In Sheep's Clothing

by Rett MacPherson

  “Sounds like a good living, anyway,” Colin said. “Even if it is a lot of work.”

  “Oh sure,” she said. “We’ve done this our whole lives, even before we moved up here, and we’ve never had to do the nine-to-five thing, and all the rush-hour traffic. That’s just not for me, no way. You know, I’ve always said that people who live in big cities are only livestock. They simply don’t realize it.”

  “That’s a little harsh,” Colin said.

  “Whatever,” she said. “I call it as I see it.”

  It disturbed me that Aunt Sissy had described herself and Uncle Joe as being too old to do all of the work by themselves. What disturbed me was the fact that, indeed, they were pushing seventy. And that she was aware of it. It just seems so sad when a person realizes that the time of doing what they love is coming to an end. It wasn’t as if they were going off to a nursing home anytime soon, but there were limitations to what they could do now. And even more limitations were to come.

  Colin stretched and rubbed his belly. “This was an amazing meal.”

  “What did you think, only Jalena was capable of cooking a good meal?” Aunt Sissy asked.

  “No, it’s just … uh…”

  “Bacon and sausage came from the neighbor’s farm down the road. Eggs are ours. We made the syrup. All natural and fresh ingredients.”

  “Well, you can tell,” he said.

  “Darn right, you can tell.”

  Aunt Sissy turned her back and Colin rolled his eyes as if to indicate how seriously she took her breakfasts. I smiled, because that was the way she had always been. Nobody ever knew how to take her exactly.

  “Coffee,” Rudy said.

  Aunt Sissy laughed and I shook my head. “He doesn’t talk much until he’s got enough caffeine in him to run the space shuttle,” I said.

  “Uncle Joe’s not a morning person, either.” She slammed a coffee mug in front of Rudy, filled it up with coffee, and gave a little laugh. Rudy picked up the mug without blinking and drank two gulps of hot coffee. He then closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and sighed.

  “Good morning, lovely people!” he said.

  “You’re pathetic,” I said.

  “What?” he asked.

  “Hey, I’m gonna run out and say hello to Uncle Joe,” I said.

  “You’re not going to eat?” Aunt Sissy asked. “Don’t tell me you’re one of these weird women who don’t eat breakfast?”

  “No, I’m going to eat. I just want to go say hello. I’ll be five minutes at the most.”

  “All right, but if your food gets cold, it’s your fault.”

  I found my shoes by the door in the living room and stepped out onto the front porch. The floor of the porch was painted slate gray and its outer perimeter was surrounded by lilac bushes in full bloom. I thought about how weird it was that my lilac bush in the backyard had bloomed a month ago. In fact, as I looked out across the yard, I saw that the trees had that surreal green to them that they get right after the buds have just opened. I took a deep breath and smelled the greenness. As I stepped down onto the concrete step, I noticed something engraved in it. Nothing fancy—in fact, it looked as if somebody had just taken a tree branch and scribbled it: 1858. That’s all it said.

  I headed over to the stables and saw Uncle Joe as he was rounding the corner with a bucket full of water. “Hey, you need help with that?” I called out.

  “Torie! Good to see you.”

  I ran up and gave him a hug, careful not to slosh the water all around. “Good to see you, too.”

  “How was the drive?” he asked.

  “Could have been better, but I won’t complain,” I said. “Do you have another bucket?”

  “Here, take this one, I’ll go get the other one.”

  I took the bucket from him and headed into the stables. I was amazed at the sheer size of the draft horses in the barn. Their heads alone were about as long as a three-year-old was tall. For the most part they ignored me, and I began looking for a place to empty the bucket. I stood there scratching my head, because I couldn’t find a water trough to pour it in. Uncle Joe came back and realized my dilemma.

  “Oh, down at the end, just outside the door.”

  I carried the bucket down the length of the stable and found the trough by the fence. I poured the water in and watched it mix with the water that was already in there. I always feel sorry for animals because their water is never clean. “How many horses do you have now?” I asked.

  “Just the two Belgians. Eat me out of house and home.”

  “I bet,” I said.

  Uncle Joe recited how much food they ate in a day, how much water they drank, how much they cost to be shod, and so forth. It seemed as if he was just making small talk to avoid having to talk about the issue that was really bothering him. I could always sense when people were doing that.

  I went along with it and asked a few questions about the horses. When I had run out of questions to ask, I asked the only thing I could think of. “So you’ve got llamas?”

  “Yup, your aunt’s idea.”

  “She’s weird.”

  “Weirder than you know,” he said. Uncle Joe was one of those all-around nice guys. Pleasant face, kind blue eyes, and a receding hairline that nearly reached the middle of his scalp. He seemed to always be busy and had a habit of talking when he had nothing to say. Sort of like me. I find that an endearing quality, but believe it or not, there are people who don’t like it.

  He glanced about nervously and finally decided to say what it was that was on his mind. “Glad you’re here, Torie. I’m worried about Sissy. You find out what’s wrong with her. Okay?”

  “If … if I can,” I said, a little shocked.

  He gave me the most pathetic look I’ve ever seen. It was almost as if he were crying without actually crying. “If you can’t find out what’s wrong, then nobody can.”

