About the time that even we, of his faithful inner cadre, were starting to picture the remaining half-full thermos, the Saran Wrapped pâté in Mimi’s old wagon, Tad’s blade struck something stone or metal. He shouted, “They’re right. I knew. They never have lied to me.”

  We stepped closer, we saw he’d dug a trench about a foot or 18 inches deep, cut right up against the foundation’s powdery brick footing. By laboriously leaning on the chimney, Tad finally stood. I worried, I saw that he was light-headed, rising too fast, and him embattled by so many competing primitive drugs. You learn to hate these stopgap “cures” as much as you respectfully despise the gin-clear anti-preservationist disease itself.

  From the hole, our Tad lifted a dark tin box with a latch on it, two feet long, filthy it was; he dragged it free of pinkish tree-roots and up into sight. Grinning, he held it off to one side the way my husband displayed the fish he’d caught, as if to use his own body as a yardstick, scale of reference. Once Tad had tugged the thing to better light, he flopped down beside it, panting with transparent pleasure and exhaustion. I remember the look of his long hand touching the tin. How blue-veined and aristocratic his wasting hand looked, stroking the black prize. All of us, no matter how old and creaky we were (chronologically in most of our cases), managed to drop right onto the grass in a rough circle close up around and against him. His hands shook so, prying it open. Somebody finally tried helping, but Tad, uncharacteristic, snapped “No!”—setting Circa off. And we all grew more still, more withdrawn, afraid to even glance at one another. I can’t explain the tension. Expectation mixed with social embarrassment. Dread, and something a bit ghoulish, this caffeinated kind of curiosity.

  Once opened, the tin casket proved stuffed with what’d been yellow straw, but a very long time back. Then some cloth, homespun, even I could tell that (I, who seem to have no knack for historical fabrics—one of my own sundry blind spots). It was sewn into a cloth valise, joined shut with big childlike stitches, faded red thread. This packet had then been sealed, crusted over, with what appeared to be about 20 candles’ worth of wax. The Reverend Sapp, who claimed some archeological experience in the Middle East from his Virginia Episcopal Seminary days, frowned a bit at Tad’s utter lack of methodical scientific technique. Tad was ripping into this item like some Christmas present meant only for himself. But that didn’t bother me one bit. None of us ever found the objects he did. Hadn’t we piled into the car to come and see exactly this, this thingum, whatever it was?

  I knew how sick he already was (though he could still hide it cleverly well). I knew how much work he felt he must do down here. (Some of us would later labor alongside him here, at Shadowlawn, as he scraped 90 years of varnish off the carved ivy paneling he’d found under beaverboard upstairs. By then Tad worked while hooked to his IV pole on a rolling tripod. He wore an oxygen tank, clear tubes in his nose. “Lorgnettes for nostrils,” Tad called these tubes, with a whimsy that came to seem more and more courageous—more of a buttress, somehow more “architectural”—as we watched him all but evaporate before our eyes. He was doing restoration “against doctors’ orders.” Somebody’d made a joke of the IV pole by taping cardboard Chippendale claw-and-ball feet onto its tripod castor legs. By then, we understood a thing or two about Tad’s glorying enslavement to the work of “binding up again,” his will day by day to make this last house perfect.)

  But that early evening, with us bunched all around him, as he tore open the shroud cloth, Tad gave off a little howl. It’s that I remember best. Every quality we loved in him was in that sound. It was a kid’s Cowboy-and-Indian war whoop but contained his knack that managed, in the worst of circumstances, to find something funny and pleasurable waiting. It’s the quality that let him proselytize so effectively for our cause; he showed people the pleasure of old houses, the pleasure of letting the places yield up their separate secrets to you. Allowing them to confide in you as you, trusting, dwelt in them. One revealed detail at a time. As your human friends will allow—“Oh, and did I ever mention how, once, here … ?” People were soon hooked, they became addicted to old houses. He was actually a sort of marriage broker. And people thanked our Tad Worth here, for hooking them to the place whose lies, pretensions, secrets, whose own looks best matched theirs.

