The Hawley Book of the Dead

by Chrysler Szarlan

  When I’d seen the photographs Carl e-mailed, I knew instantly which house was the one to restore for my own family. The lines of the Sears house were still true, the barn large and airy. But the widow’s walk was the main draw for me. It was a peculiar addition to a house of that era, a few hundred miles away from the sea. There is no record of why it was there, but since Urbane Sears had come originally from Gloucester, that seemed reason enough. Every other house built in that period in those seaside towns north of Boston had a widow’s walk. It was what Urbane was used to, I guessed. And compelling to me. Now I was a widow, after all. So I ignored the rambling King house, the Warriner house with its broad porch. Because as a young girl I had looked up and wondered so many times about the view from that narrow catwalk on the mansard roof. Although Jolon and I had managed to jig the locks of the church and the other houses, we had never been able to break into the Sears house to see that view. And when I’d asked Nan where the key was, she told me to mind my own beeswax.

  I remembered coming upon the houses with Jolon the first time we rode his pinto ponies bareback into the forest. It was the summer I turned eight, the very first summer we were allowed to ride on our own. Even then the abandoned village seemed to hold magic, to be a little unearthly, part of another world altogether. Although they’d been deserted for so many years, the houses were not decayed. I’d thought Nan was crazy when she’d urged me to go to Hawley as a place of refuge. When Carl Streeter sent the photos, I expected collapsed roofs and rotting hulls of houses. But they were the same as when I’d first seen them as a child. Untouched by time. It did seem as if the Five Corners was waiting for me.

  All the same, everyone around Hawley probably thought I was crazy, to move there. The houses were in good shape, considering their age, but they were a far cry from the pristine homes of the other city folk who’d migrated to Hawley Village. They would need a lot of work to rise to that standard, so I was sure all kinds of rumors were flying. That I was the heiress of a steel or soap-producing family, that I’d married an old billionaire who’d finally kicked the bucket. That I’d won the lottery. The possibilities were endless, really. As for the fence, the electronic gate, well, we had to be wealthy to move there in the first place, and wealthy people were often paranoid, as well as crazy, weren’t they? But there was no security against ghosts. Mrs. Pike wasn’t the only one who reacted strangely to the mention of the Five Corners.

  I’d asked Carl Streeter to hire electricians and plumbers, so the house would be marginally habitable when we arrived. But when he’d called Hawley or Plainfield contractors, they’d never called me with the estimates. Carl hemmed and hawed, but finally had to hire from Pittsfield, the nearest city “down the valley,” as they say in the hill towns.

  Ghosts or not, the house was as ready for us as a hasty few weeks could make it. It had seemed silly to move all our things, so I’d enlisted Mrs. Pike to shop for the basics: some towels and sheets, a few pots and pans, plates and glasses. Carl had also been there to take delivery of the necessary pieces of plain pine furniture I’d bought online, so we had beds set up, a sofa, a kitchen table and chairs, a desk for my office.

  Even so, the big house still felt empty and unlived in. It felt like it might be haunted. Mrs. Pike had begun cleaning, but the house retained an ancient smell, of old smoke and dry wood. An aura of disuse and abandonment pervaded the very air. Cobwebs still clung to corners, and the walls needed washing. The floors were stained, the windows were dirty. But at least we could use new dishes, sleep in clean beds that first night.

  I wanted to thank Carl, and when a big man with white hair and a handlebar moustache stepped out of the kitchen and crushed my hand with his big meaty one, I knew I’d have the chance.

  “I came to let Mrs. Pike in, been fiddling with the water heater downstairs when she wasn’t happy with the temperature. Good to meet you in person. I’d be glad to show you around, since I’m here.”

  After he’d taken me over the house, we went out to the barn. It still needed to be cleared of the bits and bobs that had been stored there and never taken out—nothing interesting, only old boards and cans of dried-up paint, some shredded old canvas tarps, and endless bales of musty, decaying hay. I’d have fresh hay delivered before the horses came, but I made a mental note to get the old nasty stuff cleared out, adding it to about a hundred other mental notes. So much needed to be done. But at least we were here. Safe. I crossed my fingers behind my back whenever I thought that word.

