51k! Woooo! I'd just barely crossed 50k, and decided to just keep plugging along for a bit, since I had a few more thoughts and know that NaNo's counters shave a few hundred words off of what OpenOffice counts. And then I didn't check my wordcount until I hit 51000-something lol. (Yesterday, I was interrupted by watching Rudolph on tv and drinking amazing hot chocolate with the MiL+husband. So I only wrote like a paragraph, which is included in today's post.)
I actually had no idea where the scene was going when I started tonight, but I set in earlier than usual, and just started wandering around. Then decided she should get her wish and see some more of Meres and Celestine...only then the rain attacked her and Jacob pounced like a spazz. Apparently, I am very attached to writing spazzy children. They're too fun. <3
...this whole month, really, has just flown by. I feel like I only just started working on the novel this year. I also don't feel like I accomplished much by way of the storyline, but.. well, hell, I didn't have names for several of the characters before, and there's an illegitimate child to clear up, and all sorts of other goodies. And now there's Jacob! And clematis flowers (which mean "artifice").
And I did manage to cross most of the things off the "to-do" list I kept making longer all month. :3 But enough unanswered questions to haul me back into that world again. At some point. Like January. Or November. We'll see. ;)
Wednesday, November 30, 2011
Parts 29-30
I linger a moment in the gate, closing my eyes to try and see the house as it would have been seen from here, before the fire claimed it. Did Avery try climbing that tree in the front yard when he was little? Or did he throw its apples at his pesky little sister? Did Evelyn try to hide behind it, when she thought she was in trouble? Or did she look from the front windows of the house at the gate, longingly, wishing she lived somewhere else, or someone would come by so her father would have to be “respekable.” Frowning, I open my eyes, and sigh heavily at the empty grounds. Maybe it's for the best, that the place burned down, clearing away the bad karma that had built up inside of it, letting the family go free.
“Run fast for your mother, run for your father, run for your children, for your sisters and brothers. Leave all your love and your longing behind, you can't carry it with you if you want to survive...” I smile wryly, at the unexpected aptness of the Florence and the Machine song blasting through my headphones.
I step through the slightly-open gateway, and walk across the front yard, following along where I think the walkway up to the door would have been. Looking down, I can see a few small patches where the gravel has sunk into the ground but is still just a bit visible. I walk up to the front door – and there's a bit of the foundation left on one side, though some particularly enthusiastic daylilies have laid claim to the space on both sides of the low bits of brick and stone, regardless of what was once indoors and once outdoors.
I walk through the front entryway, seeing in my mind again the gorgeous paintings hung on warm golden walls. Then I pause, and look around me with a deep sigh. I have no idea what rooms are off of this one. I know the rooms of the tower, and about where Calvin's room was, the entryway, and that's it. I know what the music room looked like, though not where it was. I can't even imagine how gorgeous the master bedroom would have been, or the parlor, or... There must have been so many rooms in this place. It's not exactly huge by mansion standards, but being three stories, that's got to be far more rooms than in the house I grew up in. And with as beautiful as the few rooms I've seen were...
Sighing, I stroll slowly over the remains of the foundation, trying to find some clue, catch some little glimpse of the house. I keep hoping my vision will blur and when it clears I'll be able to see the house in all of its splendor, not just its aged remains. But the visions don't come on command – if anything, they seem more likely to turn up when I've stopped thinking about them for a moment.
Or maybe... maybe the night of the fire was the end of it.
But no, that can't be it. None of the visions have been in chronological order, at least not consistently. There's no reason the fire would be the last thing I see of the Masons. Not that it made the goodbye to Evelyn any easier, I know it was still likely to have been the last time she saw me. As far as I know, the time-jumps are all linked to this place. But why?
I'm at the back corner of the house now, near Calvin's room. I find the remains of his fireplace, and sit down for a moment with a heavy sigh, looking dejectedly at the silent ruins. Why do I see them at all? If I were in some book or movie, there would be something the dead spirits needed me to do, in order for them to be at rest. But none of them were buried here – and none have asked anything of me, apart from Cal needing some water and Evelyn wanting some company when facing her father. And those aren't exactly restless-ghost material. Nor did I stop seeing the visions after that. What am I supposed to accomplish?
I turn my gaze toward the little bunch of forget-me-nots that I transplanted over here for Cal, after... after I met him. They're looking a little limp, so I dig my water bottle out of my bag and dampen the ground around them a bit. I adjust the little brick wall I'd built up near them, moving a few bricks to better block the sun at this time of day. If anyone's spirit were restless, Calvin's would have the most right to be. But he was so calm and peaceful when he died, with his sister there beside him. He only seemed sad to be leaving her for a time.
Avery and Evelyn and Cora all moved away, and continued their lives elsewhere. So too, I imagine, did the unknown baby Cora had with her. There's still some mystery around that child – though I'm not sure how I'll ever find out the story there. Evelyn didn't know, before she left the house. And Cora seemed so circumspect about the whole thing, I don't think she'd tell stranger-me about it, when she hesitated with her own daughter.
Mr. Mason... he's still an unknown. Avery thought he'd seen him in the library during the fire, but Evelyn was almost certain she'd seen him run off into the woods. I guess I know from experience that a person could fall from the height of the library down to the ground without too much damage (though I'm still getting twinges when I sit on hard surfaces). Clearly, he wasn't an overly affectionate family man, but still, to just run off and leave your family like that? And leave all your land and possessions and things, too – though I guess he could have had money hidden away somewhere, or even bank accounts his family didn't know about. It would have been easy enough to have done back then. I guess it's not too implausible to think he just ran away from his own family, leaving them to assume he died in the flames. He was such a cold and distant man, they could easily have invented any story they liked about his reasons for him to have committed suicide, or even an accidental death. Too much to drink and slept too heavily to notice how much smoke he'd breathed in. Business trouble, a temper flare-up over some recent conflict, a deep depression he was unable to bring himself to allow anyone to help with.
Or... maybe it was more about freeing his family than freeing himself. Maybe he knew that without him around, his wife and children would have better hopes for a happier life. Cora was obviously competent enough to take care of them all, if she could manage running all those groups outside of home, as well as keep the household and her children in order. And the children I don't think dared even smile when Mr. Mason was in the room.
Meres and Celestine... they're still a complete mystery, and I don't see any hope for them ever being otherwise. I feel as though they just flitted off one day on a whim, leaving one lover's hideaway for another one in some secluded spot. The town was just getting settled and becoming a town when the Mason family moved in, maybe Meres and Celestine just wanted to clear out before running the risk of neighbors poking their heads into the little endless honeymoon they were living.
I have such an idealized picture of them, it's ridiculous. I don't care how in love two people are, you can't just cut yourself off from the entire world for your whole life like that. You're going to fight, you're going to want to talk to someone else once in awhile. They couldn't have lived in total seclusion, anyway – they had to have gotten food from somewhere, for one thing.
I wonder, is that a way I could find out more about them? See if there are any records left by shopkeepers or something from that time period? I don't know if grocers would have kept really detailed receipts or anything. Thinking back to the Little House books I read as a kid, it seems like the shopkeepers would keep record of purchases, to have the tabs paid off later on when the harvest came in or whatever. But when things were bought outright, would they still have done so? Even now, in the small family-owned shops in town, there are a few I'm certain don't keep an exact inventory count – my receipts sometimes read “Merchandise $1.25 Merchandise $3.50 Merchandise $2.00”, followed only by tax and total. And that's not even counting the smaller shops, that deal only in cash for things they've produced themselves, handmade goods or produce or whatever.
Still, it's a better idea than I've had so far on the couple. They're not likely to have been in a newspaper – I'm not even sure there was a local one when they lived here, and there was no mention of them in any of the articles Mary found for me. (And if she can't find it, there's not a chance in hell I would on my own!)
I run my fingers gently through the forget-me-nots. They're such a sweet shade of light blue, just the right color to compliment their unfussy shape. I pull out my camera, and do the best I can at some close-up shots – which don't go very well, since the flowers are so small, and I don't exactly have an upscale lens on this thing. It's also starting to cloud over. Not enough to rain I don't think, but just enough big fat clouds to hide away direct sunlight for ten, fifteen minutes at a time.
Getting to my feet, I look over at the garden. The fountain looks so forlorn, standing on its own. Oh, there are a few large trees in the space still, but they're scattered. I walk over toward it, remembering the fleeting vision I had of Meres and Celestine, who seemed so happy here. How could all of that goodness have been so quickly subsumed by the sadness of the family? ...maybe not all of it, Evelyn seemed happy enough, when she wasn't in her parents' proximity. And the garden still feels like it was a happy place – it's subdued now, of course, left so long alone and untended, but I still feel like there are joyful memories bound in by the leaves and vines, warming the roots and painting a gloss on every flower petal.
I walk around the fountain, looking up at its still-beautiful sculpted features. I wish I could get the water running again... but I have no idea how to work anything more complicated than a sprinkler screwed onto the end of a garden hose. Let alone how anything more complicated would have worked a hundred years ago! Probably closer to a hundred and fifty, really, assuming this was built when the house was. Hundred and thirty, or forty...
I kneel for a minute on one of the fountain's built-in benches, and take a slow sip from my water bottle. I notice a vine creeping toward the basin of the fountain, and, following the green line backwards, see that it managed to work its way across the open space of tiles, stretching from the planted area all the way over to the fountain. That is one determined little plant! But it's not going to find much of help in the basin – if anything, the leaves will get less light in there, and that's not what it wants.
I lift the far end of the vine up, and walk back across the tile with it, pulling it back with me. “C'mon, little vine – let's find somewhere better for you to live. With my luck, I'll trip over you next time I'm here, and probably uproot you in the process!”
Approaching the vine's origin, I find myself confronted by a wall of leaves. Leaves which match those on the little vine I'm carrying, only the bit I'm holding has much smaller leaves than the rest of the plant. “What'd you do, crowd your own self out of growing space?” Pushing aside some of the larger leaves, I find that there is, indeed, a trellis underneath them. It's-- oh, it's metal, but it's painted, and the color is still there! It must have been protected from the elements, with this much plant running rampant over it. Surprisingly, it's a deep rich violet, with... I lean closer, pulling aside a few more vines to let some light in. The metal framework looks like an Islamic-style of geometric pattern, of squares and circles and diamonds in a meticulously exacting pattern. Overall it's dark violet, but there's a tiny pattern painted in over that. It's not quite all over, I only see it in some areas, but it looks like dots and flourishes in gold, I can't tell if it forms any kind of larger image or not.
I stand back up, and loop up the straggler vine in my hands. Then I throw it gently upwards, up and around the larger mass of vines, tucking it in where I'm able to reach. It feels a little like trying to get a garland around a Christmas tree that's way bigger than you are when you haven't got a ladder.
Then I frown – it wasn't blooming a minute ago, was it? I lean closer in confusion, the leaves seem to have thinned out as I was messing with the little vine, and there are huge flowers scattered among them now. They're four, five, maybe six inches across, and the exact same deep violet as the trellis...
It also wasn't raining. I throw my eyes up toward the sky, and see that it's very darkly overcast – and raining. And raining harder. Looking quickly around me, trying to decide where to seek out shelter---
I see the house.
I'm back! I grin broadly--- and then remember my camera and sketchbook, and check my bag quickly to make sure it's closed correctly and no water's getting in. Everything seems fine, but looking at the darker clouds moving ominously in this direction, the rain is only going to get worse. There's no-one in sight... all I can do is run to the house, right?
I spot a back door, off to my left, and sprint towards it as the rain begins to pelt down on my head and shoulders and arms and---
And there's a short little roof over the doorway, held up by slim little pillars. Which would be great, except that the wind has picked up and the rain is now chasing after me at an angle. Should I knock? Should I just go in? I look anxiously around, but still don't see anyone, and I can't hear anyone on the other side of the door. Would they even hear me, it's such a big house! But I can't just barge in, what if---
The door flies open, and I'm suddenly skidding backwards on my butt on the soaking wet tiles, with a kid flailing on top of me. I shriek, and the kid shrieks, and then rolls off of me and just busts out laughing.
“Hey! Not funny!”
“Oh, but it is! I'm sorry, I ought to apologize – I'll be in ever so much trouble. But that was funny!”
It's a boy, maybe ten years old, in a cream peasant-style shirt with poofy sleeves and lacing at the neck, dark pants that go only to his knees. The shirt is all askew now, of course, falling off one tanned little shoulder. He has a bit of a British accent, which is absolutely adorable in a kid of any time period. His hair is a mess of blond curls, and his eyes---
His eyes! It's the kid I saw in the creek, the very first vision I had!
“What's your name? I've seen you before---”
The boy looks at me, puzzled. “You look familiar too, miss. But if you've been a guest before, you'll have seen me I'm sure. Half the time I'm the one what opens the door and lets people in, and all the rest of the time, I'm running 'round doing whatever I've been told the minute before. My name is Jacob, though Master sometimes calls me Enoch. He told me why once, something about seeing angels, but I've never seen any that I know of.” He breaks off, jumping to his feet and straighting out his clothes. Then he offers me his hand, bowing slightly. “I'm awful sorry about my manners, can I help you up?”
I grin, taking his hand and scrambling to my feet. He leads me toward the still-open door, though he puts a finger to his lips as he does so. “Cook's taking her afternoon nap, so I just thought I'd slip out for a bit and take a bit of a frolic in the rain.” He closes the door almost silently behind us, and nods toward the wall on the right, where there is, indeed, a middle-aged woman sleeping in a rocker beside a giant behemoth of a cast iron stove. She manages to look frazzled even when unconscious – so I'm careful to stay as quiet as Jacob wishes, so as not to risk waking her up and getting the kid in trouble.
He leads me out of the kitchen, a short ways down a hallway, and then into a small room off to one side. I can't tell what it's used for, but Jacob pulls open a drawer of a huge wooden armoire, then turns to me with an immense fluffy towel in his outstretched arms.
“Oh God, thank you!” I pat my face dry, then rub my arms and hair. “That rain is crazy, I was only in it for a few seconds and I was soaked through.”
He's pulled another towel from the drawer, and is rubbing at his hair, making it a far worse mess than it was to start with. He grins broadly at my remark. “That's my favorite kind! Though I'm afraid it will ruin the picnic the Master and Missus were to take this afternoon. Still, they started out not long ago, I don't think they'll have tried getting out of the carriage yet. Maybe they'll find somewhere drier to take their meal.”
The Master and Missus... “Do they have any children?”
He looks puzzled at this, cocking his head to one side. “Them? No, none at all. It is rather odd, and Cook often wonders that a couple so in love as them hasn't had any babies yet. But didn't you know that? I know I've seen you before, you must be a friend of theirs.”
I smile wryly, shaking my head a bit. “The only time I remember seeing you, it must have been a few years ago – you were playing in the creek, by the fence?”
His eyes go wide. “Ohhh, that's right! I couldn't quite picture you sitting in the parlor or anything, that must be why. But what were you doing in the garden then, if you aren't here to see them?”
While I'm sure the kid would love the fantastic tale I could tell him... I don't want to waste the little time I have, and lord only knows if he'd believe me. I want to find out just which Master and Missus this is – and all I can from this chatty little boy.
“I have met them, once before. But I was walking through the woods, and didn't quite realize where I'd ended up, until I got into the garden. Then the rain started up, and I was just trying to find someplace dry.” Close enough to the truth, anyway, that I can say it all without much awkwardness.
He shrugs, unconcerned. “Well, so long as you're not a burglar, I suppose it's alright. Master's always so kind to people in trouble, and Missus is even more so. I'm sure they won't mind.”
My eyes widen, and I can't help but smile broadly. I try to keep my voice calm, though my heart is beating excitedly. “Your master – his first name is Meres, isn't it?”
The boy nods, and my heart lifts further. “An odd name, isn't it? But he'll never tell anyone what kind of a name it is, what country he's from or anything. He's very mysterious, but always kind, so no-one minds much.”
“Do they have many visitors, then, way out here?”
“I wouldn't say quite a lot, no, but there are some now and again. Mostly they're foreigners, friends of the Master.”
“You're a foreigner yourself, aren't you?”
“Not really – my parents were, but I was born here in the States. They'd always worked for a family from England though, and I learned to talk among that lot. But you do have a lot of questions – you're not from a newspaper or something, are you?”
I laugh, shaking my head. “No, I'm not... but I didn't get to ask your Master half the questions I thought of after my visit before. I'm just curious about the people who have such a gorgeous house and garden.”
He beams proudly at this. “Isn't it, though? This place, I mean, it's really something special. My parents were real proud when Master offered me a position, and they've never even seen this place. I've seen lots of fancy houses, I rode with the carriage driver lots when I was little, but never a place with as many pretty things as this one. There's not an inch of this place that someone didn't make especially-beautiful.”
I smile warmly, looking around. Even this little room, clearly used for storage and probably visited only by the servants, is very pretty. The pieces of furniture are all intricately carved wood, as so much of the furniture in the house. The walls are painted a warm dark plum, and an ornate trim of bronze runs around the edges of the ceiling. The ceiling! I gasp, and Jacob lets out a happy laugh at my reaction. It's been painted trompe-l'oil, made to look as though there are swathes of fabric draped across a delicate framework, which comes to a point at the center of the room. Silk, organza, other materials I don't know the name of, but a staggering mixture of different sheens and opacities and textures, all in warm burgundies and ambers and wines and purples, with the illusionary metalwork in a warm bronze, the same shade as the trim that runs around the ceiling.
