The Lost Chloe

       
October 1940

They were standing in the gray rain and staring down at the top of his casket when she first noticed.  She peered through her bouquet of wind-bent hot-house roses and whispered to her siblings, “Where’s Mom?” 

The wind was beating the tassels against the canopy top so that none of them could hear her or the preacher with his pointed picket teeth.  “What?” they sniffled through their handkerchiefs and squinted down the line at her.  She was already moving through the black suits, looking under elbows and umbrellas without success.  Behind her she heard her brother toss in the first shovelful of dirt with a thump.

Afterward the crowd milled together back at their house, their paper plates loaded with the pound cake and stewed apples that had magically appeared on the buffet.   “When was the last time anyone saw her?” she interrogated everyone at the door as they fought the wind for their umbrellas.

“She handed out the roses, didn’t she?” asked her middle sister. “Wait, no.  That was the councilman with the beard who kept bumping me.”

After they had spent two frantic hours pestering Winona’s two policemen, their mother walked through the front door brandishing a thick metal key and smiling.  Smiling? 

“I’ve been at the bank,” she said with her hands on the hips of her black funeral dress.  “I bought Merbrink for $3,000.  The bank has been saddled with the estate for years, so I only had to pay back taxes.”  She took off her raincoat and handed it to her oldest daughter, “Only one other serious buyer came years ago from Chicago and she took one look at the place and came back to the bank white faced.”  She surveyed the contents of everyone’s plates and nodded with satisfaction, “Like the stewed apples?  Your father planned the menu, you know. Anyway, that woman drove away so fast that she didn’t even bother to claim her key deposit!”  She held the heavy key out in her palm for them to inspect, “Lucky for me that she brought the key back to the bank at all. I’ve always said I’d buy the old thing and solve the mystery. Your Father and I had it all settled before he died.”

“You’re insane,” the oldest daughter declared. “In the middle of father’s funeral you were filling out a mortgage?!”

“Well now, would any of you have let me do it afterward?” Their mother returned as she plucked a radish from someone’s plate.  There was a long stuffy pause as everyone looked down and shuffled their feet.

 “Hmm,” she crunched. “That’s what I thought.  Your dad and I made our peace already.  We dealt with the issue for long enough. The funeral was for you.”

 

Chapter One – A Queenless Palaquin

End of May 1968

   Most of my childhood has blurred into oblivion, but I remember the steps involved in moving in with Grandma and helping to solve Merbrink’s mystery as if I was flipping through a sheaf of photos. Ironically, we had to move away from town first, although that certainly wasn’t a family choice; the train line politely asked my father to retire long before he had even considered the idea.  Probably something about the silver flask he always carried in his vest pocket.  Bad for engineers to drink, I suppose. Father left home that morning with his engineer’s uniform folded neatly over his arm.  He came home with a brown paper sack in the same arm and hunched down in his favorite chair.  He sat there for days doing nothing but drinking whiskey.  My mother didn’t argue with him, or try to stop him. She never argued.  It was one of many things we didn’t understand about each other.

A week later my large-breasted aunts arrived at the front door, towing the uncles and cousins.  I had never liked my father’s sisters and hid in the closet watching them through a small crack.   They harried everyone into packing and loading everything into the back of somebody’s Ford truck.  Somehow the Aunts had managed to reduce our entire house to a pile of boxes. My Cousin Wally spent the day barking and crossing his eyes at me every time he carried a box past the closet door.  My Father spent the day burrowing into his leather chair until it was the last thing left in the dark house, except for me.  At last I had to come out of my lair to pee and watch my uncles grumble as they strapped Father’s chair to the top of a panel station wagon.  We were moving from our respectable house downtown into a ramshackle farmhouse so far into the country that it was almost in the next town.  My friends stood on their porches and I waved to them with tears running down my cheeks.  “You’ll be alright, dearie,” one of the look-a-like aunts told me.  “Buck up now.  God knows what’s best for you. Now, hold this box and get in my car there.” Our line of vehicles followed each other behind father’s chair as it rode through town like a queenless palanquin. 

