by Ike Hamill
Gus waited until he thought that his cousins were asleep and then he slipped out from under his covers. Compared to the first floor, Uncle Travis’s room was as cold as an ice box. Goosebumps sprang up on his arms as he shivered. Downstairs, his mother had a nightlight so she wouldn’t bump into anything if she had to use the bathroom in the night. In Travis’s room, the only light was a thin blue glow that angled through the window.
He heard the wind outside. It rattled the glass panes, loose in their cracked putty.
Gus crept towards the door. The floor groaned underfoot. When he looked across the hall at the bathroom, he realized why it was so dark—his uncle said he was going to leave the light on. He must have forgotten. Gus reached around to flip the switch but paused. Maybe it would be best to explore in the dark.
He left the lights off.
Behind him, around the corner to the stairs, a soft orange glow painted the walls. They were listening to jazz down there. His mother liked to do that when she drank wine.
Gus left that behind him and turned to the darkness. He had seen the hallway a million times. He had only been down there once or twice. Sliding his feet along the floor, he tried to settle his weight slowly, hoping the old boards wouldn’t give him away. His mother never came up the stairs, but Gus had no doubt that she would break that rule if she suspected that he was exploring where he didn’t belong.
Gus ran his fingers across the door to Uncle Jules’s room. His eyes tried to make sense of the darkness. There had to be a window somewhere down there—he was sure of it. If there was, he couldn’t see it.
His toe found the steps that led down to the wing. The floor of the wing was a few feet lower. With a hand pressed against the wall he stepped down.
CRACK.
The sound of the dry wood accepting his weight reverberated down the wing. Gus held still and waited for the sound of his mother’s feet pounding up the stairs. She didn’t come. He stepped down.
The cold pooled around his ankles. It felt like he was standing in snow. Gus slid forward. Uncle Tommy’s room was down on the right somewhere. Sam talked about it all the time. Gus had never seen it with his own eyes.
The family had a thousand stories about Uncle Tommy. None of them were ever told in Tommy’s presence, and the man didn’t seem to do anything noteworthy when he was around. From the stories though, he was either a monster or a god.
It was unclear whether Tommy was his mother’s uncle or great uncle. The man was nearly as old as Great Uncle Travis, but nobody every called Tommy great. When Gus was a little kid, Tommy had lived in the house full time. That’s not to say that he was a presence in their lives. Gus barely remembered Uncle Tommy at the house. His truck would pull into the dooryard sometime around when Gus was going to bed. If Gus was still awake, his mother would shush him and tell him to listen for the sound of Uncle Tommy’s feet tromping up the back stairs. After his door shut, they would hear no more from Tommy. He was always gone again by the time that Gus woke up.
After the dishes were cleared away, and the napkins were balled up on the table, stories of Uncle Tommy would come out like a second round of desert. Gus was always at the kids table for these family gatherings, but he positioned himself to overhear.
At eighteen, Uncle Tommy had gone off to join the Navy, even though the Korean draft had been over for a while. Hoping to get assigned to the Pacific, Uncle Tommy had found himself manning a desk in Illinois. The Navy taught him how to type and expected him to use that skill to process paperwork of the men training at the “Great Mistakes” camp. The men going off to patrol the seas had a name for desk jockeys like Tommy. They called them, “Titless Waves,” but Tommy would beat a man senseless if he ever overheard a comment like that.
According to family stories, Chicago is where Tommy had learned to despise Turkish people and where he had acquired all of his blurry blue tattoos. Every week, his fellow Personnelmen would pool all the contributions from three different offices to buy Tommy another tattoo. They all thought it was a riot that for the low price of twenty dollars, they could get Tommy to tattoo whatever they wanted on any part of his body that would be covered by his uniform. Each week they had a little contest to see who could come up with the funniest idea. Tommy thought it was laughable that the other men didn’t know that the tattoos only cost ten dollars. For an extra ten bucks a week, Tommy would gladly get ink injected into his skin. He didn’t care if the picture was of a pinup or a hotdog boinking a doughnut. The Navy only paid him thirty dollars a week. An extra ten was a huge raise.
Gus had seen some of Tommy’s tattoos. He never saw the one of the hotdog boinking the doughnut. He wasn’t precisely sure, but he thought that meant that the hotdog would be hitting the doughnut over the head.
The tattoo that Gus liked the best was “Carla” written in fancy script on Tommy’s right shoulder. The story said that Carla was the name of his CO’s wife. That tattoo had earned Tommy a demotion and a week in the brig.
Gus’s hand trailed over the trim and then found the knob for Uncle Tommy’s door. He turned back towards the light at the end of the hall. He squeezed the knob and turned it.
# # # #
June had her eyes closed. She was listening and swaying slightly to the music. Her wine sloshed a little as she moved the glass left and right.
Auggie smiled. He hoped that she was happy. She deserved to be. Nobody he knew worked more tirelessly. June had dedicated herself to providing a safe and stable life for her son. She didn’t do a single thing for herself.
“Hey,” she said, “whatever happened to that train set you used to have? You remember that?”