“Half the rooms in the house are like that, miss. It's like you're in another country sometimes, stepping into a room. They've got some of them decorated so's you'd think you were in the Orient, or Araby, or... all sorts of places.”
And to have no trace of such art and craftsmanship remain behind... to have such glorious work last only a few decades, before vanishing forever. It makes my heart ache. But I perk up, and pull my camera from my bag.
Jacob steps over to me, and looks at the camera curiously. “If you don't mind me saying so, miss, you're a rather queer person. I've never seen a woman wearing anything but skirts – and what is that?”
I chuckle, and put the camera up to my eye – making sure to turn off the flash first, it's dim in here, but the flash would destroy the colors. I take a few snaps of the ceiling, then one of Jacob, who continues to look at me skeptically. He's such a pretty little boy, with those huge green eyes and tousled curls, that any expression looks absolutely cherubic on his face.
“It's a camera – though it works a bit differently than the kinds you've seen before. I know, it's much too small and much too quick to ever work right. But I know the trick of it, and it'll work just fine for me,” I amend quickly, with a wink at him.
“Can I try it?”
I laugh, and offer him the camera. “Why not? Just look through that window there, until you see what you want. Then press this button here – only try not to shake the camera much, it will blur the image when it's this dim.”
“Oh, I can fix the light, miss!” He doesn't take the camera from me yet, but runs over to one wall, then another, turning knobs on some fixtures on the wall. There's a soft hiss, then a low whoosh, and flickering gaslight floods the curved glass lanterns on the walls. It's not a whole lot of light, compared to what I'm used to, but it does brighten the room a remarkable bit.
He scampers back over to me, and reaches for the camera, which I hand him. He holds it like it's made of antique china, but seems to steel himself up to try the thing. Lifting it to his eye, he turns to face a wall, then brings it down carefully, then turns again to face the window. He steps closer to it, then lifts the camera up again, clearly scared to move around with it at his eye, in case he trips on something. At last, he takes a deep breath, and presses the button. Then he turns back around, still cradling the camera delicately in his hands.
“Here – you'd best take it back, I might break something. I haven't broken anything on it, have I?”
I grin, and take the camera back, twisting the knob on top to let me take a look at the pictures on the memory card. “Not at all – you did just fine. You want to see the picture you took?”
His eyes nearly fall out of his sweet little face, and I can't help but giggle. “But--- but it's hours, even when Master does the pictures himself, before you can see anything!”
“Like I said, mine's... a little different. I can't hand you a copy of it, but I can show you how it will look, at least.” I turn the camera around, to show him the small screen. “There! That's the picture you took.”
He leans in closer, squinting hard. “I rather think it is! Now that is a good trick, much better than that conjurer Cook took me to see last month. He said he could do all sorts of magic, but I could tell he just hid the cards up his sleeve, and I think he already knew the people in the crowd who he told about their dead family members.”
I grin, nodding. “Oh, I'm sure.” I tuck the camera back in my bag, happy that he took a picture of the garden – I hadn't gotten any with my camera yet, this will be the first.
“Run fast for your mother, run for your father, run for your children, for your sisters and brothers. Leave all your love and your longing behind, you can't carry it with you if you want to survive...” I smile wryly, at the unexpected aptness of the Florence and the Machine song blasting through my headphones.
I step through the slightly-open gateway, and walk across the front yard, following along where I think the walkway up to the door would have been. Looking down, I can see a few small patches where the gravel has sunk into the ground but is still just a bit visible. I walk up to the front door – and there's a bit of the foundation left on one side, though some particularly enthusiastic daylilies have laid claim to the space on both sides of the low bits of brick and stone, regardless of what was once indoors and once outdoors.
I walk through the front entryway, seeing in my mind again the gorgeous paintings hung on warm golden walls. Then I pause, and look around me with a deep sigh. I have no idea what rooms are off of this one. I know the rooms of the tower, and about where Calvin's room was, the entryway, and that's it. I know what the music room looked like, though not where it was. I can't even imagine how gorgeous the master bedroom would have been, or the parlor, or... There must have been so many rooms in this place. It's not exactly huge by mansion standards, but being three stories, that's got to be far more rooms than in the house I grew up in. And with as beautiful as the few rooms I've seen were...
Sighing, I stroll slowly over the remains of the foundation, trying to find some clue, catch some little glimpse of the house. I keep hoping my vision will blur and when it clears I'll be able to see the house in all of its splendor, not just its aged remains. But the visions don't come on command – if anything, they seem more likely to turn up when I've stopped thinking about them for a moment.
Or maybe... maybe the night of the fire was the end of it.
But no, that can't be it. None of the visions have been in chronological order, at least not consistently. There's no reason the fire would be the last thing I see of the Masons. Not that it made the goodbye to Evelyn any easier, I know it was still likely to have been the last time she saw me. As far as I know, the time-jumps are all linked to this place. But why?
I'm at the back corner of the house now, near Calvin's room. I find the remains of his fireplace, and sit down for a moment with a heavy sigh, looking dejectedly at the silent ruins. Why do I see them at all? If I were in some book or movie, there would be something the dead spirits needed me to do, in order for them to be at rest. But none of them were buried here – and none have asked anything of me, apart from Cal needing some water and Evelyn wanting some company when facing her father. And those aren't exactly restless-ghost material. Nor did I stop seeing the visions after that. What am I supposed to accomplish?
I turn my gaze toward the little bunch of forget-me-nots that I transplanted over here for Cal, after... after I met him. They're looking a little limp, so I dig my water bottle out of my bag and dampen the ground around them a bit. I adjust the little brick wall I'd built up near them, moving a few bricks to better block the sun at this time of day. If anyone's spirit were restless, Calvin's would have the most right to be. But he was so calm and peaceful when he died, with his sister there beside him. He only seemed sad to be leaving her for a time.
Avery and Evelyn and Cora all moved away, and continued their lives elsewhere. So too, I imagine, did the unknown baby Cora had with her. There's still some mystery around that child – though I'm not sure how I'll ever find out the story there. Evelyn didn't know, before she left the house. And Cora seemed so circumspect about the whole thing, I don't think she'd tell stranger-me about it, when she hesitated with her own daughter.
Mr. Mason... he's still an unknown. Avery thought he'd seen him in the library during the fire, but Evelyn was almost certain she'd seen him run off into the woods. I guess I know from experience that a person could fall from the height of the library down to the ground without too much damage (though I'm still getting twinges when I sit on hard surfaces). Clearly, he wasn't an overly affectionate family man, but still, to just run off and leave your family like that? And leave all your land and possessions and things, too – though I guess he could have had money hidden away somewhere, or even bank accounts his family didn't know about. It would have been easy enough to have done back then. I guess it's not too implausible to think he just ran away from his own family, leaving them to assume he died in the flames. He was such a cold and distant man, they could easily have invented any story they liked about his reasons for him to have committed suicide, or even an accidental death. Too much to drink and slept too heavily to notice how much smoke he'd breathed in. Business trouble, a temper flare-up over some recent conflict, a deep depression he was unable to bring himself to allow anyone to help with.
Or... maybe it was more about freeing his family than freeing himself. Maybe he knew that without him around, his wife and children would have better hopes for a happier life. Cora was obviously competent enough to take care of them all, if she could manage running all those groups outside of home, as well as keep the household and her children in order. And the children I don't think dared even smile when Mr. Mason was in the room.
Meres and Celestine... they're still a complete mystery, and I don't see any hope for them ever being otherwise. I feel as though they just flitted off one day on a whim, leaving one lover's hideaway for another one in some secluded spot. The town was just getting settled and becoming a town when the Mason family moved in, maybe Meres and Celestine just wanted to clear out before running the risk of neighbors poking their heads into the little endless honeymoon they were living.
I have such an idealized picture of them, it's ridiculous. I don't care how in love two people are, you can't just cut yourself off from the entire world for your whole life like that. You're going to fight, you're going to want to talk to someone else once in awhile. They couldn't have lived in total seclusion, anyway – they had to have gotten food from somewhere, for one thing.
I wonder, is that a way I could find out more about them? See if there are any records left by shopkeepers or something from that time period? I don't know if grocers would have kept really detailed receipts or anything. Thinking back to the Little House books I read as a kid, it seems like the shopkeepers would keep record of purchases, to have the tabs paid off later on when the harvest came in or whatever. But when things were bought outright, would they still have done so? Even now, in the small family-owned shops in town, there are a few I'm certain don't keep an exact inventory count – my receipts sometimes read “Merchandise $1.25 Merchandise $3.50 Merchandise $2.00”, followed only by tax and total. And that's not even counting the smaller shops, that deal only in cash for things they've produced themselves, handmade goods or produce or whatever.
Still, it's a better idea than I've had so far on the couple. They're not likely to have been in a newspaper – I'm not even sure there was a local one when they lived here, and there was no mention of them in any of the articles Mary found for me. (And if she can't find it, there's not a chance in hell I would on my own!)
I run my fingers gently through the forget-me-nots. They're such a sweet shade of light blue, just the right color to compliment their unfussy shape. I pull out my camera, and do the best I can at some close-up shots – which don't go very well, since the flowers are so small, and I don't exactly have an upscale lens on this thing. It's also starting to cloud over. Not enough to rain I don't think, but just enough big fat clouds to hide away direct sunlight for ten, fifteen minutes at a time.
Getting to my feet, I look over at the garden. The fountain looks so forlorn, standing on its own. Oh, there are a few large trees in the space still, but they're scattered. I walk over toward it, remembering the fleeting vision I had of Meres and Celestine, who seemed so happy here. How could all of that goodness have been so quickly subsumed by the sadness of the family? ...maybe not all of it, Evelyn seemed happy enough, when she wasn't in her parents' proximity. And the garden still feels like it was a happy place – it's subdued now, of course, left so long alone and untended, but I still feel like there are joyful memories bound in by the leaves and vines, warming the roots and painting a gloss on every flower petal.
I walk around the fountain, looking up at its still-beautiful sculpted features. I wish I could get the water running again... but I have no idea how to work anything more complicated than a sprinkler screwed onto the end of a garden hose. Let alone how anything more complicated would have worked a hundred years ago! Probably closer to a hundred and fifty, really, assuming this was built when the house was. Hundred and thirty, or forty...
I kneel for a minute on one of the fountain's built-in benches, and take a slow sip from my water bottle. I notice a vine creeping toward the basin of the fountain, and, following the green line backwards, see that it managed to work its way across the open space of tiles, stretching from the planted area all the way over to the fountain. That is one determined little plant! But it's not going to find much of help in the basin – if anything, the leaves will get less light in there, and that's not what it wants.
I lift the far end of the vine up, and walk back across the tile with it, pulling it back with me. “C'mon, little vine – let's find somewhere better for you to live. With my luck, I'll trip over you next time I'm here, and probably uproot you in the process!”
Approaching the vine's origin, I find myself confronted by a wall of leaves. Leaves which match those on the little vine I'm carrying, only the bit I'm holding has much smaller leaves than the rest of the plant. “What'd you do, crowd your own self out of growing space?” Pushing aside some of the larger leaves, I find that there is, indeed, a trellis underneath them. It's-- oh, it's metal, but it's painted, and the color is still there! It must have been protected from the elements, with this much plant running rampant over it. Surprisingly, it's a deep rich violet, with... I lean closer, pulling aside a few more vines to let some light in. The metal framework looks like an Islamic-style of geometric pattern, of squares and circles and diamonds in a meticulously exacting pattern. Overall it's dark violet, but there's a tiny pattern painted in over that. It's not quite all over, I only see it in some areas, but it looks like dots and flourishes in gold, I can't tell if it forms any kind of larger image or not.
I stand back up, and loop up the straggler vine in my hands. Then I throw it gently upwards, up and around the larger mass of vines, tucking it in where I'm able to reach. It feels a little like trying to get a garland around a Christmas tree that's way bigger than you are when you haven't got a ladder.
Then I frown – it wasn't blooming a minute ago, was it? I lean closer in confusion, the leaves seem to have thinned out as I was messing with the little vine, and there are huge flowers scattered among them now. They're four, five, maybe six inches across, and the exact same deep violet as the trellis...
It also wasn't raining. I throw my eyes up toward the sky, and see that it's very darkly overcast – and raining. And raining harder. Looking quickly around me, trying to decide where to seek out shelter---
I see the house.
I'm back! I grin broadly--- and then remember my camera and sketchbook, and check my bag quickly to make sure it's closed correctly and no water's getting in. Everything seems fine, but looking at the darker clouds moving ominously in this direction, the rain is only going to get worse. There's no-one in sight... all I can do is run to the house, right?
I spot a back door, off to my left, and sprint towards it as the rain begins to pelt down on my head and shoulders and arms and---
And there's a short little roof over the doorway, held up by slim little pillars. Which would be great, except that the wind has picked up and the rain is now chasing after me at an angle. Should I knock? Should I just go in? I look anxiously around, but still don't see anyone, and I can't hear anyone on the other side of the door. Would they even hear me, it's such a big house! But I can't just barge in, what if---
The door flies open, and I'm suddenly skidding backwards on my butt on the soaking wet tiles, with a kid flailing on top of me. I shriek, and the kid shrieks, and then rolls off of me and just busts out laughing.
“Hey! Not funny!”
“Oh, but it is! I'm sorry, I ought to apologize – I'll be in ever so much trouble. But that was funny!”
It's a boy, maybe ten years old, in a cream peasant-style shirt with poofy sleeves and lacing at the neck, dark pants that go only to his knees. The shirt is all askew now, of course, falling off one tanned little shoulder. He has a bit of a British accent, which is absolutely adorable in a kid of any time period. His hair is a mess of blond curls, and his eyes---
His eyes! It's the kid I saw in the creek, the very first vision I had!
“What's your name? I've seen you before---”
The boy looks at me, puzzled. “You look familiar too, miss. But if you've been a guest before, you'll have seen me I'm sure. Half the time I'm the one what opens the door and lets people in, and all the rest of the time, I'm running 'round doing whatever I've been told the minute before. My name is Jacob, though Master sometimes calls me Enoch. He told me why once, something about seeing angels, but I've never seen any that I know of.” He breaks off, jumping to his feet and straighting out his clothes. Then he offers me his hand, bowing slightly. “I'm awful sorry about my manners, can I help you up?”
I grin, taking his hand and scrambling to my feet. He leads me toward the still-open door, though he puts a finger to his lips as he does so. “Cook's taking her afternoon nap, so I just thought I'd slip out for a bit and take a bit of a frolic in the rain.” He closes the door almost silently behind us, and nods toward the wall on the right, where there is, indeed, a middle-aged woman sleeping in a rocker beside a giant behemoth of a cast iron stove. She manages to look frazzled even when unconscious – so I'm careful to stay as quiet as Jacob wishes, so as not to risk waking her up and getting the kid in trouble.
He leads me out of the kitchen, a short ways down a hallway, and then into a small room off to one side. I can't tell what it's used for, but Jacob pulls open a drawer of a huge wooden armoire, then turns to me with an immense fluffy towel in his outstretched arms.
“Oh God, thank you!” I pat my face dry, then rub my arms and hair. “That rain is crazy, I was only in it for a few seconds and I was soaked through.”
He's pulled another towel from the drawer, and is rubbing at his hair, making it a far worse mess than it was to start with. He grins broadly at my remark. “That's my favorite kind! Though I'm afraid it will ruin the picnic the Master and Missus were to take this afternoon. Still, they started out not long ago, I don't think they'll have tried getting out of the carriage yet. Maybe they'll find somewhere drier to take their meal.”
The Master and Missus... “Do they have any children?”
He looks puzzled at this, cocking his head to one side. “Them? No, none at all. It is rather odd, and Cook often wonders that a couple so in love as them hasn't had any babies yet. But didn't you know that? I know I've seen you before, you must be a friend of theirs.”
I smile wryly, shaking my head a bit. “The only time I remember seeing you, it must have been a few years ago – you were playing in the creek, by the fence?”
His eyes go wide. “Ohhh, that's right! I couldn't quite picture you sitting in the parlor or anything, that must be why. But what were you doing in the garden then, if you aren't here to see them?”
While I'm sure the kid would love the fantastic tale I could tell him... I don't want to waste the little time I have, and lord only knows if he'd believe me. I want to find out just which Master and Missus this is – and all I can from this chatty little boy.
“I have met them, once before. But I was walking through the woods, and didn't quite realize where I'd ended up, until I got into the garden. Then the rain started up, and I was just trying to find someplace dry.” Close enough to the truth, anyway, that I can say it all without much awkwardness.
He shrugs, unconcerned. “Well, so long as you're not a burglar, I suppose it's alright. Master's always so kind to people in trouble, and Missus is even more so. I'm sure they won't mind.”
My eyes widen, and I can't help but smile broadly. I try to keep my voice calm, though my heart is beating excitedly. “Your master – his first name is Meres, isn't it?”
The boy nods, and my heart lifts further. “An odd name, isn't it? But he'll never tell anyone what kind of a name it is, what country he's from or anything. He's very mysterious, but always kind, so no-one minds much.”
“Do they have many visitors, then, way out here?”
“I wouldn't say quite a lot, no, but there are some now and again. Mostly they're foreigners, friends of the Master.”
