While I ate, she gave me the recipe. “Buttermilk if you’ve got, to soak the chicken, then flour, salt, and pepper.”
A few questions and answers later, I thought I had it.
It was easier finding out from Scott what happened to the general store that stood behind the Royal Oak Tree. Once filled with a vast array of dry goods, including ready-made clothing, boots, and shoes, along with groceries and medicines, it also offered favored turn-of-the-century souvenirs of a stay in the country: postcards, colorfully painted gourds, and dried sunflowers.
“The store was right here.” Scott pointed to his front yard, filled now by the vegetable and flower garden.
“Needed sun for the garden, so my brother and I—”
He aimed another appraising look at the newcomers. I Know they’re preservationists but are they rabid ones? he was clearly thinking.
“So my brother and I—we burnt it down.”
When the weather was nice, we visited back and forth in each other’s yards and I came to know that Scott was always around and keeping an eye out. “Did you enjoy the evening last night in Royal Oak?” he asked at the post office early on a Saturday morning after I had arrived in town late the previous night.
Gradually, other members of the Kilmon clan emerged—Scott apparently served as their advance guard—and began to include us in village life so easily that I only noticed it long afterward. Scott’s niece Julie let me bring furniture home from her shop to try out, to see if it fit, before paying anything.
Scott’s brother Al had a stack of old green shutters for sale in his yard. I measured and thought that the shutters would fit the upstairs windows of our house. This was remarkable because all the windows had been individually hand-built and each one differs in size. Al sold the shutters for a song. When Hugo went to install them, he found that the hardware on the shutters matched the existing hardware on the house to the millimeter.
It shouldn’t have been any surprise, when big trouble turned up in our second year, that our neighbors in Royal Oak came forward. Scott’s wife, Susie, offered to help with anything at all. Julie’s husband, Jerry, mowed the lawn. Other neighbors brought over venison and freshly caught rockfish.
Scott’s son Steven brought a goose and someone else offered recipes. For children, cook a goose all day in a crock pot with a can of mushroom soup. For adults, braise a long time with orange, because the Canada geese that fly through here are tough birds.
And finally, at that time, came an invitation to hunt, which meant much, much more than it might seem. The importance of a local way, I came to understand, can be measured by how long it is withheld. The invitation to hunt was two years in coming.
Yes, there are hunting clubs around here and hunting guides. Yes, a limo will pull into the field behind our house, a hunter will get out, fire a shot, and return to the limo while the driver retrieves the dead goose and stows it in the trunk. This was different. This invitation to hunt with a neighbor meant initiation into one of the private worlds of the Eastern Shore, where people hunt for food to feed themselves and their families as they have for generations. Certain fields and farms are available at certain times—you have to know where to go.
But all that was later.
Robbie kept the third date we made to buy the property. At the lawyer’s office, settlement on the house and the future direction of our lives took less than forty minutes.
CHAPTER
3
Love and Remorse
A TANGLE OF VINES WOUND AROUND THE CHIMNEY and up into an old locust tree that leaned heavily against the front porch. The vines, poison ivy with leaves larger than a man’s hand and a hefty trunk, were clearly succeeding in their plan to bring the locust down and the porch with it.
On the day of sale, the house looked much better than I’d remembered—taller, more graceful, and plainly once proud. Behind the overgrowth thirty feet high at the back of the property, lay a long, beautiful cornfield stretching to a line of trees at the horizon. At the same time it all looked much, much worse. How had I overlooked the leaning locust, four boarded up, broken windows, and seven “No Trespassing” signs? I could not picture it as someplace anyone would ever choose to visit—and pay for the privilege.
“Typical buyer’s remorse,” a friend later remarked, amused. “But I can’t believe you fell for that old family heritage line.”
On top of seller’s and buyer’s remorse, a third remorse hovered over the sale that morning, which the lawyer alluded to in few words. “The sheriff has taken care of things, I assume?” Robbie nodded and answered quietly. “Tenants are gone.”
