Were the Sheriff a different kind of man, he might continue across the floor and clear away the debris until the rest of whatever this is lies exposed. But this is no champion of scientific inquiry, or even a reckless adventurer. This is a cautious man whose career has been a study in avoiding bold action. Ordering the deputies out of the house, he retreats after them, closing the broken door as best he can. The Sheriff is within his rights to declare the Dort house a public hazard, which he does, though the county attorney might question his subsequent order that the structure should be doused in whatever flammable liquids were close to hand, set alight, and, when the house was encased in flame, splashed with more gasoline, oil, anything to prolong the blaze. So hot does the fire burn that, while the stone walls remain standing, it is a full day before they’re safe to touch with a bare hand. The entirety of the house’s contents is reduced to ash, which the Sheriff makes certain is shoveled out and carted away — to where, exactly, isn’t clear: maybe a junkyard in Wiltwyck, maybe the waters of the Hudson. After the exterior walls of the house are leveled, a similarly mysterious fate befalls the stones that composed them.
XXVIII
The Dort house seen to, the Sheriff is satisfied. He’s already declared the estate abandoned, clearing the way for the crews to move in and begin working on the remainder of the property. Even with the dozens of men who report for duty at the end of the driveway, the task of removing all trace of the Dort estate from the earth is a daunting one. Not only are there a number of outbuildings, including a substantial barn, to be taken down, but the acres of Cornelius’s old home grown thick with trees, from apple orchards whose long rows haven’t been tended in too many years, to remnants of the forest the first European settlers cut their way through. There are rocks large and larger that have to be pried from the soil and carted away. Every last green thing, from bush to flower to weed to grass, must be uprooted, the socket it leaves behind filled in and smoothed over. It’s during this phase of the work, when the Sheriff has left and word of what he and his men found in the Dort house has sprinted to the work camp and run up and down its streets, that one of the work crews unearths the other oddity that will be associated with the place.
They’re in one of the orchards. After cutting down the trees, the men fire the stumps, chain them to teams of mules, and haul them out of the ground. By this point, the crew has this process down to a science, and it runs smoothly until they arrive at the second-to-last stump, which, despite its firing, resists the efforts of the first and second team of mules to be chained to it. This stump demands three sets of mules straining mightily before it will move, shifting slightly and then tearing free of the earth all at once. When it does, it brings a good deal of its root system with it, far more than is usual. Later, at one of the local taverns, a couple members of the crew will compare the tangle of pale tendrils that rips out of the soil to the tentacles of a squid or octopus. Thicker than any of the branches from which the tree hung its fruit, the larger roots knot around a translucent stone the size of a man’s head. Pale blue shot through with white, the stone appears to be some variety of gem; though none of the crew can identify it. Snake your fingers in amongst the pallid wood, and the gem is warm to the touch. What the crew can see of its surface is faceted, quartz-like. One of the pair at the bar claims to have stared into one of those facets and seen a distant, fiery eye looking back at him, but the man is well in his cups by the time he delivers this proclamation, and no one gives his words much weight. Though reluctant to leave their find out in the open, the crew doesn’t have much choice. They’ve discovered it at the end of a work day, and excited as they are by its appearance, they’re tired and can see that it will require a fair bit of careful sawing to free the gem from the roots. Not to mention, the crew boss, never one to miss a chance to curry favor with his bosses, has insisted on notifying those above him of the discovery, and ordered the crew to leave tree and gem where they are. Were any or all of the men more certain of the stone’s classification, those instructions might be cheerfully ignored. However, since the gem may have no more value than the dirt it was drawn from, they go along with their boss’s command. For his part, the boss assures the crew that, should the gem be worth anything, there’s no doubt the company will reward them, a statement so blatantly absurd, not one of the men bothers arguing with it.
Generous or greedy, the company’s actions will remain a subject of speculation and debate, since when their representative arrives at the orchard the next morning, the gem is gone. The tree lies where it was left, the clutch of roots that cradled the gem undisturbed. Of course suspicion falls on the members of the crew, whose protestations of innocence and alibis do nothing to stop the company summoning the police to search their various dwellings. (It doesn’t help the members of the crew that they, like most of the other work crews, are black, while their superiors are white.) The gem unfound, the company turns is scrutiny on the crew boss, whose house likewise receives a visit from the police. Already, though, the higher-ups in the company are losing interest in what a few of them are starting to suspect was a case of misidentification. When one of the scientists on the company’s payroll speculates that what the crew unearthed was a kind of mineral deposit that, as he puts it, “spontaneously sublimated,” the rest of the higher-ups treat his suggestion as fact and let the matter drop.
Rumors about the vanished stone will spread and persist much farther and longer than those about the interior of the Dort house. The majority of them treat the gem’s disappearance as theft, the responsibility for which is laid at the feet of those in power: the company, usually, whose men are imagined to have snuck out to the orchard in the middle of the night and made off with the stone. Some stories name the police as culprits; others blame more fanciful figures: agents of Henry Ford, John D. Rockefeller, even the Kaiser.
Jacob Schmidt, who has commenced his lengthy courtship of Lottie Schmidt, listens attentively to the descriptions of the interior of the Dort house, of the blue-white stone. If he closes his eyes, he pictures the foaming edge of a tide of black water rushing through the house, lifting chairs, tables, cabinets, and smashing them against the house’s walls. Why the water doesn’t burst through those walls, flooding the valley ahead of schedule, bothers Jacob enough for him to ask Rainer about it, but his future father-in-law answers only that the water went as far as it could go. Nor is Rainer much help when Jacob queries him about the enormous gem. “The Eye?” Rainer says. He waves his hand. “Someone else will worry about that.”
XXIX
Jacob seeks out Italo’s opinion on both matters, but in each case, the older man offers a shrug and a “How the devil should I know?” Jacob attributes Italo’s shortness to the burdens of his expanded family. Since arriving at Italo and Regina’s house, Helen and George’s children haven’t left. There’s nowhere for them to go, no other relatives anyone knows of to claim them, and Regina grows livid should anyone mention the word “orphanage.” Practically speaking, Italo and Regina have adopted these children, and their house, already tight with their own family, is straining at the seams. Not to mention, feeding those extra mouths has stretched Italo’s pay thin. Once every three or four weeks, Clara will cook and send over a meal to them — nothing too extravagant, a pot roast, say, which one of her younger girls will deliver after school — and Lottie saves what extras she can from the bakery — to which she’s long returned — for them, but Italo and Regina’s act of charity has had its price.