The Rememberers, a novel by Martin Edic

Chapter 8

8

The grantor was someone named Randall Freezy and he had been in title for over fifty years. I read through the description and looked at the attached survey which included two parcels, the house and the building with its lot that ran down to the river and back to the railway right of way, which was marked ‘abandoned’. The signature was notarized and stamped and the deed had a raised seal stamp on it initialed by some unknown civil service worker. There was a liber and page number on the upper right-hand corner and it all looked official to me, though I hadn’t seen a deed in several years.

The sun was almost hot and I sat absorbed in the moment, the stone step solid under me and the big house looming behind me. I turned and looked up at it, three stories high in the front though I knew it tapered back to two in the rear, the roof unseen behind a stone arched cornice with a medallion of some kind at its peak. The fairy tale quality of the morning abruptly vanished as I contemplated the place and the thatch of papers in my hand. I got up and went to the door’s window and cupping my eyes, tried to peer in, but there was a curtain. 

There was a deadbolt lock with a big round brass escutcheon with the name Stockton Lock engraved into it. I took the key out from under my shirt and stuck it into the lock. It slid in and turned with some effort and I heard the bolt sit back in its place as I turned the knob and pushed the door open, breathing in a lungful of musty air.

The door opened to stair hall to the left, tiled in black and white,  with a pair of pocket doors to the right, open to a living room, dimly lit. I left the door ajar and went into the room. It had very high ceilings. I pulled the heavy old curtains on the windows aside and light washed the room revealing an old elegant house,  mostly empty of furniture. A marble mantle on the right wall and some wall sconces and a round glass dome fixture on the ceiling. I looked into the sconces and they were wired with modern fixtures and bulbs. A panel of switches by the door, also modern (I had expected pushbuttons) turned the lights on. There was power.

I stood and looked around, not feeling right about roaming around this place in spite of having a deed and a key in hand. There was no way this was mine, nor did owning it appeal at the moment. I noticed a bowl on the mantle, picked it up. It was heavy and made of hammered copper with a lid. I almost dropped it in surprise because I had held this thing before, many times. My father had made it when I was just a small child. It was one of the things I had searched for in my mother’s house when he died a few years ago, wanting something from his hand.

You wonder, when faced with overwhelming and unplanned-for events, how much more can keep coming and how you can possibly take it in. It almost always turns out that a lot more than you think can happen, and that you can survive it over time. Certain friends’ horrendous divorces come to mind– and illnesses. And it’s not just negative events. I’ve always had a fascination with lottery winners who have gone on to destroy their lives with their unexpected largesse, blowing it so quickly you wonder if they just wanted to get rid of it. It occurred to me that I could walk out, lock the door and go home and forget about the whole thing. But there was no way. 

I took the lid off the bowl. It fit snugly. I remembered the ringing click it made when you snapped it open and shut, a sound I had not heard for 30 years. And the hand of it, all memories, as new as the last time I felt them. There was a roll of paper inside, bills apparently, quite a few. I took it out. Hundreds, bundled with a rubber band that disintegrated when I stretched it to pull it off. Nothing else inside, no convenient message.

I counted the money. $3800 in old bills with none of the technological tricks woven in that made the newer ones oddly phony looking. Another windfall. I looked around for a spot to stash them and pushed them above the shade of one of the wall sconces. The bowl I kept, knowing my claim was entirely legitimate, at least to this one thing. And I might have fought you for it, so powerfully did it embody my father, always making things, always reading things, always poking around in odd places. He’d had a deadly boring job all his life but raised us well and when he saw the chance to retire early he left without a glance back and got another 25 years of life without that office.