It was sad that the young mother and father who had tried to make a home in what was now our house had to leave. If not for us, I rationalized, then for someone else and no one could have predicted what happened to them. When their month-to-month lease was up, they refused to leave, so Robbie had to evict them and the sheriff kept watch while he carried all their possessions, clothes, furniture, baby toys, and new shoes—still in boxes—outside. People stopped by and picked over their things, neighbors said, until nothing was left. I wished I did not know that or that the family broke up. The mother went to her parents’ house with the baby, people said, and the father, who stayed behind, landed in jail.
Knowing all this might have deterred Hugo or me alone, but together we were Bonnie and Clyde. The place had everything that makes old-house fiends swoon, from original wood floors to high ceilings to premodern air-conditioning in the form of windows opening to all four directions. It had original plaster and architectural detail, even a secret backstairs. The stairs were exactly like the steep, narrow backstairs at my grandmother’s farmhouse where I loved to sit, eating her homemade caramels and eavesdropping on the grown-ups.
For Hugo, the house brought back memories of his childhood summer home. Both houses were a child’s idyll and both were sold off when the next generation showed no interest in doing the work necessary to keep them up. The intersection of these two lost happy houses goes a long way to explaining our passion. It answered the large, pressing question that came to haunt Hugo as much as me: If not this house now, then what, and when? There was the money issue: You can’t afford to be all that picky if you don’t have much. Above all, the place suggestively promised the chance to fuse our pasts and future within its walls.
Squinting up at our new acquisition, our future, I tried to imagine lace curtains lifting in the bay breeze, a well-kept garden, guests strolling outside to admire the sun setting over the cornfield, Hugo and I holding hands and watching discreetly from the bay window. An appealing, old-fashioned flavor permeated the setting, yet it would be an easy reach for weekend visitors from Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, even New York. I reviewed our decision tree again and sighed. Buying an up and running bed-and-breakfast was out of the question.
It is easy enough to see slanted floors as quaint when anyone who knows anything, I had yet to learn, will see a clear red flag indicating structural damage. It was easy to dismiss what Hugo called “small collapsed areas” in the floors as he tried to minimize the problem. Once you fall into the rhythm of minimizing problems, it’s easy, and if both partners agree to it, it’s a cinch. After a while, you don’t even have to think about it. An off-balance radiator ready to topple over and rip pipes from the walls? No problem. Ditto crumbling plaster which, more knowledgeable buyers will know, always waits until after a sale to start seriously falling. Ditto the cinderlike particles filtering out of faucets, the flaking lead paint on windowsills and doors, and the icing on our catastrophe, out in the utility shed, sinister gray dustings of asbestos. The home inspector had pointed out the asbestos to Hugo before the sale. Hugo didn’t mention it to me until now because he didn’t want me to worry.
The oil furnace, with long black pipes like giant spider legs, was another worry, but at least it worked. It had a catchpan for dripping oil. Now those are words you don’t want to hear if you have an oil furnace because it isn’t suppos
ed to need one. The pan, which I noticed but didn’t mention because Hugo already looked concerned, brimmed with black oil. But even if I had understood what I was seeing before the sale, it wouldn’t have made a difference. By now we were so attached to the idea of a bed-and-breakfast in this house, in this village, at this time that I saw no resemblance between this shaky structure and us.
Subliminally, though, I felt it.
When the nausea and exhaustion of full-blown buyer’s remorse set in, I decided we should drive back to our house on the Western Shore, where I had lived much of my life, get some rest, even though we hadn’t done anything except sit at a table to sign papers, and come back in a week or so to start work. Hugo quickly agreed and we headed for home.
It was more my home than Hugo’s because I’d stayed on there after my marriage collapsed so as not to disrupt the children’s lives any more than necessary. Eventually Hugo joined in there and helped raise the children. For twenty years he quietly wished for a home of our own. This was it.
