Maynard’s House

by Herman Raucher

  “What if they’re in a bad mood?” asked Austin.

  “Oh, then they might just upset all ya things; toss ya gear down a gulley, hide ya blanket in a cave. I guess a Minnawickie’s some kind of an Indian. They wear colorful costumes and do a crazy kind of dancin’—which is why, when they come across a Devil’s Dancin’ Rock, they just go bananas. If they like ya they’re no problem. But they can be pests. I heard of an incident where—”

  The sound was of a whining and a whooshing. Incoming mail. Someone yelled, “Mortars!” and everyone hit the ditch. Austin could hear the monotonous whump-whump—closer each time. And he threw himself through the air like the others…

  …hitting the floor prone, in the prescribed manner, his right hand groping for the M-16 rifle that wasn’t there, his eyes staring at the closed door swinging open. The sunlight barreled in and Austin knew that he was as hopelessly lit up as New Year’s Eve, in full view of whatever it was that was standing in the doorway.

  “Left ya duffle bag again, Austin,” came the twang. It was Jack Meeker, backlit and imposing, tossing the duffle bag into the room, unnerving the wallpieces and retesting the floorboards.

  Austin snapped himself up like a yo-yo, tucking his knees to his chest and getting to his feet while very much aware of the cold sweat swimming in the hollow of his back.

  “Catch ya takin’ a nap, Austin?”

  “Yeah, I was fast asleep.”

  “Bed might be softah.”

  “Think so?”

  “A-yuh. Ya seem to keep leavin’ ya belongings. Don’t ya want ’em?”

  “Naaah. Nothing in there but my toothbrush.”

  “Mighty big toothbrush.”

  “Sixty-eight pounds.”

  “Wouldn’t happen to have a transistah radio in ya duffle, would ya?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “Too bad. Radio station in Millinocket. Keep ya abreast of things. Farm prices, temperature, ball scores.”

  “Why don’t you just leave the daily paper in the postbox?”

  “Can’t do that.”

  “No?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s a weekly.” Jack looked at the big fireplace. “Might considah buildin’ yaself a fire. That is, if ya stayin’. Ya stayin’, Austin?”

  “I’m stayin’.”

  “And if ya flue ain’t boarded up. Some people do that. Chimney steals the heat. In the summah, hornets make ya sorry. Some people like to go with just the Franklin stove. Does the job pretty good. Checked ya flue, Austin?”

  “I was napping. I’ll get around to it.”

  “Ya know how to build a fire, don’t ya?”

  “I think so.”

  “My guess would be that Maynard boarded up the flue, especially with him goin’ off to war like he was.” He walked over to the fireplace and stuck his head up the flue. His voice came booming back. “Bricked up. Maynard probably got all the heat he needed out of his Franklin. Economical.” He emerged brushing loose soot from his jacket. Then he pulled off his right glove and extended that bare hand toward Austin. It came out like a pizza shovel, and Austin dropped his hand into it and watched it disappear. “If ya want, Austin, ya can forget this whole adventure and I’ll take ya back.”

  “I’m stayin’.”

  “Luck to ya, then.” He released Austin’s hand and nodded. Then he walked out through the still-open doorway, and never looked back.

  Austin stood on his doorstep and watched Jack Meeker slosh back to the jeep where the big man kicked off his snowshoes, hoisted himself up, lodged his bulk behind the wheel and turned the ignition key. The jeep protested and kicked, refusing to go, and Austin felt a momentary warmth at the thought that Jack might just have to stay, at least for the first night. And wouldn’t that be the best of all possible worlds, in that it would allow Austin to honor his pledge to Maynard while providing himself with the companionship and security of what had to be the greatest hunter-trapper-hiker-talker in all of Maine.

  That idle hope was shortly blown away by the belching exhaust of the jeep, which had apparently decided against crossing its owner. Jack stuck a big paw on the air, a gesture of goodbye which Austin returned. Then the jeep did an about-face and, eating up its own tire tracks, rambled off, soon to become a black blob on distant snow. And very soon after that—nothing at all.

