She dropped the letter in a mailbox while she still had the courage.

  He did not write back.

  When, at last, she reached her mother, she learned that he had left and not returned.

  * * *

  —

  What had happened after Robert’s disappearance was never entirely clear to her. She blamed herself and called the police, and when they couldn’t help her, hired a private investigator, who also turned up nothing. A year passed, more, and then her mother had called to say that Robert had written, from jail, that he was coming home that February. But then February passed, and her mother told her there had been an error. And Robert had been found in Minnesota, arrested for breaking into a trailer to sleep during a storm. Hadn’t touched a soul, her mother said, and the trailer was unlocked, but there was a child sleeping in the room. He’d done his time, and now he was home.

  He even came to the phone. Made no mention of their correspondence or what had precipitated his departure. But he kept saying something very bad had almost happened and he wouldn’t go away again.

  He didn’t. He stayed until their mother’s death, four years later, and when he lost the income from her Social Security, he accepted Helen’s offer to pay his bills. He still went through periods of paranoia about the phone lines, and when the water pump had broken, he refused to have it fixed, and started drawing water from the well. The old way. But he never mentioned the “Soul Heirs” or his “Stitchings” or any of his troubles, save to say from time to time how hard it was to breathe.

  * * *

  —

  It was shortly after noon when she reached the town of Oakfield. Little had changed since her last visit, save a few new buildings at the edge of town—an auto-parts shop, a dollar store, a mums-and-cider operation, boarded up, presumably, until the fall. A few trucks moved slowly along the main road, but the streets were empty.

  From there she headed up the valley, past the turnoff to her old high school. It was still raining, the road was soft and rutted, and she had to hold the wheel tight to keep the car from veering.

  How she remembered this season, the bare trees, the mists, the mud like folded slabs of potter’s clay. The winters had been terrible, and yet even her sullen teenage self could find beauty in fresh snowfall. But her memory of late March was of uncertain, unstable earth, and grey days that lurched between spring’s promise and winter’s stubborn persistence. Banished to the forsaken house, at the literal end of the road, she had felt as if the sun would never find them. The arrival of the birds would do little to assuage her—they too seemed deluded, singing in an empty forest without leaves or flowers. As if Robert had failed, and the Rupture had already come.

  Robert, she thought, suddenly. Because one needed friends to be a Bobby or a Bob.

  Farmhouses, low and dark. In the woods, a scattering of maple-syrup pails. Beer cans in the verge. She passed the Hopkins house, where classmates gathered before the dances, and then the farm belonging to the Irvings. In their yard, a figure wrapped as thickly as a Russian peasant slowly raked the dark-brown earth.

  When she reached the house, she scarcely recognized it. Its yellow paint was worn, its roof beset with moss. The damage caused by the falling elm was patched with tarp and tin. Around it, the young saplings she remembered from her childhood had matured into a forest of their own. Nothing like the old woods that lay beyond the stone wall, but still remarkable, this sense of reclamation. She recalled the dwindling grove of chestnuts that Robert guarded so fiercely. By now, she knew, the blight would have destroyed them. She could only imagine his anguish, his sense that he had failed.

  The rain had turned to a fine sleet. She was tempted to get back into the car and drive back to Oakfield, or Corbury Junction, or Springfield, or Worcester, walk into the nearest real-estate office and put the house on the market. As is. Certainly, there was someone who would see that the value of the land was worth the costs of salvage, though the memory of all the abandoned homes she passed suggested this might not be so.

  She had a key, but the door was unlocked, and she knocked either out of habit or superstition, or to give an overwintering animal fair warning that the quiet hours of its hibernation were about to be disturbed. No one answered. The door creaked as she went inside. Her immediate impression was that everything seemed smaller: the windows low, the tin ceiling now just beyond her reach. To her right, the old furniture was piled with boxes, as was the dining table. As if someone had been there before her and begun to clean it out.

