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Authors: Chrysler Szarlan

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BOOK: The Hawley Book of the Dead
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“Yut, I remember this old barn.” Carl thumped a chestnut beam, and the dust motes flew in the late afternoon light. “I remember the auction, oh, it must of been twenty years after the buildings were abandoned,” he told me. “This was in the forties, during the war. I was just a kid. We lived in Lithia then, but I had Hawley cousins. I only moved to Hawley when I married my Brenda, who was a Hawley girl. Anyway, Mother took me to the auction. She bought a pie safe, and other junk. They had the houses open so we could all troop through, pick what we wanted to bid on. So we went in.” Carl paused for effect. “And you know, it was like everybody up and left in the middle of some ordinary day. This barn still full of hay, grain still in the mangers, set up for the night feeding. You should of seen it. You’d think over the years some teenagers would figure to use the houses for a hangout. Destroy stuff, torch the furniture for campfires, maybe. But when we went in, it was all just as if it was left maybe a few weeks before. Stuff was dusty, that’s about it. Tables still set for dinner, a bed or two still unmade. What wasn’t auctioned off was cleared out and hauled to the dump.”

Of course, by the time Jolon and I discovered the Five Corners, the buildings were empty. I had always assumed that the abandonment had been gradual, one family dying out, another moving, leaving the houses unclaimed. My family among them, leaving Nan holding the bag eventually. What Carl told me put a different spin on things.

“Why was so much left?” I asked. Carl was closing the barn door. I turned back because he hadn’t answered, was still fiddling with the latch. “Carl?”

“Huh?” He finally turned toward me, a little reluctantly, I thought. “Did you ask me something?”

“I was wondering why so much was left. When people moved away, why did they leave their things?” I sensed more story, something I was good at, digging the dirt of the past, digging nuggets of magic or of fact. None of Nan’s tales had featured the abandonment of the town. I had always figured it had happened long before she was born.

Carl scuffed his loafered foot at a big shiny beetle on the gravel, smashing it to a slimy pulp. Then he shoved his hands in his pockets, peered up at the blue of the sky. “Well, I couldn’t exactly say. Maybe they were in a hurry to get somewhere. To get to a job. Probably moved to cities and lived in small apartments.” He looked at me appraisingly, looked away. “Hey, that’s some spiffy tow package you got on that 4Runner.”

I had no idea why he was trying to distract me, but I was charmed by the mystery. “You’d think they would have sold the furniture before they moved.”

“You have horses, right? I’d expect you’ll want to think about a real truck if you’re going to do any serious towing.” His face was shiny with sweat, although the day was drawing in, the air cooling. I didn’t bother replying. I knew we were done with the subject of the abandonment of Hawley Five Corners. He wandered over to his own truck, tucked behind the barn. He got in, closed the door, looking sheepish, as if he’d done something wrong and I’d caught him at it. “I’ll be sure to get back to you about getting the rest of the junk out of the barn.”

“That will be fine, Carl. Just call my cell.”

He started the truck, and I waited for him to drive off. Instead, he
surprised me. He bent his head out the window toward me, almost whispered, “About the town. It’s just stories. Don’t mean anything. I wouldn’a opened my fat mouth, but I forgot for a minute you’re not from here.” He pounded the truck door in farewell, and I waved him off.

6

When I returned to the house, the girls were still running from room to room, exclaiming over all the fireplaces, the white moldings with their deeply carved grapes. The same things I’d loved about the house when I was young myself and peeking through windows.

“Hey, look at this cool fireplace. It has Noah’s Ark all around it!” Caleigh crowed.

“No way!” I heard Grace pounding into the parlor. “OMG, she’s right. Fai, c’mere!”

“There’s giraffes, and a lion …”

“Cats and bears, and a monkey!”

“What are those things?”

“Anteaters. See, their long tongues are sticking out,” Fai chimed in. “But, you guys, you have to come see this thing in the kitchen. It’s a huge iron thing with a horse pulling a sleigh on the side of it … oh, I can’t describe it, you have to come look.”

I heard more pounding feet, then Caleigh saying, “Didn’t you all ever see a woodstove before? Even I know what a woodstove looks like.”

“That’s a
wood
stove? It looks more like the wicked witch’s oven. And where’d you ever see one?”

