by Paul Boor
Adam had loaded their trunks and drawn the wagon, a small, open buckboard that was the handiwork of local wainwright George Parsons, to the station’s dock. In his hometown at last, Nicolas gave his daughter a squeeze before climbing into the wagon in the freezing rain.
The trip had worn on Nicolas’s nerves; it had been four long days and nights on the train. The noxious by-products of his Chicago mix pulsed in his veins, his guts twisted, and his heart beat an irregular staccato as he settled into the open wagon between his daughter and his right-hand man. Abigail gave their chestnut mare a slap of the reins. Her watery blue eyes—exact copies of Nicolas’s—flashed in the station’s lamplight, and the wagon bumped and slithered into the darkness on its way along the Black River to the village of Forestport and the house that Nicolas Van Horne called home.
29
The Homes of Forestport
In the moonless night the inky surface of the Black River Road wound toward Forestport like a broad-backed serpent. The woods still held a heavy snowpack, but the road was bare, rutted, and slow going. The three travelers huddled together on the plank of the buckboard and pulled a canvas tarp around them. The wool woodsman’s caps they’d donned were soon encrusted with a cake of frozen slush. The only sounds were the gentle hiss of sleet and the clomp clomp of the mare’s hooves in the half-frozen mud.
“Father—don’t fret.”
“You say don’t fret, but you know as well as I do an ice drought will kill our local business. The icehouse is nearly empty, and now a thaw? The last ice harvest sustains us through the summer, Abby. Without it, we’ll have nothing to supply the towns in the valley.”
“All we need is one more cold snap, Father. I’ll check the prediction from Albany at the telegraph office tomorrow.”
“I’ll trust my own weather instruments, thank you, before the blasted wire from Albany.”
Abigail knew well her father’s fanatical obsession with his instruments, though she’d be the first to admit he was usually right about the weather. “You need rest, Father,” she said. “You’ve had a long voyage.”
Soon, the houses of the village began to appear on the roadside.
The village of Forestport sprang up where the Black River emerges from the great Adirondack woods; it had always been a town of lumberjacks and mill workers. Each spring, when the ice went out of the lakes, rafts of logs crashed down the Black River to be hewn at Forestport’s sawmill. The finished lumber was then floated on barges down the Forestport feeder canal to the Erie Canal and the rising cities of New York State.
The Black River widened where it flowed through the village of Forestport, slowing to a broad, still expanse of water known by the locals as “Town Lake.” Town Lake divided Forestport into two parts—the north side and the south side. Abigail turned their buckboard down Mill Street to the poorer, south side of town, where a row of small, off-kilter frame houses leaned precariously toward the slushy surface of Town Lake. She rolled the wagon to a stop at Adam’s house. In another quarter mile, Mill Street ended at Forestport Falls, where an escarpment of granite choked Town Lake into the cascade that drove the flume for the sawmill’s six-foot-diameter ripsaw—a blade notorious for its size and speed, and the reason Forestport was known as a town of one-armed men.
Father and daughter helped Adam drag his seaman’s chest through the back door of his pride and joy on Mill Street, a two-story frame structure without porch or portico. Three steps and they were in the kitchen.
Born in an Adirondack “rough camp”—a shack with little more than a roof and four tarpaper walls—Adam Klock had been raised among the hermits, reprobates, and recluses who inhabited the far north shore of Big Indian Lake. Attendance at common school was mandated through age twelve by New York State law, and Adam’s strong Seneca mother would have no criminal under her roof, no matter how humble the home she provided. So Adam snowshoed for an hour to Forestport Common School, where he proved to be among the brightest of his classmates. During summer vacations Adam forgot his books and became a leader of a pack of wild boys ages nine to twelve—Nicolas Van Horne among them—who roamed the woods, creeks, and encampments of the Indian Lakes.
After common school Adam ran traplines across the Adirondacks, from the summits of the High Peaks to the bogs of the Moose River plains, sleeping on the cold ground, in a hollowed-out log, or, at best, in a makeshift lean-to. He worked the woods as a lumberjack. He amused city slickers as a backcountry guide who guaranteed the biggest fish. When he joined in the ice trade of his classmate Nicolas Van Horne, though, he married a sturdy Dutch woman, bought a lot on the south side of Forestport and built this house, squaring every pine board and hammering every nail. To Adam Klock—trapper, lumberjack, Adirondack guide, and jack-of-all-trades—this modest house on Mill Street was a castle.