 Our new house was more a mess of overgrown lilacs and broken-down poultry barns, than a place to sleep. It was near the tiny town of Atwood, across the road from the Tippecanoe River.  As I looked out the window of my aunt’s car, my first impression was that the house grew out of a hillside like a rogue mulberry tree.  It was old, but not mysterious or elegant.  This house stood bleakly, defiantly, out in the country on a muddy road under a broken old windmill. Not many neighbors here either - across the road was another farmhouse hiding behind a hollyhock fence and next to that a small house back in the woods on the riverbank.  “Goat farmers,” my aunt sniffed as she pulled in. Other than that, there was only our landlord’s house and then emptiness up and down all the way to the railroad crossing.  The aunts supervised the piling of boxes back out of the truck and into the empty living room.  One of them ordered my mother to go find the kitchen box and make tea.  In an hour everyone was gone and we were left alone in a creaky old house with a pile of boxes. Father sat in his chair in the empty parlor and stared at the pile of ashes left in the fireplace. Mother made baloney and mustard sandwiches and we ate them together sitting on the back steps.  “Why don’t...” I began, but she only sighed.

The first night I heard hooting and howling and an awful shrill screaming like banshees.  I pulled my sleeping bag over my head and didn’t sleep a wink. In the morning Mother told me over a bowl of oatmeal with not enough brown sugar, “You’ll get used to the peacocks screaming.  They got on the previous renter’s nerves, and that’s how we got this old place for a song.”  She gave a sidelong glance at my father and he grunted. “It’s not so bad,” she said.  “Needs a little tender loving care is all.”  She balanced her spoonful of oatmeal on the rim of her bowl and reminded herself, “That’s all.”

Our backyard was surrounded by a tall privet hedge which is where Mother stopped so that she could pretend that she lived in a civilized place.  In silence she watched me stick a book in my waistband, and duck through an opening. I should have been helping her unpack those boxes, but neither of us had the desire.  In a few minutes I found a patch of stinging nettle with one ankle and bit my lip. But, a little further on, up a small rise, I found a brooding pair of gravestones half tipped-over.  This was better. I knelt down and pulled the grass roots away. Not as sinister or as interesting as they first appeared, the worn writing marked the spots of Marvy and Fluff, apparently someone’s pet sheep. 

I kept going and the trail curved through a hedge of raspberry bushes to a boulder pile bordering the neighbor’s cornfield.  Good place to read, I thought and climbed up the largest rock and settled in the moss with purple berry-scratched hands and a mouthful of berries.

The next time I looked up, I saw an ancient farmer salute me as he plowed by.  An old bowed man with peacock feathers sticking out all whichaway from his long white ponytail. What kind of place was this?  I wondered if I was dreaming, ignored him and went back to my book.  But after reading the same paragraph three times, I closed it and looked out over the field.  On the far side I could see the dust from his tractor.  I jumped about from rock to rock until I found an apiary tucked into a sunny spot in the chicory and the Queen Anne’s Lace. The bees flew by in formations and lit on their little porches together and I realized my problem. I had no friends.  Damn, I thought, I hate making new friends.  I opened the book again but the letters stuck to each other in all the wrong ways.  The old man made it around the field on his ancient tractor again and gave me another salute. He’s probably worried I’ll get stung, I thought, half hoping he’d stop to talk. But he kept going.

I wasn’t the only one having troubles. Nights grew dark for Father. His silver flask appeared more frequently. It seemed that every night he sent me to bed earlier and earlier so he could sink wearily into his deep chair.  I stood on my desk chair with the door cracked and looked at him down the stairs hunched with a gleam caught in his big calloused palms. Mother went to bed early too.  I mostly read with my flashlight in a dim sleeping bag cave, trying not to think about anything but the page in front of me.

