“This used to be the groom’s quarters,” Uncle Tinsley said. “Back in the day.”
“Where is Aunt Martha?” Liz asked again.
“Charlotte didn’t tell you?” Uncle Tinsley went over to the window and gazed at the fading light. “Martha passed away,” he said. “Six years ago this
September. Trucker ran a red light.”
“Aunt Martha?” Liz said. “I can’t believe she’s gone.”
Uncle Tinsley turned around and faced us. “You don’t remember her. You were too small.”
“I remember her really well,” Liz said. She told Uncle Tinsley she remembered baking bread with her. Aunt Martha had worn a red apron, and Liz could still smell the bread. She also
remembered Aunt Martha humming while she pruned roses in her white leather gloves. And she remembered Aunt Martha and Uncle Tinsley playing the grand piano together with the French doors open to
the sun. “I think about her a lot.”
Uncle Tinsley nodded. “Me, too,” he said. Then he paused, as if he was going to say something else, but he just shook his head and walked out the door, saying as he shut it,
“You’ll be fine in here.”
We listened to him clambering down the steps. I noticed a small refrigerator next to the sink, and that was when I realized I was starving. I opened the refrigerator, but it was empty and
unplugged. We decided it probably wasn’t a good idea to pester Uncle Tinsley about food. I was resigned to going to bed on an empty stomach, but a few minutes later, we heard footsteps on the
stairs again. Uncle Tinsley appeared in the door, carrying a silver tray with a small pot, two bowls, a pitcher of water, and two wineglasses.
“Venison stew,” he said. He unloaded the tray onto the table. “It’s dark in here. You need some light.” He flipped a switch on the wall, and an overhead bulb came
on. “You all have a good night’s sleep,” he said, and closed the door again.
Liz filled the bowls, and we sat down at the table. I took a bite of the stew. “What’s venison?” I asked.
“Deer.”
“Oh.”
I took another bite.
“It’s pretty good,” I said.
The birds woke
me early the next morning. I had never heard such noisy birds. I went to the window, and they were
everywhere—in the trees right outside, on the ground, swooping in and out of the barn like they owned the place, all the different chirps and tweets and warbling making this incredible
commotion.
Liz and I got dressed and walked down to the house. When we knocked on the front door, there was no answer, so we went around to the back. Through a window, we could see Uncle Tinsley moving
around inside the kitchen. Liz rapped on the windowpane, and Uncle Tinsley opened the door but blocked it like he had the night before. He had shaved, his wet hair was combed, the part was
straight, and instead of his bathrobe, he was wearing gray trousers and a light blue shirt with TMH monogrammed on the pocket.
“How did you girls sleep?” he asked.
“Just fine,” Liz said.
“The birds sure are noisy,” I said.
“I don’t use pesticides, so the birds love it around here,” Uncle Tinsley said.
“Did Mom call, by any chance?” Liz asked.
“Afraid not.”
“She does have the number, right?” I asked.
“This number hasn’t changed since we got it—two, four, six, eight,” he said. “First phone number handed out in Byler, so we got to choose it. Speaking of choosing,
how do you like your poached eggs?”
“Hard!” I said.
“Soft,” Liz said.
“Have a seat over there.” He pointed to some rusty cast-iron lawn furniture.
A few minutes later, he came out carrying that same silver tray, loaded up with a stack of toast and three plates that each had a poached egg in the center. The plates had gold curlicues around
the rim, but the edges were chipped. I picked up a corner of my egg and scooted a piece of toast under it, then stabbed the yolk with my fork, chopped up the white part of the egg, and mushed it
all together.
“Bean always mutilates her food,” Liz told Uncle Tinsley. “It’s disgusting.”
“It tastes better mixed up,” I said. “But that’s not the only reason. First of all, you don’t have to take as many bites, so it saves time. Second, you don’t
have to work as hard chewing, because if it’s all mushed up, it’s sort of prechewed. Finally, food gets all mixed up in your stomach anyway, so that’s obviously the way it was
meant to be.”
Uncle Tinsley gave a little chuckle and turned to Liz. “Is she always like this?”
“Oh, yeah,” Liz said. “She’s the Beanhead.”
We offered to wash the dishes, but Uncle Tinsley insisted it was easier if he did them himself, without a couple of kids underfoot. He told us to go off and do whatever girls our age did.