Flashes of lightning glared off the whitewashed clapboards of Adam’s place as Nicolas ducked his six-foot frame under the doorjamb and into the warmth of the kitchen. The two rooms on the first floor, a kitchen and front parlour, were low ceilinged and simply finished; a steep, narrow set of stairs led from the kitchen to the second floor, where the couple shared a bedroom with their four sons.
Adam’s wife, Gertrude, was pulling sheets of strudel dough paper-thin on the kitchen table. “Thank the Lord!” she cried, throwing up her hands. “Home at last, you two wanderers.”
Gertrude Klock, the daughter of a failed lumber baron, was a stocky, deeply religious woman and the chief ledger-keeper at the sawmill. It was unclear how she ended up married to the crazy part-Seneca, or how she’d cured him of his wild Indian ways, but whatever her methods, it was strong medicine.
“Ah, sweet Gertie!” Adam said with a light in his eye.
Gertrude opened her arms and hugged her husband, leaving a perfect set of handprints in flour on the back of his damp jacket. “I’m grateful, Mr. Van Horne.” She reached out to flour Nicolas’s hand. “Bless you for bringing him back in one piece.”
The excitement raised a rattle in Gertrude’s chest. She turned away to stifle a ragged cough. “Pardon me, but this dampness, this thawing weather…I was ailing something fierce while you men were gone,” she said, without mentioning the word “consumption.”
The tiny kitchen smelled of baking pastry and the first vapours from a coffeepot set to boil at the back of the stove. Once her cough subsided, Gertrude brushed the flour from her hands, stoked the fire in the kitchen stove with a stout chunk of maple, and invited the three travelers to “circle round and dry out.” She wrapped her hands in a towel and pulled a hot pan of strudel from the oven. She set the pastry, oozing butter and the smell of cinnamon, on the cooling rack next to the stove, then took a moment to catch her breath.
“Gracious me, you must be fretting about the thaw, Mr. Van Horne.”
“How long has it been like this, Gert?”
“Weeks. We’ll just cool this sweet strudel a few minutes, and it’ll take your mind off this awful weather.”
She fixed a kind, tired gaze on Nicolas’s eyes. Her lips, dark and off-color, trembled when she spoke again:
“You’re one who’s most deserving of God’s bounty, if anyone is. I’m sure He’ll see fit to bring you another month of Canadian air, and more ice.”
“I hope you’re right,” Nicolas said with a sigh.
“I’ll be praying for it.”
Though sunrise was still an hour away, a ruckus was raised in the bedroom overhead and four sturdy boys with dark, glossy hair and bright smiles tumbled into the kitchen to thump and hug their father. The oldest, nearly a man at fifteen, offered Nicolas a hearty handshake and prepared to set off for his job in the woods. The younger boys rushed back upstairs to finish homework before school. Gertie cut thick chunks of her apple strudel and poured coffee. Abigail and Adam ate like wolves, but Nicolas wouldn’t touch a crumb; his stomach had been filled with lead ever since Chicago.
Freezing drizzle had been falling steadily. When the Van Hornes left Adam’s place, sheets o
f ice fell from the wagon wheels and shattered on the street like fine crystal.
Town Lake narrowed back to a river at the end of Mill Street, just above the sawmill. Abigail turned the wagon onto the steel bridge that crossed the river to the north side of town. Abigail hauled back on the reins in the bridge’s middle and father and daughter sat without a word, watching the water beneath the mesh deck of the bridge and listening to the rumble of Forestport Falls downstream. The river under them swirled through sheets of pale ice, cutting channels the color of tea. Town Lake was a boggy slush; pools black as obsidian gathered on its surface.
“It feels like blasted spring is here,” Nicolas whispered. “I don’t like it.”
Abigail shrugged and snapped the reins. At the end of the bridge the mare wound her way uphill.
