(A tad too close to home? Well, it’s a bit of Maple Ave and Sudbury, I won’t deny, and a bit of me these days.)
“We’re done here Mr.
Goodrich!” It was the guy in charge of
the movers, Joey V, standing in the driveway.
Goodrich knew something like this was coming, a yell, or a voice from
downstairs saying it was all over. He took slow steps over to the bedroom window
and struggled to lift it. The weather
had been damp and these old wooden windows would stick. He banged a bit with the palm of his hand on
the upper rail and it stubbornly moved.
He banged some more allowing for an opening and leaned towards it. “Thanks Joey!
We’ll see you in two days.”
“Two days, yeah” said Joey. “Oh, yeah, and Mr. Goodrich. Wicked house you have! I love these old places!” With that he turned to squeeze himself into
the moving van and then drove off.
Goodrich knocked down on the either side of the sash, left then right, and so was
able to shimmy the window back down. He thought back to the time he’d tried to
sand down the side jambs after taking out the old window and had to call in a
carpenter to get it back in place.
He walked through the bedroom, sweeping dust bunnies into a
bin, and pulled the crumpled punch list from his back pocket to see if anything
in this room was left to do. He looked
fondly at a small crack in one window pane that he convinced the buyers shouldn’t
be fixed. “SPNEA came in and said it’s
authentic, maybe as old has the house itself.
It’s really a treasure and you don’t want to do anything to challenge
the historic commission,” he’d said.
The buyer had traced the crack on the wavy pane with his finger. “Humpf,” he’d said sounding dubious. “What’s
SPIN_YA?”
“SPNEA, the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities,” said
Goodrich. “We wanted to keep the house as authentic as possible, you know, and
brought them in when we first moved in to give us a sense of what we’ve
got. Here, let me show you something.”
The buyer followed Goodrich up to the door that led to the attic. “See this.
That’s stenciling on horsehair plaster! They were testing it. And look…..” he went up the stairs and held
his hand up against the main beam. “This is hand hewn chestnut…you can see the
adze marks and it’s as solid as they day they put it up. Look, the original pegs.”
The buyer said, “That’s great, “ as he turned to go back down the steps and led
himself into the bathroom where he set about turn on and off the faucets and
flush the toilet. He said, “and you get
good pressure if more than one person’s got water running?”
“Yes,” said Goodrich. “The pressure’s
fine. We upgraded the plumbing in ’97.”
“1897 or 1997?” said the buyer with a smirk.
“I’ll bet its haunted. You have
to disclose that you know, drops the price, too. Ghosts, murders, that sort of
thing.”
“No, no murders or ghosts that I’m aware of,” said Goodrich.
Goodrich continued to sweep even though the floor was clean. He went into the closet for what must have
been the 10th time that day, turning the light on, looking into the
built-in drawers, and brushing the inside with his hands as if trying to find
something. He pulled them out as well
looking in the dark recess. For
what? For something he couldn’t leave behind?
He walked into the small bedroom on the left of the hall, the one that had been
his first boy’s, Joshua, and started sweeping once again. There was no need. He pulled the broom along the wide pine floorboards
tracing the scratch marks his son had made with his toy cars. He opened the low cabinets to sweep inside
those, noticing for the first time in years the chew marks their Labrador
Rafter had made when he was a puppy and had long since been painted over many
times. With one sweep of the broom he
heard something snap against the edge of shelf and put his hand inside to feel
for what made the sound. It was a little
green plastic soldier, “Army man” his son would say, in the pose of throwing a
hand grenade. His son had dozens of
those at one time, lost in backyard battles or tossed away as solders gave way
to model planes and planes to guitars, guitars to books, and the books to
Goodwill and the local put and take.
Goodrich’s fingers trembled a bit as he held the figure in both hands and smiled at the image of his son playing with these on the floor and flicking marble in the guise of cannonballs bowling through their ranks. His son would wear all manner of headgear, from an old army helmet, to a Cub Scout cap, to a broad brimmed cowboy hat as he made up the battles being fought.
He put the soldier in his pocket. Leaving he turned to look, once more, closing
the door and then reopening it wide recalling that his son, when very young,
wanted the door open to the hall light.
He next went into the big room with the fireplace that had been Wes’s and where
they all slept during the first big renovation.
