The Writing on the Wall: A Novel (2 page)

She turned around to take the house in, what she could see above the mist. Behind the porch the eaves rose at an angle so sharp it suggested a fierce-looking steeple. Under the edges drooped a trim of gingerbread so rotten it was impossible to understand why it hadn’t dropped off. The single window had only one shutter, hanging out at a lopsided angle from the glass. Now, as she watched, it seemed aware of her presence, because, with no wind stirring, it creaked sideways on its hinges and smacked the window with a bang.

Excellent, she decided—for the second time that night she nearly smiled. Show me more of this, use your best tricks, frighten me out of my numbness, though to find numbness is exactly why I’ve come. Generations had lived and died there, the house reached back into time, so why shouldn’t it be haunted, if only by rusty hinges, rotten joists, corroded pipes. Dan would have loved tackling these, he should have been the one to come. She could bring nothing to bear on the house except slow mindless work with her fingers, wrists, and arms, and yet maybe it was this that would make the house friendlier, coax it into her favor, calm all its fret.

She remained on the secret platform until she started shivering again, this time from cold. With it came exhaustion, and it was the deeper layer this time, the one that sleep could do nothing against. She went back inside to her mattress, pressed with her slipper until it slid away from the moonlight, and into the darkness let herself fall.

The difference in time zones worked in her favor—she slept much later than she did at home. The sun touched her face as the moon had, then moved across the floor to the nearest wall. When its light filled the room she got up, searched through her suitcase for a sweatshirt, tugged it down over her jeans. A midnight arrival was no way to start with the house. It needed to be approached in daylight, from a feeling of energy and strength. She went downstairs determined not to look at anything—she pressed her hands to her eyes like blinders—and then she was outside crossing the yard to the road, walking purposefully toward the sun.

It was a modern enough road, with two smooth lanes and absolutely no traffic. A hundred yards past the house a sign announced the village was three miles off, and beyond that on the crest of a little rise stood a smaller green sign that she fixed on as her goal. When I touch it I’ll turn around.

The fog lifted through the trees, and the energy of this made the leaves toss sideways and dance. From the wet grass on either side of the road came a cinnamon scent from flowers that were new to her, with spiky blossoms only partially unfurled. There was an iron smell, too, from the mud in the gullies. Black-eyed Susans grew everywhere, with purple nettles and tough-looking gorse. Flowers had always been her joy in life, wildflowers especially, so this, she decided, is where she would come during breaks in work.

The sign turned out to be farther away than it looked. She walked for another ten minutes, and what she found when she got there surprised her considerably.

You are standing on the 45th parallel
it read, in dignified bronze script.
Halfway between the Equator and the North Pole.

And this time she did smile—tentatively, surprised at herself, but finally letting it have its way. What amused her was to think that Jeannie’s house lay a quarter mile closer to the Arctic than it did the tropics, and how this must explain the feeling, so strong when she arrived during the night, of sliding toward the planet’s edge.

Irony was good for her—joined with the sunshine it sharpened her vision so she could see things plain. She turned and faced the direction of the house. It lay centered in a frame made by the steep hill behind it and the winding trout stream across the road—bigger than it seemed up close, boxier, uglier, squatting with a hasty, improvised look on its overgrown scrub of an acre, despite the fact it had endured there almost a century. The sharp eaves she had stood under during the night were plainly visible splitting the house in two, only now it seemed less like a steeple than a stubby guided missile ready to be launched from the metal gambrel of the roof. The siding, with the sun slanting against it, was a chocolate color fading toward leather, though many boards were in the process of dropping off. The chimneys, all three of them, tilted toward the roadside, and the one that sagged furthest pressed against a rusty TV antenna that was almost bent in half.

Lower, partly obscured by trees, was the porch, with screens blackened from mildew and totally opaque. The bay windows, bulging out on either side, seemed like the turrets of a battleship ready to blast anything approaching from the road. And that was what the house suggested, seen from the distance—great fragility and great strength, so she simultaneously felt surprise that it was there in the first place and certainty that it had been there forever.

