At last they were gone and I dropped the rocks and went to where I had buried the cage: the grove of trees behind the house, a stand of elms and cedar that had grown tall and interwoven their family virtues into a small but quite lovely haven of shade and intermittent sun that allowed for an almost tropical arousal of plant life. A fist-sized rising of water came from the ground halfway up the abrupt hill that sheltered us from northerly winds, and then it trickled down into the grove. This was a spring I had discovered at an early age and claimed as my own, and its water had the dark, sweet taste of the silent stones at the center of the earth.
I went to the spring and drank of that cold clarity to cleanse my mouth of the dust from the road, then sat in the fading light of the grove to await the safety of darkness. When the moon gave me light to work by, I dug up the cage that had been so indefinably valuable to my parents.
I looked at it in the moonlight but saw nothing beyond its basic shape. I could not tell whether it had rusted from being underground or was merely discolored from the soil. I yearned for light but yearned more to be indoors to evade the chill that was sinking into my bones. I looked steadily at the black shadow that was our derelict house and grew brave enough to argue with my fear. Had I not already survived in that house during the plague’s heat? Would I not now survive its cold ashes?
I picked up my spade, pack, and birdcage, and at the back door I reentered the circus maximus, where my family had battled and died under my spectator’s eye. I sealed all doors against the night, found the kitchen windows to be intact, and I closed off that room as my retreat. I lighted a candle from my pack and set the birdcage on the floor beside it. I made ready to eat some of the food Josie had given me but then in the window I perceived my image, illuminated by the reflected candlelight. What I saw was a body and a face I barely knew. I was too big for my clothes and I was urchin dirty, but urchin no more. My face had been wrenched out of the puffy adolescence of reasonable expectation. That condition, said my mouth and eyes, is a luxury that is part of your past.
I sat beside the birdcage and studied it. Its slender bars had rusted, as had the round, heavy plate that was its bottom. I let the candlelight search out its secret, but I could find no secret. As I handled it, two of its bars snapped from the rusting.
What was I to do with such a worthless object? What was its meaning? I stared at it while I ate a sandwich. I wondered whether my mother and father had made a talisman of the cage, imposing upon it the values of the people of Clonmel, Cashel, and the towns in Mayo and Tyrone where the family had flourished. My father’s life was troubled from the time he was two, his father running off then to America. When Pa came here himself he never tried to find his father, nor did I, nor will I. Maybe Pa came with a birdcage instead of memories, but if he did, that was years behind us, all value long gone certainly from this rusty relic on the floor in front of me. My parents were gone themselves, along with their unknowns, all now remaining of what they deemed valuable embodied in me, this urchin particle floating in time, waiting for the next blow to fall.
My candle died with a guttering hiss; I lay my head on my pack of rags, and I fell asleep thinking of the cool and soothing quality of water. I awoke to a noise and opened my eyes in daylight to see a form moving away from the kitchen window. I sat up and immediately gathered my belongings to move out, and as I did, the kitchen door opened and Peaches and his brother walked through it, carrying clubs.
“I seen where you dug,” said Peaches, looking around the room. “You dug up that cage,” and he picked it up and looked at it. It looked even more worthless now than it had by candlelight.
“It belonged to my mother. I wanted to see it again.”
“I think I’ll jes take it with me.”
“Take it,” I said. “It ain’t worth a penny. I was just gonna leave it where it sits.”
Peaches opened the cage door and one hinge broke. He grunted and dropped it and the bottom came loose.
“I remember when my father buried it,” I said. “I thought he might’ve put a bag of money in it.”
“Bag of money? I’d like to have some o’ that.”
“Wasn’t no money in it. You find any money in this house I’ll cut it up halvies with you.”
Outa Plum tipped the contents of my sack onto the kitchen floor: clothes, candles, matches, a sandwich, and a glove that belonged to Maud.
“You got no money at all,” Peaches said.
“None.” I pulled my pockets out to prove it.
“Then I’ll just take this birdcage,” Peaches said, picking it up.
“Take it. Only thing you can’t take’s my spade. Worth a lot of money, that spade. My daddy used it when he dug the grave of Andy Jackson. People’ll pay me a lot of money for it when they know it buried a President of the United States.”
Peaches dropped the cage and picked up the spade.
“I just better take this ol’ spade,” he said.
“Hey, you can’t take that,” I said and I moved toward him. He threatened me with the spade and Outa raised his club at me.
“I’m gonna tell somebody,” I said. “I’m gonna tell your folks.”
Peaches and Outa smiled. “You tell ’em,” said Peaches. “You jes tell ’em.”
They backed out the door and ran with the heirloom. I smiled myself and put my things back in my sack. I looked at the cage. I could not abandon it, despite its being worthless. As I picked it up, the ruptured base separated further and I saw the cage had a false bottom. I pulled the covering off and found beneath it a circular metal disk bearing an odd trompe l’oeil design. Now it was a screaming mouth with vicious eyes, now a comic puppy with bulbous nose and tiny mouth. Depending on where the light hit the eyes they were glassy, or sad, or hypnotic. I had no time to dwell on the disk for I feared Peaches would change his mind about the spade. But I believed the disk was valuable in some way yet to be understood. It was like nothing I’d ever seen. It might be a platter. It might be gold, or silver, for it had not rusted. But even if it wasn’t precious metal it had value as a thing to look at. I stuffed it into my sack and left the house, brimming with a brand-new faith in the unknown that I had found at the bottom of a birdcage.
THAT MYSTERY REVEALS ITSELF quickly only to those without the imagination to perpetuate it is a fact that came clear to me when I decided my newfound disk might have been a serving platter for potatoes.
“Potatoes?” exclaimed Will Canaday. “Why, it’s too small for potatoes. And what’s more, it’s flat as a coin. They’d roll off.”
I saw Will had a point and the mystery of the disk continued. That mystery, along with my desolation and my desire to abdicate forever the river and the canal, had an hour earlier led me into a reverie as I left Van Woert Street. You know nothing, the reverie began. You are a penniless, ignorant orphan who thought the Mexican War was fought in Canada, and you let John the Brawn steal your most valuable possession. You are inferior to everybody in something, even to Peaches Plum, who knows stealth and violence better than you. Quinn, when will you become wise, or even smart?
This question brought back Will’s words to me when we were leaving Hillegond’s mansion: “If you find yourself interested in an education, or in the life of the mind, come and see me.” And so in my reverie on ignorance I thought of the Albany Chronicle as a source of enlightenment about both the disk and my future.