  “Yut, I remember this old barn.” Carl thumped a chestnut beam, and the dust motes flew in the late afternoon light. “I remember the auction, oh, it must of been twenty years after the buildings were abandoned,” he told me. “This was in the forties, during the war. I was just a kid. We lived in Lithia then, but I had Hawley cousins. I only moved to Hawley when I married my Brenda, who was a Hawley girl. Anyway, Mother took me to the auction. She bought a pie safe, and other junk. They had the houses open so we could all troop through, pick what we wanted to bid on. So we went in.” Carl paused for effect. “And you know, it was like everybody up and left in the middle of some ordinary day. This barn still full of hay, grain still in the mangers, set up for the night feeding. You should of seen it. You’d think over the years some teenagers would figure to use the houses for a hangout. Destroy stuff, torch the furniture for campfires, maybe. But when we went in, it was all just as if it was left maybe a few weeks before. Stuff was dusty, that’s about it. Tables still set for dinner, a bed or two still unmade. What wasn’t auctioned off was cleared out and hauled to the dump.”

  Of course, by the time Jolon and I discovered the Five Corners, the buildings were empty. I had always assumed that the abandonment had been gradual, one family dying out, another moving, leaving the houses unclaimed. My family among them, leaving Nan holding the bag eventually. What Carl told me put a different spin on things.

  “Why was so much left?” I asked. Carl was closing the barn door. I turned back because he hadn’t answered, was still fiddling with the latch. “Carl?”

  “Huh?” He finally turned toward me, a little reluctantly, I thought. “Did you ask me something?”

  “I was wondering why so much was left. When people moved away, why did they leave their things?” I sensed more story, something I was good at, digging the dirt of the past, digging nuggets of magic or of fact. None of Nan’s tales had featured the abandonment of the town. I had always figured it had happened long before she was born.

  Carl scuffed his loafered foot at a big shiny beetle on the gravel, smashing it to a slimy pulp. Then he shoved his hands in his pockets, peered up at the blue of the sky. “Well, I couldn’t exactly say. Maybe they were in a hurry to get somewhere. To get to a job. Probably moved to cities and lived in small apartments.” He looked at me appraisingly, looked away. “Hey, that’s some spiffy tow package you got on that 4Runner.”

  I had no idea why he was trying to distract me, but I was charmed by the mystery. “You’d think they would have sold the furniture before they moved.”

  “You have horses, right? I’d expect you’ll want to think about a real truck if you’re going to do any serious towing.” His face was shiny with sweat, although the day was drawing in, the air cooling. I didn’t bother replying. I knew we were done with the subject of the abandonment of Hawley Five Corners. He wandered over to his own truck, tucked behind the barn. He got in, closed the door, looking sheepish, as if he’d done something wrong and I’d caught him at it. “I’ll be sure to get back to you about getting the rest of the junk out of the barn.”

  “That will be fine, Carl. Just call my cell.”

  He started the truck, and I waited for him to drive off. Instead, he surprised me. He bent his head out the window toward me, almost whispered, “About the town. It’s just stories. Don’t mean anything. I wouldn’a opened my fat mouth, but I forgot for a minute you’re not from here.” He pounded the truck door in farewell, and I waved him off.

  6

&n
bsp; When I returned to the house, the girls were still running from room to room, exclaiming over all the fireplaces, the white moldings with their deeply carved grapes. The same things I’d loved about the house when I was young myself and peeking through windows.

  “Hey, look at this cool fireplace. It has Noah’s Ark all around it!” Caleigh crowed.

  “No way!” I heard Grace pounding into the parlor. “OMG, she’s right. Fai, c’mere!”

  “There’s giraffes, and a lion …”

  “Cats and bears, and a monkey!”

  “What are those things?”

  “Anteaters. See, their long tongues are sticking out,” Fai chimed in. “But, you guys, you have to come see this thing in the kitchen. It’s a huge iron thing with a horse pulling a sleigh on the side of it … oh, I can’t describe it, you have to come look.”