The north side of Forestport—the rich side—was built on a hill that rose to a sharp ridge. As the village grew, it crept upward toward the ridge. Climbing the winding streets, the turrets, spires, and cupolas that crowned the houses appeared progressively more intricate, reflecting the rising status of the homeowner. Midway up were the canal builders. Perched along the moneyed top of the ridge were the railroad barons’ homes, like a row of finely decorated Christmas cookies with their expansive summer porches and brightly painted gingerbread.
The family home of Nicolas Van Horne sat halfway up this slope of prosperity, on a street named Walnut lined—strangely—by giant maples. The Van Horne house was three stories, straight and sturdy, its third floor a single room with dormers all around. The exterior was ornamented with fish-scale and Germanic-style gingerbread, but its green paint had faded badly and even peeled in spots. Bits of gingerbread had fallen away with last spring’s windstorm, and the steeply pitched tin roof had rusted through at its valleys, causing reddish-brown stains to run down the clapboards. Nicolas often thought how disappointed his father, Friedrick Van Horne, would’ve been to see how the fine house he’d built had aged . . . but then, perhaps not. The senior Van Horne had been no perfectionist.
“At last we have you home,” Abigail said with a sigh.
“Home . . . such as it is,” Nicolas said, hearing the gruffness of his long-dead father’s voice in his own.
Nicolas, an only child, had been willed his childhood home on Walnut Street; he’d settled back in after college, when he began to build his business of ice and court his childhood sweetheart, the local schoolmarm. As Forestport grew and new construction stretched up the hill, the young Nicolas Van Horne found himself coveting the homes of the railroad barons that rose like castles above him. Even now, as Abigail drew up to the front entrance in the darkness, Nicolas glanced up the hill and felt a vague pang of longing upon seeing the silhouettes of the mansions of those better positioned in life.
The business of ice had been good to Nicolas Van Horne. He was a frugal Yankee who—unlike his father—had guarded his money wisely and capitalized on opportunity. He wasn’t rich, yet he opened his purse for a worthy cause as readily as any rich man. It was more in family matters that Nicolas felt impoverished. One son died as a boy. His living son was a rogue and a piano-pounding vagabond; there was no gentler way to describe the young Schuyler Van Horne, known to his friends and shady associates as “Sky.” Nicolas hadn’t seen Schuyler since New Year’s Day; he had no idea of his whereabouts.
Nicolas’s beloved daughter, Abigail, had always been the silent, steady one. But in the first week of the new year she had also abandoned the Van Horne household, moving all her things to the home of her friend Hildegard Blum, a solid German woman a few years Abigail’s senior. Hildegard hailed from the valley, the town of Amsterdam. She’d taken the position of principal of Forestport Common School two years earlier. Abigail led a quiet, happy life with Hilda, and Nicolas was glad for that. What hurt him was that his daughter felt so little regret in leaving the Van Horne household, and her childhood, behind.
Abby jumped down to help Nicolas wrestle his steamer trunk over the sheet of ice on the front porch. A light glowed faintly at a second-floor window, but Nicolas felt sure his arrival wouldn’t be noticed. He lit a lamp in the hall. He and Abby slid his trunk down the front hallway and into the dining room.
“It’s so late, Abigail. Why don’t you stay the night?”
“No, Father, I need to be home. Hilda will be waiting.” She hesitated, refused to look him in the eye. “There’s other news, too, Father. Sky’s in town.”
“Schuyler’s back?”
“My long-lost brother,” Abigail said with more than a tinge of sarcasm. “Sky, the wandering minstrel. He showed up two days ago, needing money.”
“Already? What’s he done with all I gave him at New Year’s?”
“Please, Father—let’s not have a scene like that again. Mother couldn’t stand it.”
“I should give him nothing. Not a single copper. Where’s he staying?”
“He took a room at the inn. I suggested he at least visit Mother, and I believe he did, but then he was off in a flash to play at Thomas Chubb’s Steinway. He said he had ‘associates’ to meet, whoever they are.”
“He hasn’t changed, then,” Nicolas said with a shake of his head.
“Perhaps he’s borrowed what he needs from his friends.”
“More likely they’ll be running up a tab at the inn. I must see the boy.”
“He’ll come around.”
“Ah, my baby girl,” Nicolas said with resignation. He encircled his daughter’s lithe frame, rocked her gently, and felt the delicate, birdlike strength that had been her mother’s so many years before. “This voyage I’ve been through, Abby . . . some truly ghastly things happened, but I’m back in one piece.”