In less than a minute, Hugo swung the truck around into a K-turn and headed back to the future bed-and-breakfast. Pulling into the driveway again, we remarked that the evicted tenants still seemed to be gone. We discussed what to do, maybe look around some more. I climbed down from the truck and saw in the grass at my feet a man’s hiking boot and small plastic baby toys, a red car, a green tree, and a blue block. I picked them up.
It was an icy, mouse-colored February dusk. There were few signs of life except for smoke puffs from a chimney down the road and the sound of the wind, punctuated by the distant spit of gunfire. The only bright objects in sight were new padlocks on the doors and the brilliant orange “No Trespassing” signs.
As Hugo leaned against the kitchen door to hunt for the key, the screws holding the padlock popped out of the rotting doorframe. The door swung open.
Trash and moldy rugs stretched in every direction. At least the furnace was running and it was pleasantly warm. I lined up the baby toys on the mantle, reached in my pocket for a red ribbon saved from Christmas, and went outside. Breaking a bough from the magnolia tree, I tied it up with a bow but the wind untied it so I settled for a knot. On the front door I found a rusty nail and hung it there, red tails flapping in the wind. I tore down two “No Trespassing” signs and stood back to see if it looked like someone lived here. Maybe.
Hugo came outside carrying our sleeping bags, unopened. He thought he’d see if the inn had a room for the night. The former Pasadena, now called The Oaks, was a busy place in season and he hoped it might provide some start-up business for us when they were fully booked. I never imagined being grateful for it so soon.
As we registered at the inn, I reminded Hugo as much as myself that we could not make a habit out of this even though the manager gave us a discount, clearly out of pity. You could see it in her eyes.
The idea of a warm, clean, comfortable bed for the night lifted my mood and I went back to the house to start cleaning. Upstairs I surveyed the filthy rooms and the radiators laced with cobwebs. I like radiators, with their gentle warmth, soothing hiss, and all-around handiness for warming up pajamas and snacks. My sister and I knew that on a cold night with the heat turned up, the marshmallows and chocolate for s’mores set on top of a radiator would melt in the time it took to change for bed.
Since we couldn’t afford to replace these radiators, I got to work. As a child I learned how to clean radiators from my mother, who believed it built character. To do this, you take a long, narrow brush in one hand, the hose attachment of the vacuum cleaner in the other, hold your breath, and brush between the pipes while sucking up the dust. The second step is to wipe all the radiator’s horizontal and vertical surfaces with disinfectant.
Character-building, maybe. A bigger benefit came from telling my own children about radiators and radiator cleaning in hopes of getting some help around the house.
Downstairs I heard Hugo ripping up carpeting.
“This really isn’t so bad,” I called to him as we passed on the stairs or in the hall. “It will be fine,” he answered as he lugged junk out of the house, everything from leftover food to old rugs, to a desiccated animal. He held it up by the tail.
“It’s an r-a-t!”
“Not necessarily,” he said. “It could have been a squirrel. But even if it was an r-a-t, it’s been dead a long time.”
“How long?” I was thinking about how much a second night at the inn would cost and if they might give a discount again.
“Come take a look at it.”
I stood in the doorway. “I can see fine from here. How long do you think it’s been dead?”
“A very long time.”
Hugo usually knows when to change a subject. “Honey, look at the bright side. In six months, with a little carpentry, a little paint, we’ll have this place up and ready to go. You can decorate, arrange flowers. There will be guests. Let’s open champagne tonight.”
The next day my sister, in Washington on business, drove out to see for herself how much trouble Hugo and I had gotten into. She left the car engine running, came in, took a quick look around. In less than five minutes she was ready to leave. She’s known for speaking her mind, so I didn’t have to wonder what she really thought.
“I don’t need to go upstairs,” she said. “I get the idea.”
I stood in the driveway and waved good-bye, thinking how much I would have given for a word of encouragement.
