A little further down the road… This bit’s just a tad shorter than my last several postings. Probably a good thing. It’s also just stopgap to posting the next bit that follows, as I’m just a touch gummed up in it right now, but it’s starting to shape up to at least first draft standards. Mebbe in the next two days, or so… Anyhoooo… here goes:
SEVEN
Will was awake before sunrise. He shook off the sleep, which hadn’t come easy, and took a minute to re-orient himself. His air mattress left a lot to be desired when compared to the king-sized bed he’d left behind at the hotel. The car wreck appeared briefly in his nostrils then his head, but was just as quick to disappear. He allowed himself to hope his participation would be lost in bureaucracy. He had a good grasp of how County law enforcement operated.
In addition to the mattress, another one of the positives of living in a hotel made itself evident. Will crawled out of his tent. In his absence, the parlor had been swept again and his totes had been rearranged. He had to search for a bit before he found the toilet paper. In the weak light of pre-dawn, he put on a pair of sweatpants, pulled on a clean hoodie, and headed out to the windbreak, roll of tissue in hand.
Will’s trudge to the line of trees gave him the opportunity to inspect more of Ken Maartens’ work. The cellar doors at the rear of the house, which had before been lost in a tangle of overgrowth that he’d actually forgotten about them, had been replaced. This prompted a shudder. Will could count the times he’d been in the cellar on one hand. The double doors lay at a thirty- degree angle, against the back of the house. The doors were two-by-fours, covered by three-eight inch plywood and covered by sheets of corrugated steel to protect them from the elements. They were heavy and emitted an ominous creak when lifted open. The steps leading below were roughly poured concrete. The floor was dirt. It was lit by a single bulb, and the chain to turn the light on was far enough away from the bottom of the steps that you had leave whatever sunlight that came in through and wave your hands around to find it. The weak light from the bulb did little more than highlight the gaps between the slabs of the limestone foundation, The cellar was scarcely six feet deep, which made it claustrophobic for even a child.
Enhancing the dungeonlike atmosphere was that the cellar space was scarcely a third of the footprint of the house. The far wall was the same row of limestones slabs that rose about two feet below the roof, making room for a crawlspace, accommodating the appendages protruding from the dominant feature of the cellar, the furnace. Will came to understand it was just a relic of the times, the inefficient monstrosity known nationwide as an “octopus.” Will had seen it the first time at about five years old, getting introduced to it after a tantrum at repeated refusals of his demands to see what was behind the cellar doors.
Acting out was a rare thing for Will. Bad behavior had never gotten him anywhere as a child, a lesson he often wished he’d carried into adulthood. On that occasion, the success of his wailing was effective in reinforcing, on every level of his burgeoning social awareness, that accepting “no” the first time around was always the best route to take. The furnace alone may not have been fodder for his upcoming nightmares, but the grim surroundings and his mother’s assertion that, “Rijsbergen’s don’t have funerals. That’s where we burned Greatgrandma and Greatgrandpa. Throw another fit and you’ll be sleeping down here,” quelled all future desire for instant gratification.
The west side of the lot had been mown to the treeline. There were ruts in the ground running the length of the house near the foundation, and the brick on either side of all the upstairs windows, framing sheets of polyethylene as the others, was discolored, lightened by what he figured out to be plaster dust. It made him eager to get upstairs to see how it looked without piles of demolition scrap.
The sun had hit the horizon when he worked his way through the windbreak to the base of the cottonwood tree that had become his latrine. The current state of the house had been a pleasant surprise. When he finished a process he’d overoptimistically hoped would be history, he experienced another surprise.
Beyond the windbreak, the property continued another half mile, the boundary was roughly defined by another row of trees on the western side, and south to north between the Wahpekute to the county road. It was about eighty acres. As a youngster, Will learned the entire property owned by his grandparents was two hundred forty acres, divided into approximate thirds by two windbreaks. The section in the middle was the farmstead proper, holding the house, the barn and the outbuildings. An orchard occupied the lower part of this section, five rows of apple trees starting from halfway down the driveway almost all the way to the river. The upper half, from the barn to the other windbreak to the east, was a hodgepodge of vegetable gardens and fenced pasture for livestock intended for the family table. Beyond the eastern windbreak was another eighty-acre plot dedicated to cash crop, as was the western third; corn, soybeans or sunflowers. In their heyday, the Rijsbergens had owned an equal amount of land on the other side of the county road. That had been sold even before his mother was born. The eastern acreage had succumbed to overgrowth and neglect, just as the farmstead had.
Will couldn’t help but notice it every time he left the house on his way to Maastricht those first three weeks he was here. He assumed the west eighty was in the same condition and never paid it any attention. He’d not once driven that direction.
What Will saw, stepping away from the cottonwood and looking west, was eighty-some acres of smooth, dark, freshly tilled topsoil.
Regardless of the time he’d spent here throughout his life, Will would never present himself as a farm kid. However, willful ignorance aside, he knew there was no way a piece of land as scrub infested as the rest of the property could be made so readily arable in a month. Looking toward the county road, he saw a gravel track leading into the field that looked nowhere near as new as his driveway. It was in the same place it had been when he was a kid, yet he remembered just as well that the last time this field had been tilled was the year before his grandfather died. He didn’t spend a lot of time poring over the property description in the abstract and the plat maps, but he didn’t have to do that to feel certain Nan hadn’t sold any of the land after his grandfather had passed. That wasn’t in her nature. She couldn’t have been more protective of the property had she been born and raised there herself, especially if the only reason there was for parting with a piece of her home was for a reason as banal and contemptable as money. There had to be something else going on here. He’d need to be a bit more mindful and take another look at that paperwork, which was the sort of thing Will found banal, if not quite contemptuous. Then, again, there could well be a way to bypass to that type of investigation… and that shortcut could well be found in the person of Bertie Blom.
And the next visit ol’ Bertie gets will be even more interesting than what we’ve witnessed so far…