  But no one had been there, of course. It was all just accumulation. She knew then she couldn’t complete the careful inventory she had intended. If there was something worth retaining as a keepsake, it would have to be extracted. She walked slowly, through the dining room, into the kitchen, back into the living room, and up the stairs. And everywhere was junk. Old copies of Good Housekeeping (her mother the housekeeper!), empty jars and commemorative chinaware, used clothing. She was struck by the discrepancy in meaning the belongings presented. That death meant not only the cessation of a life, but vast worlds of significance. A candle that might have once provided comfort in the winter darkness, a shawl gifted by an erstwhile suitor, a pheasant that recalled her poor lost grandfather. Old brass, old rag, old bird.

  Newsletters from a local dog club, copies of the county advertiser going back well into the sixties, chairs with torn rush seats, circulars of the “Benevolent Society” of which she vaguely recalled her mother was a member. In her mother’s bedroom, a few books—One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Little Dorrit, a Modern Library edition of Boethius—Boethius, really?—and a well-thumbed anthology of prison narratives by a John T. Trumbull of the local community college. Nothing of value, no jewelry in the dresser, but she knew her mother had sold it long ago.

  Empty-handed, Helen went downstairs and followed the hallway that led to the guest wing. Once, she’d lived upstairs, as far away from her brother and her mother as possible. But the floor that led to her bedroom was rotting from exposure to the elements, and she didn’t want to risk a cave-in. Instead, she wandered through the old “ballroom,” which Robert seemed to have transformed into a kind of syrup house—there was a stove and woodpile, and stacks of buckets and recycled soda bottles, some crusty with dry crystals. Dead ladybugs everywhere. Old electronics on the floor and tables—a film projector, a generator, the innards of a pair of televisions. Her grandfather’s old study almost unrecognizable. The zebra carpet piled high with boxes, the once-resplendent peacock upside down behind a couch. Half of a 1929 Encyclopædia Britannica edition piled on the pedestal where the catamount once stood. So it, too, escaped.

  Papers everywhere, books everywhere, miserable, half-decaying books that he’d collected from yard sales, old National Geographics, Life magazines. Stacks of phone books, broken along their spines and filled with newspaper clippings, weather forecasts, sports scores, obituaries, the names all unfamiliar. No rhyme or reason she could ascertain. Sound and fury, she thought, signifying nothing. Or signifying something, but something lost.

  She found the closet at the far end of the room, the door secured with a pair of combination locks. It occurred to her then that it was strange that, of all the emotions that followed her throughout the house, fear wasn’t one of them. Sadness, exhaustion, regret, but not fear, despite the abandoned rooms, the dusty animals with empty eyes. But now, faced with the locks, she felt uneasy. Water had run down the wall, the paper was peeling, the frame seemed to have rotted. She pulled on the handle and saw the hinges yield. It took just two more tries before the bolts broke from the decaying wood.

  It was a small closet, three shelves, each stacked with lurid yellow cases of six-inch reels of Super 8 film. She stood there, unmoving, thinking of the clutter of cameras and projectors that an hour before had seemed so innocent. Pornography? she wondered, but inherent in the secrecy was something far more sinister. Robert had never touched a soul, she told herself, and yet she felt a wave of nausea. Had she, in her pity for him, missed something? Nervously, she brought down one of the cases, on which he had written Alice? in thick black marker, followed by a date. She paused, puzzled by the question mark, then took another: Mary + Alice. Let them be adults, she prayed. A scene rose in her imagination, of two sad local whores enticed to ply their trade before the camera. Had Robert filmed it? The penmanship on the case was unmistakable—she had eight hundred pages at home. But the thought of him engaging in something so corporeal, so human, seemed impossible. Not her brother, with his endless exegeses on the ways of beetle and moss.

  But of course he wouldn’t write to her of such a…hobby. She took another down—again Mary + Alice. Then a doubtful Alice, River? Then Nurse Ana. She stacked them on the floor.

  Nurse Ana, Posing For William, Quality Poor.

  Quality poor. She could only imagine.

  William + Erasmus—well, that was unexpected. She never would have thought…but, then, she couldn’t imagine Robert interested in women either. And any actor named Erasmus deserved a little credit—she couldn’t decide if it was more amusing if he’d been named for Nash, or just for the author of In Praise of Folly. She could see the paper now: “The Influences of 19th-Century Pastoral Poetry on Amateur Sex Films: A Review.” “Hot Walden” indeed.

