Jeremiah married Priscilla Swett of Vermont, who, at a later moment, was convicted of almost eviscerating a woman neighbor with a carving knife in an argument over the neighbor’s fur hat, which Priscilla, called Priss, had stolen. Priss was sentenced to twenty years in jail but that was reversed in higher court through the influence of her son, Mason Plum, a lawyer who earned fame for keeping his family out of jail.
Other Plums: Aaron, a blond hunter thrice charged with near murders; Hanna, a beauty; and Eli (Peaches), whom Priscilla claimed as her own in order to cap a scandal, for Peaches was actually the offspring of his own sister, Hanna, when Hanna was fifteen. And the sire was Hanna’s father, Jeremiah. There was also Fletcher Plum, a cousin, whose talent for stealing horses and altering their color and markings with charcoal and dye was so well developed that even the owners of the horses were deceived. There were other Plums, but enough.
Will put a pistol in his belt, and another under a blanket on the seat between us as we drove toward the Plum farm. Will assured me there would be no violence, that the pistols were only to fend off highwaymen, but I didn’t quite believe that.
“All I want you to do when we get to the Plums’,” Will said to me, “is to identify that spade if we come across it. Otherwise let me do the talking.”
The Plum estate — house, barns, and outbuildings — sat on a knoll about two miles from Will’s house, back in the woods on a road that was all but uninhabited except by the Plum family and their poor cousins, who lived in shacks and worked the land for the Plums. Cows grazed in a low meadow, goats on a hillside, and in the corral you could count two dozen horses.
Will pulled up in front of the house and handed me the reins. He mounted the steps but before he could knock, Priss Plum came to the door in what some people might have taken for a plaid housedress. Her hair was a flaming, unnatural red, and she was a bit of a looker, even at sixty.
“Who are you? Whataya want?” she asked Will.
“Canaday is my name,” said Will. “I’d like to speak with Jeremiah.”
“He ain’t here.”
“Is Peaches here?”
“What’s anybody wanna see him for?”
“It’s about a piece of personal property,” said Will.
“You claimin’ he stole somethin’?”
“Not at all. Is Aaron here?”
“He don’t live here no more.”
“When did he move out?” Will asked.
“That ain’t none of your business.”
“You wouldn’t know the whereabouts by any chance of a man named Dirck Staats? Last time I saw him he was with Aaron.”
“Never heard of no Dirck Staats.”
In the doorway of the barn I could see a man with a heavily waxed black handlebar mustache, and with slick, ridiculously black hair, watching us. This was Jeremiah Plum, his hair dyed the way the Plums dyed spots on horseflesh. I also saw my spade leaning against the barn door. Then from around behind Jeremiah came Peaches, and I called out, “Hey, Peaches, I want my spade back. That’s my spade.” I wanted all my worthlessness in my possession, now that Will had told me that’s how it should be.
Will turned and walked off the porch. I saw Jeremiah reach to his right and come up with a shotgun, which he almost pointed until he saw the pistol in Will’s hand.
“Howdy, Jeremiah,” Will said as he walked toward the barn.
“Didn’t know you carried a pistol, Will.”
“Only when I go into the forest,” Will said. “Like to protect myself from the wild animals.”
“What brings you all the way out here?” said Jeremiah. Peaches wrapped his arms around Jeremiah’s midsection and peered out at Will.
“Just lookin’ for my good friend Dirck Staats.”
Jeremiah said nothing.
“Also came by to pick up that spade your boy Peaches borrowed from my young friend here. You know this boy, don’t you, Peaches?” Will said, pointing to me. Peaches didn’t answer.
“You’re right talky today, Will,” said Jeremiah. “Carryin’ a pistol, yappin’ like a magpie, lookin’ for shovels.”
“A spade, Jeremiah, a spade is what I’m looking for.”
Will half turned to glance at the spade, then turned back to Jeremiah. Without looking at the spade Will fired a shot from belt level that put a hole in the center of its blade.
“That your spade, Daniel?” Will asked, his back to me.
“That’s it,” I said.
“That spade ain’t worth a whole lot,” Will said. “It’s got a hole in it. But I guess we’ll take it along just for old times’ sake. You know there’s folks in this world’ll do anything to get back an old spade they feel sentimental about. Sentiment’s a powerful thing, Jeremiah, and you ought to take stock of what I’m sayin’ because, well, you take this barn here. I know you love barns and I know how many you’ve burned. I raise this issue because I want you to know how anxious I am for news of Dirck Staats, and how if I don’t hear about him by tomorrow, I’ll be comin’ back out here with more than a boy and a horse. And Jeremiah, if I find somebody’s hurt Dirck, then I’ll start doing things to people the way I did when I was ridin’ with Big Thunder in the Rent War, and I know you remember those days, and how I was one barn-burnin’, tar-and-featherin’ son of a bitch, and not a bad shot either, Jeremiah,” and Will let go another shot from the hip that went into that spade no more than a cat’s whisker distant from the previous bullet hole, the sweetest shooting I ever saw. Then Will said to me without turning, “Daniel, come and get your spade.”
I didn’t want to move. Against all logic I felt protected in the wagon. But I climbed down and walked across the yard toward the spade, which was no longer worthless now that it had those two bullet holes of Will’s in it. I saved that spade for years to remind myself that courage is a worthy commodity, but that courage alone wouldn’t have gotten me back what was mine. I looked in at Peaches when I picked up the spade.
“Hey, Peaches,” I said. “I ain’t gonna let nobody take this spade no more, so don’t come askin’.”
Peaches stuck his tongue out at me and then ducked back behind Jeremiah. I went back to the wagon and Will backed toward it also.
“We’ll be moseyin’ now, Jeremiah,” said Will. “Can’t socialize like this or I’ll never get my newspaper out,” and he climbed up onto the wagon, still holding his pistol. He turned to Priss in the doorway and said, “I’ll say so long to you, too, Mrs. Plum, so long for now anyway.” He took the reins from me with his free hand and whacked the horse, and then we moved slowly, much too slowly for my internal fluids, down the wagon path to the road.
DIRCK’S BOOK WAS PUBLISHED in an extraordinary edition of Will Canaday’s Chronicle two weeks after our visit to the Plums’. Will did not publish a paper for three days running, offering no public explanation for the uncommon lapse, then came forth with a twenty-page issue carrying all he possessed of Dirck’s manuscript. I am pleased to report that it was my adroitness in snatching up the paper that fell from behind Hillegond’s ear during her talk with the phrenomagnetist that led to the breaking of Dirck’s code.
The paper had on it two carefully inked lines of Dirck’s runic designs. Will’s unavailing scrutiny of them led him to think of the lines as a code and he took the paper to a scholar at Columbia College in Manhattan. The scholar saw instantly that the designs came from more than one language: ancient Teutonic runes and Hebrew and Arabic characters forming most of the consonants, and signs of the zodiac serving as vowels. Dirck wrote words in normal sequence but also spelled them backward. Knowing this, a translation became possible; and the opening sentences had this to say: