by Donna Ball
“It’s an iced tea butler,” Bridget replied, pleased with herself. “It hangs from a beam on your porch, or from a tree limb, and you put your iced tea or lemonade on the platform, with the glasses in the little cup-holders here, and the napkins and teaspoons go underneath. Every cultured Southern lady should have one. And it’s only fifteen dollars!”
“Look,” repeated Lindsay, from the next aisle.
She was caressing an oak cabinet with a brass handle on the side that was squeezed in between an iron baby crib with peeling white paint and a stack of Black Kow garden manure. She moved aside several wicker baskets filled with seed packets and lifted the lid, revealing an old fashioned turntable underneath.
“Oh!” exclaimed Cici. “It’s an old Victrola!”
“Doesn’t it belong in our front room,” said Lindsay, “in that corner underneath the stained glass window? Can’t you just see it there?”
“You’ve got a good eye,” said a male voice behind them. “I believe that’s right where old Mr. Blackwell used to keep it.”
They looked around at a tall, sandy-haired, impossibly skinny man in blue jeans and a plaid shirt. He had a ruddy face and friendly, faded eyes that somehow identified him immediately as the shopkeeper. It did not, of course, explain how he knew who they were.
“Nice old piece, too,” he went on. “My granddaddy used to have one just like it. I remember him and my grandma dancing to it of an evenin’, even after they got their place electrified. That’s the good thing about the Victrola, don’t you know, you can have your music even when your power’s out. Do you want to hear it play?”
Without waiting for a reply, he slid the cabinet out of its cubby on squeaky casters, and opened a side door. “See here, it comes with a couple of records. Extra needles, too. I’ve got another whole box of records in the back somewhere, if I can find them.”
Cici, Lindsay, and Bridget slanted looks toward each other that were a mixture of astonishment and uncertainty. They watched the man place a disk on the turntable and crank the handle. When the turntable was spinning, he lowered the needle arm onto the record and the slightly tinny sounds of Caruso singing La Traviata filled the store. Their eyes went wide with delight.
“Did this really come from the Blackwell house?” Bridget asked.
“Sure did. Estate auction. This is the last piece I’ve got left from it. Let you have it for, oh, seventy-five dollars.”
“Sold,” said Lindsay. She held out her hand. “I’m Lindsay Wright. These are my friends Cici and Bridget.”
“Rick Jones,” he replied, shaking Lindsay’s hand and nodding to the other two. “Folks call me Jonesie. Pleased to meet you ladies. Been wondering when you’d be in. Anything else I can get for you? You got your hands full with that old place. Need any nails, shingles, screws? If we don’t have it, we’ll get it for you.”
“Do you have water heaters?” Cici queried.
“What size you need?”
She told him.
“Gas or electric?”
Cici looked at the other two, they shrugged, and she decided, “Electric.”
He nodded thoughtfully. “Well, now there’s three of you ladies, doing laundry, washing hair, and all. Like as not, you’ll have company now and again. If it was me, I’d get two heaters, and make ’em gas.”
Cici, who was quite accustomed to dealing with salesmen, contractors, and other commission-based workers, smiled politely just to let him know who was in charge, and repeated firmly, “One water heater. Electric.”
“Up to you,” he agreed amiably. “I’ll have it delivered for you Thursday morning. Anything else you need?”
“Actually,” Bridget said, “We could use some canning jars.”
“And some rocking chairs,” Lindsay said. And at Cici’s questioning look, she explained, “For the front porch. It’s a rocking chair porch with no rocking chairs.”
“Somebody misses the mall,” Cici murmured.
At the register, they met Mrs. Jonesie, a woman with spiked iron gray hair in a John Deere T-shirt whose name was Rita. She asked Bridget what kind of jam she was making, and when Bridget told her her face lit up.
“The Blackwell Farm strawberries were always the best in the county. It’s got to be the soil. And to think they’re still putting out with nobody taking care of them these last years. You got plenty of pectin? We carry it, on the back shelf.”
No one but her friends noticed Bridget’s slight hesitation, or the almost imperceptible note of shrillness to her laughter. “My goodness, is there anything you don’t carry?”
With two of the rocking chairs snugged against the Victrola in the cargo area, and the third securely strapped to the top of the SUV, the ladies waved good-bye to the Joneses, and Bridget put the car in gear. “Pectin,” she muttered under her breath. “I knew I left something out.”
Lindsay stared at her and Cici leaned forward from the backseat. “What are you talking about?”
“Pectin. It’s the stuff that turns fruit into jam. It makes it thick.” Bridget backed carefully out of the parking space.
“And you don’t have any? Why didn’t you say something?” Cici demanded.
“And let that woman know how stupid I am? She probably wins first prize at every county fair with her jams.”
“Bridget!” This was an accusatory chorus from both women, and Lindsay added, “Go back and get some!”
“No point,” Bridget replied with a sigh. “We already cooked the fruit and sugar. It’s too late to add it now.”
“Do you mean to tell me we have ten gallons of strawberry mush sitting on the stove?”
“Actually,” answered Bridget morosely, “I think it’s more like twelve.”
While Lindsay and Cici unloaded the rocking chairs and wrestled the antique Victrola into its place beneath the stained glass window, Bridget carried the canning jars into the kitchen. With her face pulled into a grimace of self-disgust, she dipped a wooden spoon into a pot of the strawberry mixture and watched it drip back into the pot like a thin soup. She picked up the pot to dump it into the sink, and then she noticed something.
On the work surface beside the range there was a book that had not been there before. She put the pot down and looked more closely. It was more than just a book. It was a recipe book, with a faded blue cover and pages that were dark and crisp around the edges with age. It was open to the section on “strawberries.”
Bridget snatched up the book and turned toward the door, drawing a breath to shout for Cici and Lindsay. But then she stopped, glanced down at the book in her hands, and again at the door. Cici and Lindsay had been with her all morning. Neither of them could have left the recipe book there, even as a poorly timed joke. But if they hadn’t done it, who had?
Bridget flipped through the pages. Some were stained, as the pages of any good cookbook should be, and on others notations had been made in a thin spidery handwriting: “reduce to half,” “serve with sweet cream,” “substitute pecans”—the same kinds of notes that Bridget’s own recipe books contained. The recipes themselves ranged from the oddly old-fashioned—“Milque toast for the Invalid”—to the outright bizarre, like “Brains and Eggs.” Bridget turned to the front page, and saw the publication date was 1939. And in the same faded, elegant script was written the name Emily Blackwell.
“Oh . . . my,” said Bridget softly, and sat down at the island. She turned back to the section on strawberries, and began to read.
“The moral of this story,” said Cici, raising her glass, “is ‘when life hands you strawberry mush, make coulis’!”
They sat on the front porch in their brand-new rocking chairs, sipping wine, watching the evening roll in like a slow-moving wave. Crickets chirped. Purple shadows rippled in the grass. The breeze smelled like honeysuckle. The subtle rhythmic thumping of three rockers against wood boards was like the tympani of complementary heartbeats. And seventeen jars of jewel-colored strawberry syrup—which when laced with framboise could legitimately be called coul
is—lined the pantry shelves.
“I should have thought of it myself,” Bridget said, shaking her head. “After all, what is coulis anyway except fruit puree with liquor?”
“I wouldn’t know,” Lindsay said. “Until today I’d never heard the word coulis. Now I’m hearing it in every other sentence.”
Bridget sipped her wine thoughtfully. “Do you think a house can talk to you?”
Lindsay made a snorting noise. “This one can. And what it says is, ‘Feed me, feed me!’ just like the man-eating plant in Little Shop of Horrors.”
“Very funny.”
“It’s true. Everywhere you look, there’s something else this house needs. You restore the stairs, and the floors look like crap. You paint the trim and that only makes the walls look dirty. You weed the rose garden and you have to resod the lawn. It never ends.”
Cici said, “I should have gotten another water heater.”
