by Scott Thomas
When she opened the door, Abigail’s mother saw the room was dark but for chill November light falling on the bed, where damp dead crows made the shape of a body, its face a copper mask.
The Franklin Stove
North-Central Massachusetts
Poor Aunt Hattie, she can never get warm. Here it is only December and already she pines for June. But is it really any wonder, in a cavernous old house like this, with more shadows than drapes and more drafts than rugs?
Perhaps if she had some more meat on her bones things might be different. You would think she would be round and plush, the way she indulges her appetite for baked goods, but this is not the case. In summertime her dresses hang off her frame as if laundry on a line, and even in winter her fortifying layers droop.
Aunt Hattie is stingy with firewood. Even a girl my age can tell that is part of her problem. There is a brooding black Franklin stove in the parlour, yet she only feeds it a quarter-log at a time. Not until one stick is all but burnt out does she add another, propping it against the pitiful remnants of its predecessor. Whether the added piece lights or not is largely a thing of chance.
The frugality of this method often leads to a string of under-the-breath curses as Auntie scrabbles together kindling to re-light the stove. During my visits I occasionally sneak extra wood into the firebox (at the risk of a scolding).
I have mentioned that it is December. Snow has come to the region and it makes the house look grey. It’s a tall house, a staggered thing of peaks and angles and windows of varied size. Each generation of occupants has built onto it so that now it is difficult to visualize the original structure. Even Uncle Abner (rest his soul) tried his hand. Poor fellow never did earn any blue ribbons for carpentry, as evidenced by his addition. The clapboards swell as if over a secret too big to contain, and it appears to lean against other parts of the house, seems to rely on them to keep it standing.
Today the house looks uncomfortable, towering in the cold, staring out over the lumps that denote a smothered garden. Beyond it the wide white yard is striped blue with the shadows of trees.
I am making a snowman. Aunt Hattie watches from the kitchen window, shrouded in a throw. She waves and I wave back, my mitten damp and clumpy.
Sunlight glares on the panes and for a brief moment I imagine a tall, severe woman in mourning black glaring out over my aunt’s shoulder.
What my snowman lacks in symmetry he makes up for in charm. His walnut eyes beam along a carrot nose and the sprigs of fir I’ve used for hair sprout jauntily from his crown.
In the window Aunt Hattie applauds silently and smiles at my crooked masterpiece. The veiled woman behind her is gone. Strange. There seems to be a scattering of snow on my aunt’s shoulders.
There is such a clattering of pans from the kitchen that I half expect to find suits of armour wrestling on the floor when I enter. Auntie is on her knees with her head stuck in a low cupboard; she is looking for her favourite baking dish.
“I thought,” she says between clangs, “we’d make an apple pandowdy in honour of your visit.”
“Pandowdy!” I exclaim. She knows it’s my favourite.
“Oh, Dear, would you please close the door? There’s such a draft!”
I push the door shut with my rump, then put down my armload of firewood. Auntie rises triumphant, clutching her dish to her chest like a breastplate.
We divide the preparatory tasks; I remove the crusts from bread slices, then tear them into fingers to dip in melted butter. Aunt Hattie peels, cores, and slices the apples.
Once all has been assembled, and fruit and cinnamon scent the room, we sprinkle dark brown sugar across the top layer.
How curious. Afternoon light catches on a few white flecks that flutter down before the lid is placed over the dish. I turn and look up, and see a dusting of white powder on Aunt Hattie’s shoulders.
The old woman shudders. “Ohhh, my bones feel like icicles.”
I glimpse the hem of a black skirt whisking from the room.
Aunt Hattie judiciously chooses a piece of wood and places it in the Franklin. The doors squeal, clang shut, and the stove sits there ticking like a big black clock.
Waiting for the pandowdy to bake, I am patience on a stool while my aunt plays with my hair. She tries a number of styles, each time taking a step back and cocking her head as she studies her handiwork. She offers a hand mirror so that I can admire myself. I notice that cinnamon from the kitchen work has added to my freckles and I rub my cheek with a wrist.
