What Marcy Thought
EXCERPT
It was Marcy, my second wife, the one who had taken my only son, and moved to California seven years previously, who’d said my childhood home looked like a haunted house. That had been before our marriage, on the one occasion we had visited. It was a surprise to hear her say it; after all, it was the house I’d grown up in—normalized by a childhood, which, typical or not, was all I knew. I’d scoffed at her assertion and she’d grown sullen and silent—which should have been a warning. But now, all these years later, as I turned into the long drive and looked at the brick farmhouse standing back from the road, obscured behind the untidy Manitoba maples, good for nothing but shade, I thought, maybe she had a point. Not that I’d concede it, even if we’d been on speaking terms.
A gust of wind dragged some leaves off the trees, and they scattered across the dirt lane leading to the house, swirled, and came back under the rental car’s wheels from the other direction.
The ruts of the drive had grown deeper, the gravel coating thinner, and the scrappy grass bolder, since my last visit. That had been some years ago. I’d come back this time because Robert, the neighbor, had called to tell me my father had died. His modern bungalow was around a bend in the road, behind a copse, and hidden from view even at night when the lights were on. Neighbors in the county did that. They looked out for each other. They checked in and helped out.
After snowfalls, Robert plowed my father’s lane with some archaic piece of metal, a giant iron of sorts, that he dragged behind his tractor. He mowed my father’s lawn in the summer with a different attachment and hayed his fields in exchange for pasture. And called about once a week to make sure that everything was alright. So when my father hadn’t picked up, he’d come over and knocked on the side door; and when it wasn’t answered, he pushed it open. It was never locked.
My father had been old. And he hadn’t believed in retirement homes or the gun registry or medically assisted death, or bureaucracy and red tape. He believed in taking things into his own hands and the freedom to do what he wanted without filling out forms, asking for permission, or waiting on someone who lived in a city hundreds of miles away who didn’t know him from Adam to tell him what he could and couldn’t do.
So, on this gray October morning, three hours from the chintzy chain motel, with a sterile lobby that smelled like an asthmatic’s nightmare, with its stale coffee and sugary cereal in a dispenser opposite the reception counter, I was home again. I steered away from the deepest rut in the drive, and drove up on the grass and center mound, passed the side door, which led directly into the kitchen, and pulled up, behind the house, beside a big new pick-up. It was mine now. I stepped out of the car. There were memories. Even the smell of the air. So much looked the same, all the wooden outbuildings: the tumbledown original homestead where the stray cats lived, the drive shed, empty since my father had sold the boat, the outhouse, the barn. And my childhood home, brick, solid, and imposing, lonely and desolate in the cold light of morning. Maybe Marcy was right: it could be haunted. I hefted a duffel out of the trunk and tried the back door.