  Three

  It was difficult going back into Aunt Sissy’s house and eating breakfast as if Uncle Joe had not just said the oddest thing in the world to me. But I tried my best. Sometimes I think I deserve an Oscar for my performances. Subtlety is not my strong point, by any stretch of the imagination, but I can pretend that nothing is wrong if I have to.

  Breakfast was great. I’m not sure how one woman could make scrambled eggs taste so much better than anybody else’s, but she could. Rudy had gone upstairs to get ready to go fishing, but Colin was still sitting at the end of the long breakfast table. “What are you waiting for, scraps?” I asked.

  “No,” he said. “You know, you really should be nicer to me.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it would make you a better person.”

  Before I could say anything, Aunt Sissy jumped in. “He’s right, you know.”

  “I should be nicer to him?”

  “I didn’t say that,” she said. “But it would make you a better person if you were. I, personally, would be mean as hell to him.”

  “Oh my God,” Colin said to me, all wide-eyed. “There are two of you.”

  Aunt Sissy and I burst into laughter, and Colin couldn’t hold it any longer and joined us. After he had regained control of himself, he rubbed his face with his hands and sighed. “I’m going fishing.”

  “Have fun,” I said. “Don’t drown.”

  “I’ll try not to,” he said as he left the kitchen.

  “Don’t get eaten by a crocodile or anything.”

  “Not a chance,” I heard him say from the stairwell.

  Aunt Sissy had finally sat down and begun eating her own breakfast. The farm wife always eats last, and it just doesn’t seem fair, since she’s the one who does all the work. Her kitchen was beautiful. Deep mahogany cabinets hung on two walls and blond wood made up the floor. It looked like pine of some sort. In Missouri, I worked for the historical society giving tours of the Gaheimer House, which is one of the oldest buildings in New Kassel. So I always notice things like beams in the ceilings, wood floors, and mouldings.
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br />   “I forgot how beautiful this house is,” I said. I had visited her a handful of times since she moved up here twelve years ago.

  “Yes,” she said. “I love it. Sometimes I think it was built just for me, and the land surrounding it was created just for me.”

  “I’ve lived in New Kassel all my life,” I said. “And I sort of feel the same way about it. Like, there’s just no place else on earth that I would ever feel comfortable with. But I wonder sometimes if that’s just because I’ve never known any other place.”

  “All I know,” Aunt Sissy said, “is when we pulled into the driveway here, I really felt like I had come home.”

  “That’s great,” I said. Aunt Sissy had been born and raised in southeast Missouri, and lived thirty of her married years in that same area. The fact that she could move in her late fifties and find a place that she liked even better was comforting somehow. As if there’s magic in the smallest corners of the universe.

  “Of course, the house had been completely renovated,” she said.

  “Really?”

  “The house that was originally built here is long gone. Well, not completely,” she said. “The back porch and the cellar underneath it are still from the original homestead.”

  “How long ago was that?”

  “Eighteen fifty-eight,” she said.

  “Oh,” I said. “I saw those numbers carved in the front concrete.”

  She gave me a peculiar look and then smiled. “Yes, the steps are the original steps, too. The house burned down and all that survived was the back porch, the cellar, the front steps, and the chimney.”

  “Wow,” I said. “When did it burn?”

  “Not sure,” she said. “But I know that the land and the ruins just sort of stood neglected for a while and then another house was built here in 1878, I think.”

  “Is that this house?”

  “For the most part. They just built around the chimney and the back porch and incorporated it into the new house. Isn’t that odd?”

  “Yeah, sort of. Maybe the person who built it just couldn’t tear down what was left,” I said.

  “Well, anyway,” she said, clearing her dishes. “There was a fire in that house, too, and it destroyed the far western part of the house. So they rebuilt it. If you walk down the hall toward the bedrooms, you can see where they added the new part after the fire. Because the floors are uneven.”

  “Oh, that’s cool,” I said. “I love things like that. It gives the house personality.”

  “Anyway, a family of thirteen lived here all during the Depression and the war years. Then it stood abandoned all through the sixties and seventies, and finally somebody bought it in the eighties and started renovating it. I mean, they just gutted the house and started from scratch.”

  “Wow,” I said. “That’s amazing.”

  Aunt Sissy put the dirty dishes into the dishwasher.

  “You need some help with anything?” I asked.

  “No,” she said, putting detergent in the slot and slapping the door shut. She stood there a minute thinking about what to say next. “It took that family almost five years to renovate this house. They put it on the market and nobody bought it.”

  “Why? It’s a gorgeous house.”

  “Well, at the time, it only came with a few acres. The place is hell and gone from any major city. I mean, we’re practically smack-dab in between Duluth and the Twin Cities. It would be an impossible commute and there just aren’t that many jobs around here that could support living in a house like this. I mean, they were asking a lot of money for the place,” she said.

  “So, how’d you get it?”

  “After a few years, the family who owned the property next to it decided they wanted to sell off about a hundred acres. So, suddenly, if you put a hundred acres with this house, you’ve got a farm. Our real estate agent called us in the spring of 1990 and said that there was this place she knew of that had a hell of a house, with a hundred acres adjacent to it,” she said. “The problem was it was in Minnesota.”