“You're a foreigner yourself, aren't you?”
“Not really – my parents were, but I was born here in the States. They'd always worked for a family from England though, and I learned to talk among that lot. But you do have a lot of questions – you're not from a newspaper or something, are you?”
I laugh, shaking my head. “No, I'm not... but I didn't get to ask your Master half the questions I thought of after my visit before. I'm just curious about the people who have such a gorgeous house and garden.”
He beams proudly at this. “Isn't it, though? This place, I mean, it's really something special. My parents were real proud when Master offered me a position, and they've never even seen this place. I've seen lots of fancy houses, I rode with the carriage driver lots when I was little, but never a place with as many pretty things as this one. There's not an inch of this place that someone didn't make especially-beautiful.”
I smile warmly, looking around. Even this little room, clearly used for storage and probably visited only by the servants, is very pretty. The pieces of furniture are all intricately carved wood, as so much of the furniture in the house. The walls are painted a warm dark plum, and an ornate trim of bronze runs around the edges of the ceiling. The ceiling! I gasp, and Jacob lets out a happy laugh at my reaction. It's been painted trompe-l'oil, made to look as though there are swathes of fabric draped across a delicate framework, which comes to a point at the center of the room. Silk, organza, other materials I don't know the name of, but a staggering mixture of different sheens and opacities and textures, all in warm burgundies and ambers and wines and purples, with the illusionary metalwork in a warm bronze, the same shade as the trim that runs around the ceiling.
“Half the rooms in the house are like that, miss. It's like you're in another country sometimes, stepping into a room. They've got some of them decorated so's you'd think you were in the Orient, or Araby, or... all sorts of places.”
And to have no trace of such art and craftsmanship remain behind... to have such glorious work last only a few decades, before vanishing forever. It makes my heart ache. But I perk up, and pull my camera from my bag.
Jacob steps over to me, and looks at the camera curiously. “If you don't mind me saying so, miss, you're a rather queer person. I've never seen a woman wearing anything but skirts – and what is that?”
I chuckle, and put the camera up to my eye – making sure to turn off the flash first, it's dim in here, but the flash would destroy the colors. I take a few snaps of the ceiling, then one of Jacob, who continues to look at me skeptically. He's such a pretty little boy, with those huge green eyes and tousled curls, that any expression looks absolutely cherubic on his face.
“It's a camera – though it works a bit differently than the kinds you've seen before. I know, it's much too small and much too quick to ever work right. But I know the trick of it, and it'll work just fine for me,” I amend quickly, with a wink at him.
“Can I try it?”
I laugh, and offer him the camera. “Why not? Just look through that window there, until you see what you want. Then press this button here – only try not to shake the camera much, it will blur the image when it's this dim.”
“Oh, I can fix the light, miss!” He doesn't take the camera from me yet, but runs over to one wall, then another, turning knobs on some fixtures on the wall. There's a soft hiss, then a low whoosh, and flickering gaslight floods the curved glass lanterns on the walls. It's not a whole lot of light, compared to what I'm used to, but it does brighten the room a remarkable bit.
He scampers back over to me, and reaches for the camera, which I hand him. He holds it like it's made of antique china, but seems to steel himself up to try the thing. Lifting it to his eye, he turns to face a wall, then brings it down carefully, then turns again to face the window. He steps closer to it, then lifts the camera up again, clearly scared to move around with it at his eye, in case he trips on something. At last, he takes a deep breath, and presses the button. Then he turns back around, still cradling the camera delicately in his hands.
“Here – you'd best take it back, I might break something. I haven't broken anything on it, have I?”
I grin, and take the camera back, twisting the knob on top to let me take a look at the pictures on the memory card. “Not at all – you did just fine. You want to see the picture you took?”
His eyes nearly fall out of his sweet little face, and I can't help but giggle. “But--- but it's hours, even when Master does the pictures himself, before you can see anything!”
“Like I said, mine's... a little different. I can't hand you a copy of it, but I can show you how it will look, at least.” I turn the camera around, to show him the small screen. “There! That's the picture you took.”
He leans in closer, squinting hard. “I rather think it is! Now that is a good trick, much better than that conjurer Cook took me to see last month. He said he could do all sorts of magic, but I could tell he just hid the cards up his sleeve, and I think he already knew the people in the crowd who he told about their dead family members.”
I grin, nodding. “Oh, I'm sure.” I tuck the camera back in my bag, happy that he took a picture of the garden – I hadn't gotten any with my camera yet, this will be the first.
Monday, November 28, 2011
Part 28
My next day off, it's back to the garden, with my sketched-out map in hand. Instead of following the creek along to my old gap in the fence, I break off earlier, and cut through the underbrush in what I hope is the direction of the Mason house. Unfortunately, I'm so used to having use the same path all this time, I'd forgotten what a freaking pain it is to blaze a new trail through woods. That, and those first few trips I made were early enough in the season that the undergrowth was pretty sparse – now, it's nearing the end of summer, and things are growing with a vengeance. I switch my iPod to a more ass-kicking playlist, and crank it up. There are days that even wimpy-little-pacifist me would love to have a sword in hand – I feel like I'm in a fairy tale, where the evil witch has barricaded off the castle she's trapped the princess in.
Eventually, I catch a glimpse of the ironwork fence, and sigh in relief. Peering through the branches and leaves up ahead, I can just make out a glimpse of the house. I don't think I'm quite at the spot I was shooting for, but it's pretty close. I push on through until I'm beside the fence, which has fewer vines covering it in this area than it does by the creek. Still, there are plenty of other plants trying to grow over and through it, so following along beside the fence isn't much better than the rest of the woods. Luckily, I came out near the tower, so it's not far to the front gate.
I take a closer look at the ironwork as I come up near the gate, skimming my fingers lightly over it. It's such a gorgeous pattern, I can't imagine what kind of expense you'd have to go to in order to get something like this designed, and made, and installed, over so much ground. I wonder again just how long Meres and Celestine lived here, and were able to enjoy it... did they know these elegant dark swirls and flourishes would stand here so long, still guarding their home and gardens, a hundred years longer than the place would be lived in?
When I reach the gate itself, I find this section is much more hidden by plant life – the ironwork is a bit more sparse, so I guess the plants were able to just ignore it more? I also realize there are several trees off to my left, both inside and outside of the fence. Frowning, I take a closer one – and then laugh, seeing small green apples forming at the ends of the branches. Apple trees! I remember there was one planted out front, but I guess over the years some of the seeds from the fruit must have grown into trees. It's strange, to think that none of these were here when Evelyn was. It was such a different landscape to her and her family, especially around the house. I remember the night of the fire, how easily I walked over the lawn with her. I didn't think about it then, but thinking back on it now, it was a remarkably well-manicured lawn, and what little I could see of the plants and trees, everything was very neatly trimmed.
Now though, the house area is overrun, by things they had planted that have flung themselves far past their original boundaries, by things that have sprung up to take advantage of the large empty space where the house once stood. I know forest fires do a certain amount of replenishing for the local plant life, I wonder if house fires do the same? More likely for the Mason house than a house of today though, there'd be so much melted plastic and awful chemicals from a modern house, while theirs had so much wood and other natural products within.
Looking up as I stand before the gate, I can just make out where the words are wrought. “Longa est vita, amor aeternus est.” Most of the words are obscured by vines and apple tree branches, but I can make out just enough to be sure they're still there. This makes me happier than I would have expected... but I guess it is probably the most direct line I have to the thoughts of Meres and Celestine. I saw them so briefly, and haven't found a single mention of them in any document I've been able to turn up, with the exception of that one lonely photograph. “Life is long, love is eternal.” How long were their lives, after they disappeared from this place?
I begin to poke around the edges of the gate. I don't even know which side it opens on, or if it opens in the middle, or what. My fingers are stained green and lightly scratched before I've gotten far at all, and I promise myself for the millionth time to remember to bring gardening gloves with me whenever I come over here. I find the hinges first, on the left side. I try to wiggle the gate a bit, and it does seem to move – though it's obviously latched shut someplace, it seems like these hinges at least aren't totally rusted into place. I hadn't thought about that either, until I got here, I should have grabbed a can of WD-40 or something. I'm going to be so frustrated if I've found the gate and everything, but still wind up crawling under or over something to get inside again!
I head to the right side of the gate, and start pulling aside vines and leaves and things from the ironwork. It's not made any easier by the fact that the underbrush from the woods has grown right up against (and in some places through) the fence, so it's right at my back while I'm tugging away at things. Every time my arm flies back, a vine in my hand having come free, my arm hits a branch or a tree trunk behind me. But eventually, I find another hinge – so the gate must open in the middle. Just my luck, I get to pick vines clear of not just two areas, but three! Goodie. On the bright side, I suppose, that means it's a bit more likely I can get the gate open. If one side is rusted in place, the other side might not be, and I really only need to get one side to open up a foot or two in order to get through.
Finding the thing holding the gate fast is much harder than finding the hinges. For starters, I'm always miserable at finding the approximate middle of anything. On top of that, I have no idea what height it would be set at. Also, I have no idea what I'm actually looking for! I'm praying it's not a giant-sized padlock, because I will not be able to find a key. No way. I clear about a foot across at shoulder-height before I find the edges of the two side panels to the gate. I shake them a bit – but, no such luck, they're definitely fastened together somehow. It feels like it's lower down though, whatever it is. So I continue working my way down, tearing away the plants running through the small gap between the two panels.
At about waist-height, I find something different. I lean down closer as I remove the last few bits of grape vine. There's definitely something... well, not really box-like, but a flourished and curved panel, fairly flat, running horizontally. I don't see anything like a lock, but... There! Oh my lord, I am so damn lucky! It's only a little latch, though it's on the other side. It's of a style I've never seen before, but it's the same principle as a hook-and-eye latch, so it's just a matter of wiggling the movable part on the other side out of its holder. I guess they must have saved any weightier locks for the house itself? Though I'm sure they could easily have had someone always watching the door – and anyone coming up the drive would be spotted by someone at the carriage house. Their reasoning doesn't actually matter to me, I'm just relieved it's something I can manage!
It still takes me awhile to find a space in the ironwork large enough to get my hand through, at the right angle to work the mechanism, which I can't see quite clearly from this side, and while it's not totally immovable or anything, it's definitely somewhat stuck, so it takes much more wiggling than I'm sure it originally did. But I do eventually manage to get it sorted out, and I disentangle my arm with a grateful groan, rubbing my poor contorted arm muscles for a minute before I try moving the gate. It doesn't really want to move, but I can tell that it will! I spend a few minutes clearing away some of the debris near the bottom of the gate – there's a pretty deep pile of old leaves and things that's accumulated up against it.
Finally, I manage to move the gate a few inches, and I cry out happily. I clear out some more space for it to move, and wedge my arm into the gap, bracing my back and shoulder against the other gate to gain a bit of extra leverage against the one I'm trying to move. Slowly, I get it farther out, feeling the resistance of the weather-worn hinges at every millimeter of motion.
But oh, it's so worth it, when I've gotten it open enough to step through! I'm able to step onto the Mason's front lawn, through the main gate, with the words of Meres and Celestine overhead as I move into their special place. Also, I am not (as) covered in mud and creek water, which is another major plus.
Eventually, I catch a glimpse of the ironwork fence, and sigh in relief. Peering through the branches and leaves up ahead, I can just make out a glimpse of the house. I don't think I'm quite at the spot I was shooting for, but it's pretty close. I push on through until I'm beside the fence, which has fewer vines covering it in this area than it does by the creek. Still, there are plenty of other plants trying to grow over and through it, so following along beside the fence isn't much better than the rest of the woods. Luckily, I came out near the tower, so it's not far to the front gate.
I take a closer look at the ironwork as I come up near the gate, skimming my fingers lightly over it. It's such a gorgeous pattern, I can't imagine what kind of expense you'd have to go to in order to get something like this designed, and made, and installed, over so much ground. I wonder again just how long Meres and Celestine lived here, and were able to enjoy it... did they know these elegant dark swirls and flourishes would stand here so long, still guarding their home and gardens, a hundred years longer than the place would be lived in?
When I reach the gate itself, I find this section is much more hidden by plant life – the ironwork is a bit more sparse, so I guess the plants were able to just ignore it more? I also realize there are several trees off to my left, both inside and outside of the fence. Frowning, I take a closer one – and then laugh, seeing small green apples forming at the ends of the branches. Apple trees! I remember there was one planted out front, but I guess over the years some of the seeds from the fruit must have grown into trees. It's strange, to think that none of these were here when Evelyn was. It was such a different landscape to her and her family, especially around the house. I remember the night of the fire, how easily I walked over the lawn with her. I didn't think about it then, but thinking back on it now, it was a remarkably well-manicured lawn, and what little I could see of the plants and trees, everything was very neatly trimmed.
Now though, the house area is overrun, by things they had planted that have flung themselves far past their original boundaries, by things that have sprung up to take advantage of the large empty space where the house once stood. I know forest fires do a certain amount of replenishing for the local plant life, I wonder if house fires do the same? More likely for the Mason house than a house of today though, there'd be so much melted plastic and awful chemicals from a modern house, while theirs had so much wood and other natural products within.
Looking up as I stand before the gate, I can just make out where the words are wrought. “Longa est vita, amor aeternus est.” Most of the words are obscured by vines and apple tree branches, but I can make out just enough to be sure they're still there. This makes me happier than I would have expected... but I guess it is probably the most direct line I have to the thoughts of Meres and Celestine. I saw them so briefly, and haven't found a single mention of them in any document I've been able to turn up, with the exception of that one lonely photograph. “Life is long, love is eternal.” How long were their lives, after they disappeared from this place?
I begin to poke around the edges of the gate. I don't even know which side it opens on, or if it opens in the middle, or what. My fingers are stained green and lightly scratched before I've gotten far at all, and I promise myself for the millionth time to remember to bring gardening gloves with me whenever I come over here. I find the hinges first, on the left side. I try to wiggle the gate a bit, and it does seem to move – though it's obviously latched shut someplace, it seems like these hinges at least aren't totally rusted into place. I hadn't thought about that either, until I got here, I should have grabbed a can of WD-40 or something. I'm going to be so frustrated if I've found the gate and everything, but still wind up crawling under or over something to get inside again!
I head to the right side of the gate, and start pulling aside vines and leaves and things from the ironwork. It's not made any easier by the fact that the underbrush from the woods has grown right up against (and in some places through) the fence, so it's right at my back while I'm tugging away at things. Every time my arm flies back, a vine in my hand having come free, my arm hits a branch or a tree trunk behind me. But eventually, I find another hinge – so the gate must open in the middle. Just my luck, I get to pick vines clear of not just two areas, but three! Goodie. On the bright side, I suppose, that means it's a bit more likely I can get the gate open. If one side is rusted in place, the other side might not be, and I really only need to get one side to open up a foot or two in order to get through.
Finding the thing holding the gate fast is much harder than finding the hinges. For starters, I'm always miserable at finding the approximate middle of anything. On top of that, I have no idea what height it would be set at. Also, I have no idea what I'm actually looking for! I'm praying it's not a giant-sized padlock, because I will not be able to find a key. No way. I clear about a foot across at shoulder-height before I find the edges of the two side panels to the gate. I shake them a bit – but, no such luck, they're definitely fastened together somehow. It feels like it's lower down though, whatever it is. So I continue working my way down, tearing away the plants running through the small gap between the two panels.
At about waist-height, I find something different. I lean down closer as I remove the last few bits of grape vine. There's definitely something... well, not really box-like, but a flourished and curved panel, fairly flat, running horizontally. I don't see anything like a lock, but... There! Oh my lord, I am so damn lucky! It's only a little latch, though it's on the other side. It's of a style I've never seen before, but it's the same principle as a hook-and-eye latch, so it's just a matter of wiggling the movable part on the other side out of its holder. I guess they must have saved any weightier locks for the house itself? Though I'm sure they could easily have had someone always watching the door – and anyone coming up the drive would be spotted by someone at the carriage house. Their reasoning doesn't actually matter to me, I'm just relieved it's something I can manage!
It still takes me awhile to find a space in the ironwork large enough to get my hand through, at the right angle to work the mechanism, which I can't see quite clearly from this side, and while it's not totally immovable or anything, it's definitely somewhat stuck, so it takes much more wiggling than I'm sure it originally did. But I do eventually manage to get it sorted out, and I disentangle my arm with a grateful groan, rubbing my poor contorted arm muscles for a minute before I try moving the gate. It doesn't really want to move, but I can tell that it will! I spend a few minutes clearing away some of the debris near the bottom of the gate – there's a pretty deep pile of old leaves and things that's accumulated up against it.
Finally, I manage to move the gate a few inches, and I cry out happily. I clear out some more space for it to move, and wedge my arm into the gap, bracing my back and shoulder against the other gate to gain a bit of extra leverage against the one I'm trying to move. Slowly, I get it farther out, feeling the resistance of the weather-worn hinges at every millimeter of motion.
But oh, it's so worth it, when I've gotten it open enough to step through! I'm able to step onto the Mason's front lawn, through the main gate, with the words of Meres and Celestine overhead as I move into their special place. Also, I am not (as) covered in mud and creek water, which is another major plus.
Sunday, November 27, 2011
notes
The last paragraph happened as a result of screwing around with an online magnetic poetry. So I can only partly take credit for the "throwing fiery paint" and "white silhouette", ha.
Oak Leaf Cemetery is so totally based on Pioneer Cemetery in Fredonia, NY. I spent so, so many spring/summer/fall afternoons there, over the years I lived in Fredonia. (It still hasn't sunk in that I don't live there any longer...) It's a gorgeous tiny little cemetery, one of my absolute favorite places to sit and breathe awhile.
While I didn't have my photos of the place handy, I did have some from the adjacent Forest Hill Cemetery, which I referenced for a few details (like colors!). But I think every stone I described is an actual stone in Pioneer Cemetery, though the names are different. And Calvin's stone - the lamb is based on one that's there, but the real one doesn't have a name marker attached to it like Calvin's. If I remember correctly, I don't think there's any name on it, though I seem to recall it's not far from a big family name marker, under a tree in one of the front corners.
Anyway. Cemeteries. <3 My word count fleewwwww once I got Kimber in there - really *is* best, writing what you know. ;)
P.S. Locust trees, in case you've forgotten, mean "Affection beyond the grave." (And I haven't actually decided what the shrub is yet, so don't worry about it lol.)
Oak Leaf Cemetery is so totally based on Pioneer Cemetery in Fredonia, NY. I spent so, so many spring/summer/fall afternoons there, over the years I lived in Fredonia. (It still hasn't sunk in that I don't live there any longer...) It's a gorgeous tiny little cemetery, one of my absolute favorite places to sit and breathe awhile.
While I didn't have my photos of the place handy, I did have some from the adjacent Forest Hill Cemetery, which I referenced for a few details (like colors!). But I think every stone I described is an actual stone in Pioneer Cemetery, though the names are different. And Calvin's stone - the lamb is based on one that's there, but the real one doesn't have a name marker attached to it like Calvin's. If I remember correctly, I don't think there's any name on it, though I seem to recall it's not far from a big family name marker, under a tree in one of the front corners.
Anyway. Cemeteries. <3 My word count fleewwwww once I got Kimber in there - really *is* best, writing what you know. ;)
P.S. Locust trees, in case you've forgotten, mean "Affection beyond the grave." (And I haven't actually decided what the shrub is yet, so don't worry about it lol.)
Part 27
Broken Bells' “October” comes up on shuffle, and I turn it up a bit. As I continue on walking – it's such a great song for walking to – I try and actually sort out the words. I've played this one on dozens of rough mornings, but I still have no idea what it's actually about. “...'til the spark of morning light, and all those searching eyes, do they scald your tender mind? See the stars align and leave you behind...” Even focusing, I'm not sure I'm getting the words all right, the singer has such weird rhythms and pronunciations. Doesn't really matter, it's the atmosphere of the song I really love. “Don't run, don't rush, just flo-o-ow...”
A low stone wall appears next to me, and I look across it to see the beginning of the old Oak Leaf Cemetery. The late sunlight is filtering between the trees, low on the ground, casting long shadows behind everything. Thank goodness I have spare batteries with me – I'll get some fantastic black and white shots at this time of day. The place looks empty as usual, the joggers and dog-walkers frequent the much-larger St. Mary's Cemetery, with its well-kept paved paths. This one is only a block or two in size, with a slightly-graveled dirt path curling through it. I don't think there are any stones newer than the early 1900s, maybe the 1910s or 1920s, so it's not a place people come to pay respects often, either. All reasons why I've always liked visiting Oak Leaf more than St. Mary's. While the larger, more elaborate sculptures are definitely at St. Mary's, I've always preferred the age-worn look of old slate and marble stones to the highly-polished, crisply-carved granite ones.
Stepping through the wide gap in the stone wall, I take my headphones out for a minute, and just look and listen and breathe, letting the peacefulness of the place soak in for a long moment. Though the road isn't far behind me, everything feels muted here, like a soft curtain has been drawn closed behind me, leaving me in a place not quite a part of the everyday world outside. I pull out my camera, and switch my iPod to one of my more placid playlists – though I only put one headphone back in, letting the other hang free on its cord so that I can still hear the soft breeze in the leaves around me.
I don't know the exact location of Calvin's stone – while I found a number-gridded map online, to match the odd jumble of numbers I'd found on a list by his name, I couldn't get the map to load quite correctly. But I recognized some of the names that had numbers not far off from Calvin's, so they must be stones I've seen before. If I just nose around the areas I'm naturally drawn to, I should stumble across it eventually.
I start a vague circle around the cemetery, heading off to the left to start with. I pause beside a few of my favorite stones, taking pictures in the strong sunlight: An arched stone with an image of clasped hands, a tall pointed pillar of an almost yellow stone with its corners blackened by age, a sculpted urn with something draped over it. I pause at some of the stones with more three-dimensional sculpture to them, taking advantage of the deep shadows. And every stone I pass, I let my eyes skim over the name. Even the tiny little foot stones, half-buried by encroaching grass, I check, kneeling down to tug away grass and roots when needed. I find a few stones marked “Mason”, but these are all the ones unrelated (so far as I can tell) to the ones I know.
It's amazing, how much color there is in these old white stones... The slate stones, I was never surprised to find the colors in. Some campground we went to when I was a kid had a big open patch of slate nearby, where a mountain had been trimmed to put in a road or something I think. Being kids, my sister and I were always picking up pieces of it to use as chalkboards, and I remember competing to see who could find the most colorful pieces – blobs of purple, rust red, bright orange, on the blue-gray stone. But these marble gravestones have not only the expected greens of moss and aqua of lichen, the brown of dead moss and black of weather-worn stone. There are pinks and soft sages, peaches and ambers, reds and greens and violets in the shadows. One stone, I find has a nearly-smooth back, and I arrange my shot to have it fill up the image as best I can. There's a smooth scalloped indentation near the border, mostly a dark olive-gray but with touches of orange in the deep shadows. The main stone has a slight lavender cast to it, but there are reds and pinks among the dark green mossy areas near the edges. The center lightens almost to white, but then is criss-crossed, almost like someone lightly pulled a large paint brush over it, in a warm light coral. If I'd drawn something like this, I'd be mocked for making such a rainbow stone, but here it is, carved by mankind but painted only by nature.
While at first I stopped often, camera up and ready, I soon notice the light falling lower down – the tops of some of the higher stones are already in shadow. I should move quicker, if I'm going to find Cal's stone today. Still, I make sure to keep checking the names. Given the Masons apparent wealth, I would expect a larger, more elaborate stone, but then again, they were so rarely in town, and... I don't know, I feel like the death of a young child isn't something you'd want to commemorate with a giant slab of rock, or some grandiose tower. It's such a deep, private sort of loss, I feel like something small but beautiful, tucked away in a corner, would be more fitting.
I'm walking along a side edge of the cemetery now, and have to keep doubling-back when I've noticed I've missed checking a gravestone. They're not in nice neat lines in this section, but tucked among much larger trees – which, I suppose, might actually be old enough to have been planted when the cemetery opened, or shortly thereafter. The shadows are denser here, and I almost stumble over a couple of short little square markers. There's an area closed in by an ironwork fence, and for a moment my heart leaps, recalling the fence around the Mason place--- but no, I can see from outside the half-collapsed fence, there's a huge monument in the middle with the last name “TEMPLE” emblazoned across it. Not that my Masons would have a family plot like that here anyway... I wonder if they do anywhere?
On the far side of the fenced-in area is a low spreading shrub of some kind. It looks like it had flowers on it not long ago, there are browned petals on the ground underneath it, but I'm not sure what it actually is. Seems an odd place for it – it's very near a large old locust tree, so much so that its outer branches have to spread to either side around the locust's trunk. I suppose both were much smaller when planted, so long ago.
Still, to have a big bush like that just outside a family plot? Wouldn't they have planted it inside? Unless this was planted for someone else, not in that plot. I lean down, trying to see beneath the spreading branches of the shrub – which is tricky, since it's the middle of summer, so every inch of branch is totally ensconced in leaves. But there, is that a stone? I kneel down, trying to hold the branches out of my way as I lean in beneath them. The light doesn't really reach down here, so it's fairly dark, and very damp.
But there's a stone. Shaped like a lamb, only a foot or so long. It's marble, so large portions of it are covered in moss and lichen, and blackened with the long years. The lamb is incredibly detailed, curled up with its legs tucked beneath it, with soft little swirls of wool all over its curved form. I run my fingers softly over it, especially around the edges, trying to find where a name might be... and I find the stone extends forward a little ways, though grass has grown over it. I adjust my position a little, trying to hold the branches out of the way with my shoulders and back, while I reach down to try and clear the flat area of the stone. There's definitely words on it! I wish I'd brought some charcoal and tissue paper with me or something, making a rubbing is usually the way to go with hard-to-read gravestones. But I'm relieved to find that the words are still readable – they were cut much deeper into the stone than usual for marble, or maybe they've just been less harassed by the elements, hidden away like this? My heart pounds as I make out the first word, but I force myself to clear away all the straggling grass and bits of soil before I actually read it all.
“CALVIN MARCUS MASON,” in arched capital letters, a strong but somewhat unusually serifed font. Below this, the font changes to an italicized one – harder, but not impossible to read. “Son of A. & C. Mason. DIED May 4, 1901. Aged 4 years, 8 mos. 10 days.” There are ornaments all around the borders and between the lines of text, mostly flowers, but also a small angel in the space under the curved name. There are some more lines of text carved below the rest in a much lighter font, maybe even a script, but I can't make it out in this light with such an amount of weathering. I'll have to come back – but for now, I take the best photos I can, hoping that maybe I can lighten the image digitally and make out the details better.
“Calvin...” I whisper, as I stretch out beside the stone, brushing my fingers gently over the lamb's back, the boy's name. “I wish there was something I could have done for you... I wish I could have spent more time with you, given you some bit of kindness in your life... I know there couldn't have been enough love shown you in your life, even for as short as it was. You deserved better than I think you had. I wish... I wish too many things.” I smile wryly, and kiss my fingertips, then touch them to the cool stone. “I'll come back again to visit you, and make this space a little more beautiful for you. Someone made it beautiful for you when they brought you here, it's only right that it should be that way again. I'll be back again...”
Crawling out from under the bush (I seem to do an awful lot of crawling through muddy spaces for this family!), I try and arrange the branches to cover the stone a little less. It doesn't really work, but I feel better, knowing I've at least cleared the grass clear of the boy's name. I really will be back – to trim the bush (assuming that's allowed, I'll have to check), to pull back the grass, maybe even clear some of the moss from the stone, if I can do so safely.
The sun has begun to set, throwing its fiery paint over the white silhouettes of the old stones, as though casting the decaying things into a furnace to be formed again fresh and new in the morning... but no, I wouldn't wish that fate on these crumbling stones. They've been touched by a thousand gentle hands, given tender kisses by women with full hearts, seen a thousand springs and autumns and the world change around them... I couldn't wish such memories erased.
A low stone wall appears next to me, and I look across it to see the beginning of the old Oak Leaf Cemetery. The late sunlight is filtering between the trees, low on the ground, casting long shadows behind everything. Thank goodness I have spare batteries with me – I'll get some fantastic black and white shots at this time of day. The place looks empty as usual, the joggers and dog-walkers frequent the much-larger St. Mary's Cemetery, with its well-kept paved paths. This one is only a block or two in size, with a slightly-graveled dirt path curling through it. I don't think there are any stones newer than the early 1900s, maybe the 1910s or 1920s, so it's not a place people come to pay respects often, either. All reasons why I've always liked visiting Oak Leaf more than St. Mary's. While the larger, more elaborate sculptures are definitely at St. Mary's, I've always preferred the age-worn look of old slate and marble stones to the highly-polished, crisply-carved granite ones.
Stepping through the wide gap in the stone wall, I take my headphones out for a minute, and just look and listen and breathe, letting the peacefulness of the place soak in for a long moment. Though the road isn't far behind me, everything feels muted here, like a soft curtain has been drawn closed behind me, leaving me in a place not quite a part of the everyday world outside. I pull out my camera, and switch my iPod to one of my more placid playlists – though I only put one headphone back in, letting the other hang free on its cord so that I can still hear the soft breeze in the leaves around me.
I don't know the exact location of Calvin's stone – while I found a number-gridded map online, to match the odd jumble of numbers I'd found on a list by his name, I couldn't get the map to load quite correctly. But I recognized some of the names that had numbers not far off from Calvin's, so they must be stones I've seen before. If I just nose around the areas I'm naturally drawn to, I should stumble across it eventually.
I start a vague circle around the cemetery, heading off to the left to start with. I pause beside a few of my favorite stones, taking pictures in the strong sunlight: An arched stone with an image of clasped hands, a tall pointed pillar of an almost yellow stone with its corners blackened by age, a sculpted urn with something draped over it. I pause at some of the stones with more three-dimensional sculpture to them, taking advantage of the deep shadows. And every stone I pass, I let my eyes skim over the name. Even the tiny little foot stones, half-buried by encroaching grass, I check, kneeling down to tug away grass and roots when needed. I find a few stones marked “Mason”, but these are all the ones unrelated (so far as I can tell) to the ones I know.
It's amazing, how much color there is in these old white stones... The slate stones, I was never surprised to find the colors in. Some campground we went to when I was a kid had a big open patch of slate nearby, where a mountain had been trimmed to put in a road or something I think. Being kids, my sister and I were always picking up pieces of it to use as chalkboards, and I remember competing to see who could find the most colorful pieces – blobs of purple, rust red, bright orange, on the blue-gray stone. But these marble gravestones have not only the expected greens of moss and aqua of lichen, the brown of dead moss and black of weather-worn stone. There are pinks and soft sages, peaches and ambers, reds and greens and violets in the shadows. One stone, I find has a nearly-smooth back, and I arrange my shot to have it fill up the image as best I can. There's a smooth scalloped indentation near the border, mostly a dark olive-gray but with touches of orange in the deep shadows. The main stone has a slight lavender cast to it, but there are reds and pinks among the dark green mossy areas near the edges. The center lightens almost to white, but then is criss-crossed, almost like someone lightly pulled a large paint brush over it, in a warm light coral. If I'd drawn something like this, I'd be mocked for making such a rainbow stone, but here it is, carved by mankind but painted only by nature.
While at first I stopped often, camera up and ready, I soon notice the light falling lower down – the tops of some of the higher stones are already in shadow. I should move quicker, if I'm going to find Cal's stone today. Still, I make sure to keep checking the names. Given the Masons apparent wealth, I would expect a larger, more elaborate stone, but then again, they were so rarely in town, and... I don't know, I feel like the death of a young child isn't something you'd want to commemorate with a giant slab of rock, or some grandiose tower. It's such a deep, private sort of loss, I feel like something small but beautiful, tucked away in a corner, would be more fitting.
I'm walking along a side edge of the cemetery now, and have to keep doubling-back when I've noticed I've missed checking a gravestone. They're not in nice neat lines in this section, but tucked among much larger trees – which, I suppose, might actually be old enough to have been planted when the cemetery opened, or shortly thereafter. The shadows are denser here, and I almost stumble over a couple of short little square markers. There's an area closed in by an ironwork fence, and for a moment my heart leaps, recalling the fence around the Mason place--- but no, I can see from outside the half-collapsed fence, there's a huge monument in the middle with the last name “TEMPLE” emblazoned across it. Not that my Masons would have a family plot like that here anyway... I wonder if they do anywhere?
On the far side of the fenced-in area is a low spreading shrub of some kind. It looks like it had flowers on it not long ago, there are browned petals on the ground underneath it, but I'm not sure what it actually is. Seems an odd place for it – it's very near a large old locust tree, so much so that its outer branches have to spread to either side around the locust's trunk. I suppose both were much smaller when planted, so long ago.
Still, to have a big bush like that just outside a family plot? Wouldn't they have planted it inside? Unless this was planted for someone else, not in that plot. I lean down, trying to see beneath the spreading branches of the shrub – which is tricky, since it's the middle of summer, so every inch of branch is totally ensconced in leaves. But there, is that a stone? I kneel down, trying to hold the branches out of my way as I lean in beneath them. The light doesn't really reach down here, so it's fairly dark, and very damp.
But there's a stone. Shaped like a lamb, only a foot or so long. It's marble, so large portions of it are covered in moss and lichen, and blackened with the long years. The lamb is incredibly detailed, curled up with its legs tucked beneath it, with soft little swirls of wool all over its curved form. I run my fingers softly over it, especially around the edges, trying to find where a name might be... and I find the stone extends forward a little ways, though grass has grown over it. I adjust my position a little, trying to hold the branches out of the way with my shoulders and back, while I reach down to try and clear the flat area of the stone. There's definitely words on it! I wish I'd brought some charcoal and tissue paper with me or something, making a rubbing is usually the way to go with hard-to-read gravestones. But I'm relieved to find that the words are still readable – they were cut much deeper into the stone than usual for marble, or maybe they've just been less harassed by the elements, hidden away like this? My heart pounds as I make out the first word, but I force myself to clear away all the straggling grass and bits of soil before I actually read it all.
“CALVIN MARCUS MASON,” in arched capital letters, a strong but somewhat unusually serifed font. Below this, the font changes to an italicized one – harder, but not impossible to read. “Son of A. & C. Mason. DIED May 4, 1901. Aged 4 years, 8 mos. 10 days.” There are ornaments all around the borders and between the lines of text, mostly flowers, but also a small angel in the space under the curved name. There are some more lines of text carved below the rest in a much lighter font, maybe even a script, but I can't make it out in this light with such an amount of weathering. I'll have to come back – but for now, I take the best photos I can, hoping that maybe I can lighten the image digitally and make out the details better.