But things got worse. Next morning I heard my Mother sniffling behind her bedroom door.  During breakfast, she kept wiping her hands on her apron.  I saw her sad brown eyes, eyes like mixed up winter leaves. I began to rise, “Mom?”  Surely she wasn’t that worried about me, was she? But then we heard Father descending like a looming brown frown.  Brown like the farmer’s swamp, where the muck was deep and the mosquitoes whined like demons.  Where mud sucked at my hand-me-down-shoe-bitterness in a mighty angry brown whoosh.  “Eat your breakfast,” he said flatly and I sat down.

Besides, it was a morning I’d dreaded since we’d moved in.  Meeting people had never been my forte. I had circled this day on the calendar and stared at it for two weeks now.  Today I would go across the road and meet the girl I had glimpsed here and there through the hollyhocks.  She looked about my age as she limped around carrying a cane in one hand and a book in the other.  It was the book which gave me hope. I finished breakfast, “May I be excused?”  Not too quickly to arouse suspicion, but not too slowly for Father to remember chores for me either.  I threw on my shoes from the back porch and prepared to go across the road.  But what should I say? The sky muttered rain and I decided to visit the bees first. 

The bees were not alone.  I stepped off the path and snuck through the pine needles to the top of the largest rock to watch the back of the old man kneeling in front of one of the bee boxes.  He was singing softly and clearing dust and cobwebs from the entrance.  Today he had a bedraggled peacock feather hanging from his white ponytail and a shiny silver belt and shoes.  I could hear the bees humming loudly in their boxes as if they were talking back to him. Trickles ran down my ankles and into the soft moss. 

“So,” he said, without turning around, “are you going to do it?” He poked something into a pocket in a leather pouch.

“D-do it?” I stammered.  How did he even know I was there?

“Indians are known for their skill in tracking,” he informed me as he snapped the pouch shut.  “Not that I need my Indian blood.  You make enough noise for a deaf man.”

He finished and turned, “So, are you going over or not?  I’ve seen you staring at the house for two weeks now.  She don’t bite you know.”

“No, right,” I had my hands stuck deep in my jeans pockets.  I looked at a hole at the tip of my shoes. 

“Well, come along then,” he said, picking up some tools.  “Here, carry this,” he handed me a hammer and a box of nails, “Have to fix the boxes now and then or the carpenter ants’ll find a hole and move in.” 

In the end it was the horror of attending a school in the fall without knowing a soul which propelled me across the road. As a last delay, I stopped in the middle of the road and looked up. He took the hammer and nails from my hands and pushed me up the front steps.

The house was magnificent although shoddy.  Someone was obviously working hard at scraping and painting the entire outside, but it looked to be an endless task. So far the porch and the swing were patched and repainted, giving the house an odd confused grin.  The half-bald gravel driveway meandered up to a blue barn.  Blue the color of autumn sky.  A yellow rose vine grew blooming up one side and over part of the roof.  “The door,” he reminded me.  Over the front door the name Windward House meandered in crooked black letters and made my knees shake.  What would I say?  I knocked on the old screen door and the cobwebs jiggled as it bounced in its frame. I turned to look at the old man, but he was gone.

A young woman opened the door with her blonde hair cut short and messy.  She didn’t look to be more than twenty or so. “Hello?” she said. “Oh, hello.  You’re from across the road, aren’t you?  I’ve meant to come down and welcome you all, but..”  She gestured with paint splattered hands and shrugged.  “Would you like to come in?” I nodded mutely, all of my words lost.  I looked down at my muddy shoes standing on the mat and felt clumsy.  “Don’t worry,” she followed my eyes down.  “Put them here in the vestibule.  We’ve lots of mud here too.”  She smiled at me and held the door open. There was nothing to do but follow her in.  “I’m Olive Decker” she said.  “I live here in Windward House with my three younger sisters.”

“I’m Annalou,” I managed, as I pushed on the heel of my shoe. “I don’t have any brothers or sisters.” My right shoe came off and fell with a clunk.  Dirt clods rolled across the rug and rested against Olive’s shoe.

