The Four Corners of the Sky_ A Novel - Michael Malone [69]
But Sam was absolutely sincere. “That land was cursed,” she told the town. “And now the curse is lifted.”
It was true that war and weather, bad luck and their own dissatisfactions had plagued her family since 1795 when the first Peregrine house washed away in a flood. They’d built another one on the hill above the fast red river that the Algonquins had named Aquene, which meant “Peace”—not that Algonquins had gotten much peace after the first pockmarked Europeans showed up in their yard.
A third Peregrine home rose out of the rubble of the second. Nestled just below the hill’s crest, it was a large two-story white frame house with eight chimneys and a wide, columned porch and two copper-roofed wings that had their own small porches in back. This house was named Pilgrim’s Rest. But it was never very restful. During the Civil War, Federal troops had commandeered it and the family had been forced to move to a boarding house; a few had even hid in a makeshift tent in the woods and sneaked over at night to steal their own chickens. During Reconstruction, they’d moved back to the house and for the next seventy-five years felt sorry for themselves because they were no longer well-to-do.
They were not well-to-do, that is, until 1899. That’s when Joseph Peregrine returned from the Spanish-American War, via the Philippines. He returned a hero. A Spanish rifleman in Cuba had shot out his right eye and he had the patch and the medal to prove it. Joseph was a flashy man; he renamed the town “Emerald” and wore an emerald ring as large as a marble and was called “Boss” and opened a bank and ran it like he was J. P. Morgan. When he lavishly refurbished the dilapidated Pilgrim’s Rest, gilding its cracked molding with gold leaf and replacing its pine with mahogany and marble, rumors started to spread about where he’d gotten all his money. The rumors turned to buried treasure when his wife began displaying at their annual New Year’s party rubies the size of quail’s eggs on her locally famous bosom. The prevalent theory was that Boss, on his way home from war, had gone prospecting in the Blue Ridge Mountains, that he had squinted over flume lines, sluicing rubies and emeralds out of the dirty water. The town speculated that he had stashed away hundreds of these precious stones somewhere on his property; that whenever he needed money, he sold one of them; that he had so many gems he could never run out; that his neighbors the Nickersons knew all of this for a fact, Mrs. Peregrine having told them that the Boss refused to reveal even to her where he’d hidden the jewels.
When Boss Peregrine died suddenly in front of his own bank—with the one eye, he hadn’t noticed a farmer, enraged about a foreclosure, approaching to stab him in the back of the neck—any secret about his treasure died with him. Despite his written wish, Boss’s widow didn’t bury him with his emerald ring, but wore it herself, along with the ruby necklace, to his funeral. At the service, the St. Mark’s minister asked the congregation to meditate on the word “Peregrine,” a word carved in the newel post in the marble entryway to Pilgrim’s Rest. Above the name was a peregrine hawk, wings wide, with Boss’s personal motto in its beak: Peregrinus ego sum. The minister said the phrase came from a play by Plautus and meant, “I am a pilgrim,” although it also meant, “I am a Peregrine.” “Peregrine” was why, the minister mistakenly explained, the house had been named “Pilgrim’s Rest.” Boss Peregrine was on a journey to heaven, where, if it was God’s will, he’d soon be enjoying a pilgrim’s rest for all eternity.
Privately, the minister thought Boss Peregrine had no chance at even a stopover in heaven and that he would have done better to buy a new organ for a Christian church than to carve puns in Latin on his grandiose staircase and give his son a silver baby tub with his name engraved on it—a Greek name, Ulysses, the name of that Yankee general who had been elected president of the United States when the people of Emerald