The House on Crook Road

Trembling with Fear/Horror Tree/Halloween Special, 2023

If he was honest, he’d have said he felt her presence on that first day. The house was cold, as it had always been during his childhood, and the grey November day made it seem more so. The emotions-joy and freedom-felt at the closing were replaced by a nagging uneasiness, like a thin scratchy sweater he couldn’t shed. He hoped his daughter would call. He willed his phone to light, a small-screen firework exploding in his palm. Hey, Dad, she might say, hope everything went well. Can’t wait to see the place. No such luck. The house creaked and groaned with all its familiar sounds. Clark slapped a peanut butter sandwich together. Chewing slowly, he stood at the window over the sink. A reflection, a shape of a person, a woman, formed and then disintegrated in the glass. He held the half-chewed food in his mouth, a dense cud. Outside, the trees distracted, wrestled with the wind, branches scraping along the sides of the sagging house.

***

Morning light stretched across the kitchen, revealing stained linoleum floors, pealing wallpaper. Repeating his last evening’s pose, he sipped coffee, examining the backyard out the window. The barn challenged like a sunburned child, red and pealing, hands on its hips, as if to say, Get on with it, Clark. Fix this place. Get to work. His father famously painted that entire barn with a six-inch brush in one month. Clark mowed the lawns. His mother and his sister Vera weeded the flower beds. They were all long gone now, dying one by one for different reasons, no rhyme or reason to it, everyone but him. Settled at the table he scribbled lists and sketched punctilious plans on a legal pad. He was handy, more than capable of rehabilitating the house. Showering, he imagined pounding feet up stairs. He shut off the water, stood naked and wet in the slow drip silence, listening. He would begin his work outside.

***

He started in the barn, chock full of rusted gardening tools, bicycles, lawn mowers, pieces of wood. Dragged into the light of the yard, the discarded stuff sat awkwardly, reminding him of old people in a nursing home, faded, hunched, lost.  He fantasized about turning the place into an Airbnb. I could convert this barn to bedrooms. People might like it here. Energized by inspiration, he continued, resisting a familiar intruding voice, telling him to quit. Always the romantic! it scoffed. He thought of his ex’s negativity. Nothing he did was ever right, ever good enough. Everything he attempted was somehow foolish. He pushed her out of his head, cleaned all morning, stopping only for a second cup of coffee and sandwich.

In the lean-to behind the barn his father once kept a John Deer tractor. Clark stood tentatively for a moment at the doorway of the empty space. The dim light cascaded in slight slivers from the windows. A human form fell across the space before him. He turned in fear. A tiny figure loomed from a corner. Clark approached slowly, stooped to pick up the ragged bunny with a plastic face. Vera’s Baby Bunny. He remembered teasing her about the doll, hiding it. She cried for weeks.

You’re a dirty fighter, Clark, his ex had said, You’re a child. A stupid, dirty fighter.

He threw the doll on the heap for the junk collectors.

***

He managed to work out a daily schedule of breakfast, house work, lunch, nap, reading, a long walk, dinner, bed. He tossed up the noises and images emerging from the corners and crevices of the old house to the effects of change. So much had changed. Moving back here was meant to steady the ship, fix what was broken, heal. God, grant me the courage to change the things I can…

Christmas came. Clark put the tree up in its old place in the living room near the fire. The family Mitch Miller record turned, churning out the favorite tunes. His parents’ wedding photo, with his mother’s red nails contrasting with white lace and his father’s set jaw, asserted itself from the bookshelf. He wondered if he should keep it there, keep it at all. Too many mixed feelings.

How he missed his daughter, Abby! She’d chosen to spend the holiday with her mother.

“I need time, Dad,” she’d said.

He yearned for a drink, called his sponsor, nibbling at a cuticle as he spoke into the phone.

“The holidays are tough. You want to meet somewhere?” his sponsor said.

“No, no.  I don’t want to bother you. I got this.”

“You sure?”

“Absolutely.”

Clark ended the call, unplugged the tree, snapped on the television.

***

Well into spring Clark cleaned, cleared, hauled, stripped, painted, papered, polished, yet the house insisted on its original haggard expression. Fresh paint bubbled, new wallpaper lifted from the wall. In frustration he abandoned his many projects, stalked the ubiquitous antique stores and estate sales in town, searching for fresh furniture to fill the emptied house. Just the right things, that’s what the place needs, he assured himself. He walked along the road, picking up garbage tossed from cars, something he didn’t remember from before. Back in the day, this road was pristine.