Liz and I walked around to the front of the house, where there were two big trees with shiny dark leaves and big white flowers. Beyond them, on the far side of the lawn, was a row of huge green
bushes with a gap in the middle. We walked through the gap and found ourselves in an area surrounded by the dark green bushes. A few tough irises pushed up through the weeds in old, overgrown
flower beds. In the center was a round brick-edged pond. It was full of dead leaves, but in the water beneath, I saw a flash of brilliant orange.
“Fish!” I yelled. “Goldfish! There’s goldfish in this pond!”
We knelt and studied the orange fish fluttering in and out of the shadows beneath the clumps of dead leaves. I decided this would be a great place for Fido to have a swim. The poor turtle had to
be feeling cooped up after all that time in his box.
I ran back to the barn, but when I opened the Tupperware, Fido was floating in the water. He’d seemed fine when I fed him earlier. I set him down on the tabletop, scooting him along with
my finger, trying to jump-start him, even though I knew it was hopeless. Fido was dead, and it was all my fault. I had thought I could protect Fido and take care of him, but that bus trip had been
too much for the poor little guy. He’d have been better off if I’d left him in Lost Lake.
I put Fido back in the Tupperware dish and carried him out to the pond. Liz put an arm around me and said we needed to ask Uncle Tinsley where to bury him.
Uncle Tinsley was still puttering in the kitchen when we knocked.
“I thought the two of you were going to go off and play,” he said.
“Fido died,” I said.
Uncle Tinsley glanced at Liz.
“Bean’s turtle,” she said.
“We need to know where to bury him,” I said.
Uncle Tinsley stepped out of the house and closed the door behind him. I handed him the Tupperware dish, and he looked down at Fido. “We bury all the family pets in the family
cemetery,” he said. He led us back to the barn, where he picked up a shovel with a long wooden handle, then we all headed up the hill behind it.
“Fido’s a peculiar name for a turtle,” he said as we walked along.
“Bean really wanted a dog,” Liz said, explaining how Mom had told us it was always the kids who wanted the pet but the mother who ended up taking care of it, and she had no interest
in walking and cleaning up after a dog. So she’d bought me a turtle.
“Fido means ‘I am faithful,’ ” I said. “Fido was a very faithful turtle.”
“I bet he was,” Uncle Tinsley said.
Beyond the barn were a bunch of dilapidated wooden buildings. Uncle Tinsley pointed out the smokehouse, the milking shed and the foaling shed, the henhouse, the icehouse, and the springhouse,
explaining that Mayfield used to be a real working farm, though hands did most of the work. He still had all 205 acres, including a stretch of woods, as well as the big hay field where the cemetery
was. These days, a farmer up the road, Mr. Muncie, hayed the field and gave Uncle Tinsley eggs and vegetables in return.
We passed through an orchard, Uncle Tinsley showing us the apple, peach, and cherry trees, and out into a large pasture. At the top of the pasture, a cluster of trees shaded the family cemetery,
which was surrounded by a rusting wrought-iron fence. The cemetery was weedy, and a number of the weathered old headstones had toppled over. Uncle Tinsley led us to one well-tended grave with a
newish headstone. This was Martha’s, he said, with a vacant spot next to it for him when the time came.
The pets, he explained, were buried around the perimeter, near their owners. “Let’s put Fido near Martha,” Uncle Tinsley said. “I think she would have liked
him.”
Uncle Tinsley dug a small hole, and I placed Fido in it, using the Tupperware dish as his coffin. I found a nice piece of white quartz for a headstone. Uncle Tinsley gave a short eulogy. Fido
had been a brave and indeed a faithful turtle, he said, who had made the long and perilous journey from California in order to serve as a guardian for his two sister-owners. Once he’d gotten
them safely to Virginia, Fido’s job was over, and he felt free to leave them for that secret island in the middle of the ocean that is turtle heaven.
The eulogy made me feel a lot better about both Fido and Uncle Tinsley. On the way back down the hill, I asked about the goldfish we’d found in the pond. “The fish
are koi,” Uncle Tinsley said. “That was Mother’s garden. One of the finest private gardens in all of Virginia, back in the day. Mother won prizes for it. She was the envy of every
lady in the garden club.”