  From the box he lifted two joined dolls. One was a dark wooden effigy, almost a totem. It was obviously home-carved, maybe 10 inches long. The other had a porcelain head, a stuffed bodice, two simplified bisque hands attached to cloth-tube arms. Sawdust was sifting from her torso at the narrow waist. She had hair painted in a buttermilky brown and with delft blue eyes, and you didn’t need carbon dating to know the thing was 18th-century. Oddly enough, the arms of this porcelain doll were literally wired around the black carved wooden figure. That one’s hair was, or had been, knotted rope. If the porcelain doll was obviously English, the gumwood one was African or African-inspired in its angularity. But however stylized, it seemed strangely more human than the costly porcelain one. The dark form’s only facial features were two red bone buttons set deep into wood, representing her eyes. This wooden one’s arms had also been rope, square-knotted at their ends to signify hands. Both rope arms were trussed around the bodice of the porcelain doll. Embracing, the pair had stayed bound to each other, face to face, further joined by loops of circling wire long since rusted red-brown and staining the yellowed muslin.

  Tad held up the clinging two of them, a unit. We considered this fused team from all angles. Circa kept snarling, competitive-sounding, guarding, in the quince. Of course we looked from the effigies back up to Tad’s face. Ready to be told what they meant. We were always expecting it from him, and Tad certainly usually gave at least an educated guess. Sometimes his intuitive faking turned out to be truer than the gathered experts’ mustiest certainty. His going directly to that silver, buried by the stone well-housing out back of Pilgrim’s Respite, is but one profitable example among dozens, hundreds.

  I saw he had done right, to get us here just at dusk. Since all this happened on the westerly facing of the Shadowlawn plantation house, the sun gave off this wintry red but full of gold. The light had moved far higher up the chimneys. Our being so in blue shadow made us feel a little underwater and unreal here, squatting on the ground. The inlet’s reflection threw moving highlight lines, wavering across the uncertain faces of our little group. I remember looking hard at Tad and he gave me this open stare that was confused and awed yet pleased at once. I could see his cheekbone’s sweeping edge, so suddenly elegant you knew it would be terminal.

  I worried he had been feverish down here and without phoning me or telling any of us, sick in that grim little motel he enjoyed “because it looks like the one in Pscyho” and had a blue neon star blinking out in front. But before he explained this twin effigy, I guessed he’d first have to say something silly, wry or indirect, the way he did. “I know you’ve got a toddy or two hidden out in Mimi’s car, and I can’t believe you’ve made me get down on my dingy knees and fetch this thang up and that I still have to beg you all for one li’l ole drink.” Somebody ran for the thermos, and I mean they ran. Because we were waiting. We sensed it, you see. We already did.

  He started crying then. Or laughing. I think it was the only time I’d ever seen Tad Worth actually shaking with emotion—though his eyes were forever tearing up over seemingly small things. He leaned against the Flemish-bond brick chimney, he touched the shell initials of the founders. It was odd to find him, of all people, abruptly speechless.

  Usually, talking off the cuff, Tad could populate any front porch’s Windsor chairs, could describe the familiar (if long-dead) occupants right into them. Call it fund-raising via hackle-raising. At some meeting, he’d say, “Imagine it’s the notoriously cool summer of 1840, no birdsong, the doomed young consumptive Annabella Cameron’s journal noted …” and you’d see the most hardhearted of city managers gaze back, eyes narrowed, as if resisting a sudden interior draft, necks stiffening, a bit defiant and even furious, but already cooperating despite themselves.

  “Well, what?” I asked him. We were seated scattered all around him and somebody touched his shoulder, and he was smiling but with eyes running water. I had hoped that the disease would spare him possible blindness. I’d read everything on the subject. I knew that—for Tad—Blindness would be just one zoning district shy of Death. The smell, that close to the dirt in March, spoke about our many chances at finally thawing out; and with spring rushing in from the inlet and up from underground, we waited there. We sat in the sad smoky smell of the beautiful crumbling house.