  6

  He was alone. Not just alone but all the way alone. There was not one small, friendly sound to offer even the meekest argument against that conclusion, or any way in which a fire might spring up in the old stove, of its own accord, as if by magic. Austin Fletcher would have to supply the labor, pile the logs, stuff the kindling, strike the match—all of which he did, happy to hear the sounds he made in the accomplishing of those chores. For it meant that someone was on the premises, a noisemaker, a presence, alive, alive-o.

  In a short time the fire was going, orange light twittering through the cracks of the cast-iron stove; wood aged and dry, ready and willing, was spitting and snapping raucously. The stovepipes lining the wall grew warm to the touch and then hot. Old beams, floors and ceiling, creaked and sighed and stretched as the cold room grew increasingly more hospitable and embracing. And Austin experienced a deep gut satisfaction at having personally bestowed upon the old house a new reason for being—a new tenant, a new lord of the manor. He had been the passing prince and, having bussed the sleeping beauty, had restored her to her former self. All hail, let there be joy in the tiny kingdom. Let the bells ring—anything to break the oppressive silence.

  The heat soon burgeoned to such a degree that he was able to remove his parka—and happy he was to shed that heavy skin, for it had restricted his movements and bound up his spirits for too many days in too many diverse places. He lounged there, in the old rocker, without a clear thought in his head, and it was enough to not have to think, or be, or answer to, or question—though he would have appreciated a cigarette. Even a stale one. Or one of those so low in flavor that shredded sofa smoked better. But none was around, not in that house. That Maynard, what a long and cough-free life he would have lived had he not been killed.

  He had no idea how long he sat there in his self-induced state of suspended animation, a leg slung over each of the rocker’s armrests. Nor would he have budged from that chair had his stomach not reminded him, with gurgles and yowls, that it too had a small fire going that needed feeding.

  The canned goods were as stacked together as building blocks, their colorful labels facing out as would have been the case had they been displayed in the A&P or stocked by the Swiss Family Robinson in anticipation of their legendary shipwreck and subsequent maroonment.

  In honor of New England, he selected a can of baked beans, prying it from its clam-tight place with diligence and vindictives. He opened it, set it on the stove top, and allowed it to simmer right in the can—until the bubbling sound of it and the molasses-sweet smell of it overpowered his senses. Then he plunged into it with a wooden spoon and ate it all like a hungry terrier, surprised at the slurping noises that came out of him, glad that his mother was in Ohio.

  He followed the honored beans with a can of mashed pumpkin originally intended to be a pie filling but with really very little to say on the matter. And all of it he washed down with a quart-size can of Florida grapefruit juice, deliciously citric, just the right thing to cut the sweet gook of the beans and the pumpkin.

  To further establish his mastery over menu, he opened and dispensed with a jar of kosher dill pickles, putting them away as might a sword-swallower, one after another, without pause for applause. There followed a short but furious acidic belly dance inside that a normal man’s digestive juices would have been hard pressed to upstage. It didn’t last long, just long enough to inspire wonder—churning, cavorting, straining and then subsiding. An older man, or a lesser man, could not have survived such an affrontery to his metabolism.

  There were some four dozen cans of ground coffee from which Austin coul
d choose. He selected one from Colombia because he had heard that it was grown on the side of some kind of special mountain where wind and rain combined to give it exceptional qualities that coffee grown in valleys and Ecuador could not equal. The pot perked happily and Austin soon had a mug of the stuff in his hand, a dash of dried milk and a lump of sugar rounding it out to bare palatability.

  Thus armed and newly invigorated, he wandered about the big room with a greater sense of propriety than he had earlier evidenced. And he began to notice things, things he had missed at first glance. Things on the walls. That pine-framed photograph, for example—very Mathew Brady. A faded tintype, very period.

  It was of a mustachioed man in his mid-twenties, posing stiffly, his eyes staring into Austin’s from some seventy-five years ago. He was dressed in some kind of uniform. Perhaps he was a sailor. He might even have been a postman, an ancient predecessor of Jack Meeker. Whatever he was, he was nothing if not impressive. And there was an inscription on the photograph: “Dear Sara, until I return. Love, Jason.”