“Sure,” he said. He shifted in his seat and then scratched the side of his head. “Let’s see—that must still be up in the attic, I guess. That’s right, I packed it all in that metal box so the mice wouldn’t chew the wires again. It has to be up in the attic unless one of our sticky-fingered relatives got ahold of it.”
“I was thinking. I’d like you to set that up and show it to Gus. Would you do that?”
Auggie raised his eyebrows as he glanced around the room. It was a marvel of efficiency, but he didn’t think that he could add a model train setup to the space. She had a futon, a table, a small refrigerator, a couple of dressers, and a couch pointed at a small TV. He would have to build a shelf that ran around the top of the wall near the ceiling.
“Not in here,” she said as Auggie looked around. “Set it up in the old dining room or maybe that space that Allison calls the drawing room?”
“Oh,” Auggie said. “Just until New Year’s?”
“No. It can stay.”
“But Gus doesn’t go in the rest of the house when we’re not here, right? Besides, you’re moving in a couple of weeks, right?”
“Yeah,” she said. She didn’t sound sure of herself. “I’m saying that it could stay up forever, if you wanted. Gus is old enough to go in different parts of the house, don’t you think? Just because we’re moving, it doesn’t mean that this will be the last time that we’ll be here, you know?”
“I thought that you were giving up on the terms of the contract?”
“I am. That’s not what I’m saying. I don’t want Gus to lose his connection to this place, I just don’t want to be a hostage here anymore. After this year, we’re going to violate the terms and get it over with. Then we can enjoy Mumma’s house on our own terms. Don’t you feel like Allison has a better time than anyone else? She doesn’t come here for some arcane contract, she comes because she enjoys spending time with family.”
“Where did you get the idea that Allison violated the contract?” Auggie asked.
“She didn’t come in 2001, remember? She couldn’t get a flight and she didn’t want to drive.”
“She’s still on the contract, June,” Auggie said.
“I don’t know how that’s possible.”
Auggie shrugged. “I don’t know either, but it is.”
“Huh. Well, anyway, I’m getting ou
t. I want to see you and the girls and Jules and Allison and everyone, but I don’t want to be beholden to this place.”
“I understand. Technically, one day a year is not that much to ask, but I understand.”
June set down her glass. “You know it’s more than that.”
“I’ve heard you say it, but I guess I’ll never really know.”
“That’s right,” June said. She picked up her wine again and swirled it before she took it all down in one big gulp. “I didn’t get to ask her what the hell she was thinking. I was, what, a year old?”
“Almost two.”
“Almost two years old and I’m declared the future ‘Mumma’ of this place? How is that fair? What if I didn’t even want to have a kid? What if, as it turns out, I only had one kid and he turned out to be a boy? How can she dictate my entire life before I’m even old enough to understand the words she was saying?”
Auggie tilted his head from side to side as he listened. This wasn’t the first time they had discussed this topic. It wasn’t even the tenth time. He knew what she was trying to say and she knew that he wasn’t going to let the exaggeration pass.
“Technically, you understood the words. I’ll grant that you didn’t really grasp the magnitude, but you understood. You were pretty happy at the time that you were going to be Mumma June. It’s all you talked about for…”
“Stop it, Auggie. Stop. You’re not going to hold me to something I agreed to when I was twenty-two months old, okay? You’re not.”
Her tears were on their way. Auggie frowned as he realized that there was nothing he could say now that would slow them down. They were going to fall.
“Sorry, June, I’m not trying to hold you to anything. Do whatever makes you happy, okay? Hell, sometimes I think that you’ve given more to this house and this family than any of them. They didn’t live here alone. They didn’t have to manage this entire place by themselves while raising a terrific kid at the same time. I’m going to stick around because I want to, but that doesn’t mean that I’ll have anything but respect for what you’ve done.”
June took a deep breath and exhaled through her nose while she looked at the floor. A tear spilled from her eye. She wasn’t crying. Just that one tear fell.
“You can be the lord of this shit pile,” she said. “It’s not worth one second of thought. The only thing that was ever worthwhile here was the family. One day out of the year doesn’t mean a damn thing. Our family is dead.”
“Come on, June, there’s no reason to…”
He didn’t get to finish his admonishment. They both looked up at the sound of footsteps racing overhead. A moment later, his girls screamed. Auggie took off like a streak and mounted the stairs three at a time.
# # # #
When the light went on, all three kids were frozen in place. Until he saw their blankets moving up and down with their rapid breathing, some part of Auggie actually believed that time had stopped—he had continued on while the rest of the world was doomed to stay locked in one moment.
“What’s going on here?” he asked.
Gus made a big show of pretending that he was just waking up. The beads of sweat on his forehead told a different story.
“Who screamed?”
Millie’s hand came out from under the blanket very slowly. She raised it, identifying herself as the culprit. As soon as Isla realized that her sister was stepping forward, her own hand went up as well. She was not about to let her sister take all the blame.
“And why are we screaming in the middle of the night?”
“I thought something scared me,” Millie said.
Auggie rolled his eyes.
“And where were you?” he asked, turning to Gus.
Gus shook his head before he answered, like he didn’t believe what he was about to say.
“I guess I got up to go to the bathroom but the light was off.”
“That’s true,” Isla said.