“Quaint,” Jeannie had called it, when all other adjectives failed. But it was the exact opposite of quaint.

Well beyond the house, just before the road curved out of sight, was a smaller, even shabbier, house, but it was too far away to tell if it was occupied. The hill directly behind Jeannie’s was steep and rocky, cutting off any view toward the west, but the hills on the sides sloped more gently, so perhaps a sunset sometimes managed to sneak through. The fields around the house were open, but overgrown and swampy, and it was impossible to tell whether anyone cared after them. The forest started at the base of the hill, with thicker, more serious looking trees than the handful clustered around the house.

There was something Western in the landscape that surprised her, at least if you faded out the green. Not so much where she and Dan lived, but the high northern tier of Montana where they had gone on camping trips when Cassie was little. Jeannie had warned her that she would find the sky small and claustrophobic compared to what she was used to, but it wasn’t that way at all, and to the northeast, across the stream, the hills uncoiled toward Canada, widening the horizon. In walking back to the house she noticed two parallel tracks worn deep into the meadow grass, reminding her of trails left by pioneers back on the prairies. Had wagon wheels cut them? She taught middle school science, not history, but she was reasonably sure the settlers who came here first had not used covered wagons.

She approached the house from the rear this time, pushing her way through the wild honeysuckle separating it from the meadow, scaring up some robins. There were shabby outbuildings, one filled with soggy black firewood, the other looking like a cross between a chicken coop and a barn. Swallow nests drooped in pendants from the rafters, but they were dry and sterile looking, fit for ghost birds, not live ones. Both buildings, in Jeannie’s plans, were doomed to immediate demolition. A neglected stone wall marked the back of the property, now just a rock pile, nothing crafted, and the frost had long since toppled the upper boulders to the ground.

Other than these, there wasn’t much to discover. Strands of barbed wire, tarry shingles blown off the roof, a mushy baseball. She stepped on something sharper than a rock, reached down, picked up a wedge-shaped spike scaled in rust. There was a path worn into the ground, with bleached-out grass, and it led right to the wall and not one step farther. Someone had once walked there, walked there often, but had never gone beyond the edge of the property, though the meadow behind it ran for another hundred yards before the forest. This saddened her—the sense of limits, of obedience, of self-imposed circumscription.

A fence led around toward the front. A picket fence, the slats gray and peeling, only not a picket fence, because the slats were pressed tight together. She struggled to remember the right term. Stockade? A stockade fence? Stockade as in fortress? Stockade as in prison? Again, as always now, she stepped upon the booby trap of words.

Only one tree grew in back, an enormous box elder. From the thickest branch hung a tire swing that must have dated from the 1940s, so old and petrified was its rubber. Vera, reaching, was surprised to have it actually sway. They had hung a tire swing like that for Cassie from the branch of their plum—the solid remembrance of pushing came into her arms, the moment she saw it. Cassie had been reluctant to climb on that first time, she had an only child’s sense of prudence, but after that it became her favorite plaything for the whole of one summer, especially after sunset when she liked to swing back and forth kicking her legs out at the fireflies that flashed near her face.

“Higher Mommy!” she would yell—the little girl’s classic plea. “Higher!”

Good memory? Terrible memory? She wasn’t sure how to tell them apart anymore. Any walk she could find, any path, circled back to facing that.

In heading toward the back door, swerving sideways to get around a midden heap of rusty cans, she came upon a surprise. Poppies, tall ones, as brilliantly red as it was possible to imagine, their blossoms touching heads. They didn’t grow wild, someone must have once planted them, and she felt comforted by this, the evidence of a loving human presence. And there was better than that, too. Behind the poppies was a cluster of blueberry bushes taller than her head, and around these, as a kind of barrier, thorny blackberries, with so much fruit the vines sagged. She ate some of the plumpest, filled her cupped hands with more, then and only then began to think of breakfast.