  “About 6:07 yesterday,” Tad said, “I saw the girls who buried this,” he looked from face to trusted face. We glanced at one another. Faux-casual. First it seemed he meant that some local children had dug this box up and then maybe they’d reburied it, maybe he had caught them. But the dirt he’d been hacking at was good packed red clay, weather-baked nearly bricklike on the surface and, it seemed, unbroken for centuries. Reverend Sapp now scurried back with martinis sloshing in a red thermos lid. He had brought one of the leaded crystal tumblers we unregenerate drinkers travel with (a bit ostentatiously) and that we sometimes broke. Rev. Sapp said, “What?” like some kid who hates missing something by going for refreshments and is bitter at seeing how just that has happened. We shook our heads to show we didn’t know, not yet.

  Tad downed his drink all at once and choked, then laughed at doing so, which helped. He said for the record that he had been stooping, right over there, not four feet off, at the corner of the portico the afternoon before. It had been exactly this time of day, with light reflected from the Sound moving curved lines across the brick, much as it did now. Tad said he had been cleaning out some of the giant honeysuckle that’d claimed the lattice lathing under the broad front porch. There was a clump of mint (for juleps), and he was doing battle with honeysuckle vines in hopes of saving the mint, “which I admit has held its own since 1810 but it’s never too late to give a thing a break finally, right?” He said he heard a chiming knock, like some shovel striking the chimney, just three times.

  “I was squatting over yonder, there, just there near Circa’s quince.—Hush, darling, please do hush, now, girl—and, you know me, as usual, sweating like a pig. And when I wiped my forehead with the back of my hand and looked toward the Sound—and when I took my hand down?—I saw two little girls. They were charming, one black, one white. About 8 to 10 years old. They were holding on to one another, standing there and just facing me, looking me over. They had an expression that seemed to hint as how I was the one out of place, and they—of all the people on the farm—were at least glad to be the first to notice me. I said something like ‘Hi,’ something witty like ‘Hi,’ right? At first they only stared at me, each keeping very very still. But extremely there, you know, and conscious and seeming amused that I was such a mess and down on my knees. They both seemed to be wondering what was I doing on their farm. I could see plainly enough that the white girl had light-brown hair chopped off just at the shoulders and was in a sort of gingham dress, checked, brown and red, floor-length, ground-length out here, but it could’ve been some ’60s hippie-child’s ‘granny dress.’ And the black girl—blue-black African black—wore a homespun almost burlappy thing, very simple, with long sleeves and a boatneck, and she had pierced ears with small star-shaped pewter bits—pewter, I was sure of it—pewter stars in her ears. For some reason, that seemed a tip-off, like, you know, ‘pewter,’ tin mixed with lead, antique, get it? But, no, I was just as dumb as before. They were standing there, arm in arm and not quite smiling but very pleased-looking, very much together, as if about to laugh but scared to hurt my feelings. Behaving as if—how to explain this?—as if there were many other people all over the plantation, working the place, and like they had strolled off into one quiet corner—a favorite place, I felt—for a nice moment alone together and instead had found me. (I sensed how crowded the farm really was, busy and productive but sort of hostile to children; something in their sense of secrecy, the bond between them, suggested that.) And it was only then I noticed they were pointing down, they both were. Toward the same spot. I just hadn’t seen that, not at first. Or maybe when they guessed they could trust me they indicated the one spot. I was here by myself, Circa excepted. I mean, the volunteers had left about 4:30, and I was just doing a few last clean-up chores. Needed a quick nap on the cot in the foyer. Then, and only then—and by the way, all this is just taking maybe just, oh, 8 to 12 seconds, this whole loaded glance—very quick, very matter-of-fact—it was only then I noticed the texture of the bricks behind them, and only then, like a dolt, does it occur to me that I can see the goddamn bricks, like THROUGH them, right? Well, here’s the really dopey part, I smile at them, as if they live here, as if I’m the slave gardener and I know so, and yet to prove I also have a reason for being here too, right? I go back to the vine I’ve been yanking on, and I actually lift my gigantic vat of RoundUp I’ve been spraying at the honeysuckle, like I’m bored, like I’m just going on with my work, and only then, having turned my entire back on them, do I do this incredible Three Stooges eye-popping double take. ‘Boing,’ hair up—eyes out to here—and of course they’re gone.