“Welcome to Windward House, Annalou,“ she stooped to pick up the dirt. I looked around the mud room which was basically a short hallway lined with wooden pegs and cubbyholes.  It smelled like a garden – earthy and green and a little bit composty. 

“My mother’s sick,” I told her.  Words I hadn’t planned suddenly spilled out in a stream. “My father’s a drunk.”  Oops.  Now where had that come from? 

“Maybe I’m not so sad I didn’t come down and say hello,” she replied as she tossed the dirt back out the front door.   “We did wonder why anyone would want to live in that house though.  My mother lived there long ago as a child, but since then it’s gone through some rough times.”

I nodded and resolved to keep my mouth shut.  She closed the door again and looked at me more closely, “Come in and have a piece of Aunt Leona’s pie.  You need some fattening up.”  That sounded ominous, but I followed her to the galley kitchen and sat where she pointed at an old table.  Rain still coated the windows, but I could see a shiny silver windmill and a garden up a small hill in the back. I paused to look out at the gravestones in a small line by the trees and when I turned around, the girl had silently appeared and sat across from me at the table.  She had brown hair in a loose braid down her back and curious eyes. 

“What’s your mother sick from?” she asked, settling the cane on the back of her seat.  I stared without meaning to.

“You were up in the stairwell spying on us!” Olive declared, coming in from the kitchen corner somehow holding three plates of apple pie and mugs of coffee filled with cream.  She didn’t ask if I wanted either but set them in front of me.  Coffee! 

“I don’t know,” I admitted.  “I realized that she was sick just now when I took off my shoes.  I have the bad habit of thinking out loud.”

The girl frowned at her pie, “My mother died when I was little. My father too.”

Olive settled herself in a chair in silence.  I looked around the room.  There was a large woodstove, cold now.  Someone had fitted a stove and a refrigerator cleverly into the original cabinets and I could see a pantry with smooth wooden countertops and lots of tiny drawers.  The girl followed my gaze, “The pantry.  That’s where Deckers got born for a hundred years.” Born in a pantry?  What my aunts would think of that!

“Where you born in there too?” I asked.  I had no idea where I’d been born.  Probably just a hospital. Suddenly it became quite important that I ask my mother. 

“Yes,” she answered. “But I had to go to the hospital right quick when they saw I wasn’t quite right.” She gestured toward her leg.

“What’s wrong with it?” I asked, forgetting my manners.

“Polio,” she said shortly.  She must be one of the last unlucky ones before the vaccine. 

“Eat up, both of you,” Olive ordered.  We watched each other cut bites of pie.  I started in the middle and saved the tip for last.  She cut off the crust and ate the tip first.  I washed each bite down with the bitter coffee. She drank all of her coffee first.

“Made with goat’s milk,” Olive told me proudly and I felt squeamish although I didn’t know why.  “By the way, since she’s too rude to tell you, this here’s Hannegan.  She’s the youngest of us four sisters.  We live here on Windward Farm with Dago.  Aunt Leona and Great Aunt Clarabel live next door.”  She motioned over her head, “Mother homeschooled Hanny for years on account of her leg.  As you can tell, she’s gotten quite over the frailty issue by now.”  Hannegan rolled her eyes.

“Hannegan’s a pretty name,” I ventured. 

“Balderdash,” Hannegan said, and drank up her coffee.  “I’m going to the swimming hole.”

 Olive shrugged at me, “You can meet everyone else later.”

Hannegan called from the door, “You coming along or staying to chit chat?”

 I thanked Olive for the pie and followed Hannegan down a washed out path and by a cabin on the riverbank. Her limp didn’t seem to slow her down much, even in the light rain which slicked everything. “My great-uncle murdered his best friend there,” Hannegan gestured at the cabin with her cane. “Went to jail for twenty years too.” She paused to roll up her pants and sloshed through water running over the path. “Dago says that he went mad from Indian ghosts and the murder wasn’t his fault,” she kept walking and I had to jump from rock to rock to keep up. “I have seen ghosts around here,” she shrugged. 