“You look lovely,” Auntie says, delighted, “just like your Aunt Clara when she was your age.”
It is a rare occasion when my aunt mentions her deceased sister.
Clara died when I was just a baby. It was a tragic thing, and my father might never have told me the details were it not for an overindulgence of Christmas cheer (and even then I was sworn never to repeat them).
The elderly spinster Clara had moved in with Aunt Hattie shortly after Uncle Abner passed on. One bitter night in December the sisters sat by the Franklin reading, as was their nightly ritual. Hattie dozed off in her rocker and when she awoke her sister was gone from the chair opposite. Assuming that Clara had gone up to bed, Hattie locked the doors and retired to her own chamber.
Hattie is a sound sleeper. Unaware that her sister had trudged out to fetch wood for the fire, she slumbered peacefully through the desperate, then slowing thumps at the door.
Clara, alone in her crisis, was either too weak or disoriented to smash a window, it seems. Hattie found the body in the morning, as brittle as a frozen sparrow.
The day dims now, the sun faltering behind dark firs, leaving smears of muffled peach. The house is warmer for the smell of pandowdy, but the shadows increase.
Auntie hands me the mirror so that I can witness her latest creation. My hair is piled like a bee skep.
“Oh, very fancy!” I say, giggling.
I hold the mirror; the reflection shows a charcoal figure in the window behind me. She is stiff against the quieting sky, haggard behind a veil that shifts like smoke. A chill goes up my neck and I drop the mirror. It smashes as if it were ice.
The apple pandowdy is done at last and it is glorious. We enjoy it with fresh whipped cream, close by the Franklin (a banker’s safe full of precious heat).
The stove is hot, the food is hot and the tea is hot, but still Aunt Hattie shivers.
“I’m so cold,” she moans.
The sky has darkened above the chalk world and the jumbled grey house in which we sit. We have drained our tea and scraped every bit of pandowdy from our plates. I take these to the kitchen and wash them, content and humming.
Some little time passes and an unpleasant odour comes to me on the air. I hear a dull repetition of thumps.
“Auntie?”
Drying my hands, I walk back to the parlour. The room is full of terrible black smoke. At first I can scarcely make out the figure of my aunt, her head stuffed into the roaring red mouth of the Franklin stove, her body slumped behind.
The thumping of her feet slows and stops as frosty handprints on her upper back melt into her shawl.
I shriek and run from the room, racing through the kitchen and out the side door. I trip over some large folded thing that lies across the walkway.
Righting myself, I catch a glimpse of a rising darkness, its icy eyes glaring behind a veil.
I scream all the way home.
Wrought-Iron Skeleton
Massachusetts, 1877
Trowbridge painted the bones of animal skeletons once the flesh was boiled away. Then, in autumn, when the leaves got their colour, she hung them in the surrounding woods, as if the maples, birches, and sumacs weren’t enough. Never one for wire, she fastened the bones together with string or yarn where necessary, but over time those materials weathered and the bright, dangling skeletons transformed. Some of their parts might be missing, or sections might appear unnaturally elongated due to the stretching of damp yarn. In these cases, the
bones became the remains of creatures not fumbled upon by evolution, or perhaps the echo of things that strolled the globe before man took up the quill to record them.
I have forever possessed an interest in antiquated objects and while Mrs. Trowbridge was something of a relic in her own right, it was not her bones that I sought that morning when I volunteered to help those who had gathered to seek for her earthly shell. In all honesty, I was looking for things. Considering her age (ninety-something, if memory serves), I thought I might come upon some hoary treasures in the sooty heap that had been her old saltbox.
The smoke seemed to have settled in the trees, lending a touch of sepia to the autumnal mist common to October mornings. Small skeletons rattled in the low branches when we brushed past them and things that I hoped were only birch twigs snapped under foot.
