13

 

FOR TWO WEEKS straight, I watched my mother run herself ragged, trying to keep up with my father’s increasingly frenetic pace. Dad was always lean and lanky, but he was doing so much so fast that he’d noticeably lost weight; between breakfast and suppertime, his bony heinie didn’t hit a chair.

The only appreciable time I got to spend alone with my mother was when we went into town to pick up supplies. We made our trips take as long as possible, grateful for any excuse to get out of the woods. As we did our errands, we talked and laughed about little things, carefully avoiding any mention of our old home or her sister. Our relationship ripened as the summer wore on, the emotional color deepening like the wild Wisconsin blueberries that grew of their own accord, a sweet gift from God in the sub-dappled forests.

I offered to help Mom with the endless drudgery, but she only let me do the breakfast dishes or fold my own laundry before insisting that I run along and play outside. She claimed that she didn’t want me to stay cooped up in the house during the brief Wisconsin summer, but I think there was more to it than that. I think she was ashamed. She had taken leave of her sister with her head held high and her nose in the air, only to find herself bent over double with her nose up against a grindstone. Mom looked like hell at the end of the day, but it wasn’t only the physical work that seemed to wring her out like an old washrag. Children are a lot smarter than most grownups credit. I could see that my mother was dreadfully worried and desperately, desperately lonely.

Unless you happen to be a hermit, everybody needs friends, but it seems to me that some people are like schooling fish—they become anxious when separated from the group. I think it’s a matter of inborn temperament, because from what I’d heard, Kristina Sigurdsson had been a social herring long before she became Mrs. Parsons. She was always at her best in the midst of an audience, calm and poised and in her element. Sometimes it seemed like she only came fully alive in the presence of others, as if the reflection of her smile multiplied in half-a-dozen pairs of eyes made her feel solid and real and worthy of being.

As the dog days of summer wore on, it became increasingly obvious that my mother would never be happy living out in the woods, not even if she had her own house. She wouldn’t be happy in such isolation if her husband built her a palace. 

 

BY MID-JULY, the trash was cleared away, and my father had moved on to renovating the three cabins. Mom asserted herself at last; she declared that before she could be concerned with sprucing up guest lodgings, she had to make our living quarters habitable. In a moment of candor she told me quietly, “Don’t repeat this to Daddy, but Grandpa’s house isn’t fit for pigs.”

Mom began scrubbing the rambling old house from the baseboards to the ceilings and then decided to give the interior a fresh coat of paint. The whole while, Grandpa Parsons looked over her shoulder and mumbled about all the uproar, although I noticed he didn’t complain when she did his laundry in addition to ours. He also parked his legs under the supper table at six o’clock sharp, apparently expecting his victuals. As soon as it was put in front of him, he hooked one arm around the plate and shoveled it in like someone might steal it—took about four minutes flat. He barely mumbled thanks as he walked away from the empty plate, apparently expecting someone to pick up after him, too.

Grandpa tolerated my mother’s general cleaning, but when she started tearing everything out of his cupboards and closets, he tried to put his foot down.

“All these years, I’ve lived just fine without your meddling,” he declared hotly. He changed his tone somewhat when she discovered an extended family of mice nesting at the back of the linen closet. The winter blankets were destroyed; the wool was chewed to shreds and everything stank of mouse urine. Feeling vindicated for her meddling, Mom called him over to display the mouse hotel.

“Damn it. Filthy little bastards,” he groused, then yanked a blanket from the closet and threw it down in disgust. A litter of blind, pink baby mice tumbled onto the floor. The frantic mouse mother began to gather up her offspring in her mouth, one by one, to tuck them back into the fluffy wool nest. I’d never seen the like of it and was gazing tenderly upon the touching scene when Grandpa’s grimy black boot suddenly broke into my field of vision, intent upon stomping out their tiny lives.

My mother screeched as I dove in like a linebacker to shield the little family with my body. Grandpa was caught off balance as he jerked his foot back to keep from stepping on me. He did an impromptu jig before falling flat on his ass, all the while swearing even more colorfully than Mr. O’Hara—something about what he was going to do with the mice and me both.

Dad walked into the house just in time to hear the best of it and tore down the hall at a run. He said I could take as many mice as I could catch and let them go in the woods. After he hauled his old father up off the floor, they drove into town for mousetraps. Mom was left to scour the empty closet with bleach and wash all the salvageable bedding.

