Chapter Two, Pt. 1

Thus begins chapter two.  As I previously warned, it may be rough, bloated and sporting some typos. It’s sorta long, so I’ll say no more.

+   +   +

As bad nights went, Will had suffered through worse, but wasn’t eager to repeat it. He’d awakened every hour or so, shivering and disoriented. Thanks to modern automotive technology, he was able to start the truck and get the heater running without having to leave his sleeping bag. With the sky shifting to gray dawn he awoke for what he decided would be the last time. His bladder wasn’t going to allow any more sleep. The sharp air that hit him when he opened the door woke him completely. He couldn’t bring himself to pee on his brand new gravel. The ground surrounding the circle wasn’t lacking for moisture and Will had no problem adding to that.

With a relieved belly and his mind kick started by the damp morning chill, he re-evaluated the house. It was a classic, turn of the twentieth century post-Victorian foursquare. The house plan had been ordered out of a Sears-Roebuck catalogue. It was a mid-sized to large plan. Four main rooms on the first floor; kitchen, dining, living room and “sitting room.” The upstairs was accessed by a staircase placed on the outside wall between the kitchen at the rear northeast corner and the sitting room at the southeast, There were four bedrooms on the second floor. Modern minded and foreward thinking, Will’s first American generation maternal great grandparents had built a first and second floor bathroom included in the plan. They’d also had it wired for electricity. They lived in it for a full decade before they were able to enjoy either of those modern amenities.

The house, though a common style found nationwide, was a freak in Limburg County for two reasons. The first was that it was made of brick. At the time, brick was a material that was rare and expensive in this part of the world. It was reserved for use “in town” for the construction of banks, government buildings, and stores owned by well-established and prosperous merchants. Wood was the standard for the working class, and that wasn’t cheap, either. To build such a structure was nothing short of ostentatious. It had doubtless sent a message to the neighbors that they stood no chance in “keeping up with the Rijsbergens,” Will’s maternal ancestors had no problems asserting a certain degree of superiority. Unlike most of the Dutchmen they’d accompanied to the eastern prairie of their new country, they hadn’t arrived broke. Far from it. Another reason brick had been the chosen material was that one of Will’s grand-uncles was a master mason.

The other thing that set this house apart was that it had been built “backwards.” By the time sod houses and ramshackle cabins were being replaced by modern family homes, the transportation infrastructure of the county was well in place. The houses built in the farmland faced whatever roadway that crossed their property. This house faced away from the county road, fronted by the Wahpekute River. This was done, Will’s grandfather told him, because his great-grandmother enjoyed sitting on the porch in the evening and watching the river flow by. “Bullshit” his mother countered when he repeated the story, “you can hardly see that murky creek from the porch. They built the house facing that way because they enjoyed turning their backs on everyone else.”

Will’s eyes settled on the porch. From the edge of his gravel island, and through the screen of leafless, overgrown bushes, he couldn’t imagine anybody wanting to sit there now.

Not without hesitation, Will stepped from the gravel. His shoes and socks had dried overnight with help of the truck heater. Stiff as they’d been when he put them back on, it was infinitely preferable to soggy. He winced with his first step. The water seeping into his footwear seemed colder than the night before. By the time Will was standing in front of the porch he was soaked to the knees. The pillars supporting the outer corners were canted out, and roof was sagging and at either end. The porch roof itself was patchy bed off moss that grew in an odd pattern that matched the pattern of the shingles. Two more wooden pillars were at the center, on either side of the stoop that led from the yard to the deck. They were paintless, and also rotting at the tops. Framed between them at the rear of the porch was the front door. It was a tow inch thick slab of white oak, five feet wide with a window of leaded glass. To Will’s amazement, the glass was intact. His view of the door itself was cut in half by an eight-by-four, nailed into place across the middle of the door into the frame. Curious, he thought. He couldn’t remember his father as having taken any steps to have the place closed-up in any way after his grandmother died.

Will moved closer. The wooden stoop had long collapsed. He could barley make out a pattern of it through a tangle of dead vegetation. He was dissuaded from stepping up by the floor of the porch. The boards were warped and rotted. At the edges, small, naked saplings had sprouted through the rotted wood and stood almost two feet high. In a couple of weeks they’d be showing buds. Two large windows, one for the living room on the left, the other for the parlor on the right. The paint on the frames was almost gone, with a few swatches of white still clinging. Several panes had dropped away, but they were more or less intact.

He moved to the western side, stepping through a tangled mat of dead grass and sodden stalks of collapsed prairie thistle. Crossing the corner, Will noted the brick wall was dead plum. He moved close to the wall. The first side window for the living room was almost gone, both the storm window and the interior one. It did not look like a case of vandalism, however, but simple age and weather. So much for barring the front door. This side of the house took the full brunt of storms from the west. The row of trees, bordering the yard fifty feet away, wasn’t all that effective when wind was blowing steady at thirty miles an hour and gusting to sixty. Feeling a tingle of trepidation, Will looked inside.

