” he said. He went to his own room, which was at the far end of the hallway.
I shed my shirt. As I stood at the sink in my bathroom, washing off the dirt and sweat and DEET, Schanno knocked and came in. He stood in the bathroom doorway, trying to scrape the dirt from under his fingernails while I finished cleaning up.
“This guy Wellington is one cold fish,” he said. “Meloux delivers all the evidence to back up his claims, and Wellington doesn’t say a word to him. He might not be the kook Ellsworth played, but he’s hard to figure.”
“I imagine it’s a lot to absorb.”
“Sure, but most people are going to react somehow. Him, it’s like he’d just watched you peel an orange.”
“Henry Wellington’s not much like other people.”
“He was my son, I’d give him a kick in the ass.”
I grabbed a towel from the rack and began to dry myself. “I have it on good authority, Wally, that you never raised a hand-or foot-to your kids.”
“I’ll take my Python back. There’s still a lot we don’t know, like why Morrissey went after Henry in the first place.”
I hung the towel, pushed past Schanno, and grabbed the clean shirt I’d laid out on the bed. “Wellington’s hard to read, I admit, but I didn’t get a dangerous feel from him.”
“All the same, I’m going to sleep with the Python under my pillow tonight.”
“Suit yourself.” I took the weapon from the pack and handed it over.
“How much you figure there is in gold up there?” he said.
I buttoned my shirt. “Enough to set you and me and Meloux for a lifetime. Drop in the bucket to Wellington.”
We left my room, and I knocked on Meloux’s door but got no answer.