 

EVEN THOUGH I was born here, it never ceases to amaze me: Wisconsin is as cold as Siberia for half the year but can be hot as the blazes in summer. July twenty-first was ninety-seven degrees in the shade. Undaunted by the heat, Dad was outside working hard on the cabins. I didn’t know anything about carpentry, but I could see they were pretty dilapidated. No matter how much work he did, they still looked like crap to me.

By late afternoon the temperature hit one-hundred degrees Fahrenheit in the sun, but the indomitable George Parsons was up on the roof of cabin number three with a bundle of asphalt shingles, pounding away with a will. He went at it like one possessed, his face and forearms burnt red raw and his shirt soaked with sweat. Mom came outside and tried to talk him off the roof for lunch, then gave up and went inside to make lemonade, to see if she could coax him down.

I was sitting off in the shade, watching the hypnotic swing of the hammer when he stopped abruptly with his arm in the air, like a machine that got stuck. “Dad!” I hollered. “Do you need me to bring more nails?” He didn’t answer. “Why don’t you come down, and I’ll get you some lemonade . . . with ice,” I offered. That got his attention, and he looked at me a moment but said nothing. He almost seemed bewildered by the question. I watched in dismay as he got to his feet and stood on the rooftop with his hammer raised like Thor.

My father turned slowly about and surveyed the property; the look on his face was something between astonishment and ecstasy. A wave of angst washed over me—I thought maybe the sun had cooked his brain. “Dad, what’s wrong?” Still no answer. “It’s too hot. Please come down and get a drink,” I pleaded.  All at once he began to laugh. It started out a chuckle and swelled to a deep, belly laugh, until he was laughing so hard I was afraid he might tumble off the roof. I ran to get Mom, and when we came back, Dad was hard at work again, this time vigorously smashing out the cabin window. It was the only one of the three that hadn’t been cracked.

“George! My God, what are you doing?” Mom cried, dropping the glass of lemonade she’d carried out for him.

“Knocking down this shitty old shack!” he replied with a grimace, all the while huffing and puffing like the big bad wolf.

“Why?”

“I’ll tell ya why,” he declared, laying down the hammer. “We’ve been going about it all wrong. Look at this place!” He made a sweeping gesture toward the river.

“What about it?”

“It’s beautiful! It’s got great potential . . . Why waste it on a rough hunting lodge? If we take down that stand of scrubby pines, we could see sunsets. This spot is prime real estate for a resort.”

“A resort?”

“Sure! Why not? What we need is a chalet, right there on the rise overlooking the river.”

“A chalet? But . . .”

“It’ll be contemporary, with lots of glass . . . and a great stone hearth for cozying up in the winter. A marvelous juxtaposition of modern architecture and old-fashioned warmth.”

“But . . . I don’t understand. We planned out a budget for fixing up. George, how on earth could we pay for such a thing?” she asked in dismay, but he didn’t acknowledge the question—he didn’t even appear to see her.

My father was deaf to all but the symphony of triumph only he could hear—he couldn’t see anything past his wondrous plan, shining in his eyes like diamonds.

“It’ll be grand, Tina! A woodland paradise, a virtual Valhalla in Iron County. Sportsman and their families will come from every corner of the country. Not to mention, Blackstone doesn’t have a fancy hall for functions. The Parsons’ Chalet will be the most magnificent event hall available for miles in any direction!” He swept his long arms in an arc for emphasis. “We can rent it out to locals for parties and such and make money all year round. We’ll be wealthy as lumber barons, local celebrities. Soon everyone’ll see that George Parsons is a man of stature and standing.”

 

I LEARNED ANOTHER new vocabulary word to go along with bequeathed and intrusive: mortgage. My mother explained that by borrowing money from the bank, we could keep more cash on hand and do the job right. I was surprised that she shared the details with me and proud that she considered me old enough.

“It must be a solid investment,” she assured me. “The payoff will be worth it, otherwise the bank wouldn’t agree to the loan, right?”

“Uh, you’re asking me?”

“No . . . of course not. I’m just saying, it makes perfect sense.”

“So, if you build a fancy chalet with a sauna, people will pay a lot of money to visit. Then you can pay the bank back later?”

“Exactly.”

“That sure is nice of them.”

“Who?”

“The bank. It’s nice they let you use the money.”

“Well, it’s a loan, so there’s interest.”

“Like they’re interested?”

