Every Hidden Thing Read online

  “I take them personally, sir, because you suggest my incompetence.”

  “Not at all, not at all.”

  The strain in the lecture hall was thick now. Someone called, “Please sit, Professor Cartland. So others can ask their questions.”

  “My apologies,” said my father. “I am nearly done, but if I might just beg your indulgence one last time, Professor?”

  Bolt nodded curtly. “Go on.”

  “I am just yes yes wondering,” said my father, and the crowd gave a small gasp to match my own as he plucked up the elasmosaurus skull, “if the skull might just”—and he walked the thirty-five feet to the far end of the table—“fit more naturally”—and he picked up the final tail vertebra and slotted it inside the base of the skull—“right here.”

  There was a loud click. Maybe just my imagination, but it was like two puzzle pieces snapping together perfectly.

  Cartland held them high. “Which would indicate to me, Professor Bolt, that the tail is in fact the neck, and you have built your dinosaur backward, sir.”

  I felt like some important part of my chest had busted loose and plunged into my stomach. The stricken look on my father’s face confirmed my worst fear: Cartland was right.

  Father rose to his full height. “I will ask you to retract that comment, Professor Cartland.”

  The scoundrel rocked smugly on his heels. He was much shorter than my father, solid as a potbellied stove. Sparse hair began way back on his shiny head. His mustache took a sharp downward turn, obscuring the sides of his mouth, which I think was curved into a triumphant smile. I hated him. He’d come onto the stage to humiliate my father, to squash his reputation.

  “Alas,” Cartland said, “I cannot retract.”

  Father’s eyebrows were askew. His eyes, never pacific at the best of times, were fierce. His left eye had a slightly wayward angle to it and made you think that he wasn’t quite looking at you—or that he was possibly deranged. Right now he absolutely looked deranged.

  “Then, sir, I will ask you to put down my fossils and step outside with me.”

  Cartland laughed at this, but there was a pinch of alarm in his voice when he replied. “I will certainly not step outside with you.”

  “Put. Down. The fossils.”

  “There you go,” said Cartland, placing them down. “Will you assault me here?”

  Amused titters from the audience—but only from people who’d missed certain monthly meetings in the past.

  I was already half out of my seat when Father punched Cartland. It was a good strong box to the eye—can’t say I didn’t enjoy it. I doubted Cartland was as practiced a scrapper as my father, but he was denser, and I almost shouted at Father to watch out, because he was too cocky. With a forward lunge Cartland buried his fist in my father’s stomach, doubling him over.

  I vaulted onto the stage. A chorus of disapproval rose from the audience.

  “Gentlemen!”

  “Shame! Shame!”

  “Not again, Bolt!”

  “Sir!” someone called out to my father. “Are you not a Quaker!”

  “I am, sir!” my father panted. “But not a very good one today!” And he took another punch at Cartland’s face, which the other man dodged quite nimbly.

  “Father!” I took him by the arm, but he shook me off.

  “That skull,” he panted to Cartland as the two faced off, “was found near the vertebrae I selected for the neck. My prospector was most clear in his notes!”

  “That may be,” Cartland said. “Nonetheless, they were caudal vertebrae, not cervical !”

  He managed to seem calm and somehow dignified, standing still as my father fumed and circled. Like he knew he couldn’t be struck down, because he was right.

  “Father, stop!” I yelled again.

  He lurched in close for another jab at Cartland, too close, and the cast-iron professor stamped hard on my father’s oversized shoe. He’d paid a cobbler in Chicago a fortune for those shoes. Father jackknifed with a whoop, then butted against Cartland’s belly with his full weight. They both toppled over, each trying to thrash and claw his way atop the other.

  Suddenly the girl from the lobby was beside me, cheeks blazing. I’d never seen anyone look fiercer. She grabbed my father’s ear and twisted like she was trying to yank a turnip from the earth.

  “Hey!” I yelled. “Easy!”

  “Get him off my father!”

  Stupidly I looked from Cartland to the girl. “That’s your father?”

