Topping the massive house was a squat, pyramid-shaped roof. This was broken by small dormer windows facing into the yard, if you could call it a yard. Every window was boarded over with scrap lumber, making the house look like a blind man behind dark glasses, his mighty shoulders stubbornly hunched.
It was so much worse than I had imagined.
I realized now that I had envisioned a quaint Arts and Crafts bungalow, like the historic homes in Phoenix. Or perhaps a charming farmhouse like the ones in movies, with rocking chairs on a wraparound verandah. Well, this house had a verandah, all right, except that I could barely see it through the dense bushes.
“Are we going to live here?” Even Bridget was incredulous.
I kept my voice cheerful. “Let’s go inside and take a look.”
I struggled toward the front door through branches that clawed at my face, climbed the six creaking wooden steps to the verandah, and lowered Bridget to her feet. As I pulled the key from my pocket, I saw a lucky horseshoe hanging over the panelled front door. The heavy door opened smoothly, and we stepped inside. Bridget clung to my hand, whining and dragging on me with her full weight.
We found ourselves in a large vestibule. The daylight from the open door behind us illuminated the first few steps of a staircase leading upward to the right. On the left, an open doorway revealed the living room, and I felt relief that the house was furnished. I was afraid my great-aunt might have taken everything with her when she moved. I sniffed. The odour wasn’t unpleasant: a combination of wood and fabric and dust. There was a faint scent of woodsmoke, and even something fragrant. Lavender?
I stepped into the living room and pulled aside one of the sheets on the lumpy shape nearest to us, revealing a brown velvet couch.
“Mama, it’s too dark in here!”
I pulled a flashlight from my pocket, thankful that Edna had suggested it. Oddly, she had seemed to know where we were going. I shone it onto the hardwood floor. Over the sound of Bridget’s complaints, I walked to the end of the hall and opened the door.
The kitchen was pretty bad. My beam of light fell onto a large wooden table covered with a piece of oilcloth. A porcelain farmhouse sink stood in one corner, with a green metal hand pump. Along one wall were floor-to-ceiling fir cabinets, stained the same rich brown colour as the rest of the woodwork, darkened with a layer of dirt and grease. An old-fashioned cook stove stood against the wall, and beside it a rocking chair. My flashlight picked out a fly-spotted calendar bearing a photograph of three cocker spaniel pups. The date read August 1990.
Everything was so dirty! I swallowed hard, resisting the urge to shudder. For a minute I wanted to turn around and go straight back to town, back to the airport, back to Arizona.
“Mama, you’re hurting me!”
“Sorry, sweetie.” I released my grip on her little hand. “Let’s look upstairs.”
“Mama, let’s go. I don’t like it here.” I shone the flashlight toward her, anticipating another tantrum. Her little face was screwed up with anxiety.
“Just one quick peek, then we can go back to the car.”
I led the way down the hall and toward the stairs. We began to climb, following the flashlight beam up eight wide treads. When we got to the landing where the stairs turned again to rise into total blackness, Bridget pulled her hand away. “I don’t want to go up there!”
“All right.” I spoke in my most soothing voice. “Stand right here for a minute while I look upstairs.”
I left her standing in a narrow shaft of sunlight shining from a crack between two boards nailed across the landing window. I hurried up another eight steps and found myself in the upstairs hallway.
My flashlight beam picked out five closed doors, two on each side of the hall and one at the end, all made of the same panelled wood with matching crystal doorknobs set into filigreed brass plates.
Bridget continued to whimper while I stepped across the hall and opened the first door. There was nothing in this room but a wrought-iron metal bedstead painted cornflower blue, the mattress covered with a sheet, and beside it a small wooden table bearing a candlestick and a half-melted candle. A candle!
The next door opened on a closet, stacked with neatly folded towels and bedding.
The third door revealed another narrow staircase leading upward into darkness. I closed it and opened the fourth door. This must be the bathroom, I thought. An oval-shaped metal tub stood in one corner, and a washstand with a flowered bowl and pitcher in the opposite corner. Over this hung a mirror covered with black spots.
I fought a wave of choking disappointment. The house was clearly uninhabitable.
Bridget had stopped whining, so I walked to the far end of the hall and opened the fifth and final door, shining my flashlight into the corners. This room was large, twice the size of the others. A brass bed stood against the back wall, facing four boarded-over windows across the front. A pencil-thin ray of light revealed a crack where the boards didn’t quite meet. I tiptoed across the dusty floor and peered through it.
Bathed in brilliant sunshine, a panoramic view of green fields marbled with streaks of darker-green forest stretched away to a distant line of purple hills. Not far from the house was a creek, the blue water rippling through the thick grass and silvery shrubs along its banks.
I must be facing south. I suddenly remembered the map I had studied on my computer screen. This was my land! Or would be, if we could possibly survive in this filthy monstrosity of a house for the next year.
An unfamiliar sound interrupted my thoughts. Bridget. I whirled and took a quick step toward the door, thinking that she had started to cry. Then I realized with a shock that she was laughing, that deep belly laugh that came so rarely. I rushed down the hall and shone my flashlight onto the landing below.