“Calvin...” I whisper, as I stretch out beside the stone, brushing my fingers gently over the lamb's back, the boy's name. “I wish there was something I could have done for you... I wish I could have spent more time with you, given you some bit of kindness in your life... I know there couldn't have been enough love shown you in your life, even for as short as it was. You deserved better than I think you had. I wish... I wish too many things.” I smile wryly, and kiss my fingertips, then touch them to the cool stone. “I'll come back again to visit you, and make this space a little more beautiful for you. Someone made it beautiful for you when they brought you here, it's only right that it should be that way again. I'll be back again...”
Crawling out from under the bush (I seem to do an awful lot of crawling through muddy spaces for this family!), I try and arrange the branches to cover the stone a little less. It doesn't really work, but I feel better, knowing I've at least cleared the grass clear of the boy's name. I really will be back – to trim the bush (assuming that's allowed, I'll have to check), to pull back the grass, maybe even clear some of the moss from the stone, if I can do so safely.
The sun has begun to set, throwing its fiery paint over the white silhouettes of the old stones, as though casting the decaying things into a furnace to be formed again fresh and new in the morning... but no, I wouldn't wish that fate on these crumbling stones. They've been touched by a thousand gentle hands, given tender kisses by women with full hearts, seen a thousand springs and autumns and the world change around them... I couldn't wish such memories erased.
Saturday, November 26, 2011
notes
Despite what little color-boxes say over there, my word count is in quite good shape. The yellow days are usually 1667+ words, just not totaling the recommended total wordcount. (Which is odd, because NaNo's stats are also telling me I only need to do like 14-15k each day now to hit 50k. But I am not going to think about math now.
I did enough math yesterday, trying to sort out ages and dates and generations and omfg. Counting on fingers ftw.
Let's see. Recent names, I pulled from the usual social security census site. Photos, again, I made up. (I will, at some point, absolutely have to draw that one of Meres. <3) I did do some quick google searches similar to the ones Kimber did for the genealogy info, just to get an idea of what you'd normally turn up. Gamer-speak was shamelessly ganked from whatever random phrases I overheard the gaming-husband spouting while I was writing. Work-related gripes were based, not very loosely, on my own back at PF in Fredonia.
Oh, and I have noooo idea if my Latin grammar was anywhere near correct. I mean, I think it's generally about right. I went with Google's translation, because it made the most sense to me - other sites used different words for "love", and the verb conjugations were all over the damn map. That's an issue for post-November research. ;p
Long, long day. Yesterday was a long day because I thought it wouldn't take long to drill a few holes in my new cabinets for the wires of the blu-ray, xbox 360, and wii to go through. HA. omg it took HOURS. (Drill bits weren't big enough to make a hole to squeeze a plug through, let along a giant wonky-shaped device-specific plug. Drilled smaller holes, drilled bigger holes, and sanded like hell. FOR HOURS.) Today was a long day because I thought it was going to be a nice lazy "day off", beta-testing the new Star Wars MMO and then maybe some DDR on the Wii. HA. SW:TOR decided to throw an as-yet-unresolved-bug at me, so I eventually played on Tom's computer instead of mine. Neither of us knew how we'd rigged up the Wii, nor how I should get a new game onto the harddrive hooked up to it. I have since learned that there's a file structure format called WMFS or something that's specific to the Wii. Aaaand that a usb adapter for my dance mat does little good when THE WII WON'T TAKE USB CONTROLLERS despite its two usb ports.
...long, long day. I was a little afraid the writing was going to continue this trend, but, Kimber's head wound up being a nice sympathetic place to hang out in this evening. <3
I did enough math yesterday, trying to sort out ages and dates and generations and omfg. Counting on fingers ftw.
Let's see. Recent names, I pulled from the usual social security census site. Photos, again, I made up. (I will, at some point, absolutely have to draw that one of Meres. <3) I did do some quick google searches similar to the ones Kimber did for the genealogy info, just to get an idea of what you'd normally turn up. Gamer-speak was shamelessly ganked from whatever random phrases I overheard the gaming-husband spouting while I was writing. Work-related gripes were based, not very loosely, on my own back at PF in Fredonia.
Oh, and I have noooo idea if my Latin grammar was anywhere near correct. I mean, I think it's generally about right. I went with Google's translation, because it made the most sense to me - other sites used different words for "love", and the verb conjugations were all over the damn map. That's an issue for post-November research. ;p
Long, long day. Yesterday was a long day because I thought it wouldn't take long to drill a few holes in my new cabinets for the wires of the blu-ray, xbox 360, and wii to go through. HA. omg it took HOURS. (Drill bits weren't big enough to make a hole to squeeze a plug through, let along a giant wonky-shaped device-specific plug. Drilled smaller holes, drilled bigger holes, and sanded like hell. FOR HOURS.) Today was a long day because I thought it was going to be a nice lazy "day off", beta-testing the new Star Wars MMO and then maybe some DDR on the Wii. HA. SW:TOR decided to throw an as-yet-unresolved-bug at me, so I eventually played on Tom's computer instead of mine. Neither of us knew how we'd rigged up the Wii, nor how I should get a new game onto the harddrive hooked up to it. I have since learned that there's a file structure format called WMFS or something that's specific to the Wii. Aaaand that a usb adapter for my dance mat does little good when THE WII WON'T TAKE USB CONTROLLERS despite its two usb ports.
...long, long day. I was a little afraid the writing was going to continue this trend, but, Kimber's head wound up being a nice sympathetic place to hang out in this evening. <3
Part 26
I need a really, really strong drink. Or something. Work was completely absurd today. I don't usually work day shifts, but a coworker had “something come up.” She informed me (though she neglected to specify to the boss) that her friend had bought them both tickets to a concert out-of-town, and they just really wanted to make a whole day of it. Evidently, she knew since it was music-related, I was the one she'd get sympathy from. And since she's picking up one of my shifts in return, I'll have a three-day “weekend” (can never manage to get a Friday and Saturday off together) coming up shortly, which will be a nice little mini-vacation for me.
Unfortunately, today is Saturday, so everything was chaos all day long, and I'm now exhausted. I had to be up at like eight, to be there by nine, and I didn't even really get to sit still on my lunch break. The other girls never remind me, until I'm on a lunch break and someone needs them, that I'm one of like two people who understand how to make double-sided copies. And it was one of those days where you have three different gaggles of tourists, each gaggle consisting of four to seven persons, either all under the age of twenty-five or all over the age of sixty-five. (I honestly cannot tell you which age group is the more terrifying.) On top of this, there seemed extra numbers of the usual customers who tie you up for half an hour, either with irrelevant stories about their own teenage years back in the 1940s (usually charming, but not when you're swamped), or with uncertainty over which ink cartridge is the one they're supposed to be getting. And while you're grateful that it's a standard computer printer cartridge they're deliberating over, and not a God-forsaken typewriter ribbon which neither they nor you remotely understand...
After spending several long minutes flopped in the first chair I find in my apartment, I stagger over and stare into the fridge. There's a few bottles of beer that are only behind a few other things. There's a semi-ancient partial bottle of coconut rum shoved in the back, behind many other things. Somehow coconut rum and orange juice doesn't sound particularly appetizing right now, and that's about all I have to mix it with. Or lemon juice in a little plastic lemon, but that sounds far worse. I grab a beer, and flop back in the chair.
Then I make the mistake of looking around my disaster of an apartment. I haven't swept in weeks, partly because it would take a very long time to clear things up enough to sweep. Dirty dishes are stacking up again. I really should have done laundry like three days ago, only my less-comfortable jeans are still clean.
Groaning, I rest my elbows on my knees, and rest my chin in one hand, holding the bottle in front of my eyes with the other. Amber bottles are so pretty when the light shines through them, especially late afternoon light. Too bad empty beer bottles as décor start looking trashy really fast. Maybe I could find some really old ones, with kitschy vintage labels to them. Or I could just stash one or two of these in a box for a few decades, and save myself the money.
Sighing, I sit back in the chair again, taking another swig and closing my eyes.
“Yeah, diagnostic scan just does not cut it.”
“It didn't really look like it did a whole lot when I equipped it...”
“It's just so bad, what a waste!”
...while the screen door closed behind me, it seems I didn't pull shut the solid wood door. I can hear my neighbor's voice loud and clear from outside, along with a slightly lower second male voice.
“Do be careful when you head into that instance – remember, line of sight, line of sight, line of sight! It does a shitload of damage. How close were you when you caught aggro?”
Gamers. At least I think so. I've overheard other conversations – when enough windows are open and the breeze blows in the right direction, I can sometimes overhear the in-game chatter between my neighbor and whoever it is he plays with online.
“Yeah, and if you get that one, it specs in at six when you have upper hand; six percent...”
I've watched just enough of friends gaming to understand that it can get pretty emotionally engaging, depending on what you're playing, but good lord does the technical side go over my head in a second. I remember looking over an ex-boyfriend's shoulder as he was playing... oh, I don't even remember what the name of the game was, something that involved a lot of shooting, loud noises, him swearing and yelling, and jumping around oddly abstract buildings that were occasionally in outer space. When I started feeling dizzy from all of the rapid turns and jumps he was making, I glanced at the in-game chat box – and felt even more dizzy. It's exactly what I think my grandma would feel like if she tried reading my sister's text messages. While I understand general internet and most cell phone acronyms... gamers have their own unique language. Even things that aren't abbreviations, I can only guess at from the way in which the words are used.
I liked Myst. I'll occasionally lose spectacularly at Mario games with friends, but I get stressed out when there are countdown clocks involved. Myst was pretty, and quiet, and didn't require shooting anything. Plus, it involved abandoned places that people had once lived in, and left little traces of their lives behind for me to puzzle together. Ha! No wonder I liked it so much.
That beer didn't last me very long. I slow down and enjoy the last couple of sips – since I was only buying it for myself, I splurged a little (like, an extra dollar) and got a brand I knew I'd like.
I get up and head over to shut the door – but pause in the doorway, looking outside. It is really nice out still, and there's probably another few hours of daylight. I look back into my gloomy, messy apartment. I see a rather large dust bunny blowing in the slight breeze from the open door. It skates blissfully across the tile floor, eventually curling up under the lip of a cabinet door.
I'm going out.
It's not until I'm out the door, headphones in place, sketchbook and camera in bag, that I realize I hadn't thought about where, exactly, I'm going. I could always go nose around the Mason place – but I want to have an hour or two more than this for my next walk over there, since I'm sick of wriggling through the muddy hole under the fence, and am determined to find a main gate entrance. It occurs to me that I haven't looked closely enough at the structure of that gate in the photograph to have noticed whether it could be fully closed with a gate or not. While a giant padlock might have rusted through in a hundred years... given what surprisingly good shape most of the fence is in, I'm not going to bet on it. I feel like if I'd had a brother instead of a sister, we would have spent our childhood learning much more useful things, like how to pick locks instead of how to tie our hair up in rag-curls.
I've already started up the street in the direction of--- no, not of work, I am not going over to work. I'm going to the cemetery, where it's nice and quiet and peaceful, and nobody will talk to me, and even if a ghost arises from the ground, it won't be to ask me about what damn ink cartridge they need “for a Windows computer”. Aaaarg. (Though, I might be able to ask them to explain how to load a new ribbon into a typewriter!)
Though it will add another five or ten minutes to the walk, I avoid the main road and take a few side residential streets in the direction I'm headed. The sunlight is such a warm, deep gold, that it makes every leaf look like it's carved from a precious stone. Even the worn cracks in the sidewalk look interesting, the shadows of every rough edge and bump so sharp and dark. There are some very pretty little gardens in people's front yards – and while some are carefully manicured and painfully neat, others are a riot of bold colors at this time of year. Low mounds of neon pink impatiens beneath sprawling old oak trees, tall plumes of blues and purples flung in front of white fences, vines swarming over wooden trellises and covering them in glowing scarlet and crimson...
Next time I'm there, I should do some more work in the Masons' garden. I've cleared the weeds and overgrowth from a few little spots, but, I'm always so worried that I'll pull out the wrong thing. I'd feel so awful, if I pulled up something that Evelyn planted, or even Celestine. I've never spoken with her, but, she just seemed so sweet and happy, one of those rare people who never has a truly bad day, but always finds something to smile about, because they're always able to step back and see the world with fresh eyes... I wish I could know her better, I feel like she'd be a wonderful influence on me. Days like today, I let myself get so overwhelmed by the world spinning around me, that I find it hard to let go and just let it spin off wherever the hell it wants, while I stop to look at the way the sunlight falls on a flower's petal, and feel happy again.
I don't stop to take many photos – I always feel so awkward, pointing a camera into someone else's yard – but I take a few of the trees' shadows laying lazily across the road, tiny wildflowers sprouting up between the squares of concrete sidewalk, the dramatic contrasts created by the rich light falling on a thick vine curling around the deeply-grooved bark of an old tree.
Unfortunately, today is Saturday, so everything was chaos all day long, and I'm now exhausted. I had to be up at like eight, to be there by nine, and I didn't even really get to sit still on my lunch break. The other girls never remind me, until I'm on a lunch break and someone needs them, that I'm one of like two people who understand how to make double-sided copies. And it was one of those days where you have three different gaggles of tourists, each gaggle consisting of four to seven persons, either all under the age of twenty-five or all over the age of sixty-five. (I honestly cannot tell you which age group is the more terrifying.) On top of this, there seemed extra numbers of the usual customers who tie you up for half an hour, either with irrelevant stories about their own teenage years back in the 1940s (usually charming, but not when you're swamped), or with uncertainty over which ink cartridge is the one they're supposed to be getting. And while you're grateful that it's a standard computer printer cartridge they're deliberating over, and not a God-forsaken typewriter ribbon which neither they nor you remotely understand...
After spending several long minutes flopped in the first chair I find in my apartment, I stagger over and stare into the fridge. There's a few bottles of beer that are only behind a few other things. There's a semi-ancient partial bottle of coconut rum shoved in the back, behind many other things. Somehow coconut rum and orange juice doesn't sound particularly appetizing right now, and that's about all I have to mix it with. Or lemon juice in a little plastic lemon, but that sounds far worse. I grab a beer, and flop back in the chair.
Then I make the mistake of looking around my disaster of an apartment. I haven't swept in weeks, partly because it would take a very long time to clear things up enough to sweep. Dirty dishes are stacking up again. I really should have done laundry like three days ago, only my less-comfortable jeans are still clean.
Groaning, I rest my elbows on my knees, and rest my chin in one hand, holding the bottle in front of my eyes with the other. Amber bottles are so pretty when the light shines through them, especially late afternoon light. Too bad empty beer bottles as décor start looking trashy really fast. Maybe I could find some really old ones, with kitschy vintage labels to them. Or I could just stash one or two of these in a box for a few decades, and save myself the money.
Sighing, I sit back in the chair again, taking another swig and closing my eyes.
“Yeah, diagnostic scan just does not cut it.”
“It didn't really look like it did a whole lot when I equipped it...”
“It's just so bad, what a waste!”
...while the screen door closed behind me, it seems I didn't pull shut the solid wood door. I can hear my neighbor's voice loud and clear from outside, along with a slightly lower second male voice.
“Do be careful when you head into that instance – remember, line of sight, line of sight, line of sight! It does a shitload of damage. How close were you when you caught aggro?”
Gamers. At least I think so. I've overheard other conversations – when enough windows are open and the breeze blows in the right direction, I can sometimes overhear the in-game chatter between my neighbor and whoever it is he plays with online.
“Yeah, and if you get that one, it specs in at six when you have upper hand; six percent...”
I've watched just enough of friends gaming to understand that it can get pretty emotionally engaging, depending on what you're playing, but good lord does the technical side go over my head in a second. I remember looking over an ex-boyfriend's shoulder as he was playing... oh, I don't even remember what the name of the game was, something that involved a lot of shooting, loud noises, him swearing and yelling, and jumping around oddly abstract buildings that were occasionally in outer space. When I started feeling dizzy from all of the rapid turns and jumps he was making, I glanced at the in-game chat box – and felt even more dizzy. It's exactly what I think my grandma would feel like if she tried reading my sister's text messages. While I understand general internet and most cell phone acronyms... gamers have their own unique language. Even things that aren't abbreviations, I can only guess at from the way in which the words are used.
I liked Myst. I'll occasionally lose spectacularly at Mario games with friends, but I get stressed out when there are countdown clocks involved. Myst was pretty, and quiet, and didn't require shooting anything. Plus, it involved abandoned places that people had once lived in, and left little traces of their lives behind for me to puzzle together. Ha! No wonder I liked it so much.
That beer didn't last me very long. I slow down and enjoy the last couple of sips – since I was only buying it for myself, I splurged a little (like, an extra dollar) and got a brand I knew I'd like.
I get up and head over to shut the door – but pause in the doorway, looking outside. It is really nice out still, and there's probably another few hours of daylight. I look back into my gloomy, messy apartment. I see a rather large dust bunny blowing in the slight breeze from the open door. It skates blissfully across the tile floor, eventually curling up under the lip of a cabinet door.
I'm going out.