Lindsay rocked forward; Bridget rocked back. Both of them glanced at Cici.
“I was just thinking about how you were too proud to admit to Mrs. Jones that you’d forgotten the pectin,” Cici went on. “I think maybe I should have listened to her husband. I thought he was trying to prove he knew more than a bunch of women, and I wanted to prove that he didn’t, so I stuck to my guns. But we need another water heater.”
They rocked in silence for a while, while the tide of darkness seeped across the lawn, and lapped at the steps. The mountains in the distance looked like purple clouds stacked against an indigo sky. A handful of stars were sprinkled across the horizon like carelessly tossed jewels.
Bridget said, “How do you suppose the cookbook got there?”
“I think it was Lindsay’s ghost,” Cici said.
Bridget said, “I think the house was talking to me. It wanted me to have Emily Blackwell’s recipes, just like it wanted Lindsay to have the map of the gardens.”
“I don’t think the house cares whose recipes you have. I think it just wants to suck every drop of life’s blood out of us. It’s even got Cici buying it two water heaters.”
“Oh, Lindsay, hush. Nobody hauls a hundred and twenty-eight river stones by hand unless she wants to. You love this place, you know you do.”
Lindsay smiled to herself, sipping her wine. Piece by piece, the rose garden was beginning to reveal what it must have looked like in its glory. When the flagstone paths were fully uncovered, the statue was cleaned and centered, and the river rock wall was rebuilt around it, the garden would be a work of art. Next year she would plant baby’s breath around the wall and lavender along the path. It would be like a living bouquet.
“It’s like a blank canvas,” she admitted. “The only limit to what you can create is your imagination.”
“Speaking of which,” Cici said, “I’m ready to help get your art studio started whenever you are.”
“Oh, don’t worry about it. There’s not that much to do, and I have to finish my bedroom first. I think I’m going to do a Venetian plaster treatment.” Over the past weeks she had tried painting, paneling, and re-wallpapering, none of which had produced satisfactory results. The project, like everything else in the house, had become an exercise in patience.
“I wonder if Jonesie sells Venetian plaster.”
“I wouldn’t be a bit surprised.”
They laughed, softly, into the night.
“This whole house is kind of like a love affair, really,” said Cici after a moment. “You know, they say when you fall in love the body releases enough hormones to keep the feeling going for three to five years.”
“Those would be the hormones that make you stupid.”
“Right. And five years later you wake up in bed with some sweaty, hairy creature you never met before in your life.”
Lindsay said, “Do you think we’ll still be here in five years?”
No one answered, but the sound of the question turning over in their minds was almost palpable. So absorbed were they in their thoughts, in fact, that it was a moment before the sound of music—sweet, lilting, and a little tinny—registered with them. It took a moment longer to realize that the music was coming from inside the house.
They stopped rocking at once, listening, eyes wide in the darkness. “What is that?” Lindsay whispered.
“ ‘Roses of Picardy’,” Bridget whispered back.
Lindsay stared at her. “How could you possibly know that?”
Cici stood slowly. “It’s the Victrola,” she said.
Bridget stood, too, pressing close to Cici. “I don’t think those things play by themselves,” she whispered.
Lindsay inched to her feet. “Maybe this one does. Maybe . . . it’s glad to be home.”
Cici gave her one disparaging look, and then cast her gaze around the dim and shadowed porch, looking for a weapon. She found a twisted laurel branch that they had used to prop open the door while moving boxes in and out, and weighed it in her hand. It wasn’t very heavy, but it was better than nothing. She moved toward the door. Bridget whispered, “Not without me, you don’t!”
And Lindsay hurried to join them. “You’re not leaving me out here alone!”
Cici turned the doorknob carefully and they edged inside. They had left a single lamp burning on a low table by the fireplace, and the big room was filled with shadows. The music wafted out of the darkened corner of the room where the Victrola was located. The sound of it made gooseflesh rise on Cici’s arms. She fumbled for the light switch beside the door. The pendant overhead bathed them in a welcoming pool of light, and the staircase chandelier chased away all but the deepest shadows in the remainder of the room. They moved slowly forward, turning on lamps as they went. The lid of the Victrola was open, the turntable spinning, “Roses of Picardy” spilling from the speaker. Nothing else was amiss.