We swung around the barn and the big white house came into view. I started telling Uncle Tinsley about my house dream and how, when we first arrived at Mayfield, I realized it was the actual
house in the dream.
Uncle Tinsley became thoughtful. He rested the shovel against an old water trough in front of the barn. “I guess you’d better see the inside of the house, then,” he said.
“Just to make sure.”
We followed Uncle Tinsley up the big porch steps. He took a deep breath and opened the door.
The front hall was large and dark, with a lot of wooden cabinets that had glass doors. Everything was a mess. Newspapers, magazines, books, and mail were stacked high on the tables and the
floor, alongside boxes of rocks and bottles filled with dirt and sand and liquids.
“It may look a tad cluttered,” he said, “but that’s because I’m in the middle of reorganizing everything.”
“It’s not so bad,” Liz said. “It just needs a little tidying up.”
“We can help,” I said.
“Oh, no. Everything’s under control. Everything has its place, and I know where everything is.”
Uncle Tinsley showed us the parlor, the dining room, and the ballroom. Oil paintings hung crooked on the walls and a few were falling out of their frames. The Persian carpets were worn and
frayed, the silk curtains were faded and torn, and the stained wallpaper was peeling away from the walls. A grand piano covered with a dark green velvet cloth stood in the big ballroom with the
French doors. There was all this stuff piled on every available surface—more stacks of paper and notebooks, antique binoculars, pendulum clocks, rolled-up maps, stacks of chipped china, old
pistols, ships in bottles, statues of rearing horses, framed photographs, and all these little wooden boxes, one filled with coins, another with buttons, another with old medals. Everything was
coated with a thick layer of dust.
“There sure is a ton of stuff in here,” I said.
“Yes, but every single thing you see has value,” Uncle Tinsley said. “If you have the brains to appreciate it.”
He led us up a curving staircase and down a long hall. At the end of the hall, he stopped in front of a pair of doors that faced each other. Both had brass door knockers shaped like birds.
“This is the bird wing,” Uncle Tinsley told us. “This is where you’ll stay. Until your mother comes to pick you up.”
“We’re not sleeping in the barn anymore?” I asked.
“Not without Fido there to protect you.”
Uncle Tinsley opened the doors. We each had our own room, he told us. Both were wallpapered with bird motifs—common birds, like robins and cardinals, and exotic birds, like cockatiels and
flamingos. The bird wing, he explained, had been designed for his twin aunts, who were little girls when the house was built. They had loved birds and kept a big Victorian birdhouse full of
different kinds of finches.
“Where was Mom’s room?” I asked.
“She never mentioned it?” he asked. “The whole bird wing was hers.” He pointed through the door of one room. “When she brought you back from the hospital after you
were born, she put you in that cradle in the corner there.”
I looked over at the cradle. It was small and white and made of wicker, and I couldn’t understand quite why, but it made me feel very safe.
The next morning,
over our poached eggs, Liz and I tried to talk Uncle Tinsley into letting us help him clean up the house just a
little bit. But he insisted that nothing in the house could be thrown out or even moved. Everything, he said, was either a family treasure or part of one of his collections or necessary for his
geological research.
We spent the morning following Uncle Tinsley around the house as he explained what all the stuff meant to him. He’d pick something up, say an ivory-handled letter opener or a tricornered
hat, and give us a long explanation of where it came from, who had owned it, and why it had extraordinary significance. I came to realize that everything was, in fact, organized in a way that only
he fully understood.
“This place is like a museum,” I said.
“And you’re the curator,” Liz told Uncle Tinsley.
“Well said,” he replied. “But it’s been a good while since I gave my last tour.” We were standing in the ballroom. Uncle Tinsley looked around. “I admit the
place is a tad cluttered. That was the phrase Martha liked to use. I’ve always loved to collect things, but when she was alive, she helped me keep the impulse in check.”
Uncle Tinsley finally agreed to let us throw out some of the old newspapers and magazines and carry up to the attic and down to the basement boxes of mineral samples, spools of thread from the
mill, and Confederate paper money. We washed windows, aired out rooms, scrubbed floors and counters, and vacuumed the rugs and curtains with this old Hoover from the 1950s that reminded me of a
little spaceship.