  “You know the phrase ‘disappeared into thin air’? Well, that’s what I had seen happen. I’d never felt that term meant much—isn’t all air thin? Well, air so recently evacuated does, believe me, feel damn ‘thin.’ Who says air can nevah be too rich or too thin, hunh? But I kept thinking ‘thin air,’ ‘thin,’ like snatching at that phrase, because I so wanted to touch them, to hold on to them. Mainly to ask them things. I didn’t run to phone anybody, didn’t tell a soul. Not at first. Didn’t even ring Patrick—I mean nobody. And then, about two o’clock this morning, at the Norman Bates motel, I wake and sit up and say aloud, setting poor Circa to barking, ‘They buried something. They were burying something. And I caught them at it and so then, they went ahead and showed me where they’d hidden it.’ I was that sure of it, I called you up.

  “Now you’re all here, and here is this cask, these doll things. I mean, I wanted you to see the progress on the house generally. But I felt I had to have my sanctum-sanctorum nearest-dearests here for this. I figured that if I didn’t hit anything, I would stop digging, as if suddenly even more than usually absentminded lately—then I’d maybe stand up and just show you the handpainted horse-and-river French mural paper we’re beginning to uncover in the foyer, and then I’d take you all to the Fish House over near Edenton for dinner, but I’d not say nothin’ and jes’ keep rollin’ along. But to find these things, the one a slave toy and the other something porcelain and plainly English import … I believe it was a pact between them, the girls, to go ahead and wire their arms around each other, the dolls. Like they knew their friendship couldn’t stand whatever tests were coming—a salable slave child and the owner’s daughter, or the overseer’s—but to plant these here. As a sign, near the house, a sign they loved each other. To show they knew that, and to save it some.”

  • • •

  By now the light was mostly gone. Only the tips of the four chimneys held a charged kind of sandpapery red, like the heads of matches. The shadow where we stooped felt privileged but too permanent. It’d got some colder. We could see the scallop boats, their lights blinking way out there, coming home, nets hoisted after the long day’s catch. Two bats kept diving near the house. And Tad lifted his effigies, Tad moved to pass these into the hands of the person nearest him, everything—that tin box, the wax-sealed bag, and those odd dolls—still bound together…. He handed it to somebody, who instinctively drew back, acting almost comically repulsed. She—actually, it was I, alas—pulled away as if fearing that this thing had come direct and scalding from some infernal oven. Would it burn, or freeze? Maybe it was how quick and saturated the darkness had become. I felt he was placing some image of himself dead into hands not willing to accept that, not yet. (Still not.) I steeled myself … hating this squeamishness which seemed so unlike me, at least the “me” I could admire even a bit. But then Mimi, God love her, laughed and said, “What is this, hoodoo voodoo? Gi’ me it!” and reached past me, grabbed the thing. Out of order. Then we each took hold of his find, all of us, me going right after Mimi. I think it was something about my husband’s death, and being so near the water. Made me hesitate, then feel that I had let Tad down. I felt like Saint Peter, denying on the crucial night. It’s odd, but we all held on to the dolls, and even the box, and for quite a while. As if greeting them, a cordial welcome, to aboveground. It seemed we’d expected the dolls to melt into the same thin air where the girls had gone. We expected the dolls to melt when they left Tad’s hands as he tried to fit them into ours. We knew then, that “thin air” was already welcoming him. But the object(s) remained, solid, like his legacy—like Tad himself till then—so reassuringly material. These figures had lasted the way inanimate things get to (lucky for us, as compass points and referents). Lord knows, we don’t.

  Then our group drove over to Edenton for shrimp and oysters and scallops which were excellent and right off the boat, everything’s so fresh down there. At dinner, no one really mentioned what he’d dug up. I remember how quiet was the long car ride home without Tad. I begged him to come back home to Hillsborough just for tonight. He’d have none of it, of course. On the long trip back, it wasn’t so much that we were spooked … though we were, and in some new way. I’d always felt a little scared for him—bodily, I mean. Worried for his fragile bones, a fall, things like that. Now something else took over.