The boys loved sleeping near the blazing fire, especially when they lost
electricity in a storm, which happened with frequency before the generator was
installed. Goodrich started to sweep
again, diligently and deliberately, though pretty sure he wasn’t getting any
dust. The cleaners had been quite thorough.
He went along the wide wainscoting that was, like so much, original to the
house. “Chestnut,” the historian from
SPNEA had said, “My goodness, imagine the tree this came from. Early 1800s if not older.” Wes had carved his name in it, near the floor,
and his birth date when he was seven. At
first Goodrich had been angry but his wife had admonished him. ”He’s added a
bit of our history and I think that’s wonderful.” Afterwards Goodrich carved all their names
and birthdays low on the wainscoting and they would imagine kids 50, 100, years
from then finding it and wondering who these people were.
He found a tiny ash in the fireplace and rubbed it between his fingers; he
couldn’t remember the last time there’d been a fire in it but detected the
smell of old wood smoke. He put his
hand on the mantle and bent over, getting on his knees, to feel around recalling
the night they’d thrown some pennies into they blaze to see if they would
melt. Indian head pennies, they found in
the attic. “Treasure!” Josh had
exclaimed. “It’s all a treasure,
Josh. We live in a treasure chest!”
Goodrich continued from room to room, moving slowly, touching the walls, the
guard rails, breathing in the woody mustiness and sensing it as if for the
first time. “Why didn’t I appreciate
that before?” he asked himself. “I
should have bottled it.”
He eased down the front stairs, turning to look back from the lower landing,
imagining the boys barreling down early on Christmas mornings to open gifts. His eyes started to swell with the
memories. He swirled his hand in the
air, “I wish I could wave a wand…”
He walked slowly down the main hall into the living room,
the formal living room, which was never to be formal, with it’s four large
windows that faced southeast and southwest and took in the morning and evening
sun. It, too, had a fireplace, a deep
one with a crane that held a pot he once tried to boil maple sap in after Josh,
or was it Wes, had read about maple syrup in a child’s book. The sap had boiled but filled with ashes and
covered the bricks in a sticky coating he’d spent hours cleaning up. The boys loved it, however, and poured the
syrup on snow to eat like pudding.
Goodrich swept this room as well, trying to take up the old
needles nestled in the wide spaces between the floors boards. He took up a pinch, about all he could get,
and held them to his nose detecting the faint hint of balsam as he crunched the
dried needles in his fingers. Did they
once make balsam tea? Yes, it was a
scout project for Josh; and it was awful.
He started to chew on some of the needles but quickly spit them out, bitter,
dry they were, and swept the remnants into the fireplace. He looked around thinking how empty it
was. He heard a scratching and thought
about when they discovered a squirrel’s nest behind the fireplace, but it was
only a holly bush by the window holding a cardinal on a branch.
Goodrich approached the window but it flew off.
“Off to your own nest your eminence!” he said with a smile. “Off to the little ones. Home you go!”
He went back around, one more time, and then to the kitchen, which too had a
fireplace, a massive one you could walk into with a bread oven on the
side. He opened the cabinets and doors;
clean as a whistle. There wasn’t
anything left for him to do; this was the first place he swept all that time
ago.
He looked at his watch, and looked out the window to see shadows growing. Time
to leave, the moment he had looked forward to once and now dreaded. Another walk around? Had he shut the lights off?
Goodrich eyed the built -in bench by the fireplace where they had kept Rafter’s
food and bowls, and then Barney’s after and
Aretoo’s later on. He lifted the
seat looking for something, forgot what he had in mind, and sat on it, leaning
his arm on the counter. He closed his
eyes and thought back.
“Dad, dad!” yelled the little boy crawling on his lap. “C’mon! We gonna open the presents.” Joining him was the young yellow lab and a
still younger boy, in a onsey that was getting a bit snug, both competing to
get onto the bench. “Dada,
pleasants!” The dog just licked the
residual crumbs boys’ faces.
Goodrich rose as his wife came into the kitchen. “A wee bit much last night?” she asked with
raised eyebrows. “Dad’s already in the
living room demanding another cup of coffee.
I’ll get you one, too. Let’s go.”
He grabbed the boys to him and let the dog lick his face as much as he
liked. “Let’s go?” he said to them. “Let’s go?
Not a chance. No, never.”