“Oh, they’re interested all right, but being charged interest means you have to give back more money than you borrowed in the first place.”

“How much more?”

“It’s a percentage.”

“Is that a lot?”

“I’m not really sure; Daddy says that Northern Mortgage and Trust had a good deal. Grandpa Reuben had to sign off on it since he owns the property, so he must think it’s a good deal, too. Daddy says you’ve got to spend money to make money. He says you never get anywhere working for someone else—people only get rich by going into business for themselves.”

“Oh. Mom, do you want us to get rich?”

“I . . . uh . . . sure, why not? Why shouldn’t we be rich as much as anyone else?” She smiled broadly.

“How long will it take until we get rich?”

“Oh, I don’t know, Cassandra. I only hope that we get enough clientele—that’s the folks who come to stay—enough to pay all the bills.”

“But . . . how do you know they’ll come at all?”

“What? Why, of course they’ll come.”

“But what if they don’t?” I asked in a small voice.

“They will. They’ll come, you betcha,” she said reassuringly. “They’ve just got to,” she added softly.

Once the finances were in order, time was of the essence; winters in the Northwoods come early and hit hard. Rough weather lasts at least until April, and spring snows are often the worst and the wettest. The foundation for the chalet had to be poured before the ground froze. Exterior walls and roofs had to be done before the snow fell; the interior work could be finished later.

The place was suddenly abuzz with men at work: surveyors, building contractors, and general laborers. Trucks came and went delivering lumber and pipes. A dump truck dropped off a mountain of gravel to make a proper driveway out to the road, since the dirt driveway was full of potholes and tended to turn to mud every spring. Another dump truck deposited a load of fill dirt over the old cellar pit, burying all evidence of the tragic fire at last.

I had goose bumps as I hung over Dad’s shoulder and studied the architect’s drawing of the chalet. It would have an open-beamed ceiling, twenty-foot high at the peak, and a massive stone hearth. The place was big enough to seat two hundred and still have plenty of room for people to dance; the hardwood dance floor would be made of oak. In back, there was a full kitchen with a refrigerator, stainless steel counters and a large gas range where caterers would prepare food for parties. One whole side of the chalet would be filled with tall, double-pane, insulated custom glass windows overlooking the river.

That was the top story. Beneath the main floor were large, twin redwood saunas, as well as separate shower and toilet facilities for men and women. A flagstone path led from the saunas down to the pure cold river; if the water was high enough and the current not too rough, and if it suited your fancy, you could run straight from the hot steam and plunge right in.

When my mother saw the blueprint her eyes went wide. She sucked her breath through her teeth with a barely audible hiss, like a tiny snake, then curled back her lips to smile and nod agreeably. My father didn’t seem to notice her reservations. He bubbled over with enthusiasm like Guinness stout on tap.

When the tree crew started felling pines, my parents ordered me to stay in the house for my own safety. Next, a bulldozer and excavator were brought in on a huge, flatbed truck. I watched from the kitchen window as the dozer obliterated all the outbuildings, including the infamous chicken shed where the rusty old tools had been stored. The shack where Mr. O’Hara once lived was leveled without a trace—he’d already up and left in the night after his outhouse was destroyed. Nobody knew where he went or if he had any place to go. Grandpa Parsons didn’t much care, but groused that Mr. O’Hara still owed him fifteen dollars rent and forty-five cents for a can of kerosene.

After the dozer graded the lot, driveway, and parking area, the excavator broke ground for the chalet’s foundation. Dad zipped nimbly in and around the heavy machinery, adding his two cents worth and scaring my mother to death; he flitted about on air, so happily busy that there seemed to be two of him.

As the days wore on, my mother grew increasingly anxious. The constant din of construction must’ve eroded her nerves, and my moping around underfoot with nothing to do didn’t help matters. Finally, she couldn’t stand it anymore; she ordered me to circumnavigate the building site and go play in the woods.

“All alone?” I whined.

“Bring your dolls . . . or some coloring books. Bring your stationary and write to your friends,” Mom insisted. “It’s a beautiful day . . . you need fresh air and sunshine.” She packed a brown bag with peanut butter sandwiches, some cookies and an apple, along with a canteen of water. “And here’s a pack of Kleenex,” she added, escorting me to a path by the riverside, well past the danger zone. “Just in case you have to . . . you know.”

“Aw!”

“It’s too dangerous; this way, you won’t need to come home until the men quit work.”