“Dago?” I stumbled along behind, bewildered. “Ghosts?”

“Shhh,” she stopped.  And we paused on the riverbank to watch patches of mist float above the dappling water.  Up and down we could hear peacocks bawling and wind blowing through sycamore leaves like giant clapping hands. “See,” she said. I stopped and looked up and down the dark river.

“If I believed in ghosts,” I frowned, “I might believe they would be here.”

She tapped me on the shoulder with her cane, “Ghosts don’t care if you believe in them or not.  That’s what Dago says.”

“Who is Dago?” I asked again, as I looked out across the dark trunks rising from the river.  Must be the old guy with the feathers.

She thought a moment, “Well, he’s really my great-grandfather, but I call him Dago.  Aunt Leona’s really my grandmother.  It’s very confusing, but don’t worry. Look here.  We’ve come to the pool.” And suddenly, out of the muddy rush of river, a ring of gray rocks rose like teeth.  An oval of water pitted with raindrops reflected silver sky above like a giant coin. Hannegan threw off her pants and began to wade around lifting rocks and inspecting.  “Ooh, look, I found McCarthy,” she looked up at me.  “Aren’t you coming in?”

I frowned at the mud between her toes and she misunderstood. “Don’t be afraid. They’re just crawfish.” And, here I’d thought that her leg might make it hard for her to keep up with me. I pulled off my pants too – better to be safe than to make father angry with muddy jeans. 

“Why’s he drink?” she asked me as she lifted turned over a large rock carefully with the tip of her cane. 

“My father? Silly question,” I answered.  “Sometimes ‘cause he’s sad, and sometimes ‘cause he’s happy, and sometimes for no reason at all that I can see.  Right now he misses his job I ‘spect.” The mud felt slimy and full of leaves as I eased my way in.  Colder than I thought too. 

“Look,” she explained with a frown.  “I’m a Decker.  You don’t know what that means ‘cause you’re from out of town.  But to anybody from Atwood, being a Decker is the same as being crazy.  My daddy shot himself right up there,” she pointed to the top of the tallest rock.  “Ain’t nobody but me swim here since. It doesn’t bother me though.  His craziness just got to ‘im that’s all.  No more, no less. Your father mite let his craziness get to ‘im too.”

I stared at the rock, “Right there?” 

“Yup,” she pushed another rock over and a puff of mud clouded the water. “My sister Emiline saw him.” 

“So,” I turned back toward her, “are you crazy too?”

“I’m not sure,” she answered and swooped down into the water with her fingers.  I saw that she was using the tip of her cane to herd the crayfish where she wanted them to back up.  “I suppose I’m half crazy at least.” She didn’t seem put off by the idea at all.

“My father calls my Grandma Crazy Jane,” I offered.  “She lives in a haunted house.” I felt the water moving more quickly as I approached the mouth where the circle spilled back out into the current.  “On Winona Lake.”

“My Aunt Leona used to know a lady who lived in Winona,” Hannegan wasn’t impressed.  With one arm she held the cane and with the other she held up a big red crayfish right behind its claws.  “Meet McCarthy.  I call him that because he’s a red.” She giggled.

“I hate politics,” I said flatly. 

“Why’s she crazy?  Your grandmother.”  Hannegan put the crayfish gently back in the water. “See you tomorrow,” she told him.

“Well, my father thinks she’s a witch.” I stuck one hand out in the current and caught a leaf floating by.

“Is she?” she stared at me, one hand still underwater.

“I dunno.” I shrugged.  “She claims there’s some mystery to be solved at the house and she won’t

leave until she figures it out even though she’s getting too old to take care of it.”



Hannigan grunted and sat on a rock to rub her bad leg.  “Well, I guess we’ll have to figure it out for her then.”

“Naw,” I told her, throwing the leaf back into the water.  “My father would never let me go

there.”

 

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