Bridget stood with her arms outstretched, covered with bits of colour. The sun was shining through the crack at just the right angle, striking the stained glass window over the landing, creating a shower of rainbows that sprinkled her face and arms.
“Mama, look! It’s raining rainbows!”
“Oh, how pretty, Bridget! I wish you could see yourself!”
She laughed again, and tears sprang to my eyes. It had been so long since I had heard her laugh. I had forgotten how adorable she looked when her little face was grinning, her perfect baby teeth revealed in two pearly rows.
I vaulted down the stairs to the landing and held out my own arms beneath the sunlight. The colours tumbled onto me like a waterfall of tiny jewels.
“Mama, your hands have polka dots!”
I bent over so that a shaft of green light fell on my nose, and she laughed again while she held out her hand as if she were wearing a ruby ring. We exclaimed together, twisting this way and that. After a few minutes, the sun shifted and the rainbows twinkled away. But all at once the house seemed less unwelcoming.
I could scarcely believe Bridget’s next words. “Mama, can we please, please, please stay here? In the rainbow house?”
“I don’t know yet, darling. Maybe.”
We went outside and made our way around to the back of the house. The golden sunshine poured down on our shoulders like molten rain. A heavenly host of birds sang in harmony from the treetops. A gigantic black and orange monarch butterfly flitted past.
Standing in the long grass, I ran my eyes over the house.
The black asphalt shingles on the roof looked intact. There were only a few bricks missing from the chimney. Since the windows were boarded over, I hoped that none of the panes were broken. But what did I know? I needed to find someone who could do a proper assessment and tell me whether we could actually live in this place, and the sooner the better.
I hoisted Bridget onto my back and hurried to the car. We sang “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” Obviously, Bridget had forgotten about the grasshoppers.
I was quiet on the drive back to town, mulling over everything we had seen. Bridget, on the other hand, chattered happily like the squirrel we had heard i
n the big poplars at the edge of the yard.
When we came into the hotel, I went straight to Edna behind the front desk. “Is there a building inspector in town?”
“No, ma’am. Somebody from the city comes around whenever a new house goes up in Juniper. But you can ask Old Joe Daley. He knows pretty much everything there is to know about house construction.”
4
August
Standing knee-deep in weeds, Old Joe held up his hands and put his thumbs together to make a three-sided square, squinting at the corners of the house. “She looks pretty straight,” he said. “When the walls start to sag, you can usually spot them in a jiffy.”
“Old” Joe couldn’t have been more than fifty. He had arrived at the hotel in a work truck with his son, predictably called Young Joe. Bridget and I rode out to the farm in the back seat of their king cab. I dreaded Bridget’s reaction to the two burly men, but luckily neither of them paid her the slightest attention. The adults chatted while she huddled in the corner and looked at her books.
“Get the crowbar and uncover the windows,” Old Joe now directed his son. “Let’s have some light on the subject.”
Young Joe opened the big metal tool box sitting in the back of the truck and produced a crowbar. He climbed the steps to the overgrown verandah and started prying boards off the front window. The rusty nails tore through the wood with a tremendous screeching sound.
I watched anxiously as the main-floor windows on each side of the front door were uncovered. These were adorned with smaller panes along the top in a pretty green and gold checkerboard pattern. It seemed as if the house’s eyes were opening after a long sleep, blinking and drowsy, heavy-lidded with coloured glass like green and gold eyeshadow.
Young Joe returned to the truck and pulled a metal extension ladder off the roof rack. He moved around to the side of the house facing east, toward a waist-high tangled mass of weeds and shrubs in the corner of the yard, presumably the former garden. Jutting out from the eastern wall was a three-sided bay window, covered with plywood sheets. Young Joe climbed the ladder and began to tear them off.
While he worked, his father clambered through the undergrowth surrounding the house until only the branches waving overhead revealed his whereabouts. At last he emerged, brushing off his pants, a leafy twig sticking from his flat tweed cap like a jaunty feather.
“The foundation looks solid, what I can see of it,” he said. “Let’s go inside.”
I checked on Bridget to make sure she was still happy sitting in the truck and pretending to read her Dr. Seuss books, which consisted of turning the pages and saying the memorized words aloud. Then I followed Old Joe into the house.
When I stepped through the door, I exclaimed with pleasure. The entrance was now illuminated with sunlight from the main floor windows. The wooden staircase leading up to the right was the colour of cinnamon, rich and glossy, with turned spindles and a round newel post worn smooth by human hands. A crystal and brass chandelier, wreathed in cobwebs, hung from the nine-foot ceiling.
“George Lee had nothing but the best.” Old Joe followed my eyes with an expression of pride, as if he were showing off his own home. “He bought this house from a mail-order catalogue and then hired a pair of carpenters from England, two brothers who knew their craft, to put it all together.”
We turned left into the living room. What I hadn’t seen before in the darkness was a fieldstone fireplace against the far wall, flanked with built-in bookcases. Above them were small rectangular windows bearing leaded glass panes with a stylized tulip pattern.
Old Joe looked around with satisfaction. “You can see the mice haven’t gotten in here, nor the squirrels, otherwise you’d have a real mess. There aren’t no bugs around here either, not the kind that eat wood. It’s too cold for the little buggers up here.”