Their quick search of the house turned up nothing, and they met at the Victrola just as the scratchy old tune was winding down. Lindsay lifted the needle arm from the record. She said, “I don’t ever want to hear another word about ‘Lindsay’s ghost.’ It’s everybody’s ghost now.”
“I don’t know,” Bridget said. “You’re the one who brought a haunted Victrola into the house.”
Cici said uneasily, “We should probably lock the doors and windows.”
Since moving to the country, their suburban paranoia had gradually fallen away, partly because of the intoxicating and addictive nature of sleeping with windows open to the fresh air, and partly because many of the doors had not come with keys. Even now, with clear signs that an intruder had entered the house, they were reluctant to return to the habits that seemed to belong to another place, another time.
Bridget said, “We might be locking it in with us.”
“Great, Bridge. Thanks, Bridge.” Lindsay hugged her arms. “I’m going to sleep so much better now.”
Cici frowned a little. “There’s no ‘it.’ This”—she made a vague circular motion toward the Victrola—“is spring-operated. Obviously we left the needle on the record when we were moving it, and there was enough tension left in the spring from the demonstration at the store to play the record.”
“And it started up all by itself?”
“Sure,” Lindsay said, eager to agree. “Things like that happen all the time. Gravity.”
Bridget drew in a breath. “Okay. I believe that.”
Cici was still scowling at the Victrola. “Then you’re crazy.”
They were silent for a time, brooding. Then Bridget decided, “I think it was the house. And I think it’s saying, ‘Welcome home.’ ”
And at the looks the other two gave her she went on insistently, “Think about it. We have electricity even though the power company never turned on the power. A recipe book appears out of thin air to save our strawberries. And we have background music to make our evenings more pleasant. All of these are good things. The house is welcoming us home.”
“Bridget,” replied Lindsay after a respectful moment, “you are definitely crazy.”
“Entirely certifiable,” agreed Cici.
But neither of them could think of a better explanation, and that night, no one locked her windows.
Summer
Growing
9
In Which the Earth Moves and the Roof Caves In
“Miz Burke, can I just show you one thing?”
The ladies had only been in the house for a few months, but already they knew that those words, particularly when uttered by a workman, were never followed by good news. Cici and Lindsay were using paint scrapers and sandpaper to ready the front porch for painting; Bridget was in the garden. When the heating-and-air contractor poked his head out the front door and pronounced those fateful words, Cici looked at Lindsay, gave a small shrug of resignation, and followed him back inside.
The garden path was still only half restored, but the living room walls had been painted a pale shade of antique gold and the trim—including an endless chair rail and an acre of pressed tin ceiling—had been refreshed with gloss white. The floors were still rather dull and battered looking, but the rock wall in the garden was now eight inches high. Lindsay was still debating how to finish her bedroom walls, but Cici had completed the closets for Bridget’s and Lindsay’s rooms. No one had time to shop for furniture, so they ate all their meals at the wicker table on the porch, or sitting on stools at the kitchen island. The problem with taking on such a huge project, they soon discovered, was focus. No matter how much they accomplished, nothing ever seemed to really get done.
The central-heating and air-conditioning project had begun three weeks previously, at which time afternoon temperatures rarely surpassed the high seventies. To date, a forced air furnace had been wrestled into the cellar, several hundred feet of silver paper tubing coiled and snaked across the cellar floor, and random holes had been cut into the ceiling on every floor. There was as of yet no sign of an actual air-conditioning unit, and the temperature now rarely dropped below the high seventies. Cici couldn’t help wondering, as she followed the contractor down the stairs into the brick-floored cellar, whether the reason he was taking so long with the job was because the cellar was the only place in the house where it was cool enough to work.