  “Yes!”

  “Well, maybe you should remove your father from my father,” I bellowed, and pointed down to the writhing mass: Cartland now had the upper hand and was strangling my father, who was drooling slightly.

  We each took hold of our struggling parents and shouted and tugged. In all our grappling, her hands and mine got tangled briefly.

  She looked at me, and I couldn’t look away. Her eyes were extraordinary, not just for their piercing blue—it was the white and amber markings in her irises, like shooting stars and the aurora borealis radiating from the blackness of her pupils. I felt like I was witnessing the birth of the universe.

  It took me completely by surprise: With absolute certainty, I knew I’d fall in love with her.

  2.

  THE CRATE

  I FOUND THE CRATE THE NEXT MORNING.

  It was unopened under Father’s desk. The muddy boot prints on its lid told me he’d been using it as a footrest for a good while. Exactly the kind of thing my father would do absentmindedly. I dragged it out and cleared a space on one of the worktables.

  A small crate, not much bigger than a shoe box, stenciled all over with the faded insignia of the Kickapoo Medicine Company. It was addressed to the “Most Esteemed Professor Michael Bolt” in a spidery hand. Clearly the sender was hoping flattery would get Father’s attention. Which was normally an excellent plan. But in this case it still hadn’t saved him from being used as a boot rest.

  Tons of things got sent to my father by amateur naturalists. Ancient leaf impressions in sandstone, the giant toe bone of some extinct mammal, the skins of two warblers with unusual wing markings. And lizards. Plenty of lizards. Sometimes they were sent to him care of the academy; other times they came direct to our house. Our doorframe was splintered by the number of crates wrestled through. They stacked up in the hallway, in the long, narrow rooms of our ground floor.

  The floors crunched with dried clay trimmed from fossils. You stepped around rickety towers of dusty books and papers, trays of things yet to be labeled—and tried not to tread on Horatio, our tortoise, who made his slow creaking perambulations around the house and somehow managed to turn up underfoot when you were lugging something tricky.

  There was no parlor or living room or library. No comfortable room with great leather armchairs for guests to sit and stretch their legs. Our decorations were the skins of a vole, a snake slowly uncoiling in a jar of spirits, an antelope femur.

  Mrs. Saunders, our cook and housekeeper, was forbidden from cleaning these front rooms—Father didn’t trust her not to whisk up some treasured body part or scrap of paper with a brilliant note. Not that she’d ever set foot in here, even if ordered. She hated the chaos, our salamanders, and the sight and smell of our Gila monster, who had a habit of regurgitating her meals.

  Often there were students over, or colleagues, helping father with something or other. Some days it was like being in a telegraph office. News and chatter flashing between tables. It was a museum upended, everything dragged out of its cases and cupboards. It was a zoo. It was a morgue. More dead things here than the local slaughterhouse. More pickling alcohol than the tavern down the street.

  I loved it. But I was also glad that, upstairs, I had a bedroom with a door I could close. And there were times I needed to shut it tight and keep it shut. Against the dust and the roving salamanders. Against my father’s cries of fury or joy.

  Two weeks ago I’d been sent home from school. For the rest of the year. I�
��d been suspended, mainly because of the incident with Harold Thom. He’d asked me what my father had done during the war. It was a sneaky question, since most Quakers hadn’t fought as a matter of conscience. But some had, including Thom’s own father. When I told Thom my father had worked in field hospitals since he was a pacifist, Thom had snorted, said that was a joke since everyone knew my father was quick enough to use his fists when it suited him. And it was only for the war he decided to be a coward.

  I kept hitting him until his nose and teeth bled. Which was not a good thing to do in a Quaker school. I got yanked off by several of his friends and marched to the headmaster’s office. He lambasted me for my “deplorable violence.” Also, I’d played billiards in the town, gambled, and scandalized several girls at the school with my “saucy poetry.” “Moreover,” the headmaster added, “your penmanship is atrocious.” I think he found this the most despicable thing of all. I would not graduate this year, he said, and would need to reapply to return in the fall, if there was any hope of me being accepted into college. I didn’t care about returning, and I didn’t care about college. But I knew my father did. My first few days home had been explosive with his angry talk.