I have never been accused of philanthropy, which is not to say that I’m as unscrupulous as those “salvagers” who would lure a ship to rocky reefs in order to reap a soggy reward. Still, I was not one to slight opportunity. Once or twice (all right, seven times) I had set upon nocturnal forays into the homes of antediluvian locals who, busy making amends with their Creator, seemed not to mind my rummaging about their dark rooms for collectibles.
I kept an ear open for word of funerals, scheduling my adventures accordingly. Sometimes it was a race against the departed’s ravenous offspring, but most of the time the houses sat empty and I was at my leisure to go about my hunting.
One time, however, I misheard a bit of dialogue and consequently stole into a place where an old woman was apparently near death and not actually in its possession. The word of Spinster Spooner’s funeral—in the fragment of conversation that I had perceived—turned out to be a prediction, not an arrangement.
There I was in the middle of the night, in a great rambling tomb of a house, when suddenly the ghastly figure of the hag shot up in her bed. I started of course, but calling swiftly upon my resourceful nature, I noted that she had a carving of that poor thorn-crowned fellow hanging over her bed. I promptly and (very earnestly) mentioned to her that I was Saint so and so, come to see her off. Well, with that she gave me a blissful little smile then settled back and went about her death rattle. I came away with a few handsome items that night—but I’ve digressed!
At any rate, that clammy morning I had joined the rest trudging through damp leaves to the burned wreckage of the Trowbridge house. I received my share of suspicious glances from the boys of the fire brigade because, as mentioned, I was not known for my generosity and thus my motives were likely to be questioned. At least they had the restraint not to accuse me outright of anything unsavoury.
The house had been a fine specimen of 18th-century construction, but now it was one of God’s smashed toys, a few upright fragments of rooms seemingly resting atop a baroque nest of blackened timber. A shame, really, for the house and the occupant. The fire seemed to have started on an upper level, according to witnesses of the previous night. An attempt had been made to rescue the widow, and one fellow swore he saw a figure stumbling about behind the flames, but the blaze drove them out from the first floor. The body was not recovered, thus our morning stroll in the burnt-smelling mist.
Looking at the ruin, I harboured little hope of finding anything worth taking, and even if there were treasures, they would need to be of concealable size. I hoped I would not be the one to actually discover the scorched corpus and, as it turns out, I was not.
“Dear heavens!” a Mr. Needham—one of the more ethical volunteers—exclaimed.
He stepped back from the blackened mess where he had been prodding with his stick.
“I expected her to be burnt,” he said, “but there’s not a trace of flesh upon her.”
While moments before I had dreaded the thought of such a discovery, I suddenly found myself as morbidly inclined as any young fellow and hastened to view the horror.
Tangled among the dark wreckage, partly obscured by ash and mud and morning shadows, lay an adult-sized assemblage of blackened bones, which, despite the grey day and the debris, had something of a gleam to it. I puzzled and tapped the ribs with my cane; the sound was distinctly metallic.
“I don’t believe that’s her,” I noted.
The others gathered and the undertaker, Bellows, put his hands on the thing, determining that it certainly was not what was left of Mrs. Trowbridge. He tapped his knuckles on the forehead of the grinning skull.
“Wrought iron,” he noted.
We all turned to look at Simon Perry, the blacksmith, as if he might have an explanation.
“Don’t look to me,” he said.
“Curious.” I was intrigued.
“Whatever is it?” Needham, the volunteer asked.
Even though the “bones” were formed of metal and not Adam’s rib, it seemed as if the undertaker was burdened with the task of authority. The blacksmith stood stupefied alongside the rest of us.
“Well, it appears to be a replica of sorts. She always did like bones.”
“Queer old woman,” Simon Perry muttered.
I noticed something just then. “Look there, how she must have positioned that bucket in its hands, as if it were fetching water.”
There was still a trace of ash-coloured liquid in the vessel.
Before long Mrs. Trowbridge was uncovered. While she was not cooked down to the bone, she was quite charred, and the smell was something I’d rather forget. She was gently lifted from the devastation and wrapped in a sheet before being slid onto the back of a wagon.