It's not until I'm out the door, headphones in place, sketchbook and camera in bag, that I realize I hadn't thought about where, exactly, I'm going. I could always go nose around the Mason place – but I want to have an hour or two more than this for my next walk over there, since I'm sick of wriggling through the muddy hole under the fence, and am determined to find a main gate entrance. It occurs to me that I haven't looked closely enough at the structure of that gate in the photograph to have noticed whether it could be fully closed with a gate or not. While a giant padlock might have rusted through in a hundred years... given what surprisingly good shape most of the fence is in, I'm not going to bet on it. I feel like if I'd had a brother instead of a sister, we would have spent our childhood learning much more useful things, like how to pick locks instead of how to tie our hair up in rag-curls.
I've already started up the street in the direction of--- no, not of work, I am not going over to work. I'm going to the cemetery, where it's nice and quiet and peaceful, and nobody will talk to me, and even if a ghost arises from the ground, it won't be to ask me about what damn ink cartridge they need “for a Windows computer”. Aaaarg. (Though, I might be able to ask them to explain how to load a new ribbon into a typewriter!)
Though it will add another five or ten minutes to the walk, I avoid the main road and take a few side residential streets in the direction I'm headed. The sunlight is such a warm, deep gold, that it makes every leaf look like it's carved from a precious stone. Even the worn cracks in the sidewalk look interesting, the shadows of every rough edge and bump so sharp and dark. There are some very pretty little gardens in people's front yards – and while some are carefully manicured and painfully neat, others are a riot of bold colors at this time of year. Low mounds of neon pink impatiens beneath sprawling old oak trees, tall plumes of blues and purples flung in front of white fences, vines swarming over wooden trellises and covering them in glowing scarlet and crimson...
Next time I'm there, I should do some more work in the Masons' garden. I've cleared the weeds and overgrowth from a few little spots, but, I'm always so worried that I'll pull out the wrong thing. I'd feel so awful, if I pulled up something that Evelyn planted, or even Celestine. I've never spoken with her, but, she just seemed so sweet and happy, one of those rare people who never has a truly bad day, but always finds something to smile about, because they're always able to step back and see the world with fresh eyes... I wish I could know her better, I feel like she'd be a wonderful influence on me. Days like today, I let myself get so overwhelmed by the world spinning around me, that I find it hard to let go and just let it spin off wherever the hell it wants, while I stop to look at the way the sunlight falls on a flower's petal, and feel happy again.
I don't stop to take many photos – I always feel so awkward, pointing a camera into someone else's yard – but I take a few of the trees' shadows laying lazily across the road, tiny wildflowers sprouting up between the squares of concrete sidewalk, the dramatic contrasts created by the rich light falling on a thick vine curling around the deeply-grooved bark of an old tree.
Friday, November 25, 2011
Parts 24-25
Ed pulls a more recent map out from under several others on his desk. “Seems I need to sort out property lines about every day around here, no use in filing this map. Someone always needs to know just whose property that tree is on, so they can harass their neighbor about keeping it trimmed.” The map arranged, he pulls a folder out from a desk drawer, and flips through a few pages, comparing notes in the folder and on the map. “So the property still under Mason ownership...” He skims a finger over the map, and soon lands on the area near where the house stood. “This area here, which extends... not nearly so far anymore. Several different people own what were sections of the Mason land now. Looks like little pieces have been sold off over the years, since the family left town. Probably just selling when asked, or when the family needed some money. Hanging onto it the same way anyone else hangs onto property, as an investment, waiting for the right price to come along. As far as I know, none of them ever came back here after the fire.”
“That's right, you said whoever owns it was somewhere out West.”
“Mmhmm. It was... Jeremy Mason, that was it, out in Nevada.”
I pull the sketchbook out of my bag. “I just want to jot down the general idea of where the property used to extend, and where it does now.”
“I can always run you a copy of these, if you want.”
“That's alright – a rough idea is really all I need. And I suspect Susan is still doing battle with the copier.”
Ed chuckles at this. “Watch out – you'll probably have about five times as many copies as you need. She won't charge you for them, but she'll have hit a button here or there too many times, and rather than have Claire catch sight of the copies in the recycling bin, she'll just sneak them on to you.”
I laugh. “I can definitely see that happening! But that's alright, it's copies of some of the old photos of the Masons and their house. I won't mind having a couple extra.”
When I've made my way back to the front office, it's to find Claire straighting up the few papers on the front desk, and Susan slipping the old photos back into their file folders. Seeing me, Susan spins around and darts into the room with the copier, returning with a small stack she hands over to me.
“Success! Your photos are all set. I figured you'd want them all to be color copies, even the black and white images – since they're never really black and white, and I suspect that being an art sort of person you'd notice that sort of thing.”
I grin happily as I take the pile from her. “Definitely, thank you. What do I owe you?”
Susan pauses, counts on her fingers. “Twelve color copies, so that's---” She looks helplessly over at Claire.
Without looking up from what she's doing, Claire answers immediately. “Three dollars, assuming you have each photo on a separate sheet of paper. Four-twenty, if you used the good photo paper.”
“Four-twenty, then,” Susan repeats. “Thank you, Ms. Calculation.”
“Mmhmm.”
I dig through my bag, and hand over the requested amount. “Thanks again – I really appreciate all the effort.”
“No trouble! Oh, and it turns out, those Reese reprints I was thinking about are actually not here at the moment. There's a show coming up soon, I think next weekend, in the gallery over on West Main? It's focused on local photographers, and they offered to try and sell some of the prints for us there.”
“That's actually pretty cool, I'll have to check it out.”
“You want a folder or something to put those copies in?”
I've already pulled out my sketchbook, and started slipping the copies inside. “Nope, I'm all set! For today, anyway, I'm sure I'll be back at some point.”
“Glad to hear it! Mary says you're in at the library fairly often, I'll pass word along to her if I come across anything that might interest you in the meantime.”
“Fantastic! Thanks again!”
As I fumble for my keys at the apartment door, I realize I never even put my headphones back in for the walk home, I was so lost in thought over everything I've seen today. That Latin phrase over the entryway... something about love eternal is my guess, but I want to check the translation. Once inside, I hit the power button on my computer, and pull out my sketchbook while it's booting up. I carefully remove the photos, and look around for somewhere I can put them that I'll be able to see them easily, but where they'll also be safe from me stepping on them in the middle of the night. There aren't exactly a lot of clear spaces around here anymore, with all the drawings and supplies strewn about. I dig around in a junk drawer for a few, and succeed in finding a glob of poster-tack. I break off a few bits, and begin sticking the photos up in a row along a wall near my drawing-nest. I spend a few moments looking closely again at each one as I put it on the wall. Susan was right, it's definitely a really nice copier – as good as I could hope for, actually, short of an actual photographic process. Some of the crispness in the shadows has gone, but it's not noticeable from any distance.
Looking over, I see that my computer seems happy enough, so I plop down in the chair and pull up a web browser. Then I get back up to double-check the spelling on the photo. Fortunately for me, online translators have gotten worlds better since my friends and I first messed around with them in junior high. I run the lines through a few different sites anyway, just for comparison's sake. Definitely Latin.
“Life is long, love is eternal.”
Or “long is the life, love eternal is”, or some other grammatical variant. The gist seems the same across all the sites, and, taking another look at the words, I feel like a bit of an idiot for not having figured it out on my own.
“Longa est vita, amor aeternus est.” I check the pronunciation, now that I have it pulled up on a few sites, then say the phrase over a few times, trying to burn it into memory a little better. I jot down the line, and the translation, on the next page of my Mason-centric sketchbook. Frowning, I pick my pencil back up, and write the Latin out more slowly, in as elegant a script as I can manage. (I've kept to my resolution, and been practicing it a little here and there.) When done, I nod, satisfied at how much better that looks. While I'm pretty darn sure Latin wasn't originally written in such a script, it just feels better to me to give it that formality.
The gate was put in by Meres and Celestine, there's no doubt in my mind. "Life is long, love eternal..."
I sit back for a long moment, looking across to the photographs. It feels so strange, to be able to look over, in this time, this place, and see their faces...
A little later on, I make myself a bit of dinner – and by making dinner, I mean re-heating a bowl of tomato soup I made a few days ago, and throwing together a lazy grilled-cheese sandwich. Bread goes in the toaster, then quickly put some cheese between the bread while still a bit warm, then throwing that in the microwave alongside the soup. Not exactly world-class, but a slight step up from the de rigueur college meal of microwaved Easy Mac. Grabbing the bowl of soup and paper towel-with-sandwich from the microwave, I set them down over on my computer desk. Too depressing to sit at a kitchen table all by yourself to eat – and anyway, mine is completely buried in the pile of mostly-finished pastel drawings. (As opposed to the pile of half-done drawings on the floor, and the just-started drawings on the couch, and...) After adding a glass of water to the meal (milk would be better, but I'm all out again), I sit down, and pull up a web browser again. How to search for this? But I guess I'll start with the obvious: “Genealogy Mason Forestville NC.”
Three hours later, I scrub at my eyeballs, and force myself to get up and put my dishes away. I really need to train myself into better computer habits, alongside the better drawings habits, or I'm going to be totally blind in about five years. I get another glass of water, and stretch a little before sitting back down to the ten different windows I have open.
Unfortunately for me, Mason is an absurdly common last name – about five minutes in, I started searching more specifically for Cora, Avery, Evelyn (though I'm sure she would have lost the last name when married), even Meres. If I knew Mr. Mason's first name, I feel like things would have been easier – but maybe not, I've stumbled across plenty of Arthurs, Asas, Aarons, Adams, Abrahams, and I don't even remember what others. There are a freaking lot of Masons. The most popular family tree sites cost money to use, so I've had to skip most of those for now. It's also tough, having so little information to start with. Some sites would search for you, once you'd put in your name and birthday, and the same for your parents. But I don't know any of their birthdays (even the years, I can only guess at), or Cora's maiden name, or the names of grandparents or anything... All I know is their names, and not even their middle or married/maiden names, and that there's a Jeremy Mason descended from one of them. But which one, I don't know...
What I have found, and it's still giving me shivers – I haven't been able to bring myself to close the web page yet – is Calvin's gravestone. I hadn't expected the very small, very old, cemetery in town to have such a thorough website. The larger, current cemetery only has information about buying plots and cemetery etiquette and things. But while the site for Oak Leaf Cemetery was clearly developed years ago, there's a ton of plain-text information on it, and more pictures than I'd expected. I was surprised to find any results for “Mason”, since someone at the historical society meeting had mentioned none of the family were buried here. At first I chalked it up to it being such a common surname – clearly, it wouldn't be surprising to have had more than one unrelated family with that name in the town over the years. But while I had that page open, another one I'd opened finished loading, and on it were photographs – mostly old family photos, but also some newer images of old gravestones, followed by a listing of information from other gravestones the family historian must have investigated. I skimmed through the list quickly, but then my heart stopped: “Calvin Marcus Mason, died 1901, age four. Parents unknown. NC.”
On seeing that, I jumped back to the local cemetery's page, and took a closer look at the giant grid of names and dates. Calvin! He's there! The site has very blunt, simple information: “Calvin Marcus Mason, 1897 – 1901, 4 yo,” and then some abbreviated gibberish that I eventually figure out is location information. Calvin is buried at Oak Leaf, which I pass every day on my way to work. I've walked through it once or twice... but if I'd seen his stone, his name would have sounded familiar to me when he told it to me. God that's a creepy thought – to have a child tell you his name, and to have remembered seeing it on a gravestone! I shudder, so relieved that it didn't work out that way. Poor kid... and I can't imagine anyone's done more than given his grave a passing glance in all the time since his family moved away.
I made note of the location information in my sketchbook, and decided that the next day off I have, that's where I'm headed. I know it won't give me any new information, but... but there's no way I can not visit poor Cal.
Despite the several hours searching, I don't find much more than cursory information on the Masons I know. I did find Avery's name a few times – at least, I hope it's the right Avery, the years seem about right. Hopefully I'll get a chance to ask one of them if his middle name is Dorcey. Avery Dorcey Mason... Calvin Marcus Mason... they sound similar in style, anyway. And none of them have Biblical names at all, which still seems a little odd to me. But having been staring at the names of people from that era for a few hours, it's not quite as unusual as I would have guessed.
Assuming my Avery is Avery Dorcey, it looks like he was married, and had a few kids. Married in 1905, so he would have been... let's see, four years older than Evelyn, who was probably fifteen in 1902 at the time of the fire, so... married at twenty-two, that sounds about right. He was married somewhere in New York to a Sarah Pemberton, and they had... well, five children, only three of whom lived past the age of a year or so. It's still crazy to me, how high childhood mortality rates were back then. I have to wonder if Calvin wasn't the only Mason child to not make it very long. Avery and Sarah's kids were Alice Viola (born 1906), Hazel Marie (1907), and Cecil Bernard (1910), with the two who died being Daniel (1905) and Lillie (1911). All three were married, and had children, but I could only follow Alice down to her kids, not her grandkids. She may not have had any, but that website didn't have much information on the branch I was interested in anyway, I don't think I found Cecil even listed on the tree that showed Alice's marriage. It's Cecil's descendant that owns the property now – makes sense, it went to the eldest son, and then down from there to Avery's... let's see, great-grandson, probably? I couldn't find a cohesive tree actually linking Avery down to Mr. Jeremy-in-Nevada, but despite missing a few steps here and there, I think that's the case.
I suddenly have way more respect for my grandpa, who I've seen working on family trees on and off again for as long as I can remember. I understand now why he had so many stacks of paper all around his desk, this stuff gets complicated! I've been trying to sort out if any of the family came back to North Carolina at some point, but following the daughters down the line is difficult. And Hazel didn't have any sons, just daughters, only one of whom I was able to find a marriage notice for. If I can figure out even what states they all wound up living in, I might be able to find marriage records or something, even notices in newspapers – assuming that information is online, and not just stashed away in a neat binder in a dim corner of some library on the other side of the freaking country!
Groaning aloud, I lean back from the computer, again rubbing my fists against closed eyelids. I need to go to bed, I have to work tomorrow, and my eyeballs are freaking shot for the night. I make sure I have everything bookmarked, and take another look at the tentative, sprawling family tree I've sketched out. There are a lot of arrows heading off in awkward directions – I'll have to draw it out more clearly, to get a better idea of what I know and don't know. My head is spinning from all the generations and maiden names and married names and...
Computer off. No more. Time for bed.
“That's right, you said whoever owns it was somewhere out West.”
“Mmhmm. It was... Jeremy Mason, that was it, out in Nevada.”
I pull the sketchbook out of my bag. “I just want to jot down the general idea of where the property used to extend, and where it does now.”
“I can always run you a copy of these, if you want.”
“That's alright – a rough idea is really all I need. And I suspect Susan is still doing battle with the copier.”
Ed chuckles at this. “Watch out – you'll probably have about five times as many copies as you need. She won't charge you for them, but she'll have hit a button here or there too many times, and rather than have Claire catch sight of the copies in the recycling bin, she'll just sneak them on to you.”
I laugh. “I can definitely see that happening! But that's alright, it's copies of some of the old photos of the Masons and their house. I won't mind having a couple extra.”
When I've made my way back to the front office, it's to find Claire straighting up the few papers on the front desk, and Susan slipping the old photos back into their file folders. Seeing me, Susan spins around and darts into the room with the copier, returning with a small stack she hands over to me.
“Success! Your photos are all set. I figured you'd want them all to be color copies, even the black and white images – since they're never really black and white, and I suspect that being an art sort of person you'd notice that sort of thing.”
I grin happily as I take the pile from her. “Definitely, thank you. What do I owe you?”
Susan pauses, counts on her fingers. “Twelve color copies, so that's---” She looks helplessly over at Claire.
Without looking up from what she's doing, Claire answers immediately. “Three dollars, assuming you have each photo on a separate sheet of paper. Four-twenty, if you used the good photo paper.”
“Four-twenty, then,” Susan repeats. “Thank you, Ms. Calculation.”
“Mmhmm.”
I dig through my bag, and hand over the requested amount. “Thanks again – I really appreciate all the effort.”
“No trouble! Oh, and it turns out, those Reese reprints I was thinking about are actually not here at the moment. There's a show coming up soon, I think next weekend, in the gallery over on West Main? It's focused on local photographers, and they offered to try and sell some of the prints for us there.”
“That's actually pretty cool, I'll have to check it out.”
“You want a folder or something to put those copies in?”
I've already pulled out my sketchbook, and started slipping the copies inside. “Nope, I'm all set! For today, anyway, I'm sure I'll be back at some point.”
“Glad to hear it! Mary says you're in at the library fairly often, I'll pass word along to her if I come across anything that might interest you in the meantime.”
“Fantastic! Thanks again!”
As I fumble for my keys at the apartment door, I realize I never even put my headphones back in for the walk home, I was so lost in thought over everything I've seen today. That Latin phrase over the entryway... something about love eternal is my guess, but I want to check the translation. Once inside, I hit the power button on my computer, and pull out my sketchbook while it's booting up. I carefully remove the photos, and look around for somewhere I can put them that I'll be able to see them easily, but where they'll also be safe from me stepping on them in the middle of the night. There aren't exactly a lot of clear spaces around here anymore, with all the drawings and supplies strewn about. I dig around in a junk drawer for a few, and succeed in finding a glob of poster-tack. I break off a few bits, and begin sticking the photos up in a row along a wall near my drawing-nest. I spend a few moments looking closely again at each one as I put it on the wall. Susan was right, it's definitely a really nice copier – as good as I could hope for, actually, short of an actual photographic process. Some of the crispness in the shadows has gone, but it's not noticeable from any distance.