Caleigh answered in her superior ten-year-old voice, “Catalogs.”

Nathan entered, bags still in hand. “Will you just drop those,” I ordered, and he did.

He took a moment to look around him, then told me, “This house is fabulous.”

It was. Our house in Nevada seemed brash by contrast, too new, uncouth. Even in its desolate state, the Hawley house was an aging beauty from another era: elegant, timeless, built before the country was a country at all, when Massachusetts was still a colony and wealth could be measured by the number of windows a house boasted.

“Mom!” Caleigh yelled. “Come look!” I followed her voice to the dining room, large and formal. Even unfurnished, it looked grand. At the end of the room was a mural, painted on the wall. I found the girls clustered before it.

“This is
awe
some.” Fai took my hand. Her eyes were glowing.

“It’s in bad shape.” One of the only things in the house that had really suffered with the years, the paint flaking, patches of dampness spotting it. But I remembered it resplendent with color. Silvery green willows hanging over azure ponds, shining red barns, the white houses standing ghostly among autumn trees that were like plumes of smoke, scarlet and gold and purple. Tiny people rode horses on the hilly roads, stood outside their houses, hung wash. It was Hawley Five Corners, dated 1824. Painted by an itinerant artist whose name had been long lost and forgotten. “Jolon and I used to look through the windows at it.”

“Who’s Jolon?” Grace demanded, instantly alert to a secret.

How could I explain the complexity of Jolon? “He was my best friend,” I hedged. I was on safe ground there. He had been.

“You mean your
boy
friend?” Fai goaded me.

“Maybe.”

“What happened to him?”

“He left, a long time ago.”

“Like you did.”

“Like I did.”

“But now you’re back. Maybe he is, too.”

“I seriously doubt it.”

“You could Google him. Or find him on Facebook. Then you’d know.” Fai hated to let things go.

“Shut
up
.” Grace pounced on her. “Mom doesn’t need to find any old stupid boyfriend. You make her sound like some Facebook slut. She isn’t even
on
Facebook.”

“Well, I guess my virtue is safe, then. That’s a relief.”

Grace was under the impression—they all were—that I was functionally illiterate when it came to modern technology. The Amazing Maskelynes’ website had been kept glossy and exciting by strangers to me, our Facebook page as well. Fai was right, though. It could be that simple. Maybe I would google Jolon. It might dispel my nostalgia to know that he was a bank manager somewhere in Wisconsin, or a sheep farmer in South Dakota. But nothing I imagined seemed right. Nothing real could satisfy me. It was better he stay in the past, where he belonged.

“Hey, what about dinner?” Fai asked suddenly.

“I’ll set the table. You girls need to help me find everything,” Nathan told them. “We’ll eat in half an hour.”

I wanted to get to my office, to make more mental notes as I looked it over. It was a room I’d be spending significant amounts of time in.

I had a new job: writing scripts for other magicians, other magic shows. Henry, my agent, suggested it. The money I had seemed like a lot, but with none coming in, it wouldn’t last forever. If I was going to support my family, I had to do something. I couldn’t perform, probably never would again, but the shows I scripted were moneymakers. I’d never had a flop. It used to be that magic shows were just one trick or illusion after another with no theme, no integrity. All that changed with David Copperfield, Siegfried and Roy, Cirque du Soleil—their spellbinding spectacle shows told intricate stories. And if I brought anything to the Amazing Maskelynes beyond my disappearing act, it was my ability to weave a story.

Writing is a kind of magic. One person sits in a room alone and makes marks on a page that represent the images in her mind. Another person looks at those marks, weeks or months or a hundred years later, and similar images appear in
that
person’s mind. Magic. Plays and choreography hold yet another level of magic and meaning: The marks on the page leap to action in another person’s body, to be seen by thousands of others. The ability to weave that kind of magic paid well in Las Vegas. Stage magicians were a dime a dozen there, but a show that would run for years—that was gold.

I planned to write them in the third-floor attic of the Sears house, my choice for an office from the photos Carl had e-mailed. It wasn’t anything
like my old office, a tiny closetlike room in our magic workshop, a warehouse outside of Las Vegas, where Dan and Jeremy and our engineering crew planned and constructed new illusions. My office there was usually crammed with bits and pieces from tricks that were in the works or abandoned. Casts of heads and arms, boxes of discarded wigs or masks. The junk that magic produces. It was also filled with sound drifting in from the warehouse, including the occasional explosion. It was dear to me, the place where I plotted the story lines of our shows. My office in Hawley could never be the same, so I wanted it to be as different as possible. But it held its own magic—the view from the widow’s walk.