  But that was past now. I think he was secretly glad to have me home. Since he wasn’t an organized man, he quickly enlisted me to help sort and identify his specimens.

  So all this morning I’d been dutifully opening boxes and letters and taking notes. Trying to stay focused.

  But I kept seeing those eyes of hers. Rachel. I’d only learned her name from my father on our way home from the academy. She’d filled my head as I slept. In my dreams I was trying to schedule a train trip to see her. The Pennsylvanian from Philadelphia to New York, arriving at Penn Station, and then a quick change to the New England line that would bring me to New Haven in another two hours. She would see me, wouldn’t she, if I showed up at her doorstep? But the train schedules didn’t make any sense. Columns of jumbled numbers and letters, and anyway I was always running late and never getting to where I was supposed to be, and I woke up with my heart pounding.

  I wanted to talk to her, tell her I wasn’t a rash, cocky fool. Wanted to tell her I wasn’t a mad brawler like my father. Quite a speech I had planned. I kept hearing her voice, catching her scent, seeing her looking up at me gravely. Just one meeting. No beauty, and an ass of a father. But she’d snagged at something in my heart.

  I dropped a fossil shell to the floor and went scrabbling for it—and that’s when I found the Kickapoo Medicine Company crate under my father’s desk.

  On the worktable I used a chisel to prize up the lid. Inside was a nest of prairie grass for padding and three separate burlap bundles. I’d only just started to unwrap the largest when I heard the front door burst open and slam shut. Father exploded into the room with a mighty sigh.

  “It’s too late, they say.”

  All through the night, holding a handkerchief bulging with ice chips against his bruised cheekbone, he’d furiously rewritten his elasmosaurus paper. It had already been slated for publication in the next issue of Transactions of the American Philosophical Society. He’d even paid (too much, I thought) for a set of lithographic plates illustrating the glory of his find.

  “It’s already gone to the printer’s.” He plummeted into his cane-backed swivel chair—the only chair without a stack of paper on it—and slouched, his long legs shooting out.

  “You’re sure Cartland was right?” I asked pointlessly.

  “I knew the instant he said it. I blame that numbskull dentist Hawthorn for leading me astray. He assured me the skull rested near those vertebrae . . . but that was my mistake: relying on others. If I’d been there, if I’d dug it out myself, there’d be no confusion.”

  “What’ll you do?”

  “Buy up all the copies of the journal as quickly as possible.”

  He didn’t need to say what a huge embarrassment this was. He had no degree. No professorship at an esteemed university. All he had was his work and what he published.

  “Everyone makes mistakes,” I said, hoping to cheer him. “Remember Agassiz, the Harvard man who fell for the Cardiff Giant?”

  My father smiled only briefly. “Yes. It was Cartland who exposed that as well, of course.”

  “Well, you still brought the elasmosaurus to life, just a little . . .”

  “Backward,” my father said, and we laughed together.

  Absently he touched his bruised face, winced. “That was a fair thrashing I gave him, eh?”

  “You thrashed each other.”

  “I got in more blows, I think. The parasitic carbuncle. Did you know how he got his position at Yale?”

  “Yes, you’ve—”

  “He cajoled a wealthy relation into creating a department of paleontology, building it, endowing it. And now he is the chair of that very department!”

  A series of rasping pants came from the Gila monster’s vivarium.

  “Have you fed her?” my father asked.

  “Just an hour ago.”

  “That’s her hungry sound.”

  “She’s getting fat.”

  My father went to her, stooped, and scratched her head. “Old girl,” he said fondly.

  I felt sorry for her, pacing her small home with her splay-legged gait. Sometimes Father let her have the run of the workroom, but once she disappeared for several days, and Mrs. Saunders refused to come downstairs and cook until we’d found her and gotten her back into her vivarium. Father let her out less now, since neither of us enjoyed going hungry.

