At three thirty the district man got on the microphone and read the results from the stage. He went through the junior divisions first, papers and performances and documentaries, and the Molly Maguires twins got an honorable mention for their documentary and screamed so loudly that the whole gym laughed, and Deborah Mazurek took first in Senior Individual Performance for the Johnstown Flood and burst into tears and had to be helped off the stage by her mother. Then he got to Senior Individual Exhibit, and he read honorable mention, a girl from Jim Thorpe, and then he read second place, The Lehigh Canal Lock System, Tamaqua Area High School, and the canal lock boy whooped, and then he read first place, The Bear Ridge Slope, What the Town Remembers and What the Logbook Says, Calvert Beckwith, Mahanoy Area High School.
Calvert did not hear the applause. He would be told about it later. He would be told that Mrs. Agard stood up and clapped with both hands over her head, which was not something anybody at Mahanoy Area High School had ever seen her do, and that the old woman in the church coat who had touched Francis Gallagher's name was in the bleachers and stood up too. He did not hear any of it. He walked up to the stage because Mrs. Agard pushed him, and he took the certificate and the blue ribbon from the district man and shook his hand, and on his way down the steps he looked out across the gym and saw, by the double doors at the back, in the gray Wrestling sweatshirt, with his arms folded and a stack of folding chairs leaning against the wall beside him, Mick Kostka, not clapping, just standing there watching, and when Calvert's eyes found him, Mick gave one short nod, and then picked up the chairs and went out.
There was an envelope tucked into the front pocket of the binder when Calvert went back to his table. He did not know who had put it there or when. It was a plain white business envelope with BLOOMSBURG UNIVERSITY, DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY printed in the corner, and inside it was a single sheet of yellow legal paper, and on the paper, in a careful slanted hand, was a phone number with a 717 area code and four lines.
Mr. Beckwith. Page 81. I have read that transcript perhaps two hundred times in my life and never once put it next to page 104. I am ashamed of that, as a historian and otherwise. If the Kostka family is willing, I would like very much to see the book again. F. Dombrowski.
Broad Mountain Manor was a long low brick building on Route 54 with a circular drive and a flagpole and a row of white plastic benches along the front that nobody sat on in March. Mick drove them out in the white Ford at a quarter to five, after the tables were down and stacked on their carts in the storage room and the wrestling team had eaten its pizza, and Calvert's grandmother followed in the Buick with the display board in three pieces in the back seat, because she had said, when Calvert called her from the pay phone in the school lobby, that she was not going to let him go out there by himself, and that if he was going to tell Stasia Kostka about Thurlow, then she was going to be standing next to him when he did it, because some things you did not send a child to do alone, and she was forty years late for it already.
Ethel Beckwith was seventy-three, five feet tall, with a white perm and a navy blue car coat and a pocketbook she held in front of her with both hands like a shield. She shook Mick's hand in the parking lot, firmly, and looked up at him for a long moment.
"You look like him," she said. "Your grandfather. Through the eyes."
"People say that," Mick said. "Mostly not as a compliment."