Looking over, I see that my computer seems happy enough, so I plop down in the chair and pull up a web browser. Then I get back up to double-check the spelling on the photo. Fortunately for me, online translators have gotten worlds better since my friends and I first messed around with them in junior high. I run the lines through a few different sites anyway, just for comparison's sake. Definitely Latin.
“Life is long, love is eternal.”
Or “long is the life, love eternal is”, or some other grammatical variant. The gist seems the same across all the sites, and, taking another look at the words, I feel like a bit of an idiot for not having figured it out on my own.
“Longa est vita, amor aeternus est.” I check the pronunciation, now that I have it pulled up on a few sites, then say the phrase over a few times, trying to burn it into memory a little better. I jot down the line, and the translation, on the next page of my Mason-centric sketchbook. Frowning, I pick my pencil back up, and write the Latin out more slowly, in as elegant a script as I can manage. (I've kept to my resolution, and been practicing it a little here and there.) When done, I nod, satisfied at how much better that looks. While I'm pretty darn sure Latin wasn't originally written in such a script, it just feels better to me to give it that formality.
The gate was put in by Meres and Celestine, there's no doubt in my mind. "Life is long, love eternal..."
I sit back for a long moment, looking across to the photographs. It feels so strange, to be able to look over, in this time, this place, and see their faces...
A little later on, I make myself a bit of dinner – and by making dinner, I mean re-heating a bowl of tomato soup I made a few days ago, and throwing together a lazy grilled-cheese sandwich. Bread goes in the toaster, then quickly put some cheese between the bread while still a bit warm, then throwing that in the microwave alongside the soup. Not exactly world-class, but a slight step up from the de rigueur college meal of microwaved Easy Mac. Grabbing the bowl of soup and paper towel-with-sandwich from the microwave, I set them down over on my computer desk. Too depressing to sit at a kitchen table all by yourself to eat – and anyway, mine is completely buried in the pile of mostly-finished pastel drawings. (As opposed to the pile of half-done drawings on the floor, and the just-started drawings on the couch, and...) After adding a glass of water to the meal (milk would be better, but I'm all out again), I sit down, and pull up a web browser again. How to search for this? But I guess I'll start with the obvious: “Genealogy Mason Forestville NC.”
Three hours later, I scrub at my eyeballs, and force myself to get up and put my dishes away. I really need to train myself into better computer habits, alongside the better drawings habits, or I'm going to be totally blind in about five years. I get another glass of water, and stretch a little before sitting back down to the ten different windows I have open.
Unfortunately for me, Mason is an absurdly common last name – about five minutes in, I started searching more specifically for Cora, Avery, Evelyn (though I'm sure she would have lost the last name when married), even Meres. If I knew Mr. Mason's first name, I feel like things would have been easier – but maybe not, I've stumbled across plenty of Arthurs, Asas, Aarons, Adams, Abrahams, and I don't even remember what others. There are a freaking lot of Masons. The most popular family tree sites cost money to use, so I've had to skip most of those for now. It's also tough, having so little information to start with. Some sites would search for you, once you'd put in your name and birthday, and the same for your parents. But I don't know any of their birthdays (even the years, I can only guess at), or Cora's maiden name, or the names of grandparents or anything... All I know is their names, and not even their middle or married/maiden names, and that there's a Jeremy Mason descended from one of them. But which one, I don't know...
What I have found, and it's still giving me shivers – I haven't been able to bring myself to close the web page yet – is Calvin's gravestone. I hadn't expected the very small, very old, cemetery in town to have such a thorough website. The larger, current cemetery only has information about buying plots and cemetery etiquette and things. But while the site for Oak Leaf Cemetery was clearly developed years ago, there's a ton of plain-text information on it, and more pictures than I'd expected. I was surprised to find any results for “Mason”, since someone at the historical society meeting had mentioned none of the family were buried here. At first I chalked it up to it being such a common surname – clearly, it wouldn't be surprising to have had more than one unrelated family with that name in the town over the years. But while I had that page open, another one I'd opened finished loading, and on it were photographs – mostly old family photos, but also some newer images of old gravestones, followed by a listing of information from other gravestones the family historian must have investigated. I skimmed through the list quickly, but then my heart stopped: “Calvin Marcus Mason, died 1901, age four. Parents unknown. NC.”
On seeing that, I jumped back to the local cemetery's page, and took a closer look at the giant grid of names and dates. Calvin! He's there! The site has very blunt, simple information: “Calvin Marcus Mason, 1897 – 1901, 4 yo,” and then some abbreviated gibberish that I eventually figure out is location information. Calvin is buried at Oak Leaf, which I pass every day on my way to work. I've walked through it once or twice... but if I'd seen his stone, his name would have sounded familiar to me when he told it to me. God that's a creepy thought – to have a child tell you his name, and to have remembered seeing it on a gravestone! I shudder, so relieved that it didn't work out that way. Poor kid... and I can't imagine anyone's done more than given his grave a passing glance in all the time since his family moved away.
I made note of the location information in my sketchbook, and decided that the next day off I have, that's where I'm headed. I know it won't give me any new information, but... but there's no way I can not visit poor Cal.
Despite the several hours searching, I don't find much more than cursory information on the Masons I know. I did find Avery's name a few times – at least, I hope it's the right Avery, the years seem about right. Hopefully I'll get a chance to ask one of them if his middle name is Dorcey. Avery Dorcey Mason... Calvin Marcus Mason... they sound similar in style, anyway. And none of them have Biblical names at all, which still seems a little odd to me. But having been staring at the names of people from that era for a few hours, it's not quite as unusual as I would have guessed.
Assuming my Avery is Avery Dorcey, it looks like he was married, and had a few kids. Married in 1905, so he would have been... let's see, four years older than Evelyn, who was probably fifteen in 1902 at the time of the fire, so... married at twenty-two, that sounds about right. He was married somewhere in New York to a Sarah Pemberton, and they had... well, five children, only three of whom lived past the age of a year or so. It's still crazy to me, how high childhood mortality rates were back then. I have to wonder if Calvin wasn't the only Mason child to not make it very long. Avery and Sarah's kids were Alice Viola (born 1906), Hazel Marie (1907), and Cecil Bernard (1910), with the two who died being Daniel (1905) and Lillie (1911). All three were married, and had children, but I could only follow Alice down to her kids, not her grandkids. She may not have had any, but that website didn't have much information on the branch I was interested in anyway, I don't think I found Cecil even listed on the tree that showed Alice's marriage. It's Cecil's descendant that owns the property now – makes sense, it went to the eldest son, and then down from there to Avery's... let's see, great-grandson, probably? I couldn't find a cohesive tree actually linking Avery down to Mr. Jeremy-in-Nevada, but despite missing a few steps here and there, I think that's the case.
I suddenly have way more respect for my grandpa, who I've seen working on family trees on and off again for as long as I can remember. I understand now why he had so many stacks of paper all around his desk, this stuff gets complicated! I've been trying to sort out if any of the family came back to North Carolina at some point, but following the daughters down the line is difficult. And Hazel didn't have any sons, just daughters, only one of whom I was able to find a marriage notice for. If I can figure out even what states they all wound up living in, I might be able to find marriage records or something, even notices in newspapers – assuming that information is online, and not just stashed away in a neat binder in a dim corner of some library on the other side of the freaking country!
Groaning aloud, I lean back from the computer, again rubbing my fists against closed eyelids. I need to go to bed, I have to work tomorrow, and my eyeballs are freaking shot for the night. I make sure I have everything bookmarked, and take another look at the tentative, sprawling family tree I've sketched out. There are a lot of arrows heading off in awkward directions – I'll have to draw it out more clearly, to get a better idea of what I know and don't know. My head is spinning from all the generations and maiden names and married names and...
Computer off. No more. Time for bed.
Wednesday, November 23, 2011
Part 23
The third photo is a more casual image – very blurry, I doubt it was taken by a professional. But it looks like it was taken in the garden, or in a garden, or a park, anyway. I think it's Avery, a little younger, maybe eight or so? He's sitting near a pretty iron bench, with his arms wrapped tightly around a dog's neck. The dog must be Rollie, it's large and black, with a little splash of white at it's throat. I can only make out part of the boy's face, as he's laying his head against the dog's neck, but when I flip the image over, I see the name on the back: “Avery Mason and dog, taken by Phillip Nestor. 1890s.” The image overall is fairly dark, very low contrast, though I can just make out the dappled shadows from tree leaves overhead. I can pretty well re-imagine the scene in my mind, filling in the colors and the actual lighting, and it's a lovely summer sort of image.
That's it for the Masons in this folder – no, that's right, Susan said there were unidentified images in the back of the folder. Since no-one else... no-one else alive now knows what Meres looks like. That's an eerie thought. But I might be able to pick the family out, as I know them a little more personally than the town historians do!
It seems this is the section where the group photos are, as well – makes sense, it seems there's no group photo without at least a couple of question marks. Skimming through, I pause at a photo of a garden party – it looks like – oh, it is the Mason's garden! Cora stands in the middle of a group of other women. Flipping the photo over, I can see that some have been identified, others not. Cora has been, and a few other names I don't recognize. I turn it back over, to spend another moment looking at the photo. Those dresses look so uncomfortable, it's insane. But Cora seems to be the center of attention – the image isn't very sharp, I'm actually impressed at how spontaneous of an image it is. It looks like the women are all standing around, some with small china plates of food, some with glasses, talking. Some of their faces are eerie blank blurs – I suppose they turned their heads while the photo was being taken. Cora is relatively clear, and so, of course, are the flowers. There are huge bushes surrounding the group of women, and it looks like they're standing on that large tile area I've seen, with the patterned tiles.
I don't find any more of interest in this folder, and move onto the next. Nothing in the M section, and... no, nothing in the unidentified section, either. I suppose that's not surprising, these images cover the years 1900-1920, the Masons would have only been in town those first two years. While I'm sure there would have been more photographs taken of the family, more formal shots of the children if nothing else, those would have been kept by the Masons themselves, and were probably lost in the fire. I suppose they may have rescued some of them in their flight, as it seems they had a few minutes at least to gather things before escaping the house, but those would be with their descendants out in... wasn't it New Mexico or something, that the current owner of the property lives in? I wonder... would he have anything more of theirs? Or know any more of their story? I'm sure he wouldn't know much about their lives at the time they lived in this house, I probably know more than he would, but... what did the family become after they left this town? Did Evelyn get married? Avery? Which of them had children? Did Avery need to find work to support the family – for that matter, did Evelyn--- no, I don't think she would have gone to work outside the home, I feel like it was still pretty rare for women to do so at that time. Anyway, the family clearly had money. Avery managed to pull something from the family safe before the house burned, and I'm sure there would have been bank accounts and things. With Mr. Mason presumed dead, all of that would have been turned over to Cora, I would imagine.
Oh, so much speculation! I wish I had any chance of finding out more... maybe I'll go nose around one of those genealogical websites or something, see if I can find anything.
Sighing, I rub at my eyes, and look around the room. I can tell by the light just filtering through the window that it's getting near closing hour for the hall. I scoop up the folders, careful not to drop any of the loose photos I've pulled, and peek out into the hall, listening for the sound of a copy machine and/or Susan.
It's hard to miss the sound of the copier, and Susan's loud chatter over it. Following the sound, I'm not surprised to find myself peeking my head into a small room adjacent to the main office I first found Susan in. She's now standing at a large, modern-looking digital copier, and though Claire is nowhere in sight, her voice sounds clearly from the next room.
“You just hit the---”
“I know, I know! Oh, it's going to-- no, no wait, I've got it! I know exactly what I'm doing now!” Susan holds aloft a fresh print, grinning, and as she turns to wave it in the doorway to the next room, catches sight of me. “Oh! Kimber! Not to worry, the situation is under control.”
I giggle at this. “I can tell.”
“Well. Here's the first one – I had to switch out our cheap generic paper for the nicer photo paper, but it's all set now. The rest will be ready for you in a minute. You found a few more? Excellent.” She reaches for the folders in my hands, and I pass them over.
“Can I help at all?”
“Nope! I've got it now. Was there anything else you wanted a look at while you're here? I'll only be a few minutes, you're welcome to just have a seat if you want to wait.”
“Actually... is the map guy here today? I can't for the life of me remember what his name is.”
“I'm not surprised! He doesn't think of a thing but his maps, I'm sure he never even thought to tell you his name, or ask for yours. That would be Ed Josephson. And, yes, I'm sure he's here. We usually have to drag him bodily out of the building at closing.”
Which reminds me – I look around the room, and spot a clock on the wall. Four-thirty, not so bad. I have time to pop up for a quick question without keeping anyone late.
“I was just curious about the borders of the Mason property, I figured he'd be the one to ask.”
“Most definitely – you go on ahead, I'll get your copies all settled for you in the meantime.”
“Thanks again!”
I head up the hallway and a flight of stairs, generally remembering where I found his office before. There is, actually, a name outside the door, which I suppose I saw last time, though it evidently didn't stick in my mind. I knock at the half-open door.
“C'mon in – just watch your step.”
I step tentatively around the door, and instantly see why I was given the warning. If I thought the maps were all over the place the last time I was here... well, clearly, I underestimated the possibilities. I look across the floor, searching for a safe path, and... there's definitely no way to get anywhere. I look up at Ed, and my expression must be pretty hopeless looking, because he laughs and apologizes.
“Sorry, young lady! I wasn't expecting visitors today – but no, no, you're not interrupting anything but me cleaning up my own mess. Just hand me that satellite map at your feet there, and you should be clear to make it to the chair.”
I do as instructed, and he carefully folds the map as I take a seat.
“So, what can I help you with today? You were the one that wanted to know about the area around the old Mason place, right?”
“Yep! Kimberly Bennett – Kimber,” I offer, reaching out a hand.
“Ah! You've been talking with the girls downstairs, and they told you about my bad habit with names, didn't they?”
I grin, nodding. “Afraid so.”
“Well.” He takes my hand and shakes it once firmly. “Edward Josephson – but just call me Ed, it's too darn long of a name otherwise.”
“I was actually wondering if you had an idea of the outlines of the Mason property. I know you showed me a map last time I was here, but I'd like to take a closer look at where all it extends – or, extended – to.”
“Certainly!” He's already rummaging through piles, having started the instant I said the name “Mason”. “You've been back there, then? Find the house yet?”
I laugh at this. “To put it mildly! I've walked through the gardens about a dozen times now, and it wasn't long before I found the ruins of the house. I've been doing some more research, on the house and the family – working on a series of drawings, when I have time.” It sounds so calm and normal to word it like this, when really, it's become a full-time obsession. Even when I'm at work, my mind constantly wanders back to Evelyn and her family. I keep bringing home little doodles of compositions and poses drawn on the back of receipt paper snagged out of the cash registers.
“Mm-hmm...” While I suspect he completely understands the obsession angle, his tone indicates that he's less interested in some young whippersnapper's attempt at “Art”. “Ah! There we are.” He carefully lays a map on top of the million other maps on what I assume is his desk. I recognize it as the very old map he showed me last time. He leans down close to the half-faded ink lines, and I move my chair closer and lean forward as well – though I make sure to stay out of his way.
“Let's see... the Mason place is over here. There's the stream, and the old road...” His finger traces the air just above the old yellow paper. “Here we are – this dotted line here, that shows the borders of the property. It fades in and out, but you can get a fairly good idea.”
I lean closer, trying to match up the faint lines with the areas I've walked over a hundred times. “Right...”
He picks up on my uncertainty. “Well, now that's Central Avenue right there. Walnut, which didn't exist at the time, probably runs about here. You live nearby there, don't you?”
I nod. “Apartments on Watercress.”
“Right! Those would be... let's see, I think they'd sit right about here. That look to be about the right distance from the creek to you?”
I squint a little, then let my eyes glaze a little, trying to match up the lines with the images in my head. “I think so, yeah...”
“The Mason property line runs clear out past there – it looks like your apartment is on land that used to be theirs. I can double-check that on a newer map, I don't know if the family leases that area, or if they sold it at some point in the past to a developer.”
I scan lightly around the rest of the property line, just to get a general idea of how far it extends. And it looks like I was right – there's no way the fence encloses an area that large, it looks like they definitely bought up the land for at least a half-mile, a mile in some places, around the house's location, to ensure their continued privacy.
“Do you have any idea what year this map was made?”
“Somewhere near the end of the 1800s, maybe early 1900s. The only thing we have to go on is the style of handwriting – it's a different kind of paper from what was usually used for newspapers and things, so it's tough to match up.”
So much for figuring out if it was Meres or Mr. Mason who purchased the extensive plot shown on the map – either would be possible. Meres may have only enclosed the area he felt they needed for the homestead, or Mr. Mason may have bought more beyond the fence just to keep neighbors from happening.
That's it for the Masons in this folder – no, that's right, Susan said there were unidentified images in the back of the folder. Since no-one else... no-one else alive now knows what Meres looks like. That's an eerie thought. But I might be able to pick the family out, as I know them a little more personally than the town historians do!
