Chapter 8 - The Clearing of the Silt
The lock on the front door of June’s house didn't take the key.
Evan had jammed a broken three-corner file into the cylinder before he left with the deputies on Tuesday—a final, silent spit into the well.
Deputy Cole had to use an iron pinch-bar from his trunk to pop the pine jamb, the dry wood screaming as the old screws pulled through the paint with a sound like pistol shots.
The house smelled of three things: dead cabbage from the unemptied trash bin under the sink, stale tobacco, and the chemical sweetness of the cheap carpet cleaner Lauren had used to cover the dog stains in the parlor.
The rooms were empty, but they were not clean.
They had left what they didn't want: broken plastic laundry baskets, four mismatched tires from an old Chevrolet, three boxes of wet magazines in the pantry, and on the kitchen table, a single loaf of white bread that had gone green and hairy in the summer humidity.
In the center of the living room, where Grandma’s oval braided rug had lain for forty years, the pine floorboards were white with lime dust where Evan had tracked in the mortar from the basement project.
"They took the ceiling fans," Cole said, shining his flashlight up at the bare junction boxes where the black and white wires hung down like dead spiders.
"They can have them," I said.
I walked through the kitchen into the small back room that had been Grandma’s office—the room where the window looked out over the garden toward the orchard.
The floor here was tongue-and-groove white oak, greyed by seventy years of sunlight.
I knelt in the corner by the cold-air return.
The screw heads on the floorboard were covered in old dark brown wax—the beeswax Grandma used to seal her thread when she made quilts for the church bazaar. I took out my pocketknife—the small, three-bladed Stockman my grandfather had given me when I was nine—and scraped the wax out of the brass slots.
The screws turned easily. They had been greased with tallow before they were driven.
Beneath the board was a space four inches deep, framed by the two-by-eight joists that had been hewn with a broadaxe in nineteen-twenty-six.
Inside sat a five-gallon lard tin with the red label of the Shenandoah Packing Company still bright on the tinplate.
I lifted it out. It was heavy—not with gold or silver, but with the specific, dense weight of lead and paper.
I set it on the oak floor and pried the lid off with the blade of my knife.
Inside were four things:
First, the original deed to the sixty-two acres, written on sheepskin parchment in eighteen-eighty-four, bearing the seal of the county court and the signature of a Barrows who had survived the Wilderness with one leg.
Second, eighty-six silver dollars, wrapped in rolls of brown paper that had been sealed with red paraffin.
Third, an envelope marked: For Claire’s schooling if the state does not pay.
And fourth, a small, black-and-white photograph from nineteen-sixty-two.
It showed two girls sitting on the stone wall by the well-house. One was eight, with long, dark braids and her knees covered in Mercurochrome. The other was three, with pale, fine hair that blew across her face like milkweed silk, holding a yellow plastic duck by the neck.
Behind them, the house was white, the boxwoods were small enough to step over, and the limestone terrace was clean of any stain.
I sat on the floor with my back against the lath-and-plaster wall and held that photograph between my thumb and forefinger until the paper became warm from my skin.
Deputy Cole’s boots came down the hallway, heavy and slow.
"Claire?"
"In here, Cole."
He stood in the doorway, his hat in his hand, looking down at the tin can and the open floor.
"Wayne’s down at the gate," he said.
"Wayne?"
"He’s in his truck. He won't come up the lane because of the court paper. He says he wants to know if he can have the iron kettle by the wash-house. He says it was his mother’s."
I looked down at the photograph in my lap—at the little girl with the yellow duck whose husband had put five stitches into my cheekbone while Wayne watched the meat on the grill.
"Tell Wayne," I said, my voice quiet as the dust motes falling through the window light, "that the iron kettle belongs to the house."
"He’s going to be sore, Claire."
"Tell him," I repeated, "that if he touches the gate chain, I’ll have David Vance file an attachment on his milk cows before the sun goes down behind the ridge."
Cole looked at me for three seconds. He didn't smile, but the corner of his young jaw tightened with something that looked like relief.
May you like
"Yes, ma'am," he said.
He turned his back and walked out, his boots crunching through the lime dust in the parlor, leaving me alone with the black photograph and the lard tin that smelled of tallow and eighty years of salt.