The first thing he noticed was all the furniture was gone. He didn’t expect to see any, but at the same time, he couldn’t recall his father taking any steps to clear things out. The carpet was still there, however, a huge oriental rug that centered the room, leaving a border of bare wood floor a foot on every side. The pattern was lost under a thick layer of dust and fallen chunks of plaster. The walls on every side were bulging, stained wallpaper. In some places the paper had either torn or rotted away, the plaster dropping off to expose the lathe. He could see through the arch into the sitting room. It didn’t seem to be in as bad as the living room, but was still in horrible shape. Will looked up to the ceiling. Where the plaster hadn’t dropped, it hung, dangling in chunks of every size and shape, clinging by some invisible strings to the lathe. Where it hadn’t completely dropped or dangled, it bulged. Best not to go in there without a helmet. In the center of it all hung a brass chandelier. Brown with verdigris, it held two rings of porcelain candles, topped by small bulbs shaped like flames. It hung from stretched wires. The ceiling medallion it highlighted was gone. Pieces of thick plaster were caught between the faux candles, the rest of it laying in a scattered pile on the floor directly beneath. It did, however, appear to be completely intact, bulbs and all. Will couldn’t imagine what the price would be for such a piece back in the Cities. I might soon find out, he thought.

He moved along toward the back of the house, every step challenged by clinging vegetation and ending with a little more water working into his shoes. It was the same story at the dining room. The windows nothing more than warped and rotted frames, a few panes, some intact, some cracked broken, still clinging to their places but most of them gone. It was no different for the glass on the second floor.

At the back, the same, though the windows had fared a little better, both at the ground floor and above. Away from the house, looking back toward the county road were a few outbuildings. The closest was an outhouse, a two-seater deluxe model. It was gray and paintless, tilted and twisted heavily to one side, the roof completely collapsed. Will believed he could level the structure with a shove. Further beyond, a four-bay machine shed, a chicken coop, both made of wood, and a brick utility building that had primarily served as a slaughter house for the few chickens, pigs and cattle that were always on hand. All were obscured by the unchecked tangle of growth. Only the roofs were visible, and all but the utility shed were near demise. The slaughterhouse had a tin roof. Will had no desire to give them a closer look.

He trudged across the back yard to the driveway. Acoss the drive, in the northeast corner of the farmyard about one hundred yards away, was the barn. It had been invisible in the darkness when Will had arrived. About a third of the roof was a hole. The shingles and decking around it sagged at the edges, as if being sucked into the barn by an invisible vortex. Will could see daylight through the hole, which indicated the other side of roof was about in the same shape. The sides of the barn, however, held an evident stain of red and appeared to be straight and fully intact.

Back on dry ground, Will looked at the east side of the house again. The windows were in better shape than the rest, but were still nothing more than rotten frames holding about a third of the glass that had been there. The roof, just as the brick shed, was tin. There were no holes, and the only evidence of neglect was the lightning rod that had stood at the peak. It had fallen over and was lying on the slope, held there by the wire at its base. Even under scrutiny at his distance, Will couldn’t see anything disastrous, but he could only assume the grey metal sheets only masked a score of problems just beneath it. There were tar patches at many of the seams, patches that had been made decades ago. The only thing certain was that twenty-plus years of brutal summer sun, sub-zero winters, rain, ice and wind had created countless gaps that went untended.

His gaze held the full side of the house, then zeroed in on the open side door. He knew he should go inside. Check out the bedrooms on the second floor, and probably work up enough guts to take a peak at the basement. He shivered, but the only cold he felt was in his feet. In fact, it felt to him the temperature had gone up at least ten degrees since he gotten out of the truck. He stared at the doorway, an open black void. Not now, he told himself. Any more inspection could well crumble the resolve he’d mustered the night before. It had been tested strongly enough by what he’d seen already. Nope. Enough.

He turned his eyes away from the door and looked at his watch. Six A.M. He was hungry. There had been a diner in Venlo that opened at six. He had no reason to believe it wouldn’t still be there. And he had to go into town anyway. The cell service out here was spotty, and his first order of business was to fire the contractor, who’d made a more complete shambles of an already worthless kitchen. He also had to go to the bank. There were at least two hours before that was open, so he’d just have to make slow work of his breakfast.

Before entering his truck, he looked at his feet. They were soaked, mud smeared and coated with an impressive amount of dead vegetable matter. His pants were wet to his knees, and covered with dead leaves and stickers of every size and variety he bent and plucked off a dozen balls of burdock. He thought about changing, but his extra shoes and socks were at the bottom of one of the totes in the box of the truck. He didn’t want to dig through it. He sighed and looked back at the house. His attire was a perfect match for his dwelling. He got in the cab and hoped the heater would dry his feet off enough that he wouldn’t squelch with every step he took. Put on his sunglasses and started the truck. As he turned in his beautiful driveway, he figured there wasn’t anybody in town that would know him, and nobody he’d concern himself with when it came to first impressions.

+   +   +

Like I said, long. 2nd half coming in just a few short days… Don’t be shy in telling me what you think.