“And tomorrow is another day.” Abigail broke away, then hesitated as she passed the stairs. “I’ll not bother Mother,” she said wistfully, with a shake of her head. “You’ll see to her.”
Nicolas stood on the porch to watch Abby go. Now it was rain—simple and steady—that beat on the porch’s tin roof. The chestnut mare pulled away on its downhill run to the small house on Main Street that Abigail and Hilda shared. Nicolas watched the wagon disappear in the darkness. He turned, shut the door, carried the lamp down the hall, and entered the parlour. The time had come to face the other inhabitants of this darkened house—his wife, Ruth, and the ghost of his father, Friedrick Van Horne.
30
A Ghost in the House
Nicolas carried the lamp close, felt its scant warmth, and watched its arthritic fingers of light flicker across the blackened knotty pine of the parlour walls. He lit a second lamp on the side table. Around him loomed the heads of a dozen deer slaughtered by his father decades earlier. Bobcats. A grizzled old panther with yellow teeth bared. A spike-horned deer—Nicolas’s first kill as a youth—draped with cobwebs. The fireplace was boarded shut, unused for decades.
An old country saying among the superstitious holds that those who die a sudden death may take years to leave the earth. So it was with Nicolas’s father, Friedrick Van Horne, who, like these beasts he’d collected, had made a sudden and unexpected rendezvous with his Maker, then haunted the town for years.
Friedrick Van Horne was a born upstate New Yorker, a particularly shrewd one who’d made a fortune building the locks and canals that within the span of two decades traced along every decent-sized creek and river feeding the mighty Erie Canal. But when the railroad like a monstrous sea creature extending its tentacles reached out to every town between Forestport and the Saint Lawrence River, the elder Van Horne’s fortune began to shrink. His assets dwindled with the crack of each spike driven, with the thud of each rail laid, until the Forestport feeder canal dried up, and the paint began to peel from the Van Horne house.
Friedrick, who’d grown accustomed to luxury and leisure, found it difficult to feed his wife and his only child, the young sprout, Nicolas. Without holdings in land, the senior Van Horne could hardly take up farming; besides, he knew nothing about growing hops or potatoes and didn’t care to le
arn. He loved the woods but deemed lumbering operations far too strenuous and dangerous for a once-successful canal man.
By the time he’d lost his wife to yellow fever, Nicolas’s father was penniless. He spent his days fishing and hunting to put food on the table, and his nights in the taverns grousing at the bar about the “blasted railroad” and how it had changed the Adirondacks. On one such dismal night, desperate for funds, Friedrick forged an agreement with the local innkeeper, Mr. Hulbert, to run his newly built inn and tavern.
Hulbert’s Inn proved easy enough to manage, but the long hours and hard liquor quickly robbed Friedrick of his health. He drank Canadian whiskey for breakfast; beer became his nightly antidote for the delirium.
When Nicolas chose to go off to college in Boston, his father, standing half-drunk by the fireplace in this very parlour, refused to pay a nickel for tuition.
“Find a scheme, boy!” his father had declared. “That’s all a young man needs. An enterprise, any sort will do, anything to keep from laying rail for the blasted railroad.”
It was a month into Nicolas’s senior year when the sad news came from Forestport that his father had been found dead in the outhouse early on a frosty October morning, still in his flannel nightgown, his dead wife’s favorite afghan wrapped around him, his nightcap fallen sadly to the rough-hewn planks.
“Heart stoppage,” the town doctor proclaimed at the funeral. “The man never knew what hit him.”
He hadn’t been buried a week before the taverns were buzzing with talk of Friedrick Van Horne’s ghost. Banging, thumping, and ghastly wails came from the top floor of Hulbert’s Inn. An eerie blue light passed from window to window. The inn was abandoned by its regulars and shut tight by Mr. Hulbert.
Then, after Christmas, when old man Van Horne had been frozen in the ground for months, the strange happenings moved to the Van Horne house on Walnut Street. Erratic flashes of light were seen in the dormer windows of the third floor. Protracted moans were heard overhead. The place became impossible to heat, no matter how hard Nicolas stoked the stoves.