Shooed off the premises and left on my own until suppertime, I had no idea where to go or what to do with myself when I got there. I wandered into the woods like a disembodied soul, keeping parallel to the river so as not to lose my way, until I could no longer hear the noise of buzz saws and diesel engines. My mother had warned me not to go too far, but my limits weren’t clearly defined.

I was miserable. Being on my own made me realize that I’d grown up spoiled rotten, the sole beneficiary of a doting aunt who seemed to think of little else but me from the time she combed out my curls at the breakfast table to when she tied up my hair for bed. I’d always got plenty of attention from Mom, too, and Dad, when he was in a good mood. Naturally, I’d unquestioningly accepted it as my birthright.

I’d been accustomed to a neighborhood teaming with children of all ages. My head had been filled with a daily dose of merry chatter and laughter, squabbles and tears; the dead silence of the woods was eerie. I was pretty sure I’d make friends when school started up but that was still over a month away. I’d never wanted to go back to school so bad, and July wasn’t even over.

I missed Kitty terribly. Our last week together was still fresh in my mind—the image of her tear-stained face as she clutched the Kissy doll under the light of the front porch stood out like flash photography. But as I sat down to write to her for the first time, I realized I had nothing to say. I certainly couldn’t tell her about the drive to Blackstone. She’d be confused and frightened if I told her about the incident at Two Toots—I struggled to understand it myself. I’d never been without friends before, and there were no words to describe my sense of isolation. I was too proud to tell the truth about nasty old Grandpa, or the condition of his smelly house before my mother attacked the dirt with the ferocity of a Viking hoard.

For the first time, I concocted an elaborate social lie. “We had a nice drive through the country and saw lots of wild animals on the way. Grandpa’s house in the woods is nice too, and I have my own room with a private backdoor.” I finished up by explaining that Kissy was having a lovely vacation with Chatty Cathy but was looking forward to going home to her mommy and signed it with hugs and kisses. I planned to return the doll when we drove home to visit the next Christmas, and I was pretty sure I’d throw Chatty into the bargain, especially now that she had more than one thing to chat about.

Sometimes when I was alone, I conjured an image of Tante’s face or closed my eyes and imagined her voice. It left me with a hopeless, hollow feeling that I just couldn’t put in a letter. I told her simply that I missed her and didn’t let on about much else, except that I hadn’t had a chance to do an art project since I’d arrived. There wasn’t any place to spread out without being in the way, and I didn’t want to make a mess in Grandpa’s house. Besides, out of all the stuff I’d brought along, somehow my poster paints and brushes never turned up.

Time passed slowly. Gradually, I stopped my sulking long enough to pick up my head and see the new world around me. I found a fallen tree that stretched across the river, with a fork in its trunk that formed a seat and a wide branch for a footrest. From my perch above the flowing water I watched the fish swim, saw how their bodies undulated and their fins flowed with the current. I was amazed to find that they often looked right back up at me, at times warily and at times with unmistakable curiosity.

I learned that the forest was not a tomb of silence. It might be quiet, but it was never silent. The air was filled with sounds of life, a delicate symphony of bugs and birds to the accompaniment of the flowing river, here and there punctuated by the note of a raptor or the scurrying feet of a squirrel. I followed the birds with my eyes as they foraged through the pine needles or swiftly dodged the trees in pursuit of insects. I melted into my surroundings until I not only heard, but felt the piercing cry of the hawk and the deep resonant hoot of the owl. I closed my eyes, the better to hear the water trickling over rocks. I took off my shoes and waded to feel the cold polished river stones beneath my feet, the round flat black stones that gave the town its name. Once I sat so still for so long that a large barn owl suddenly swooped low on noiseless wings and deftly snatched a brown snake from where he lay blissfully sunning, not six feet from me. I watched in wonder and awe and pity as the helpless creature was carried off, writhing and twisting in the sharp talons of the huntress so that she might live and feed her young. 

I’d never realized how much clutter was in my mind, like a tangled field of weeds, until it was cleared away. At last I could hear myself think and began to find within even more than I had lost. I learned the difference between isolation and solitude.

The end of July marked a graduation of sorts. Independence had been thrust upon me. Loneliness and gloom had given me a good fight, but I won, and learned how to stand on nothin’ but my own two feet. It was the magical summer that I cracked the hull of childhood to send my first tentative roots into the fertile soil of youth.