lie beneath it.
He started the truck and moved down Main Street, looking in the rearview mirror. She came out of the post office, her eyes focused on the truck for a moment. The bounce of the truck and sun reflecting in his mirrors made her into a figure dancing through a prairie grass fire. Then she was gone, turning right at the post office corner. He made a promise to do better the next time he saw her, knowing he wouldn’t.
Carlisle drove through Salamander and then, six miles west of town, turned north off the secondary highway and onto a dirt road the color of iron oxide. Same road he had traveled yesterday. About two and a half miles farther was a grove on the left. He checked the map again: Turn right at the intersection, go about two miles or a little more, grove on left side of the road, look for old house sitting fifty yards or more up from the road on the right. He found it.
The land had not been farmed or grazed for a while. High weeds everywhere, sunflowers scattered around, cattails bending long and yellow and brown in the ditches. In the grass, meadowlarks carried on, a red-winged blackbird stared at him from a fence wire, and a gopher headed for cover when Carlisle got out of his pickup. He shut the truck door quietly.
A rutted lane of sorts led up to the house, but he parked just where the lane began and walked along it, feeling like the trespasser he was. He liked the softness of old dirt under his shoes and the August sun on his face, liked the scent of open country in his nose, dense smells from a mixture of heavy dew and sun and wild things growing and a light breeze from the western mountains. High clouds formed random shadows on the ground when they passed before the sun.
As the woman at Danny’s had said, the house was in rough shape. But Carlisle was good at seeing what could be. Hammer enough nails, saw enough boards, consider possibilities, and you get to that place where you can see. He walked around the building, looking in through broken windows, banging his hand against the siding, then backed off fifty feet and circled it again. Unlike the big two- or three-story farmhouses built out there to shelter large families, this was a little fellow. About a thousand square feet on the first and only floor, covered by a roof with a forty-five-degree pitch.
A sink with faucets, which meant a well of some kind outside. No toilet, but that didn’t surprise him, since he had noticed the privy behind and off to one side of the house when he walked up the lane. That could be remedied. The porch floor was rotten, its roof sagging where supports had fallen away. He stepped inside carefully, watching through shadowy light for holes and snakes that prefer to hang around old places such as this. Some holes, no snakes.
And no basement, which was unusual for this part of the country. Since footings had to be sunk more than forty inches to get under the frost line, the conventional strategy was to just keep going and build a basement. But this structure sat on its footings about two feet above the ground, weeds poking up through cracks in the floor. Nobody had lived there for a long time.
About then he started thinking log cabin and pried back a piece of moldy wallboard to see if chinked logs were underneath. No. Only the normal two-by-four fir studs, but with no insulation in the cavity. Must have been cold in here during the winter and hot in the summer. Whoever put this up had been in a hurry or simply unskilled. Yet the basic structure looked all right, no tilt from a distance. And inside was a huge stone fireplace, a handsome one, with a gunky flue for certain.
After that he examined the two large bur oaks in the yard, one on the south side, the other near the front of the house on the west. Along with their aesthetic value, they’d help keep things cool in the summer. Both trees seemed to be healthy and were inhabited by squirrels that opened up with a broadside of chattering, resenting his
He started the truck and moved down Main Street, looking in the rearview mirror. She came out of the post office, her eyes focused on the truck for a moment. The bounce of the truck and sun reflecting in his mirrors made her into a figure dancing through a prairie grass fire. Then she was gone, turning right at the post office corner. He made a promise to do better the next time he saw her, knowing he wouldn’t.
Carlisle drove through Salamander and then, six miles west of town, turned north off the secondary highway and onto a dirt road the color of iron oxide. Same road he had traveled yesterday. About two and a half miles farther was a grove on the left. He checked the map again: Turn right at the intersection, go about two miles or a little more, grove on left side of the road, look for old house sitting fifty yards or more up from the road on the right. He found it.
The land had not been farmed or grazed for a while. High weeds everywhere, sunflowers scattered around, cattails bending long and yellow and brown in the ditches. In the grass, meadowlarks carried on, a red-winged blackbird stared at him from a fence wire, and a gopher headed for cover when Carlisle got out of his pickup. He shut the truck door quietly.
A rutted lane of sorts led up to the house, but he parked just where the lane began and walked along it, feeling like the trespasser he was. He liked the softness of old dirt under his shoes and the August sun on his face, liked the scent of open country in his nose, dense smells from a mixture of heavy dew and sun and wild things growing and a light breeze from the western mountains. High clouds formed random shadows on the ground when they passed before the sun.
As the woman at Danny’s had said, the house was in rough shape. But Carlisle was good at seeing what could be. Hammer enough nails, saw enough boards, consider possibilities, and you get to that place where you can see. He walked around the building, looking in through broken windows, banging his hand against the siding, then backed off fifty feet and circled it again. Unlike the big two- or three-story farmhouses built out there to shelter large families, this was a little fellow. About a thousand square feet on the first and only floor, covered by a roof with a forty-five-degree pitch.
A sink with faucets, which meant a well of some kind outside. No toilet, but that didn’t surprise him, since he had noticed the privy behind and off to one side of the house when he walked up the lane. That could be remedied. The porch floor was rotten, its roof sagging where supports had fallen away. He stepped inside carefully, watching through shadowy light for holes and snakes that prefer to hang around old places such as this. Some holes, no snakes.
And no basement, which was unusual for this part of the country. Since footings had to be sunk more than forty inches to get under the frost line, the conventional strategy was to just keep going and build a basement. But this structure sat on its footings about two feet above the ground, weeds poking up through cracks in the floor. Nobody had lived there for a long time.
About then he started thinking log cabin and pried back a piece of moldy wallboard to see if chinked logs were underneath. No. Only the normal two-by-four fir studs, but with no insulation in the cavity. Must have been cold in here during the winter and hot in the summer. Whoever put this up had been in a hurry or simply unskilled. Yet the basic structure looked all right, no tilt from a distance. And inside was a huge stone fireplace, a handsome one, with a gunky flue for certain.
After that he examined the two large bur oaks in the yard, one on the south side, the other near the front of the house on the west. Along with their aesthetic value, they’d help keep things cool in the summer. Both trees seemed to be healthy and were inhabited by squirrels that opened up with a broadside of chattering, resenting his
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