The old Murchison homestead had been unoccupied for five years at this point—and even before that, the family only came up summers. Nobody had spent a winter in the house since before the war, and Ed wasn’t talking about Vietnam or even Korea. There was an ancient furnace but no insulation. The town no longer plowed the road, though if Eleanor lived there in the winter—he studied her face here, assessing the likelihood of this—she’d have a right to request it.Ten minutes later, she was in the passenger seat of Ed’s Oldsmobile headed north out of town.
On their way, Ed handed her the sheet with the listing information, but Eleanor chose to look out the window instead. Though she took in a number of fine old colonials and capes—the kind with stone walls around them and apple trees out back—this wasn’t one of those prettied-up New England towns featured on postcards and calendars. There were two-hundred-year-old houses like the one Ed was taking her to, but there were also double-wide trailers and ranch houses with cars in the yard that didn’t appear drivable. A pizza place, a Laundromat, a gas station, a church next to which were cemeteries with gravestones that went back to the seventeen hundreds, Ed told her.
They passed a row of mailboxes. A farm stand, not yet open for the season. A sign that said “Deaf Child.”
Not a whole lot else.
The house sat on a rise at the end of a long dirt road—the kind in which a strip of grass marks the space straddled by a car’s tires. It looked out over a hillside: a few acres of open land, and beyond those, another thirty of woods, Ed told her. No streetlights, of course—they’d passed the last of those a couple of miles back. This was a place where a person could look out at the night sky with no light competing with the constellations but that of the moon, no sound but the cry of owls and, in the fall (though she would only learn this later), the gunshots of hunters. The nearest neighbors lived a good half mile away.
It was lilac season when she first laid eyes on the property, and the trees were leafing out. One in particular dominated the view: an ash that had somehow survived the famous hurricane that people in these parts still spoke of, Ed told her. The tree sat just far enough from the house so as not to block the sun, but its branches seemed to fill the sky and span the horizon.
“How’s that for a tree?” Ed said, as he pulled the car up alongside the door to the porch. “I’m guessing this one got started right around the time my great-great-great-grandfather hung out the first sign for his dry goods store. That would be more than two hundred yearsback. Maybe longer. I’m going to wager you’re looking at the oldest tree in town.”
A person could hang a hammock here. If she ever had the time to put her feet up, that is. With all the work a property like this required, not to mention coming up with the tax money, there might not be much time for snoozing.
Never mind that. Eleanor wasn’t looking for something easy.
She stood there out front for a while, taking it in, before stepping onto the granite slab by the front door. She made no comment, asked no questions. She could feel the beating of her heart.
5.
Where the Happy People Lived
The house was small, but she liked that. Her childhood home had been large and lonely. When she had children, she’d keep them close.
She stepped onto the porch first—a screen porch, with a trestle table. From all the stuff stored there, it looked to Eleanor as if whoever used to live here knew how to have good times together. Hung up along the back wall with the kind of care that suggested the sun shone regularly here were a croquet set and an assortment of badminton racquets, shuttlecocks, Ping-Pong paddles, baseball bats, fishing poles, horseshoes, skates and sleds in a variety of sizes. There was a hammock and a dartboard, an old pedal car.
There was a miniature cannon. Every Fourth of July, Ed explained, the family had fired off three shots. You could hear it all the way over to the Pouliots’ place.
Everywhere Eleanor looked lay evidence of a life full of good things. Gardening tools. A toboggan. There were board games and a Victrola with a stack of old 78s. (Benny Goodman. The Andrews Sisters. Bing Crosby.) The wall by the door featured pencil marks indicating the heights of various children.(Mickey, 4th of July weekend 1952 four foot six. Susan, July 1957. Bobby, five foot eight! Peter, five foot eleven. Look what happens when a boy eats his vegetables!)
It looked like a house where people who loved each other had lived.
In the kitchen, a fireplace occupied most of one wall; in another century the woman of the house might have set a loaf of bread in the baking oven. The floors were wood, counters Formica. At one end of the room was an old Coldspot refrigerator. “You’d want to replace this,” Ed told Eleanor, but she knew she wouldn’t.
Off to one side of the kitchen lay a small pantry whose shelves had been covered with red-and-green flowered contact paper, most likely laid down in the fifties. Running her hand along one of these shelves, Eleanor pictured mason jars filled with vegetables canned in the pressure cooker, sitting on a top shelf alongside cake toppers and packages of birthday candles and little yellow plastic corncob holders, with plates to match shaped like corn husks.
Out the pantry window she could see blackberry bushes. If this house were hers, she’d make jam and write the dates on the labels, line them up along the shelves. She’d grow tomatoes for a winter’s worth of sauce.
The other end of the kitchen opened to a tiny space—barely large enough for a single bed—that Ed referred to as the borning room. In the old days, this was where the woman of the house gave birth to her babies, Ed told her. Another bedroom, larger than this one, faced out to the front of the house, with another, smaller fireplace and windows opening south and east. Morning sun.
There was a small front hall, and a living room with a third fireplace and old nails on the mantel suggesting that some December long ago, children had hung stockings here. Wide pine beams spanned the ceiling of the room, as they did in the kitchen.
There was a surprising brightness to the space, thanks to the windows, looking out to a field no longer tilled, stone walls, a few old apple trees, and beyond them, woods. And that enormous tree, of course. The ash.
“The Murchisons never did much in the way of upgrading,” Ed told her. He said this as if it might be a problem, but Eleanor loved that about the house. The walls still bore decades-old wallpaper (roses in the bedroom, farmers and milkmaids chasing cows across the living room, a row of their buckets spilling milk, a row of dancing children below them). The floorboards were wide and rutted, and not even close to level, though not enough to suggest major issues with the foundation, Ed assured her, as if she might be worried about that, which she wasn’t.
Upstairs (steep risers, bowed in the middle from 150 years of use) there was a single room, divided in the middle by the massive chimneyfrom the fireplaces below, with a window seat where a person might place herself and take in the scent of lilacs. Children should sleep here.
At this point in the tour Ed suggested that Eleanor might like to see the basement, but she was more interested in studying the dishes in the pantry (a complete set of Fiesta ware, and a Blue Willow teapot, and cast-iron frying pans and muffin pans and an old popcorn popper). In the living room cupboard were at least two dozen boxes of jigsaw puzzles, which, when completed (give or take a piece or two), might reveal the image of a covered bridge in fall, or a New England churchyard surrounded by snow, along with an ancient Monopoly game with the original pieces in lead.
He took her out into the field, to the spot where the green of young grass met the trees, so she could look up the hill toward the house. Already she thought of it as her house. When she looked down, she saw moss and a patch of lady’s slippers.
There was more: the tool shed, an old plow, a wooden wheelbarrow. “You probably wondered about the well and the septic system,” Ed said to her.
She hadn’t.
He was saying something then about what it would cost to insulate the place, and to install a new furnace (essential) and double-pane windows. The roof was old, but they built them right in those days. She’d need to install a new water heater.