Auggie rolled his eyes again.
“Okay, this experiment is over,” Auggie said. “Girls, you get downstairs into our room. Gus, you go down to your futon or whatever. Get going.”
“Do we have to?” Isla whined.
Millie was already climbing over her.
“Normally, I would make you serve out your sentence up here. This is what you begged me for and you should learn to live with your decisions. But tonight, I’m too tired to deal with your nonsense. Get downstairs and we’ll have to re-clean this room again tomorrow.”
Millie wrapped the blanket around herself, leaving Isla alone with nothing but a sheet. Helping her sister up, Millie included her little sister before she started moving towards the door.
“I’m sorry, Uncle Auggie,” Gus said.
Auggie nodded for a moment and then patted Gus on the back as the boy sat up.
“It’s okay, Gus, I know that things are exciting when your cousins come to town. You don’t have to come down if you don’t want to. If you can keep quiet, you’re allowed to stay up here for a change of scenery.”
Gus looked around at the place like the walls were covered with bugs.
“No thanks.”
Gus pulled the covers up on his bed and took his pillow before he followed his cousins towards the stairs. Before he rounded the corner to go downstairs, he took one last look down the hall. Uncle Tommy’s door was lost in the shadows down there.
Chapter 3 : Kate
“YOU GIRLS SHOULD GO inside. It’s freezing out here,” their Aunt June said as she stepped over them to descend to the yard. They were sitting right in the middle of the stairs, right between the railings.
“Okay,” Millie said. When Isla shot her a look, Millie gave her head a tiny shake. They weren’t going anywhere—she was just saying that to appease Aunt June. Isla propped up her chin in her hands and watched June scrape the windshield as the car warmed up. It was really cold. The sun had just started to come up over the trees and it was bright but didn’t seem to deliver any warmth. It was like when their father had replaced the lightbulb in the living room lamp. The old bulb had given off a dusty warmth that was pleasant to sit next to when they read a book. The new bulb was dazzling, but didn’t feel warm at all.
Aunt June beeped her horn twice and then backed up to turn around.
They both waved.
“When is she coming?” Isla asked.
“I don’t know. I just know that it’s today.”
The door behind them squeaked.
“She’s not going to come any faster if you’re waiting,” their father said.
“We know,” Millie and Isla said at the same time.
“Come inside. I made muffins.”
Isla looked at Millie for permission. Most of the time, Isla liked to make and break her own rules. With really important things, like waiting for their mother, she deferred to Millie’s vast experience.
Millie nodded.
They ran inside.
# # # #
“Why are we eating in here?” Isla said, looking around the room shared by her cousin and her aunt. “I thought we were big kitchen people.”
“There’s something wrong with the heat back there,” her father said. He came to the table with a spatula balancing an egg. His other hand was cupped below to catch any grease. “I’m going to bleed the lines later.”
“Eww!” Millie said.
“What? I thought you wanted a fried egg.”
“No, not eww to the egg, eww to bleeding.”
Her father slid the egg onto her plate and then stuck his palm to his mouth to clean it.
“It’s not like that.”
Gus lowered his book. “Air gets caught in the heat, right Uncle Auggie?”
“That’s right,” Auggie said. “Not at home though, girls. We have a different system at home.”
“Can I help you bleed the lines?” Gus asked.
“Me too,” Isla said.
“Everyone gets to help,” Auggie said. “It’s going to take a whole team of
us to figure it out.”
Isla turned in her chair and looked around the room, taking in the details.
“Dad? When you were kids, did everyone have to come through Aunt June’s room to get into the house all the time? Wasn’t it weird if she was asleep or whatever?”
“No,” Auggie said. He turned a chair around and propped his arms on the back. “When we were kids, she lived in the room across from mine, down that hall. Nobody stays in there now. We just use it for storage.”
Gus put his book down again. “I thought she had a room upstairs in the wing?”
“She did that too. She lived in a few different rooms. One summer, she lived in that balcony room of the barn.”
Gus’s mouth dropped open at the idea. He shook his head, apparently dismissing the notion as a joke.
“It’s true,” Auggie said, with a laugh. “Your mother was pretty adventurous at one point. I mean, not to say that she’s not anymore. She was adventurous as to where she lived. Over the years, she has contracted a little in that respect.”
Auggie stood up again and took the plates from Gus and Isla off to the little kitchen area.
“One time, when we had chickens in a coop on the north side of the barn, a fox stole a couple of our good hens. June was heartbroken and she swore that she would keep the rest of the chickens safe. She put them out each morning and guarded them until the sun was fully up. She gathered them in each evening. For a long time, she thought she had the problem licked and then fall came. The sun sets earlier and earlier until it feels like it’s barely poking up above the trees before it’s going back down again. Gus can attest, I’m sure.”
“Yup,” Gus said. “It’s like that right now.”
“And on the north side of the barn, it’s even worse. It was just before Thanksgiving that June really started to have trouble. The bus came for school when it was still pretty dark out and we didn’t get home until after sunset. And that time of year, the foxes start to get really desperate. June thought she was going to have to lock up the chickens for the whole winter. Aunt Allison wouldn’t hear of it. She said it was torture.”