  I heard more pounding feet, then Caleigh saying, “Didn’t you all ever see a woodstove before? Even I know what a woodstove looks like.”

  “That’s a woodstove? It looks more like the wicked witch’s oven. And where’d you ever see one?”

  Caleigh answered in her superior ten-year-old voice, “Catalogs.”

  Nathan entered, bags still in hand. “Will you just drop those,” I ordered, and he did.

  He took a moment to look around him, then told me, “This house is fabulous.”

  It was. Our house in Nevada seemed brash by contrast, too new, uncouth. Even in its desolate state, the Hawley house was an aging beauty from another era: elegant, timeless, built before the country was a country at all, when Massachusetts was still a colony and wealth could be measured by the number of windows a house boasted.

  “Mom!” Caleigh yelled. “Come look!” I followed her voice to the dining room, large and formal. Even unfurnished, it looked grand. At the end of the room was a mural, painted on the wall. I found the girls clustered before it.

  “This is awesome.” Fai took my hand. Her eyes were glowing.

  “It’s in bad shape.” One of the only things in the house that had really suffered with the years, the paint flaking, patches of dampness spotting it. But I remembered it resplendent with color. Silvery green willows hanging over azure ponds, shining red barns, the white houses standing ghostly among autumn trees that were like plumes of smoke, scarlet and gold and purple. Tiny people rode horses on the hilly roads, stood outside their houses, hung wash. It was Hawley Five Corners, dated 1824. Painted by an itinerant artist whose name had been long lost and forgotten. “Jolon and I used to look through the windows at it.”

  “Who’s Jolon?” Grace demanded, instantly alert to a secret.

  How could I explain the complexity of Jolon? “He was my best friend,” I hedged. I was on safe ground there. He had been.

  “You mean your boyfriend?” Fai goaded me.

  “Maybe.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “He left, a long time ago.”

  “Like you did.”

  “Like I did.”

  “But now you’re back. Maybe he is, too.”

  “I seriously doubt it.”

  “You could Google him. Or find him on Facebook. Then you’d know.” Fai hated to let things go.

  “Shut up.” Grace pounced on her. “Mom doesn’t need to find any old stupid boyfriend. You make her sound like some Facebook slut. She isn’t even on Facebook.”

  “Well, I guess my virtue is safe, then. That’s a relief.”

  Grace was under the impression—they all were—that I was functionally illiterate when it came to modern technology. The Amazing Maskelynes’ website had been kept glossy and exciting by strangers to me, our Facebook page as well. Fai was right, though. It could be that simple. Maybe I would google Jolon. It might dispel my nostalgia to know that he was a bank manager somewhere in Wisconsin, or a sheep farmer in South Dakota. But nothing I imagined seemed right. Nothing real could satisfy me. It was better he stay in the past, where he belonged.

  “Hey, what about dinner?” Fai asked suddenly.

  “I’ll set the table. You girls need to help me find everything,” Nathan told them. “We’ll eat in half an hour.”

  I wanted to get to my office, to make more mental notes as I looked it over. It was a room I’d be spending significant amounts of time in.

  I had a new job: writing scripts for other magicians, other magic shows. Henry, my agent, suggested it. The money I had seemed like a lot, but with none coming in, it wouldn’t last forever. If I was going to support my family, I had to do something. I couldn’t perform, probably never would again, but the shows I scripted were moneymakers. I’d never had a flop. It used to be that magic shows were just one trick or illusion after another with no theme, no integrity. All that changed with David Copperfield, Siegfried and Roy, Cirque du Soleil—their spellbinding spectacle shows told intricate stories. And if I brought anything to the Amazing Maskelynes beyond my disappearing act, it was my ability to weave a story.

  Writing is a kind of magic. One person sits in a room alone and makes marks on a page that represent the images in her mind. Another person looks at those marks, weeks or months or a hundred years later, and similar images appear in that person’s mind. Magic. Plays and choreography hold yet another level of magic and meaning: The marks on the page leap to action in another person’s body, to be seen by thousands of others. The ability to weave that kind of magic paid well in Las Vegas. Stage magicians were a dime a dozen there, but a show that would run for years—that was gold.

