Wildwood. Elinor Florence
of emerald grain stood on both sides of the trail. The air was thick with the yeasty scent of ripening wheat. Occasionally an unfamiliar sweet fragrance rose from a cluster of wildflowers.
When we crested the rise, I saw a stand of trees that formed a rough rectangle, floating like a dark-green island in a lighter-green sea, backed by a solid wall of forest to the north. I quickened my steps toward a rough opening in the rectangle.
We came around the corner, and I stopped abruptly at the first sight of the house.
The three-storey building was shaped like an enormous shoebox standing on one end. If it weren’t so tall, it might have been hidden behind the surrounding mass of overgrown shrubs. The peeling, cream-coloured horizontal clapboards on the lower half were barely visible. On the upper half, the walls were covered with dark-red shingles faded to a deep rose, the same colour as the brick chimney that climbed up one side.
Topping the massive house was a squat, pyramid-shaped roof. This was broken by small dormer windows facing into the yard, if you could call it a yard. Every window was boarded over with scrap lumber, making the house look like a blind man behind dark glasses, his mighty shoulders stubbornly hunched.
It was so much worse than I had imagined.
I realized now that I had envisioned a quaint Arts and Crafts bungalow, like the historic homes in Phoenix. Or perhaps a charming farmhouse like the ones in movies, with rocking chairs on a wraparound verandah. Well, this house had a verandah, all right, except that I could barely see it through the dense bushes.
“Are we going to live here?” Even Bridget was incredulous.
I kept my voice cheerful. “Let’s go inside and take a look.”
I struggled toward the front door through branches that clawed at my face, climbed the six creaking wooden steps to the verandah, and lowered Bridget to her feet. As I pulled the key from my pocket, I saw a lucky horseshoe hanging over the panelled front door. The heavy door opened smoothly, and we stepped inside. Bridget clung to my hand, whining and dragging on me with her full weight.
We found ourselves in a large vestibule. The daylight from the open door behind us illuminated the first few steps of a staircase leading upward to the right. On the left, an open doorway revealed the living room, and I felt relief that the house was furnished. I was afraid my great-aunt might have taken everything with her when she moved. I sniffed. The odour wasn’t unpleasant: a combination of wood and fabric and dust. There was a faint scent of woodsmoke, and even something fragrant. Lavender?
I stepped into the living room and pulled aside one of the sheets on the lumpy shape nearest to us, revealing a brown velvet couch.
“Mama, it’s too dark in here!”
I pulled a flashlight from my pocket, thankful that Edna had suggested it. Oddly, she had seemed to know where we were going. I shone it onto the hardwood floor. Over the sound of Bridget’s complaints, I walked to the end of the hall and opened the door.
The kitchen was pretty bad. My beam of light fell onto a large wooden table covered with a piece of oilcloth. A porcelain farmhouse sink stood in one corner, with a green metal hand pump. Along one wall were floor-to-ceiling fir cabinets, stained the same rich brown colour as the rest of the woodwork, darkened with a layer of dirt and grease. An old-fashioned cook stove stood against the wall, and beside it a rocking chair. My flashlight picked out a fly-spotted calendar bearing a photograph of three cocker spaniel pups. The date read August 1990.
Everything was so dirty! I swallowed hard, resisting the urge to shudder. For a minute I wanted to turn around and go straight back to town, back to the airport, back to Arizona.
“Mama, you’re hurting me!”
“Sorry, sweetie.” I released my grip on her little hand. “Let’s look upstairs.”
“Mama, let’s go. I don’t like it here.” I shone the flashlight toward her, anticipating another tantrum. Her little face was screwed up with anxiety.
“Just one quick peek, then we can go back to the car.”
I led the way down the hall and toward the stairs. We began to climb, following the flashlight beam up eight wide treads. When we got to the landing where the stairs turned again to rise into total blackness, Bridget pulled her hand away. “I don’t want to go up there!”
“All right.” I spoke in my most soothing voice. “Stand right here for a minute while I look upstairs.”
I left her standing in a narrow shaft of sunlight shining from a crack between two boards nailed across the landing window. I hurried up another eight steps and found myself in the upstairs hallway.
My flashlight beam picked out five closed doors, two on each side of the hall and one at the end, all made of the same panelled wood with matching crystal doorknobs set into filigreed brass plates.
Bridget continued to whimper while I stepped across the hall and opened the first door. There was nothing in this room but a wrought-iron metal bedstead painted cornflower blue, the mattress covered with a sheet, and beside it a small wooden table bearing a candlestick and a half-melted candle. A candle!
The next door opened on a closet, stacked with neatly folded towels and bedding.
The third door revealed another narrow staircase leading upward into darkness. I closed it and opened the fourth door. This must be the bathroom, I thought. An oval-shaped metal tub stood in one corner, and a washstand with a flowered bowl and pitcher in the opposite corner. Over this hung a mirror covered with black spots.
I fought a wave of choking disappointment. The house was clearly uninhabitable.
Bridget had stopped whining, so I walked to the far end of the hall and opened the fifth and final door, shining my flashlight into the corners. This room was large, twice the size of the others. A brass bed stood against the back wall, facing four boarded-over windows across the front. A pencil-thin ray of light revealed a crack where the boards didn’t quite meet. I tiptoed across the dusty floor and peered through it.
Bathed in brilliant sunshine, a panoramic view of green fields marbled with streaks of darker-green forest stretched away to a distant line of purple hills. Not far from the house was a creek, the blue water rippling through the thick grass and silvery shrubs along its banks.
I must be facing south. I suddenly remembered the map I had studied on my computer screen. This was my land! Or would be, if we could possibly survive in this filthy monstrosity of a house for the next year.
An unfamiliar sound interrupted my thoughts. Bridget. I whirled and took a quick step toward the door, thinking that she had started to cry. Then I realized with a shock that she was laughing, that deep belly laugh that came so rarely. I rushed down the hall and shone my flashlight onto the landing below.
Bridget stood with her arms outstretched, covered with bits of colour. The sun was shining through the crack at just the right angle, striking the stained glass window over the landing, creating a shower of rainbows that sprinkled her face and arms.
“Mama, look! It’s raining rainbows!”
“Oh, how pretty, Bridget! I wish you could see yourself!”
She laughed again, and tears sprang to my eyes. It had been so long since I had heard her laugh. I had forgotten how adorable she looked when her little face was grinning, her perfect baby teeth revealed in two pearly rows.
I vaulted down the stairs to the landing and held out my own arms beneath the sunlight. The colours tumbled onto me like a waterfall of tiny jewels.
“Mama, your hands have polka dots!”
I bent over so that a shaft of green light fell on my nose, and she laughed again while she held out her hand as if she were wearing a ruby ring. We exclaimed together, twisting this way and that. After a few minutes, the sun shifted and the rainbows twinkled away. But all at once the house seemed less unwelcoming.
I could scarcely believe Bridget’s next words. “Mama, can we please,