  Three more reels of William + Erasmus. Two with a “?” and one without.

  Then Nurse Ana, Voice Only.

  Oh dear.

  The next was Three Puritans.

  Well!

  But what to do with all of it? she wondered. Straight to the fire? Or to the police? But why to the police, if she didn’t know what they contained?

  William + Erasmus, Teasing Nurse Ana, Only Voice.

  First Lovers.

  Alice, on Fife.

  Oh, no.

  First Lover, with Chicken.

  No, no, no.

  Charles Osgood, Discussing Apple Cultivation, Only Voice.

  She stopped. Apples? She turned the reel over in her hands, but the case said nothing else.

  The next four were similarly labeled.

  C.O., Voice Only, on Damage from Waxwings.

  C.O. on Grafting Technique.

  C.O. on Other Varieties—With Mary—Discussion of Pruning, Porcupines.

  The whores stood up, put on work shirts and overalls, and picked up a ladder and a basket. Looked at her accusingly: What kinds of sick thoughts did you have?

  C.O.—Memories of the French and Indian War.

  Now her unease had yielded fully to her curiosity. She dragged the projector to the living room, as far as possible from the generator, and slid the reel out of its case.

  * * *

  —

  C.O.—Memories of the French and Indian War opened in the forest. She didn’t know the spot, but it might have been any of a thousand in the woods around them. It was late fall or early spring: almost all trees were bare, the leaves upon the ground were brown and indistinguishable. There was a smooth, pale marble gravestone, letters illegible. Beech and birch trunks rose among a rank of weathered, knotty trunks she did not recognize. On the right, a log pointed toward a beech sapling, its fluttering leaves so pale as to be nearly white. Spring, then: now she remembered how the beech leaves faded. Other than the swaying of the camera caused by her brother’s labored breathing, this was the only movement until the wind blew through the grove. A pair of leaves rose into the air and circled each other like butterflies. And that was it. The reel finished; the celluloid released, slapping at the projector as it continued spinning.

  Perplexed, she removed the reel, and loaded another—Charles Osgood, on Pruning (she was not quite ready to risk First Lover, With Chicken yet). This time, the scene was winter, and it took her a moment before she realized that she was looking at the same scene as the previous. Snow covered the forest floor before her. The leaves of the small beech were darker. This time a light wind was blowing, the only sound.

  A third: Charles Osgood, His Orchard. Summer, and she recognized the beech and birches, and now the old, weathered trees, their new shoots full of blushing fruit.

  Memories, then, of the wild apples growing on the hill.

  The forest was in full leaf, the floor alight with ferns and small white flowers. A brown bird, unknown to her, flew into the frame and settled on a log, then vanished, and then a second—robin—landed upon the apple’s branches and sang its wobbly song. Cheerily—cheer up—cheerily—cheer up. In the distance, a squirrel disappeared up one of the trunks.

  The reel reached its end.

  Mary + Alice showed a ferny boulder before another beech, this with what seemed like scars slashed in its bark.

  Mary: oaks growing from an old stone wall.

  Nurse Ana: a muddy beach beside a river pool.

  William + Erasmus, Poor Quality, Voice Only: a bed of moss and lichen, beetle lumbering across the frame.

  And on. Each reel was the same; by the time that she reached Alice, on Fife, she had no fear of what she’d find. A bird, a passing squirrel, a pair of deer were the only signs of life that weren’t vegetable. And yet she was riveted. She had never been drawn to the woods as Robert was, but now, in the shambles of her old home, the same forest, flickering upon the cracked plaster beneath the stairs, seemed rich with meaning. It was as if she were attending a video installation at a museum, and yet she knew her brother could not have intended it as art. What, then? And why the names, Mary, Alice, William, Charles Osgood? “Osgood,” in its strangeness, vaguely familiar from her brother’s tales of “Soul Heirs” long ago. And then she understood, and with this understanding came a sense of the void across which her brother lived.

