Lambsquarters (2 page)

Inside the house proper, things improved and worsened. Intact floors, walls and ceilings flashed the paint and debris of the reclusive former tenant in a skirmish of odour and pattern, colour and dirt. His shelter? Two rooms: the kitchen, a complete winter bedsit with woodstove, and one tiny upper bedroom for summer sleeping.

A pantry offered a shallow enamel sink that had once been white, a cold water tap from the well, and a hand pump connected to the cellar cistern, which filled with rainwater through a downspout from the roof. That was the water supply in the house. Well, there was a toilet in the upstairs hall too. But no basin there, no hot water tank, no shower or bath. There was electricity. The house had been wired in the 1940s and had just enough power for the few light bulbs dangling bare from the ceilings. Forty amps for house and barn.

Treacherous oil-burning stoves were rusting away in the living room and back kitchen, but the only reliable heat radiated from the wood cookstove. White and black, with a reservoir, its pipes going straight through the ceiling to the occupied bedroom, and bending
through the wall to finger heat into the next room, and out a buttressed chimney. Each downstairs ceiling had chimney and heat holes so that pipes could meander throughout the house, and heat could rise through intricate iron plates over what our then unborn children would come to call their holler holes.

The parlour was wedged shut. Disuse had warped the doors and roller-coastered the floor. The boards had heaved like rocks from frost, swelled from damp, buckled from humidity and were now resigned to abject neglect. Like the other unused rooms, the parlour was empty. No furniture to disimagine, no camouflage to interpret, no fancy dressing, just bare walls, floor, ceiling, and puttyless windows blotted out with homemade storms of plastic and wood, trapping millions of flies and years of dust. The place was almost derelict. A brick tent. With outbuildings.

At the barn, boards were loose, soffits missing and roof panels lifting, but the weather was still on the outside. Two lofts with ladders, ropes and pulleys for ancient hayloads, hinged doors toeing in, and a granary lined in tin. The stable was a warren of rabbit pens stacked on rugged cattle stanchions, and the chains of former Jerseys and Holsteins who once gave up their milk. Their spirits seemed to linger, lying heavy and still.

A privy, its trench filled in, its seat gone, hadn’t even a half-moon in its door. It leaned against the drive-shed, a long low building with iron bars hooking
the front to the back, a pole frame and a dirt floor. It housed an implement I couldn’t name then, painted red, picked out in black and gold—a seed drill, I know now—as well as tanks and barrels, spiles and sap buckets that were battered and worn and mended with lead. Beyond the drive-shed, forming its end wall, was the pioneer shelter. A log house, rotting, its chinking shattering and shrinking, falling to the ground.

I saw no rot that day. I breathed in only the air of possibility, of recovery, of stability and future. The rusty roof, the missing glass, the tilts and angles of slipping foundations and ill-fitting hardware misted out of focus behind the vast sense of impending connection and claim from, and for, this place.

From the first moment it became clear. Together, Thomas and I would become stewards and careful guardians of a property that dreams are made on. Its history was a vast effort of human hope, labour, tenacity, frustration and love. Woods and fields, hills and valleys, swamp and dry land were to be protected and nurtured in our naive hands. It would be our first and only foreseeable home, where we would learn about each other, about farming, about everything that would make us who we are. We didn’t know then that we would conceive our children here and raise them with lambs and chicks and flowers, and fruit from trees that were planted before any of us drew breath. We only knew we wanted to turn this shell into a home and make it ours.

BUS ROAD

THE REAL ESTATE AGENT
claimed it was a good road to buy on. A school bus road. The snow-plough opens it early each day in the winter. “You’ll be able to get out,” he said.

We had no concept of the local climate. We couldn’t picture snowbanks devouring the road, covered now with the brilliance of falling autumn leaves. Our attention was on the house, the barn, the huge task of taking on this place. Getting out was the least of our worries. Buses didn’t figure.

HOUSE

I’D NEVER SIGNED
a cheque with the word “thousand” on it before. My hand shook. The bank had lent the money, we drew up the documents and the deed was ours. Joint owners.

It was October, and the leaves were falling, the sky greying, the earth closing down. Fields were ploughed or browning with late corn. Frosted flowers rotted on soft stems, or were flattened, or bravely held up seed pods for those confusing fall warblers Peterson calls “troublemakers.”

The house was so empty. Echoes met us, then hid behind walls, around corners and disappeared. Generations of one family had lived here. Born and died within the walls. They had sold out for a song to a rabbity bachelor only ten years before. Would their ghosts accept our tenancy?

All I could manage was to walk from stark room to
room, up and down stairs, in and out the various doors and start over again. Dizzy from circling, listing from the slant in the floors, overcome with the responsibility of ownership.

Neighbours arrived. They farmed to the north and the east. Shared line fences. Good fences. They had small kids and large dogs. Fast tractors and slow schedules. They sent their son to lure us over, so they could check us out and see for themselves. They took us in for tea and tales.

With their welcome came their warning, the first of many. October was waning toward Hallowe’en, they cautioned, when local goblins and hooligans set fires and smashed glass. So we came prepared with sleeping bags, dog, flashlights and candy, and waited on the darkest of nights for vandals to appear. For the privy to be tipped, the windows soaped, the barn burnt. We were city people then. With city people’s fears. But we got only a couple of carfuls of kids—out here the spaces are too great to walk. We filled their bags with treats, admired their disguises, listened as the gravel crunched when they drove away. Such dark. Such silence.

We slept in the west bedroom because it seemed contained and whole. The wallpaper, painted a dull blue, was bubbling, but not hanging in strips. There were no mouse holes in the baseboards, and the window seemed secure. We slept on the floor with the dog
at our feet, camping with a real roof over our heads. Our roof.

The kitchen seemed vast in the morning, linoleumed, and wainscotted in thin board painted to look like tile. Black with white lines. We had a couch, a small electric two-burner stove and an antique fridge, which had all been left behind. And we had the wood stove, stoked from the cooling coals of the night before. We wore our coats until it warmed, brewed our coffee and tea, made toast over the open flame and looked at each other in wonder.

When I pulled on my boots they were full of kibble. All night the mice had been busy stowing it away from the dog’s bowl, amazed at their find. I up-tipped every boot for years after.

Outside in the frost I dug away at resistant soil, rocky soil, rooted soil, and planted a hundred daffodils in the geriatric orchard. That might have been my first attempt to focus. To concentrate on something small so as not to be overwhelmed by the enormity of the work to be done. The whole house. And the barn. And the shed. The fences and fields and woodlot. Work for ever.

We were loath to hire anyone to do anything we thought we could manage. We’d just returned from Greece, where plaster is rough. We were acquainted with paint. We didn’t seek perfection.

I scraped layers of wallpaper until my wrists were jammed and my fingertips raw. Took great delight in
any piece that exceeded postage-stamp size. Lived in a slurry of hot steam and old glue, stuck to the stairs as I tried to move higher in the hall, a slow step at a time, the walls getting bigger and higher as the paper refused to budge. Seven layers, and if I scraped too hard I gouged the wall. A loathsome job, to be repeated in every room in the house. Inch by inch.