He passed a threadbare, grey-faced woman sitting in a shadow. It was almost like she was the shadow, like a charcoal rubbing. He imagined himself blowing his breath toward her, her body breaking up, scattering into the wind.

“You move in down the road?” she said.

“I grew up here,” Clark said, smiling, faking vitality, enthusiasm.

“Nothing can be done there, no sirree. You’d better head back! Head back, that’s right!”

“Take care!” he dismissed, carrying on his false brightness, making his way to the graveyard where his entire family lay buried. The stern Methodist church sat beside it, new (at least to Clark) graffiti scribbled across its side.

***

At night, no matter the season, the wind kicked up and the trees banged into the windows. When it was particularly bad, he’d rise to study the backyard. The trees’ long dark fingers reached up and out like a woman’s graceful but strong hands. Vera playing the piano. He marveled at the trees’ strength and perseverance, hoped they were protecting him, feared they might reach out, suffocate him in their clutches. Sometimes he silently wished they would crash through, remove him, save him.

***

His father’s vegetable garden remained on the east side of the house, needing to be reframed and retilled and replanted. His mother, overburdened by its proliferation of squash, tomatoes, everything, hated the garden. Always the naysayer. Clark remembered believing in his father’s agricultural aspirations, helping plant, water, harvest. He loved picking and eating the sweet strawberries in June.

Exuberant in the early morning sun, he dug and planted and patted. He especially anticipated the pumpkins. He remembered the gourds of his childhood, the pale orange spheres nestled in giant green leaves.  I’ll even have a vegetable stand, he speculated, picturing himself sitting on the back step husking armloads of corn.

Finally, Abby will come for a meal.

Summer passed. Each seed, plant, even the weeds, produced only withering, death.

Hands in pockets, he paced between the lines of plants, head drooping. Something shiny caught his eye. He squatted and pulled on the glittering speck, extending to reveal a gold necklace. Something long repressed emerged in his mind, his father snapping the same necklace from his mother’s neck. Clark knelt in the dirt. Rain fell. The dirt turned to mud. He sank further still.

***

At Halloween Clark bought three pumpkins and a packet of cigarettes at the grocery store in town. Settled on the porch, he carved, newspapers spread out beneath him, cigarette stuck in the corner of his mouth. He stabbed out chunks of triangular eyes and toothy grins, gathered and trashed the soggy newspaper, set battery operated tea lights in each stringy hollow. He arranged his feet on the porch railing - the same way his father propped his legs after a long day - draining a cigarette of nicotine.  

His mother’s antique clock ticked and tocked while he hunched over a bowl of tomato soup at the kitchen table. A slight smell of her Estee Lauder Cinnabon perfume tugged on his nostrils, made him slightly queasy. The doorbell stayed ominously silent. A stillness replaced the expected footsteps and voices gathering on the front step. The candy bowl on the side server remained full. The pumpkins’ frozen grins blazed into the night. The wind was kicking up. Clark decided to go out.

At Foxies, the bartender wore hilariously terrifying vampire teeth and a powdered white face. Clark blocked him out to focus on the thirty-something woman sitting at a corner table. Abby? He almost shouted his daughter’s name with joy. The woman’s foreign profile shifted into view.

“Lager,” Clark said, snapping back to reality, telling himself a lite beer would be fine. He really needed this. Just this once.

He sat on a barstool, glanced up at a blaring television.

A warmth came across him. He turned. A woman in dark clothes, wearing a cape, sipped a margarita by his side.

“Hey,” she said.

“Hey,” Clark replied, taking in her round, ageless face. She had the hooked nose of his mother, the china white skin of his ex, the strong brows of his sister, and Abby’s tiny spray of freckles across her cheeks.

 “Aren’t you the guy who bought the house he grew up in?” she said.

“It’s not working out. I can’t fix anything,” he confessed.

She stared at him for what felt like a long time, forever actually. Her eyes were unique-green, bottomless ponds.

“Trust me, you can’t fix it. What’s done is done,” she said.

The bartender set the beer on the bar.

A tear escaped, rolling down Clark’s cheek. He resisted the urge to fall into the woman’s shoulder, collapse into her body, like a tree chopped through its trunk.

 “You’re not the worst thing you’ve ever done. You’re not,” she said.

Clark followed her flowing cape out the door.

They drove through town, crossing the railroad tracks, headlights shining into the night. Clark’s cigarette’s tip burned red, tilted slightly out the window. He leaned his head back and dozed, enjoying the pleasing movement of the car, the woman’s scent, her confident control, the steady silence. They continued on this way, leaving the past, he hoped, behind, following the well-worn road into a fortress of trees.