Last Alchemist (eBook)

2.

RED CAT FARM, OCTOBER 1985

The day that I first met the man, I was jogging. It was shortly after dawn and the chill air stung my lungs. Up the road, as I ran toward the pink rim of the sky, I first saw him as he rounded the black iron fence which circles Veteran’s Park. A gray shawl billowed from his shoulders. He wore a hat, and his head was lowered, inspecting a scribble on the wall. I stopped for breath on the path next to the man. Over his shoulders, I looked to the wall at the figures etched there: lines twisted, black and jagged.

“There is trouble,” the man said.

His face was lined deep, his eyes burning behind dark glasses.

“I have some paint back at the farm,” I said. “I could get rid of that.”

“You can erase it from the wall. Not from the mind,” the man said. “You are a painter?”

“I paint houses,” I said. “We’re painting one at that farm up the hill. The Red Cat Farm they used to call it.”

“Yes, it is time it was painted,” the man said, and all the color seemed to go out of his face. For a moment there were no other words between us. A scattering of leaves took off into the air, settling along the edge of the woods nearby.

“I’m Jake Kincaid,” I said. “And you?”

The man’s lips quivered for a moment.

“My name is Ezra,” he said.

“Good to meet you, Ezra,” I said. “I’ll go up and get some paint. That will be gone from that wall before you know it.”

“You are the one who is painting at the farm? You paint like Michelangelo - but houses, not chapel ceilings. So, is that is what you do all the year around?”

“It’s what I do when I’m not in school.”

“You are in school. Do you study painting there?”

“No. I’m going to college this year for media arts. I want to major in movie making. That’s what I’m most interested in.”

“Enchanting,” he said. “You wish to be making the movies. You are young, Jacob. When we are young, we study many things. Young people are like pliable wooden boards. Your mind moves freely. It bends more flexibly. Me- I am hard like old wooden desks. So then, that is your dream? It is movies you wish to be in?”

“I’d like to make them. Of course, my dad says I should be more realistic. Jake, that’s not the real world, he says. I tell him that movie making is creative and there are some real interesting movies coming out these days. The people who make them are creating lots of great special effects. Do you like movies, Ezra?”

“I would not know much about the movies these days, Jacob” Ezra said. “My life, it has rarely come into contact with the company of young people like you. No, not for many years. I am an old man, Jacob, an old man who has seen too much.”

I resumed my jog, waving back at the man as I rounded the park. The man watched me for a moment. Then the billowing gray shawl turned back to the wall. I took one last look back at him, held there like a statue amid the newly fallen leaves.

There was a movement in the forest. I heard footsteps crackling on the leaves. Someone came forward from behind the trees. The man was tall; his face, a long and indistinguishable shadow under a wide-brimmed hat, looked hard and determined. He was following me. Hurrying from that spot, I went back to the farm. I went quickly, never glancing back. I pretended I hadn’t noticed the man. Yet I could sense him there, always behind me: someone following, someone watching me.

Jogging, I passed the white fences around the hills of the Red Cat Farm. As I turned in the front gate, I noticed that the strange figure was gone. Yet, still I felt his presence, as if the stranger might be lurking about somewhere.

My friend, Tom Sheffield, had already set up the ladders along the farmhouse. Taking one look at me coming up the driveway, he could tell that something was wrong.

“Someone is following me,” I said.

“I don’t see anybody, Jake.”

We looked together back down the long driveway. No one was there. A single figure dominated the hills: a bulky milk cow swatting its tail at flies. Sunlight played along the hills and the farm seemed as peaceful and remote from the world as when we had first seen it.

“Maybe it was some kind of mistake,” Tom said.

“It was no mistake, Tom. Somebody followed me from the park. It was right after I met an old man. He was just standing there, looking at a couple of swastikas that were scribbled on the wall there. It was like he was looking at a ghost. So, I said hello. Then, as I was leaving, I saw somebody in the woods behind me.

“Strange,” Tom said. “You said swastikas? Like the Nazis?”

Atop the ladder, Tom looked like a bird on the heights. He finished a broad stroke of paint above the first-floor window and stepped down to refill his paint can.

“So, you think it has something to do with the old man?”

“It must,” I said. “It happened right after I spoke with him.”

“Who is he, the old man?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Just some old guy named Ezra.”

“Okay. So, you talk with this guy Ezra and then all of a sudden there’s somebody following you?”

“That’s just it, Tom. Everything has been a little bit strange ever since we got to this farm.”

“Like those stories about the German baron, you mean? Yeah, I guess they’d give anybody the creeps.”

I felt my stomach tighten. Being followed was bad enough. But those strange stories about the German baron – now that was odd!

“He must have been nuts, huh?” Tom said. “I mean, to kill himself and his wife like that.”

Tom went back up the ladder. Swish – his brush raced across another beam. He swung it back down and the bristles emerged wet from the paint can, white, reflecting sunlight. “Or maybe she killed him and then took the poison. It was poison, wasn’t it?”

“Therese didn’t say. She doesn’t like to talk about it.”

“Sure. What if the old baron’s ghost is around here somewhere listening – huh?”

With a long dash of paint, I finished a board. I felt the muscles in my wrist tighten. The paint assaulted my nostrils. I curved my fingers lightly around the brush, the way that Tom had taught me.

“Do you think Therese will like the yellow border?” Tom laughed. He gazed out across the farm for a moment and then reached for a spot far above his head. “That German guy who owned this place must have been loaded. I wonder what this farm cost him.”

“His life,” I said. “At least that’s the story.”

“The story Therese didn’t want to tell,” Tom said. “You know what I think the story behind this farm is? The story is that he probably had some land in Germany and then he bought this farm here. And then he gave away this land to a religious charity to save his soul.”

The aluminum ladder creaked as Tom climbed another step. His paint can was swinging from his hand.

“Yeah, that’s what I think.”

Sunlight caught in his hair and I could swear he was looking up at Mount Olympus, like a golden boy reaching for the sun. The ladder shook as he went up. I could see that Tom was favoring his right leg again. He’d been doing that ever since the football injury in high school.

It all came back to me again: Tom’s blue football jersey, number 32 running up the high school field. I watched him shake one tackle and another. Then there was a popping sound. A linebacker had done it, quickly, from behind. Like a knife. Tom snapped like a branch and fell. His knees were buckling up in the dust. He rolled onto his side. Then he just lay there. I could see players leaning over him, people rushing across the field with a red blanket, a stretcher rolled out from an ambulance. I pushed the memory away.

“You’re trying for the peak today?” I said.

“Later on,” Tom said. “We’ll get it.”

“What do you mean we?”

To me the peak of the house, a skewed triangle forty feet up, did look like Mount Olympus. Moving up toward it, Tom looked so at ease, like a hang glider, a bird on the heights. I hesitated from making such a climb. If you ask me – I’d rather stay with both feet close to the ground. I wasn’t about to do any climbing. All this business about a German baron and a double suicide on the farm was making me feel a little dizzy.

Tom paused in mid-flight, leaning out from the ladder, reaching for a difficult spot. That’s when I heard the sound of a car coming up the driveway. For a moment I felt my stomach tighten. I thought of the man who I’d seen following me. I looked out at the bulky milk cows, big blotches of black and white on the hill, their tails chasing away flies. From behind them came a car, an old station wagon, gravel crackling under its tires. There past the silo...