  Return from where? Austin thought. Certainly it would seem to rule out the man’s having been a postman. Then again, maybe not. A good postal route, those days, might just well have kept a man on the road so long that his wife would indeed need a photograph of him to remember him by.

  Austin looked more pertinently into the man’s eyes as if expecting him to say something. And he wondered, Jason who? Sarah who? Who are the two of you who knew this house how many years ago?

  A surge of melancholy swept over him, for, whoever the man and woman were, they were no more, their bones moldering under some granite headstone that idle travelers made rubbings of. “Here lies Sarah Somebody.” “Here lies Jason Whoever.” They had lived, and possibly died, it would seem, in this very house. Lived and died, dead and gone, their story—whatever it was—forgotten, if indeed it had ever been told at all. “Dear Sarah” and “Love, Jason”—two lives played out before Austin Fletcher had ever happened. Ebb and flow. Sarah and Jason. Dust unto dust—and all that.

  Austin tapped the frame with his fingers, as much to reassure himself that the photo was there as to reassure Jason that someone was seeing him again, posed in perpetuity.

  He then experienced a flood of emotions all at once, some of them contradictory, others murky, all of them hard to line up for analysis. He felt a security in that he was suddenly a part of a continuing scheme of things that had been set into motion years before—a man, a woman, a house, and now himself. That was good. He felt an awareness of mortality, his own in particular. Jason had been alive when that picture was taken, alive when he inscribed it. Sarah had been alive to receive it. And Austin had been alive when he discovered it. Was alive. Is alive.

  The tenses jittered erratically, time and grammar crossing swords in his mind. He had never been good at utilizing either and so felt incapable of separating the confusions they were causing.

  He felt ruffled at having looked at the face of dead Jason. He felt cheated at finding no photo of Sarah at all. He felt purposeful in that he knew it was his place to keep the fire lit, the hearth of Jason and Sarah, the stove of Maynard Whittier. He felt distraction as to why they were all bunching up in his mind, melding into one being, clawing at his singularity, insisting that he allow them to be he, and he to be they. He felt resignation at no longer having free and clear choices—his last choice leaving with Jack Meeker in the obstreperous jeep. He felt hemmed in, honored, burdened, exhilarated, and—to hell with grammar—he felt more present-active than at any other time in his life.

  He saw something on the far wall. How could he have not seen it before—it was so large. He walk toward it, his stride long and assertive, shaking the floor, for it was now his house and the little animals beneath the floor had better start getting used to the gait of their new giant.

  It was flat and smooth and hung perpendicularly. It was perhaps an inch thick, eighteen inches across, and some five feet in length. Nailed to the wall, it first looked to be a small door. But as he drew closer it more nearly resembled a warrior’s shield, some kind of ornate design brocaded upon it. It proved to be neither. It was a plank of white pine, honied yellow by time, upon which some words had been carved with meticulous thought. The words were small and finely strung, completely legible once Austin’s eyes adjusted to their minuteness, even the i’s being dotted.

  Starting at the very top, the words ran from left to right in four carefully etched lines, the cutting instrument apparently having been a small knife, maneuverable and sharp.

  Jason Booth Adamson, despite rumors and dire predictions, rebuilt this house, 1876–1877. He lived in it with his wife, Sarah Margaret, and one son, Thomas Caleb. A daughter, Katherine Marie, died February 21, 1882, aged three, of the winter. He wishes a good life to all others who may inhabit this house, successors and purchasers, and he leaves room on this wood for them to add their words to the history of this house.

  A deeply etched horizontal line was laid onto the wood just below the inscribed words, the line running from one side of the plank to the other, marking a period to the thoughts of Jason Booth Adamson. Another set of words began directly beneath, carved by a lighter hand, a shallower cut.

  Jason Booth Adamson, husband and provider, passed September 22, 1889, the last warm day of that year. He was 34 years in this world and I do not forget him.