  He had tried to capture his hallucinations. She had disbelieved him, and he had spent his final months trying to record what he had seen and heard, and offer them to her as proof.

  * * *

  —

  She watched every reel without stopping to sleep, and when she was finished it was late morning. She stood. There were still shelves and closets to explore, but she knew that she had seen enough. She found some old grocery bags and filled them with the reels and carried them out and put them on the back seat of the rental car. She had no idea what she would do with them. Likely, she would store them among her belongings, and one day—when she died, when the small beech had grown, and the lumbering beetle had turned to glittering dust, and the ruined apples had finally given up their ghost—Saul or Michael would find them. Find them, puzzle over them, and then perhaps hunt down an old projector, unafraid, for the possessions of an old lady were not the same as those of an old man. Then, there, in the room of her empty house, or the archives of the library where one could still find such forgotten equipment, they would watch the screen light up before them—robin, sapling, eternal beetle—the images stripped of all their prior meaning, signifying nothing but the gentle motions of a forest that no longer was.

  An Address to the Historical Society of Western Massachusetts

  WELCOME, everyone, and what a lovely spring day.

  It is an honor to give our illustrious Society’s seventh annual “Mitch” Harwood Lecture. As you might know, Mitch was a dear friend of mine, and though our falling-out over Worcester cabinetry is well known, he was a grand aficionado of mystery and intrigue, and I do think he would have enjoyed today’s address.

  I also wanted to thank a few people whose aid and counsel have been of inestimable value. On more than a few occasions, Ed Franklin has lent me his MetalQuest 3000, even after I accidentally broke his first one. For those of you who have wielded that puppy, you know you are in command of the true king of the hand-helds—try to find a Puritan shoe clasp at the Chicopee Exxon with a Detecto F25 or a Pinpoint WS10! [Pause for laughter.] Hat’s off to you, Ed. I’d also like to thank Carol Watkins of the UMass Press: Carol, doll, even though you are not here tonight, I’m taking your advice to heart and will try to cut some of the “personal touches” from my next submission. Promise!

  Finally, I am aware—we are all aware, I think—of the circumstances that led to my temporary suspension from the Society. The past year, as you also know, has been one of loss for me, and while this does not excuse the, well, enthusiasm with which I dealt with my grief and loneliness, I do appreciate everyone’s generosity in taking my circumstances into consideration. This group is family to me, and I cannot fully express my gratitude, especially to our fine Chairman, Leonard, for welcoming me back within the fold. I hope that today’s talk will serve to rehabilitate me, not only as a historian, but as your friend.

  [Pause for dramatic effect/glass of water/applause.]

  Let us begin.

  [Spread hands in “panning, scene-setting” motion.]

  On April 3, 1951, on the windswept shores of Halifax, Nova Scotia, Robert Jorgensen, Professor of History at the University of King’s College, stood at the lectern of the Library Auditorium, much as I stand here today, and delivered a public lecture on “Indian Captives in Canada,” before a packed, enthusiastic audience.

  Drawn from a chapter of his recently published Our Canada, it was, by all accounts, a resounding speech.

  “The crowd rose to its feet,” reported The Weekly Advertiser the following morning.

  “Prof Captivates,” proclaimed the arts page of The Chronicle-Herald.

  “For two hours, Jorgensen regaled his audience with knuckle-biting tales of men and women carried off into the wilds,” wrote the Gazette.

  And how could he not regale? Yes, friends, from the earliest days of the colonial era, readers have been transfixed by accounts of Europeans taken from the sanctum of their homes and spirited into the realms of the Iroquois, the Mohawk, the Abenaki. Perhaps you have your favorite? A Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson? Cotton Mather’s “Notable Deliverance” of Hannah Dustan? The “Sufferings” of Zadock Steele? Yes, history offers a veritable smorgasbord of abduction. Pity the poor eighteenth-century reader who spent his hard-earned shilling on The Redeemed Captive, only to be tempted by A Very Surprising Narrative of a Young Woman, Discovered in a Rocky-Cave! Was he no different from today’s housewife in thrall to her daily soaps? A captive of Captivities!