  Father’s distracted eyes turned to the crate I’d just opened. “Anything good?”

  “Did you know you were using this as a footrest?”

  He made no reaction. Not sure he even heard me. He already had one of the burlap bundles open in his hands and was staring. His face very still.

  Slowly he laid it out on the table. It was a seven-inch span of bone, some stone still clinging stubbornly to it. Tapered at one end, much thicker at the other, like hardwood polished to a high sheen. I was trying to place it. Tibia? Part of an ulna? But the shape wasn’t right. Both ends were jaggedly broken. I tore away the burlap from the second bundle as my father unwrapped the third. His piece was the thickest yet, with a broad oval base. He placed it near the thick end of the first piece. They clearly belonged to each other. And my piece . . .

  My piece tapered to a very sharp point. The surface was smooth to the touch, but the pad of my thumb felt telltale serrations along the edges. I placed it in front of the other two pieces.

  I felt a bit breathless. “This is the biggest tooth I have ever seen.”

  “Who sent this?” my father demanded.

  I foraged inside the crate. “There’s a letter!”

  “Read it!”

  So like him to command me to do something he could easily do on his own. So impatient he couldn’t bear the idea of doing only one thing at a time. He handled the portions of the tooth and peered close as I ripped open the envelope. Yanked out the letter and started reading aloud.

  Dear Professor Bolt,

  It is with great humility I write to you, as it’s my truest wish to become a fossil collector like yourself. I am a section boss on the Union Pacific near Edford station, and—

  “What’s a section boss?” I asked.

  “Takes care of a stretch of track. Go on!”

  —I’ve been a dedicated collector for several years, and made a fair collection of leaves and flowers from the Cretaceous.

  “Dear God,” said my father, “hurry this along!”

  “If you’ll let me!”

  While prospecting northeast of Fort Crowe, I came upon a portion of exposed femur and sacrum, which to my untrained eye, were so large that they could only belong to the Dinosauria. But what I think might be of greater interest to you, sir, is this tooth which I found. I have never seen a bigger one, and think this creature in the rock must be of enormous proportions. I did not have time to do much quarrying, but I think th
ere is a great deal of bone here. I send you this tooth as a way of showing my interest and ability, in the hopes you might find a use for me. I would like to continue work at the site, but have no funds available to me. This work is God’s work for me, and my needs are few.

  Awaiting your advice, I remain yours truly.

  Edward G. Plaskett

  This tooth was a meat eater’s. Those serrated edges helped sink the tooth deep into its prey and hold. Imagine it punching into you, gripping, bleeding you.

  “What length would you say . . . ,” my father was murmuring.

  I already had the tape measure in my hands. “Eleven and a quarter inches.”

  With calipers my father measured its thickness and called out the girth at its widest and narrowest bits. I got out ink and a pen and noted the figures. He snatched the pen from my hand and began talking aloud to himself as he made his own calculations. “Our model will be Laelaps . . .”

  Laelaps aquilunguis—practically a member of our family I’d seen it so many times. Sketched what it might look like with muscle and skin. But its longest teeth were not even a full inch.

  Father inked more numbers. “Given the size of the tooth, we will assume the jaw . . .” He jotted again. . . . “Making the overall size of the skull five feet. Again, using Laelaps as our model . . .”

  There was this French anatomist, Cuvier, who claimed you could build an entire animal from just a single tooth. I knew this was what my father was trying to do. He was calculating the extent of the backbone, then the hips, then the humeri.

  “And we have,” he concluded, looking up at me triumphantly, “a bipedal creature of some fifty feet in length, whose height, measured from the ground, would be in the area of thirty feet.”

  Never had I imagined anything so big. There was the megalosaurus, which Buckland had discovered over in England decades earlier. It was big. But if megalosaurus could peep into my second-floor window, this new creature could crash right through the roof before swallowing me whole.

  “It’s like the king of dinosaurs,” I said.

  “A rex,” Father said. “Ha! You’ve half named it already!”