Stone steps led up to the kitchen. It was dark inside—past ten now, and the sun hadn’t penetrated. A huge sink, zinc or cast iron, took up most of one wall, and past it was a gas range that must have been new in 1950. Hotpoint read the raised lettering on front, though both
t's
 were twisted. This was the one room in the house that wasn’t wallpapered, but painted. The wainscoting, running up from the linoleum, looked greasy and dusty at the same time, and above it the walls were the color of raw liver. A piece of stovepipe stuck out from the ceiling like a fat cigar, but there was nothing under it other than a black scar on the linoleum where a woodstove had once rested. The room smelled of something she couldn’t identify, but seemed part shoe polish, part charcoal, part skunk.

The only thing new was the refrigerator, which Jeannie had insisted on installing ahead of her visit. She had crammed it full of food and then piled even more on top. Half was the junk food they loved as girls, half was the organic that was Jeannie’s new passion; Vera ended up having soy yogurt and a cellophane-wrapped cupcake for breakfast.

The bathroom was wedged in a corner behind flimsy walls. Vera, despite herself, knocked on the door before she went in— the door with heart-shaped openings cut in the panels to let heat flow through. The wallpaper inside had shiny red and green stripes like Christmas wrapping, but it was peeling and didn’t look like it would be hard to strip. There was no tub or shower, which Jeannie had apologized for a dozen times over, but the hose worked out in the yard, and, if she felt adventurous, there was always the stream across the road for skinny-dipping or splashing.

The kitchen will be my base camp, Vera decided. I’ll keep it neat and organized and not worry about the chaos everywhere else. Once breakfast was over she started upon an inspection tour of the rest of downstairs. And it was really very simple, at least as regards the basic layout.

The hall, the central hallway along which she had groped her way the night before, ran all the way from the kitchen to the front entrance. The stairs climbed one wall—they looked even steeper and narrower than they had in the dark, and most of the banister was missing. Three rooms opened off one side of the hall, two off the other side, each reached by its own door. On the west, front to back, was the main parlor, then a sewing room or den, then a smaller back parlor with boarded-up windows. On the east was a foyer with brass pegs, then a narrow closet, then a dining room that was the largest, most pleasant room in the house, with windows that ran all the way up from the floor and an old-fashioned ceiling fan that, upon her entrance, began stiffly spinning, as if showing off what it could do.

This was the geography, it was easy enough to understand, and on her second inspection she turned her attention to the details. The floors were as beautiful as Jeannie claimed—birds-eye maple that gleamed satin in the morning light. Transom windows were cut in the tops of the doors, and the one in the dining room was stained glass. The windows, old as they were, looked sturdy and formidable, with filigree trim around the sashes that matched the gingerbread outside.

These were the highlights, the little touches that had convinced Jeannie to buy. “Everything’s horrid after that,” she said on the phone, and she hadn’t been exaggerating. Water stains on the ceilings expanded outwards in urine-colored rings. Plastic sheeting had been tacked to the doors to make up for gaps caused by the house’s settling. A mirror framed by a toilet seat dominated the back parlor, along with a Mickey Mouse clock with the eyes gouged out. The curtains, what were left of them, hung like shrouds. Cobwebs lay thick in the corners, mice droppings littered the floor, and everything seemed possessed by the kind of cold that, having nothing to do with temperature, remained impervious to the sun.

Fireplaces would have helped, working fireplaces, but the one she found in the front parlor had collapsed into a shapeless mound. Lichen covered the stone—stalked cups, yellow nodules, rosettes of greenish-gray. The grate was still there, but in place of logs was a damp, cradle-shaped slurry where squirrels or chipmunks had once made their nests.

That left the wallpaper—the wallpaper she had been trying her best not to worry about before examining all the rest. Even with Jeannie’s warning, it was hard to look at without shuddering. The rooms on the left of the hall were covered with a thick brown paper that was meant to imitate pine, complete with knots and grain, while the rooms on the right had a paper that was even thicker, a faded white velvet with red-pink squiggles that suggested frosting. It was hung badly—seams split apart from each other and hardened pimples of glue bubbled up in the cracks. Horizontal strips had been pasted on as patches above the radiators and baseboards, but the bottoms hadn’t been trimmed, so in places the velvet dangled against the floor like a trollop’s dirty skirt.