The party of volunteers and brigade men slowly broke up. I went to have another look at the metal skeleton lying half-buried under boards and falling leaves. It was darker than the seared wood, the hollow eyes so vacant. It chilled me to think that we living beings harbour anything like that ghastly visage beneath our soft, pretty flesh. Still, there was a beauty to it, conjoined with my horror.
As it turns out I was the last to leave. I had found no trinkets worth pocketing, nor, for whatever reason, did I seem to care. I headed off along the path away from the house, into the woods where brick-coloured bird bones floated under dissipating maples and the smeary blue skeleton of a raccoon swayed, clattering in the breeze that came up to shoo off the mist.
I had come into possession of a large centre-hall house dating from 1774, complete with wide “King’s timber” pine floors and great twin chimneys. The fireplaces were set flush in the baronial panelled walls and the exterior corners boasted wooden quoins. It was a wonder of symmetry and grace.
It was at this house, one fine October evening, that I entertained a small party of close friends. Idle chatter was an art that I had long mastered, as good a diversion as drink or flirtation, though I may have liked it best when the three were combined. That night I was in top form.
A chill warranted the crackling pile of birch and the brandy that followed dinner offered heat of its own. My dear friend Richard had brought along his latest fiancé, the giggly Madeline. She burst into unscrupulous laughter at one of my more imprudent jokes and dashed theatrically out of the parlour, her skirt—the size of a circus tent—hissing past the hearth.
A sudden scream shrilled and a very pale version of Madeline came rushing out of my adjacent study, a hand to her considerable bosom.
“Maddy?” I said innocently.
“What is that thing?” she demanded.
I chuckled; all eyes had turned from Madeline’s bosom to me.
“The skeleton? Yes, a marvel, isn’t it?”
The others rose from their seats and went to investigate. There, standing like a starved, blackened suit of armour in a corner of my study, was the wrought-iron mystery I had salvaged from the Trowbridge ruins.
“And how much did you pay for that?” Richard asked. Richard’s nerves were wrought iron, so he was not as appalled as the others.
“I found it. Very life like—or should I say death-like, isn’t it?”
Madeline peeked back in over Richard’s shoulder and
asked in an accusatory tone, “Why would you want a thing like that?”
“It’s unique, for one. It’s also a marvel of craftsmanship. My physician tells me that it is correct in every detail.”
Richard was warming to the thing. “It is an interesting piece, I suppose, but a bit on the morbid side.”
“Perhaps that’s the appeal.” I gave them a devilish smile. All collectors are guilty of a measure of madness, and my friends knew this and loved me for it. “More brandy!”
Imagine my horror when I woke the next morning to find my front door lying in the frost and my wrought iron skeleton gone from the house.
Not even Richard would have taken a joke so far. It was a malicious act, really, and if it was meant to be humorous, it entirely missed its mark. I promptly dismissed my few disgruntled servants (despite their proclamations of innocence) and set out to find the heavy black anomaly.
It was obviously the work of more than one culprit, for no single man—even a powerful man—could have moved that thing the mile and a half distance I traversed to find it. Apparently they had dragged the skeleton, for there was a broken trail leading the way, the frosty leaves displaced, the damp grass gouged by the hard black foot bones.
“Oh, clever,” I said, leaning on my stick, having followed the trail to the cheerless black heap that had been Mrs. Trowbridge’s house. Reddish leaves sprinkled down and skittered over the tragic clutter.
It was the most elaborate prank I had ever witnessed, and if it had been someone other than myself on the receiving end, I’d have admired the effort.
They had taken the skeleton and positioned it face down amongst the charred boards, going so far as to dig a hole to accommodate the bulk of the iron torso, suggesting that the thing had been burrowing.
I hired some men to return the sculpture to my home and hired others to return my door to its hinges and add a number of secure locks. I was furious, the more so for my confusion. Perhaps, I speculated, it was the wretched town folk behind the violation—they all harboured a certain bitterness toward me, after all. It was envy no doubt, because of my position, because my fortune came from an inheritance rather than my sweat. To Hell with them all, I thought.