So there were some advantages to this climate. Coming from a place where every household carried on a constant battle with cockroaches and termites, this was welcome news.
Old Joe opened and shut the living room door, and it swung soundlessly. “Another good sign. If the wood was warped, the door would stick.”
He lowered himself to one knee and turned back the corner of the Oriental carpet, which was obscured by a mask of grey dust. Underneath the carpet, the floor was gleaming. “You can’t buy wood like this no more,” he said. “First-growth Douglas Fir, shipped here from the West Coast. Tongue-and-groove boards. There was no plywood then, or any of that newfangled laminate.”
He thumped his knuckles on the fir boards. “Almost a hundred years old and hard as iron. The dry and the cold have preserved it, petrified it, you might say.” The foot-high baseboards and trim around the windows and doors were made from the same rich russet-coloured wood.
Old Joe reached into the tool belt slung around his waist and pulled out his level, a piece of wood with a tiny floating bubble suspended in the centre. He set it on the floor. The bubble didn’t move. “Yep, that’s what I thought. Straight as a die.”
He hoisted himself to his feet and ran his hands over the walls, papered with delicate sprays of green leaves and white flowers on a cream background. “The plaster is in good shape, too, nice and smooth. You know, this whole house was built with hand tools: hammer and handsaw, plane and level and square. There weren’t no power tools back then. A carpenter sawed hundreds of laths — those are strips of wood — and his helper nailed them, side by side, across the supporting beams. Then the third guy dipped his trowel in a big tub of plaster and coated the whole thing by hand. When the plaster was smooth and dry, you could either paint it or paper it.”
“I think the wallpaper is lovely.”
“Your great-aunt was partial to wallpaper. If you cut into this wall, you’d find umpteen layers, each one with a different pattern.”
As he walked around the room, Old Joe explained that the house design was called a foursquare, for the simple reason that it had four outside walls of equal length, with four rooms on each floor. Even the roof had four equal panels, covering an attic with four dormer windows facing in all four directions.
He stopped at the front windows, shaking his head. “Here’s the weak point in these old houses. They were good windows in their day, but they didn’t do much to keep out the cold. Now we have double-paned windows and insulated glass, but all they had back then were storm windows.”
He took a jackknife out of his pocket and tested the putty around the panes. “Good, just like concrete.” He snapped the blade shut. “You’ve got one thing going for you, this house has been sealed up tight as a drum. One of the neighbours, Roy Henderson, he comes over every month to make sure the house is airtight. He promised Mrs. Lee when she left for the last time, and he’s kept his word all these years.”
Old Joe walked past the shrouded furniture to the end of the room and put his big fingers into two brass pulls attached to a pair of solid doors. They slid apart smoothly, opening the wall in half, and we went into the dining room.
Now I could see the bay window, composed of four long rectangles of equal size — two in the centre and an angled window on each side. The room was spacious enough for a dining table covered with a sheet, a large sideboard, and a treadle sewing machine draped with a fringed shawl. In one corner, surprisingly, stood a double bed.
“Your great-aunt slept down here after the stairs got too much for her,” Old Joe explained.
“I don’t understand why everything is still sitting here. It looks like she just left the house yesterday.”
“She didn’t need anything where she was going, except her clothes and a few personal things. Maybe she was hoping to come back someday. Or maybe she left everything here on purpose so somebody else could use it.”
A set of double-sided cabinets with red- and green-glass panes was built into the interior wall. I could see straight through them into the kitchen. We entered the kitchen through the adjoining door. Sadly, it looked even worse in daylight. The varnished fir cabinets, with brass hin
ges and hardware, were dulled with age and smoke. A green-painted door with an iron latch stood ajar beside the cook stove, revealing a large pantry filled with a jumble of cooking utensils, bottles, and tins.
I looked doubtfully at the hand pump, set into a wooden countertop covered with green-speckled vinyl. “Where does the water come from?”
Old Joe snorted. “Well, you don’t got to worry about the plumbing, because there isn’t any except this pump here. Let’s see if it still works.”
He went over to the sink and grasped the pump handle. He gave it a few sharp strokes but nothing happened except a wheezing sound.
Glancing at my face, he said: “Don’t give up hope yet. This is how they got their drinking and washing water into the house. There’s a pipe connecting this pump to the well down below. It probably needs to be primed.”
“How do you prime it?”
“Pour water down it. I’ll get some from the truck.”
After he went outside, I remained motionless while my eyes roved around the room. It was so dingy I didn’t want to move, in case I accidentally touched something. Even the windowpanes were clouded with grime.
In a few minutes Joe came back carrying a five-gallon plastic jug. He unscrewed the cap and poured water into the top of the pump assembly, then raised and lowered the handle vigorously. A few more wheezing strokes, and the gasping changed to a deeper sound and suddenly water gushed out of the spout.
“That’ll do her,” he said. “You won’t need to prime it if you’re using it every day, because there’ll be standing water in the pipe.”
A pail sat on the kitchen counter, with a tin cup hanging from the rim. He held the cup under the stream then took a few large gulps before handing it to me.
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