That night I fell asleep in a haze of self-pity. In the morning I woke up to the heart-stopping sound of gunfire.
Hugo lay motionless next to me in his sleeping bag. Are we being attacked? I whispered.
He turned over. “Why not relax where you are, stay away from the windows?” It was the ultracool voice he uses when something is really wrong. “I’ll check it out.”
Getting up, he edged along the wall to the window and looked out.
The gunfire stopped at that instant, then started up louder than before.
“I guess the neighbors don’t like us. They don’t want any outsiders—come-heres, I think they say.”
“No, that’s not it. They’re firing away from the house, about fifty yards off. It just sounds close. That was a rifle, a twenty-two . . . Now they’ve moved on to a twelve-gauge shotgun.”
After another silence there was more shooting.
Now Hugo didn’t sound calm. “That’s a two-twenty-three.”
“What’s that?” I zipped up my sleeping bag.
“It’s what you’d use to take down a lion.”
Next he identified a forty-four magnum going off, and after that a semiautomatic forty-five.
“Jesus! Someone around here has a lot of firepower.”
A barrage started that sounded like the finale in a gangster flick. Hugo flattened his body against the wall and moved away from the window.
“What’s that?”
“That is an automatic assault weapon.”
I thought about the former tenants. “Drug dealers?”
“Who knows? Maybe we’ll work inside today.”
It got very quiet. Hugo went downstairs to make coffee and when the reassuring dark-roast aroma drifted up to the bedroom, I climbed out of my sleeping bag and went down. Sitting on the floor away from the windows, we drank coffee and planned the day’s projects. When it had been quiet for half an hour, Hugo decided to go out and look around. He came back, saying he did not find any bullet holes or broken glass around the house. If it stayed quiet, he thought we could go outside later.
That afternoon when Scott Kilmon biked by, Hugo flagged him down. We stood in the driveway talking weather until Hugo got around to saying, the way males do when they need information but don’t want to be caught asking for it, “Some gunfire this morning.”
Scott nodded. “Yep.”
“Trouble around here?”
“Probably not.”
“Well, that’s good.”
Scott was playing the game. Humiliating himself, Hugo f
inally got out an actual question.
“You hear anything over at your place?”
“Heard a couple of rounds,” Scott said. Then he looked at Hugo.
“Probably the deputy sheriff. Lives a few doors up from you.”
“And?” I tried to help out.
“Sometimes on weekends he target shoots.”
Hugo had not fired a gun since high school, when he joined the rifle club out of a vague sense of self-preservation. Once his parents decided this was not an optimal educational environment, he landed in a military boarding school where he also figured that being on the rifle team might be a safe bet for a new kid. Although he qualified as an expert marksman, he never liked guns and after high school his rifle stayed in the closet.
When Scott left, Hugo said he might get his gun cleaned.
This struck me as a bad idea. We were supposed to be creating a tranquil bed-and-breakfast experience for guests from the cities seeking rest and relaxation, I pointed out, not a rod and gun club. Hugo said nothing, which meant he was planning to ignore my advice.
CHAPTER
4
Frankly?
THE NEXT WEEKEND, LOADED WITH OPTIMISM, HUGO packed saws, lumber, sandpaper, and scrapers into the back of the truck and I added a dozen paint and fabric samples, a vase, and a clock. Time to stop dreaming, time to work.
Pushing open the unlocked side door of the future bed-and-breakfast, I sensed something wrong, though I couldn’t immediately say what it was.
A wave of cold hit my face as I stepped inside. It was cold in the kitchen, in the sunny dining room, the parlor, and upstairs—a deep, biting cold. I checked the thermostat. Forty degrees. In the hall I noticed the corner of a white envelope under the front door. Our first mail in the new house, probably a note of welcome from a neighbor, I thought, forgetting the cold for the minute, maybe even an invitation. I ripped it open. A season’s greetings card from the local oil company.
The House at Royal Oak Page 4