  —Sarah Margaret Adamson

  Another horizontal line and the next set of words appeared. These were carved with less care, almost in haste—reflecting an angrier mood.

  Sarah Margaret Adamson passed July 15, 1894, aged 38. Thomas Caleb Adamson, son and heir, leaves this house with no thought of returning.

  A horizontal line sealed off the above words as if put to the wood by an ax. And beneath that line—more words. And Austin felt as though he had come upon some sort of Rosetta Stone, a key to the emerging hieroglyphics of a house that suddenly seemed to have more to say than just wood, nails and mortar.

  William Evers Houlton and Anna Jane Houlton occupied this house unhappily, 1897–1898.

  Another horizontal cut and Austin wondered what had happened in the years between 1894 and 1897. Had the house been unoccupied for three years following Thomas Caleb Adamson’s departure? Certainly it was clear that that man had left because the house held too much personal unhappiness for him, his parents and his infant sister all having died there. But why had William and Anna Houlton stayed on but one year? And why should they have been unhappy? All houses witness death, if for no other reason than that houses live longer than people. Why should the Adamson griefs have rubbed off on the Houltons?

  The knife-whittled words continued, the next legend set down by an unsteady hand, a hand either infirm or frightened. And Austin had to bend slightly to read it, for he was then reading halfway down the pine plank’s depth.

  Little or nothing will grow here. The witch’s tree casts no shadow. A. G. Roberts, June 1906. One season is enough.

  1906? What about the eight years between? And how was it that A. G. Roberts gave it but one season before leaving? As to the witch’s tree, Jack Meeker had apparently not been making it up to “fun” Austin, for there it was, referred to in 1906, by a man who had no trouble accepting its existence and that it cast no shadow. It had cast no shadow for Austin either.

  Another horizontal line, a deep one, so deep that it looked to have been inflicted upon the wood by the slashing stroke of an infuriated hatchet. Beneath it, the tale continued.

  Thomas Caleb Adamson exercised legal claim on this house, December 12, 1909. He lived in it with his wife, Elizabeth Deere Adamson, until her death, March 8, 1910. This house is not fit. It never was. Nor will it burn. To hell with it.

  Fifteen years prior, Thomas Caleb Adamson had left with “no thought of returning.” But he did return, to try again, to his father’s house, bringing with him a wife who died in less than three months. Had he really tried to burn the house down? If so, why wouldn’t a wooden house burn? It was mo
re and more like the unraveling of a Gothic tale, and Austin’s heart raced in anticipation of the next chapter.

  John and Martin Rivers, trappers by trade, stayed two nights here, January 23rd and January 24th, 1919. We did not sleep.

  The developing picture was coming in sharp and clear—and it was not a pleasant one. True, it was fair to assume that everyone who had come upon the house, whether by accident or by design, had come upon its dark history as recorded on the wooden plank. And true, the power of suggestion in so solitary a house in so remote a region could easily have frightened them, or at the very least caused them to be apprehensive. But these were hardy New Englanders, self-reliant and rugged, descendants of tough early-immigrant stock. Why, then, should they reveal such susceptibility—and put their names to it?

  The chilly conclusion, the only conclusion that Austin could arrive at, was that something in and about that house was not right. Over the years, what had once been a happy and hope-filled home had become instead a grim mausoleum, an icy vault in which were stored the bad dreams and fragmented fears of various people—a solitary structure, secretive and suspicious, with gaps in its history so wide that, with very little information, one could populate it with creatures bizarre and tales macabre, and intermittent years of unrelenting terror.

  Austin knew that he was doing a ghost-story number on himself but was unable to check the flow of it. He read on.

  Seth Hamble tried this house two months in 1923. All that they say may well be true.

  What might well be true? Austin felt the disquiet crawling in his every cell, growing and splitting off and breeding new and more virulent disquiet. Who was Seth Hamble? Had he been there alone? Why was he as unspecific as all the others about the things that had frightened him? Why no examples of “All that they say may well be true.”? Who were they?