The way out to it had been sealed for some long-forgotten reason. Perhaps so children like my young self wouldn’t climb out and fall three stories. I’d asked Carl to have the French doors stripped of the plywood that had covered them, so I could throw them open and walk out in fine weather. My refuge in the trees, my sanctuary from the real world, which no longer contained any magic for me.

I climbed the wide flight of stairs. What had once been the attic seemed like an attic still; no Ikea desk and chair could change that. But I could polish the chestnut beams so they’d glow in the afternoon light. My desk was set up at the far window, with a view of the treetops. If ever I could write anything, this was a fine place to do it.

The small dish that would give us satellite TV and Internet access was just visible, just the edge of it, from my window. The girls assumed that there was Internet and cell access everywhere in the world. But there was none in the forest, without satellite to bring it.

I set my laptop down, booted it. While I waited for the screen to come up, I went to the antique French doors that looked out to the formerly forbidden widow’s walk. I opened one side, and saw myself reflected in the waves and bubbles of old glass, a small woman with wild red hair and a pale face. A widow, walking.

Then I startled. There was another face next to mine in the glass. I gasped and spun around. Across the room from me was a portrait of a woman in nineteenth-century dress. She was young, lovely, her upswept auburn hair framed a pale oval face. A straight nose, classical in its lines.
Hazel eyes, calm but with a glint of irony. A slight smile played on her lips. Her gaze revealed culture, intelligence. She was seated in a carved chair, her arm resting on a table covered in a crimson cloth, her finger pointing at the floor. Frothy lace adorned her wrists and slender neck. A delicate pink rose and trailing vine grew by her chair. I walked closer. Her ring—was it a wedding ring?—sparkled, as did her eyes, and the gold chain she wore that pooled at her waist. She had been a wealthy woman. Her dress was black silk. Perhaps she was a young widow. Like me.

I thought that maybe the painting had been marooned in the house, a relic of the past, as the mural downstairs had been. But as I examined it more closely, that seemed less probable. In spite of a patina of fine lines, the painting glowed, shone, as if it had been well cared for. The frame was delicate, richly gold-leafed wood. No dust bloomed on it. I looked into the woman’s eyes. She compelled me. She seemed to be watching me, appraising me.

“Who are you?” I asked impulsively, and she looked as if at any moment she might answer. But of course she didn’t. She was just a painting. It was strange, though, that I hadn’t noticed the portrait just a half hour before, when Carl showed me the house.

I stepped out into the cooling air and breathed it in. I walked along the roofline of the house, looking over my domain, new and old. The steeple of the church, the slate roofs of the empty houses, the tall, protective wall with its comforting electric wire receding into the woods, the massive gate with the computerized entrance. Even with all the beauty surrounding me I felt forlorn. I had to face the fact that here I was, without Jeremy. I’d made a home without him. As hastily thrown together as the Hawley house was, it was our home now. A home we would never share with him. How final it seemed. I realized, though, that something had altered in me. Under the darkening sky, I felt I could breathe for the first time since Jeremy died, that in this place I could live my life and keep what was left of our family safe. Compared to what I’d had, it wasn’t much. But it was something.

7

Nathan had uncorked a bottle of wine, and he proposed a toast to happiness in our new home. The girls raised their glasses of sparkling apple cider, giddy in the festive atmosphere Nathan had created with candles and their champagne-like drinks.

“I have a toast to make, too.” Fai lifted her glass again. “To Mom’s old boyfriend, who I just found!” Her eyes sparkled with delight.

“Whoa. Wait a minute.” Grace frowned suspiciously. “How do you know it’s him? Mom didn’t even tell us his last name.”

“Be
cause
,” her twin retorted, drawing out her explanation for the slow-witted among us, “Jolon’s not a common
first
name. There were a lot of entries for other things, like a site in Ireland selling Bibles, a town in California with a headless ghost.”

BOOK: The Hawley Book of the Dead
6.15Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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