  I planned to write them in the third-floor attic of the Sears house, my choice for an office from the photos Carl had e-mailed. It wasn’t anything like my old office, a tiny closetlike room in our magic workshop, a warehouse outside of Las Vegas, where Dan and Jeremy and our engineering crew planned and constructed new illusions. My office there was usually crammed with bits and pieces from tricks that were in the works or abandoned. Casts of heads and arms, boxes of discarded wigs or masks. The junk that magic produces. It was also filled with sound drifting in from the warehouse, including the occasional explosion. It was dear to me, the place where I plotted the story lines of our shows. My office in Hawley could never be the same, so I wanted it to be as different as possible. But it held its own magic—the view from the widow’s walk.

  The way out to it had been sealed for some long-forgotten reason. Perhaps so children like my young self wouldn’t climb out and fall three stories. I’d asked Carl to have the French doors stripped of the plywood that had covered them, so I could throw them open and walk out in fine weather. My refuge in the trees, my sanctuary from the real world, which no longer contained any magic for me.

  I climbed the wide flight of stairs. What had once been the attic seemed like an attic still; no Ikea desk and chair could change that. But I could polish the chestnut beams so they’d glow in the afternoon light. My desk was set up at the far window, with a view of the treetops. If ever I could write anything, this was a fine place to do it.

  The small dish that would give us satellite TV and Internet access was just visible, just the edge of it, from my window. The girls assumed that there was Internet and cell access everywhere in the world. But there was none in the forest, without satellite to bring it.

  I set my laptop down, booted it. While I waited for the screen to come up, I went to the antique French doors that looked out to the formerly forbidden widow’s walk. I opened one side, and saw myself reflected in the waves and bubbles of old glass, a small woman with wild red hair and a pale face. A widow, walking.

  Then I startled. There was another face next to mine in the glass. I gasped and spun around. Across the room from me was a portrait of a woman in nineteenth-century dress. She was young, lovely, her upswept auburn hair framed a pale oval face. A straight nose, classical in its lines. Hazel eyes, calm but with a glint of irony. A slight smile played on her lips. Her gaze revealed culture, intelligence. She was seated in a carved chair, her arm resting on a table covered in a crimson cloth, her finger pointing at the
floor. Frothy lace adorned her wrists and slender neck. A delicate pink rose and trailing vine grew by her chair. I walked closer. Her ring—was it a wedding ring?—sparkled, as did her eyes, and the gold chain she wore that pooled at her waist. She had been a wealthy woman. Her dress was black silk. Perhaps she was a young widow. Like me.

  I thought that maybe the painting had been marooned in the house, a relic of the past, as the mural downstairs had been. But as I examined it more closely, that seemed less probable. In spite of a patina of fine lines, the painting glowed, shone, as if it had been well cared for. The frame was delicate, richly gold-leafed wood. No dust bloomed on it. I looked into the woman’s eyes. She compelled me. She seemed to be watching me, appraising me.

  “Who are you?” I asked impulsively, and she looked as if at any moment she might answer. But of course she didn’t. She was just a painting. It was strange, though, that I hadn’t noticed the portrait just a half hour before, when Carl showed me the house.

  I stepped out into the cooling air and breathed it in. I walked along the roofline of the house, looking over my domain, new and old. The steeple of the church, the slate roofs of the empty houses, the tall, protective wall with its comforting electric wire receding into the woods, the massive gate with the computerized entrance. Even with all the beauty surrounding me I felt forlorn. I had to face the fact that here I was, without Jeremy. I’d made a home without him. As hastily thrown together as the Hawley house was, it was our home now. A home we would never share with him. How final it seemed. I realized, though, that something had altered in me. Under the darkening sky, I felt I could breathe for the first time since Jeremy died, that in this place I could live my life and keep what was left of our family safe. Compared to what I’d had, it wasn’t much. But it was something.