Chapter 1 - The Mark on the Casing
The silence inside the unpainted kitchen seemed heavier than the humid spring heat rolling through the broken casement screens. Outside, the waist-high thistles and volunteer scrub oaks whispered in the ditch along Route 9, but here, under the naked bulb Nate had wired two nights earlier, nothing stirred except the dust rising from our boots.
Opal did not take her hand away from the pantry casing. Her fingers, dry and spotted like parchment, rested on the yellow pine jamb with an eerie familiarity, the tips pressed into the grain as though she were reading braille. Her knuckles were swollen with the hard arthritis of sixty years spent scrubbing cast iron, gutting broilers, and wringing damp bedsheets through the rollers of an old Maytag. In the eleven years since Nate had brought me to her Sunday table for pot roast and peach cobbler, I had seen her withstand the deaths of her sisters, the auction of three hundred family acres during the drought of ninety-eight, and the lingering decline of her husband, Arthur, without so much as reaching for a handkerchief. When Arthur’s casket went into the hard clay of the lower cemetery, Opal had stood straight-backed in her navy linen coat, her gloves clasped at her waist, watching the backhoe idle by the fence row with an expression that defied the earth to shake her.
Now, her shoulders—usually held with the rigid discipline of a country schoolteacher who had taught sixty children in a one-room schoolhouse—hitched once, twice, in silence. The tears did not pour; they simply gathered in the deep wrinkles beside her nose and rolled into the creases of her mouth.
"Opal?" I asked again, taking a half-step across the gray linoleum that Nate and I had spent thirty-six hours scrubbing with lye and hot water. "What is it? Are you feeling dizzy? The heat in here—"
"I am not dizzy, child," she said. Her voice was cracked, like dry cedar shingles under summer sun, but the tremor was buried under something older and harder. "Bring me that utility lamp from the bench. The one Nate uses for his junction boxes."
I hurried to the overturned milk crate by the sink where Nate kept his tools. My hands, still raw from pulling horsehair plaster off the lath in the front parlor, fumbled with the switch of the heavy yellow flashlight. When the halogen beam cut across the kitchen, Opal pointed with a single, trembling finger toward the upper half of the inside door jamb, right where the frame met the hollow recess of the shelving.
"Hold it right there," she commanded. "Low against the bevel."
I held the beam flat against the weathered pine. Under the glare, years of grime and flaking lead paint cast long, jagged shadows. There, obscured by two generations of dirt and the dull gray grease that settles in old kitchens, a series of light, razor-straight knife notches had been scored into the wood. Above each cluster of marks, tiny initials were gouged with the tip of a pocketknife, followed by dates written in faded carpenter's pencil: M.B. 1934, E.B. 1937, A.B. 1941.
And then, down near the bottom of the column, level with what would have been a five-year-old child’s hip: O.B. May 1942.
My breath hitched in my throat. The flashlight beam wavered, dancing across the yellowed wood. "O.B.? Opal... that's you."
"Opal Becker," she murmured. Her fingers moved down to that lowest notch, settling into the groove as if her skin had memorized the contour seventy-five years before. "Before I married your grandfather. Before the name Miller was ever attached to this section."
"The deed says Miller," I stammered, my mind racing through the thin manila folder the county clerk had handed us on the courthouse steps. "Dobbs called it the Miller tax parcel. It’s been in the Miller name since the late fifties."
"Because Frank Miller bought it from my father’s creditors on the courthouse steps for nine hundred dollars while Arthur and I were living in a tenant shack three miles south of here, trying to pay off Ronald’s infant hospital bills," she said. She turned around slowly, her back against the pantry door, her pale blue eyes taking in the ceiling joists, the water stain near the flue, the place where the wood-burning stove had left an oval ring of iron rust on the floorboards. "This was the Becker homeplace. My grandfather built this house out of white oak he hauled from the river bottom with two teams of mules. My brothers were born in the front bedroom. My mother died where you’ve got your drywall stacked."
I lowered the light, my chest tightening with an unexpected, suffocating weight. "Nate doesn't know. He had no idea. When we walked the perimeter, he just saw good timber in the sill and twenty-two hundred feet of copper he'd have to pull."
"Of course he doesn't know," Opal said, her jaw setting with that familiar, stubborn line that Nate had inherited down to the millimeter. "Ronald never told him. Ronald spent forty years pretending this side of the township didn't exist. When Frank Miller’s dairy went belly-up ten years ago and the place was left to the brush, Ronald wouldn't even look out the truck window when we drove past the turnoff to go into town. He looked straight ahead like there was a cemetery on this hill."
She stepped away from the door frame, her black lace-up shoes clicking against the linoleum Nate had patched with scraps. Her gaze moved deliberately over every corner: the rusted cast-iron bracket where a wall-mount telephone had hung before the war; the two square scars in the wainscoting where an oak icebox had stood; the hook above the sink where her mother had hung the tea towel.
"Why didn't Ronald want you to see it?" I asked. "When you called me... you told me specifically not to mention this to him. You said, 'Don't let Ronald know where we're going.'"
Opal stopped in the center of the room, right beneath the bare bulb. She reached into her wool handbag, pulled out an embroidered linen handkerchief that smelled of lavender water and ironed starch, and slowly dabbed at the corners of her eyes. When she brought her hand down, the tears were gone, replaced by a cold, calculating stillness that made her look twenty years younger.
"Because Ronald thinks he buried this place," she whispered. "He thinks he and Judy bought the whole world with their three hundred acres on the ridge, and he thinks he's the only one who remembers the shame of how they got it."
She looked at me then—really looked at me—her eyes raking over my faded denim work shirt, the blisters along my palms, the gray dust of plaster clinging to my hairline.
"He gave Kim twenty thousand," she stated. It wasn't a question.
I swallowed, the old, dull burn from Easter dinner flaring back to life behind my ribs. "Yes. And Jeff. And Stacy."
"And to you and my boy?"
"A card," I said, keeping my voice level. "With a bluebird on the front. Judy wrote that we were independent. That they knew we could handle anything."
Opal let out a dry, rattling sound from the back of her throat that might have been a laugh if there had been any humor in it. "Capable. That’s Ronald’s favorite word for the ones he wants to turn his back on. He called his brother Carl 'capable' right before he bought out Carl’s share of the cattle for fifty cents on the dollar after the barn fire."
She turned toward the front of the house, heading through the archway into the parlor where Nate had stacked the new two-by-fours and the rolls of fiberglass insulation we’d bought on credit. Her gait was slow, but there was no hesitation in her stride. She knew every riser in the floorboards; she stepped over the warped plank near the front window without looking down.
"Where is Nate?" she asked.
May you like
"Down at Miller's Creek with the bush-hog," I said. "He borrowed Joe Gidley's tractor for the afternoon to clear the old lane down to the bottom well. He wanted to make sure we had water pressure before he started hanging the drywall in the bathroom."
"Go get him," Opal said. She sat down on the edge of a dry, unopened bucket of joint compound near the fireplace, resting her hands on the bone handle of her black umbrella. "Go get my grandson. And leave the door open. I want to smell the honeysuckle in that hedge row before the sun starts to drop."
