Chapter 8 - The Clearing of the North Wing
On Saturday morning, the sun came up over the Gap in a blinding, crystalline blaze that turned the entire valley into an empire of diamond and ice.
The north wing of the Blackwood house was thirty degrees colder than the kitchen, but the light was incredible. It came through the sixteen divided-light windows of the sun parlor in great, golden shafts that illuminated the dust motes dancing in the air like powdered gold.
I stood in the center of the room with an eight-foot wooden ladder, a bucket of warm vinegar water, and a bundle of clean linen rags torn from old flour sacks.
Mark’s things had already been removed.
Frank and his boys had come through at seven with three hand-trucks and a flatbed trailer. They had taken the oversized leather sectional Mark had bought on credit; they had taken his three-hundred-dollar golf bags from the library closet; they had taken his flat-screen television and the barstools he had ordered from the catalog in Chicago. Everything had been loaded onto the trailer and hauled down to the storage units behind the feed mill, where the rent was paid through the end of the month and not an hour longer.
All that remained in the north wing were the things that belonged to the dirt.
The two-hundred-year-old cherrywood seed-sorting table, its surface scarred by a thousand pocketknives and stained with the purple juice of elderberries and black walnuts.
The six ladder-back chairs with their seats woven from swamp-rush that my grandfather had harvested from the marsh in the dry summer of nineteen-thirty-six.
And in the corner, covered in a heavy linen sheet that had grown yellow along the folds, was the Steinway upright my mother had played every Sunday evening after the milking was finished.
I pulled the sheet away.
The mahogany case was dusty, but the finish was intact—deep, dark red, like the heartwood of an old cedar stump. I ran my fingers along the fallboard, lifted the brass latch, and touched middle C.
The note was low, rich, and slightly flat from four years of neglect, but it sang through the empty room with a solid, iron certainty that made the floorboards vibrate under my boots.
The door behind me creaked.
Frank Vance was standing in the archway, holding a cardboard carton filled with glass quart jars.
"Brought the clover honey from the south hives," Frank said, setting the box down on the seed table. "And two bushels of Northern Spy apples from the cold room. Thought you might want to get the cider press working before the freeze gets too deep into the cellar."
I looked at him, then at the piano keys. "Did Mark come by the storage units?"
"Came by at nine," Frank said, leaning his hip against the doorframe and pulling his pipe from his pocket. "Brought his cousin Toby with him in that noisy Dodge. They loaded his clothes and his golf clubs into the bed and took off down toward the turnpike. Toby said Mark’s got an interview with a concrete outfit out in Scranton on Tuesday. Said he’s living in an extended-stay motel by the rail yard until his first check clears."
"And Linda?"
"Linda moved her things into the tenant house with Ashley two hours ago," Frank said, striking a match against the doorframe and holding the flame over the charred bowl of his pipe. "Brought her three strands of pearls and four suitcases of knit suits. Ashley had her out on the stoop with an iron shovel, clearing the snow off the well-slab so they could get the bucket down. Looked like she was trying to figure out how to work the leather latch without getting grease on her sleeves."
I picked up a linen rag, dipped it into the warm vinegar water, and began to wipe the dust from the piano lid.
The smell of the vinegar—sharp, clean, and honest—cut through the stale, closed scent of the room like a cold wind through an attic.
"She’ll hate it down there, Frank," I said.
"Of course she will," Frank replied through a cloud of sweet cherry smoke. "A Caldwell hates work like a sheep hates deep water. But she’ll stay there. Because the only thing a Caldwell hates worse than work is letting the neighbors see them eat off a paper plate in a public campground."
He walked over to the windows, looked out across the forty acres of frozen pasture toward the blue ridge of the Gap, and tapped the ash from his pipe onto the stone sill.
"You got six head of heifers coming up from the lower barn on Monday, Claire," he said. "The co-op lease calls for thirty ton of hay to be dropped in the south manger before the first blizzard hits. You want my boys to start hauling tomorrow, or you want to take the tractor down yourself?"
I looked down at my hands.
May you like
The skin was rough around the knuckles, the nails were short and scrubbed clean, and the wedding ring—a narrow band of platinum that Mark had picked out of a showcase in a mall because it matched his watch—was gone, dropped into the bottom of the stone springhouse where the cold water pushed through the shale at forty-two degrees.
"I'll take the tractor down myself, Frank," I said. "I've been sitting on the porch long enough."