  “That’s an amazing story,” I said.

  “Well, yes,” she said. “Because we had told our real estate agent that we were willing to relocate out of state. We’d told her we would move to Colorado, Montana, Wyoming. We never said anything about Minnesota. She just happened across it and thought it was exactly what we were looking for. And it was. When we got here, there were repairs that needed to be done, because it had stood vacant for so long. Outbuildings had to be built. But we bought the hundred acres next to it and the house and have never regretted it one moment.”

  “Well, I think this house is you,” I said. “My whole childhood, I remember you and Uncle Joe living on the farm in Ste. Genevieve. And I thought you guys were insane for moving up here. But then, when I came to see you the first time, I fell in love with it. And I remember thinking, well, of course she moved up here. Look at the place.”

  Aunt Sissy smiled.

  “You must love it,” I said. “Because you know a lot about its history. Most people can’t tell you the name of the people who owned their houses before them, much less the history you just gave me. All the fires and everything. You must have done some research on it.”

  “Yeah,” she said and looked out the window. She paused just a little too long, and it made me worry. “You seen the new quilt I’m working on?”

  “No,” I said.

  “It’s out there on the back porch.”

  “On the back porch? Won’t the sunlight fade it?”

  “Oh, I pull the shades when I’m not working on it. But there is nothing better than natural sunlight to quilt by,” she said. “Go on. Go have a look.”

  “Okay,” I said. I went out to the enclosed back porch to take a look at the quilt that she was working on. If I was not mistaken, it was a Lemoyne Star, done in earth tones. Greens, gold, browns. I rubbed my fingers across the stitches that she had most recently sewn. I couldn’t be near a quilt and not touch it, just as I couldn’t be near a piano and not run my fingers over the keys. Her stitches were so tiny. I had recently begun quilting. I have to admit, it’s addictive, and I find myself buying fabric that I don’t even have projects for. But I was nowhere near this good, and wasn’t sure I ever would be.

  Aunt Sissy came up behind me. “This is the porch that survived the first fire,” she said and looked around.

  “The quilt is gorgeous.”

  “Thank you,” she said. “It’s for you. I’m almost finished with it.”

  “Oh, Aunt Sissy,” I said, chills dancing down my spine. “You can’t give this to me.”

  “Sure, I can. I’ve quilted so many quilts in my life. All my kids got more quilts than they have beds to put them on. You can have this one. You’ve always been my favorite niece.”

  I swiped at a tear and hugged her. Her favorite niece. And that was saying something, considering my father’s family was huge. There were many nieces and nephews to choose from. “Thank you,” I managed to say.

  “Don’t go gettin’ all misty on me,” she said.

  “Oh, of course not. Never,” I said.

  “You see that?” she asked and pointed to a small trapdoor in the floor.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “That was the cellar.”

  “Oh,” I said, wondering why she was back to this subject. A peculiar feeling flowered in my chest.

  “That was where she died,” she said as if it were the obvious next step in the conversation.

  “Where who died?”

  She shrugged. “Not sure. Neighbor told me there was a girl who died during the first fire. She was in the cellar and died of smoke inhalation,” she said.

  “Oh, Aunt Sissy. Neighbors get things wrong,” I said. “She might be overexaggerating.”

  She shrugged. “Maybe.”

  “Is there … are you … why are you telling me this? Is it bothering you that somebody may have died here? You can’t let something like that ruin how much you love this place.�
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  “Oh, no,” she said. “That’s not it.”

  “Well, what is it?”

  “I don’t know exactly,” she said. She paused a moment and opened the back window, allowing a very cool, moist breeze to float across the quilt. “I just think it’s a coincidence. And I hate coincidences.”

  “What’s a coincidence?”

  “Well, when the couple that renovated the place started working, they found some things—”

  “Not bones, I hope. Please tell me they didn’t find bones. Because that will ruin the place for me.”

  “No, they didn’t find bones,” Aunt Sissy said.

  “Whew, good,” I said with a sigh.

  “There were things in the cellar and in one of the outbuildings, and they told me that they belonged to the family that lived here during the Depression,” she said.

  “Okay,” I said, wondering just where she was going with this.

  “Well, they put everything up in the attic and told me that I could do what I wanted with the stuff, since nobody really knew who it belonged to and nobody claimed it. That beveled mirror in the guest room that you’re in was one of the items.”

  “Very pretty mirror,” I said. I sounded like one of those birds. Polly want a cracker. Very pretty mirror. Kaaawww.

  “So, I kept the stuff,” she said.

  “There’s no law against that.”

  “One of the things I found was a book.”

  “A book. What kind of book?”

  “Melodrama. You know, like one of those Brontë girls would write.”

  “Who was it by?”

  “Don’t know. That’s part of the problem. It was written in longhand, still on paper. It was not bound or published. And there was no name on it.”

  She was driving me mad. Why didn’t she just tell me what it was she wanted me to know? I stopped and thought a moment. Usually when people did this type of thing, it was because they were uncomfortable discussing whatever the subject was. “Did you read it?”