Searching for Caleb

In all the accounts of the family history, told by all the aunts and uncles and upstairs maids, that was the only direct quotation of Caleb's that was ever handed down. Two generations later it was to ring in Justine's ears like poetry, taking on more depth and meaning than Caleb had probably intended. But Justin was not moved at all, and he kept his eyes shut very tightly and waited for his son to leave.

Now Laura ran both households, upright and energetic as ever in her ugly brown dresses with her hair screwed back so tightly it stretched her eyes. To the Peck children she was the center of the universe, sometimes the only family member they saw for days. Justin was too old and sick to be bothered, and Daniel hardly ever came home before their bedtime. As for Caleb, he kept to himself. They might catch sight of him striking out across the field toward the Samson stable, the sunlight pale on his Panama hat; or leaving for work in the morning, already tired and beaten-looking; or returning late in the evening with his manner of walking curiously careful. He never played with them. Sometimes on those extra-careful evenings he even got their names confused. He did nothing to earn their attention. So they failed to notice how he appeared to be dimming and wearing through, almost transparent; and how his only friends now were the questionable types in taverns, and how the music from the stable had thinned and shredded until you almost couldn't hear it. Laura noticed. But what could it mean? She pondered over his long, unbreakable silences, the likes of which she had not seen before and would not again until the days of Caleb's great-nephew Duncan, as yet unborn and unthought of. She tried to shame him into more normal behavior. "Where is your common courtesy? At least think of the family." But he would only wander off, not hearing, and sometimes he would not reappear for days.

On a Saturday afternoon in the spring of 1912, Daniel was standing at the bay window watching Justin Two ride his bicycle. It was a heavy black iron one, hard for Two to manage, but he had just got the hang of it and he teetered proudly down the driveway. From out of nowhere, Daniel saw a small, clear picture of Caleb on his velocipede merrily pedaling after a flutist on a sidewalk in old Baltimore. The memory was so distinct that he left his house and crossed the yard to his mother's and climbed the stairway to Caleb's room. But Caleb was not there. Nor was he in the kitchen, where he most often ate his meals; nor anywhere else in the house, nor outdoors nor in the stable. And the Ford was parked in the side yard; he wouldn't be downtown. Daniel felt uneasy. He asked the others-the children and Laura. They didn't know. In fact, the last time anyone could remember for sure he had been walking off down the driveway three days earlier, carrying his fiddle. The children saw him go.

"Goodbye now," he called to them.

"Goodbye, Uncle Caleb."

But of course that didn't mean a thing, he would surely have . . . Daniel went to Justin's room. "I can't find Caleb," he said. Justin turned his face away. "Father? I can't-"

A long, glittering tear slid down Justin's stony cheek.

Really, the old man was beginning to let his mind go.

Years later, whenever he was fixing some family event in its proper time slot, Daniel Peck would pause and consider the importance of 1912. Could there be such a thing as an unlucky number? (Justine would look up briefly, but say nothing.) For in 1912 it seemed that the Peck family suddenly cracked and flew apart like an old china teacup. First there was Caleb's disappearance, without a trace except for a bedroom full of hollow, ringing musical instruments and a roll-top desk with an empty whisky bottle in the bottom drawer. So then they had to sell the business, Justin's last link with the outside world. And after that Justin started dying, leaving his family in the same gradual, fading way that Caleb had until it was almost no shock at all to find him lifeless in his bed one morning with his bluish nose pointing heavenward.

In the winter of 1912 there was another envelope from Washington addressed in brown ink. After Daniel read it, he told his children that Margaret Rose had been killed in a fire. They were to pray for her to be forgiven. Now her children wore brown to school and could properly be called poor motherless orphans, although they continued to look surprised whenever some well-meaning lady told them so. They were calm, docile children, a little lacking in imagination but they did well in their lessons. They did not seem to have suffered from all that had happened.