It seems this is the section where the group photos are, as well – makes sense, it seems there's no group photo without at least a couple of question marks. Skimming through, I pause at a photo of a garden party – it looks like – oh, it is the Mason's garden! Cora stands in the middle of a group of other women. Flipping the photo over, I can see that some have been identified, others not. Cora has been, and a few other names I don't recognize. I turn it back over, to spend another moment looking at the photo. Those dresses look so uncomfortable, it's insane. But Cora seems to be the center of attention – the image isn't very sharp, I'm actually impressed at how spontaneous of an image it is. It looks like the women are all standing around, some with small china plates of food, some with glasses, talking. Some of their faces are eerie blank blurs – I suppose they turned their heads while the photo was being taken. Cora is relatively clear, and so, of course, are the flowers. There are huge bushes surrounding the group of women, and it looks like they're standing on that large tile area I've seen, with the patterned tiles.
I don't find any more of interest in this folder, and move onto the next. Nothing in the M section, and... no, nothing in the unidentified section, either. I suppose that's not surprising, these images cover the years 1900-1920, the Masons would have only been in town those first two years. While I'm sure there would have been more photographs taken of the family, more formal shots of the children if nothing else, those would have been kept by the Masons themselves, and were probably lost in the fire. I suppose they may have rescued some of them in their flight, as it seems they had a few minutes at least to gather things before escaping the house, but those would be with their descendants out in... wasn't it New Mexico or something, that the current owner of the property lives in? I wonder... would he have anything more of theirs? Or know any more of their story? I'm sure he wouldn't know much about their lives at the time they lived in this house, I probably know more than he would, but... what did the family become after they left this town? Did Evelyn get married? Avery? Which of them had children? Did Avery need to find work to support the family – for that matter, did Evelyn--- no, I don't think she would have gone to work outside the home, I feel like it was still pretty rare for women to do so at that time. Anyway, the family clearly had money. Avery managed to pull something from the family safe before the house burned, and I'm sure there would have been bank accounts and things. With Mr. Mason presumed dead, all of that would have been turned over to Cora, I would imagine.
Oh, so much speculation! I wish I had any chance of finding out more... maybe I'll go nose around one of those genealogical websites or something, see if I can find anything.
Sighing, I rub at my eyes, and look around the room. I can tell by the light just filtering through the window that it's getting near closing hour for the hall. I scoop up the folders, careful not to drop any of the loose photos I've pulled, and peek out into the hall, listening for the sound of a copy machine and/or Susan.
It's hard to miss the sound of the copier, and Susan's loud chatter over it. Following the sound, I'm not surprised to find myself peeking my head into a small room adjacent to the main office I first found Susan in. She's now standing at a large, modern-looking digital copier, and though Claire is nowhere in sight, her voice sounds clearly from the next room.
“You just hit the---”
“I know, I know! Oh, it's going to-- no, no wait, I've got it! I know exactly what I'm doing now!” Susan holds aloft a fresh print, grinning, and as she turns to wave it in the doorway to the next room, catches sight of me. “Oh! Kimber! Not to worry, the situation is under control.”
I giggle at this. “I can tell.”
“Well. Here's the first one – I had to switch out our cheap generic paper for the nicer photo paper, but it's all set now. The rest will be ready for you in a minute. You found a few more? Excellent.” She reaches for the folders in my hands, and I pass them over.
“Can I help at all?”
“Nope! I've got it now. Was there anything else you wanted a look at while you're here? I'll only be a few minutes, you're welcome to just have a seat if you want to wait.”
“Actually... is the map guy here today? I can't for the life of me remember what his name is.”
“I'm not surprised! He doesn't think of a thing but his maps, I'm sure he never even thought to tell you his name, or ask for yours. That would be Ed Josephson. And, yes, I'm sure he's here. We usually have to drag him bodily out of the building at closing.”
Which reminds me – I look around the room, and spot a clock on the wall. Four-thirty, not so bad. I have time to pop up for a quick question without keeping anyone late.
“I was just curious about the borders of the Mason property, I figured he'd be the one to ask.”
“Most definitely – you go on ahead, I'll get your copies all settled for you in the meantime.”
“Thanks again!”
I head up the hallway and a flight of stairs, generally remembering where I found his office before. There is, actually, a name outside the door, which I suppose I saw last time, though it evidently didn't stick in my mind. I knock at the half-open door.
“C'mon in – just watch your step.”
I step tentatively around the door, and instantly see why I was given the warning. If I thought the maps were all over the place the last time I was here... well, clearly, I underestimated the possibilities. I look across the floor, searching for a safe path, and... there's definitely no way to get anywhere. I look up at Ed, and my expression must be pretty hopeless looking, because he laughs and apologizes.
“Sorry, young lady! I wasn't expecting visitors today – but no, no, you're not interrupting anything but me cleaning up my own mess. Just hand me that satellite map at your feet there, and you should be clear to make it to the chair.”
I do as instructed, and he carefully folds the map as I take a seat.
“So, what can I help you with today? You were the one that wanted to know about the area around the old Mason place, right?”
“Yep! Kimberly Bennett – Kimber,” I offer, reaching out a hand.
“Ah! You've been talking with the girls downstairs, and they told you about my bad habit with names, didn't they?”
I grin, nodding. “Afraid so.”
“Well.” He takes my hand and shakes it once firmly. “Edward Josephson – but just call me Ed, it's too darn long of a name otherwise.”
“I was actually wondering if you had an idea of the outlines of the Mason property. I know you showed me a map last time I was here, but I'd like to take a closer look at where all it extends – or, extended – to.”
“Certainly!” He's already rummaging through piles, having started the instant I said the name “Mason”. “You've been back there, then? Find the house yet?”
I laugh at this. “To put it mildly! I've walked through the gardens about a dozen times now, and it wasn't long before I found the ruins of the house. I've been doing some more research, on the house and the family – working on a series of drawings, when I have time.” It sounds so calm and normal to word it like this, when really, it's become a full-time obsession. Even when I'm at work, my mind constantly wanders back to Evelyn and her family. I keep bringing home little doodles of compositions and poses drawn on the back of receipt paper snagged out of the cash registers.
“Mm-hmm...” While I suspect he completely understands the obsession angle, his tone indicates that he's less interested in some young whippersnapper's attempt at “Art”. “Ah! There we are.” He carefully lays a map on top of the million other maps on what I assume is his desk. I recognize it as the very old map he showed me last time. He leans down close to the half-faded ink lines, and I move my chair closer and lean forward as well – though I make sure to stay out of his way.
“Let's see... the Mason place is over here. There's the stream, and the old road...” His finger traces the air just above the old yellow paper. “Here we are – this dotted line here, that shows the borders of the property. It fades in and out, but you can get a fairly good idea.”
I lean closer, trying to match up the faint lines with the areas I've walked over a hundred times. “Right...”
He picks up on my uncertainty. “Well, now that's Central Avenue right there. Walnut, which didn't exist at the time, probably runs about here. You live nearby there, don't you?”
I nod. “Apartments on Watercress.”
“Right! Those would be... let's see, I think they'd sit right about here. That look to be about the right distance from the creek to you?”
I squint a little, then let my eyes glaze a little, trying to match up the lines with the images in my head. “I think so, yeah...”
“The Mason property line runs clear out past there – it looks like your apartment is on land that used to be theirs. I can double-check that on a newer map, I don't know if the family leases that area, or if they sold it at some point in the past to a developer.”
I scan lightly around the rest of the property line, just to get a general idea of how far it extends. And it looks like I was right – there's no way the fence encloses an area that large, it looks like they definitely bought up the land for at least a half-mile, a mile in some places, around the house's location, to ensure their continued privacy.
“Do you have any idea what year this map was made?”
“Somewhere near the end of the 1800s, maybe early 1900s. The only thing we have to go on is the style of handwriting – it's a different kind of paper from what was usually used for newspapers and things, so it's tough to match up.”
So much for figuring out if it was Meres or Mr. Mason who purchased the extensive plot shown on the map – either would be possible. Meres may have only enclosed the area he felt they needed for the homestead, or Mr. Mason may have bought more beyond the fence just to keep neighbors from happening.
Tuesday, November 22, 2011
Part 22
“Well, when you do, there should be a few goodies in this folder as well. Images of the house, and a few even of the gardens.”
“Fantastic, thank you!”
“Oh, no trouble at all. Let me check one other spot, and see if there are any other photographs of the family.”
I continue flipping through the portfolio of Derek Reese's photos, and while I don't spot any more of the Mason family, I'm happy to have looked through the rest, they really are beautiful. The photos make it look as though each person in them has some particularly unique quality, something that makes you stop and give them a moment's more consideration than you otherwise would have. There's one of an old man, face and hands severely weather-worn, who looks quite out of place in an ill-fitting suit. But he's sitting on a stool, leaning one arm against a table, and looks off to one side – and there's a glint in his eyes, a hint of a smile around his crevassed face, and instead of an awkward portrait shot of a man in his Sunday suit, it's a really sweet photo of someone's father, someone's grandfather.
I move on to the next folder, and find, like the first one, a loose stack of old photographs. There are sheets of looseleaf paper set in between some, marking off different areas of the town. I flip through the first few, and see an assortment of photos of the town as it looked fifty, a hundred years ago. They're vaguely in order, with the oldest images in front of the newer ones, but the locations and subjects jump around quite a bit. Most are of storefronts, and photos taken along the length of a street in town, though some are of more ephemeral things – a hot dog stand in the park, a woman hanging clothes out on a line between two old brick buildings, school science fairs, festivals in the square, kids in parades and kids holding ice cream cones.
I skip over several sections in this folder, until I reach the section marked “town outskirts”. These skip around even more with their locations, some as far away as what's now the next town over. But the photo I want is fairly old, so it's not long before I've found it – no, found them! There are several images, and I smile fondly as I flip through them.
The first image is another general shot of the house – the trees out front are smaller, so it must have been taken relatively early on. The next seems to focus on the pattern of the brickwork, though it's framed nicely by daylilies blooming on each side of the image.
The next photo surprises me – it's a room I haven't seen before, though the back of the photo has a light pencil notation reading “Mason house – music room. Pre-1900.” The walls of the room alternate between sections of smooth pale stone (marble? granite?) and sections that have been either painted or carved, with elaborate graceful swirls and floral designs. Almost art nouveau, really, though a little less stylized. The ceiling seems to be wood, intricately carved, though the area is too much in shadow for me to make out the details. The wood-paneled floor is a striking pattern of varied lines radiating from a star at the center of the room. Low couches curl around two sides of the room, their dark cushions looking very deep and comfortable. Several sconces are set into the walls, though I can't tell if they would have been lit from within by candles or gaslight. There is a tall window behind one of the couches, and though it's partly covered by diaphanous curtains, I can see a small section of the frame – and oh, it's gorgeous! Instead of the usual grid pattern of iron frame with glass set in rectangles, the ironwork again echoes the swirls of the fence outside. There is a small grand piano set on the opposite side of the room, and several ornate music stands are set against the wall nearby. Just at the edge of the frame, I can make out some kind of stand with several shelves, and there is the glint of light reflecting off of metal tubing – other musical instruments, I'd guess. It would have been expected, of Evelyn at least, to learn the piano. I wonder what the other instruments are, and if they were all brought in by Mr. Mason and Cora, or if they were left by Meres and Celestine? I could see them having a real love of music, while the later pair of adults would have seen it more as a social status thing.
I know I shouldn't just assume the best of Meres and the worst of Mr. Mason, but it's hard for me not to. I've seen nothing but harshness and cold cruelty from Mr. Mason, and while I had only a short glimpse of Meres... I still hold to my idea that someone really mean and detached couldn't have created a place so beautiful to live in. I could see Mr. Mason filling the place with expensive things, sure, but the artistic eye that arranged everything there – that, he couldn't have done.
I still wonder that Evelyn is Mr. Mason's child, she seems so little like him. As for Evelyn's mother... the jury's still out on that front. There ought to be more information about her - probably in these archives I'm surrounded by, come to think of it! I'll have to come back another day though, I've forgotten my watch but I'm sure it's getting on in the afternoon.
I move on to the next photo, and smile as I recognize the tall, elaborate main fountain in the gardens. There's water moving over the intricate twining flowers and figures, and I think I can just make out the fish swimming in the basin. The next photograph is of the bridge I crossed one day, spanning the creek. Obviously, there's no color in the photo, but from the shade of gray, I suspect I was right in guessing that the bridge had once been a vivid red. The willow tree, just visible in the background, is so little! Its leaves are nowhere near touching the water below. The last photo is a hand-colored one, showing the rose garden – and I shiver a little, remembering the confrontation with Mr. Mason that Evelyn and I had there. But the roses themselves are lovely, and the photo shows the formal arrangement of the garden nicely. Though I think the colors chosen to paint the image aren't quite right, I remember there were white ones, right at the start of that path--- oh, they could have planted different roses at different times, I know, but I like the thought that my memories of the garden a hundred years gone have more detail than the photo taken at the time!
The next photo is one of a bed and breakfast a little ways outside of town – though, of course, it was someone's home at the time of the photos, not a home-based business. I flip lightly through the rest, but there's nothing more of the Mason place. I set the photos I found carefully aside to be copied. Though only the music room is new to me, they're still really pretty pictures, and I don't have any photos yet of the gardens as Evelyn saw them. (Here's hoping that the distortion that happened to the camera files is the same each trip – I feel so lucky to have found the solution this last time, I'm terrified it'll take something even more complicated to fix them on subsequent visits back there!)
Just as I'm closing the folder, Susan lets out a triumphant cry, and closes a file drawer with a flourish. “Found them! “Miscellaneous People, 1850-1900” and “1900-1920”. Alphabetical by last name inside each folder, with ones we couldn't identify at the back of the folder.”
“Awesome, thanks!” I reach over to take the folders from her, and as she leans forward, she takes note of the photos I've set aside for copying.
“Found some you like, I see?”
“Definitely!”
“You want me to get started on the copies, while you skim through these last folders? It'll take the machine a little while to warm up if no-one's used it in the past few hours, but it's a fantastic near-photo quality thing, so it's worth the wait.”
“I'm so glad to hear it – I was worried I'd be getting blotchy old-school xeroxes.”
“Nope! ...now, if you'd stopped in, say, two years ago? You'd have been lucky to get a blotchy print, or anything at all to come out of that old monster. But we worked over our budget with a fine-tooth comb, and with the help of one of the professors on campus who's obsessed with Derick Reese's work, we managed a lovely new behemoth.”
I've handed her the folders with the photos I've already picked out, and she flips through them curiously. “Oh! Is this one of the Masons?” She flips the image of the young man over, and notes the blank back. “If you're reasonable sure, I'll label it – it would be fantastic to have an unknown one filled in! Do you think it's the one who died in the fire?”
I shake my head, my words coming slowly, unsure. “I'm not totally positive, but, I think it's actually the first Mr. Mason, the one who built the house.”
“Really? That's fantastic! We have so little information on him... oh, and won't Mary Sueter love this photo,” she adds with a grin. “Just her sort of romantic image, with a dark and handsome young man.”
I grin back – both at the jest, and in relief that she hasn't asked me how I know, or even guess, at the man's identity. I nearly told her I saw some similarity between this man and Mr. A. Mason, but remembered just in time that someone told me there were no known photographs of Mr. Mason. Still, the more I look at the photo, the more I felt sure, it's an image of Meres. Those eyes... they couldn't be anyone else's. I've run that brief scene of him and Celestine at the fountain through my mind a thousand times, and while the images blur a bit with each repeat, I'm almost positive this is him.
As Susan leaves the room, I open the first of the two folders she handed me. I skip directly to the M's – realizing as I do so, that I have no idea what Cora's maiden name is. I should see if I can find that out. It's not likely that there are many younger photos of her, since the farther back in time, even by only a decade or so, the more rare photographs are. I doubt there's any hope of finding out Celestine's maiden name, but somehow I feel like she wasn't a local girl anyway. The seclusion she and Meres seemed to have sought out wouldn't have been really possible if her parents lived a short drive up the road.
There! The first image in the M section is the photo of Cora that was in the town history book. And--- oh! The picture behind it is the children! Well, Avery and Evelyn, anyway. Evelyn looks to be about five or six here, Avery probably about ten, so Calvin wouldn't have been born yet. She looks as cute and charming as ever, despite the solemn expression on her round face. She's dressed in a frothy concoction of white lace, with her curls accented by a large white bow that sits behind them. Avery is pretty adorable too, he looks like such a miniature man, dressed in a very sharply-cut suit, which he looks surprisingly comfortable in. He has one hand on Evelyn's shoulder, and looks straight ahead into the camera, with almost a bit of menace in his eyes, as if daring anyone to harm his little sister. His hair is darker than hers, though nowhere near as dark as his father's, I don't think. It's cut short, and carefully combed and slicked back into place. His face is very handsome, having lost some of its childish roundness, the features gaining the first strength of young adulthood.
Avery's eyes... there's only the faintest hints of their father in either of their faces, but Avery's eyes have by far the strongest of those hints. In place of the coldness, there's a fierce passion lurking there, but there's the same strength, the same intense insistence that the world is going to do what he demands of it. Though in Avery's case, I suppose it's more of a defense mechanism, than his father's sense of entitlement.
“Fantastic, thank you!”
“Oh, no trouble at all. Let me check one other spot, and see if there are any other photographs of the family.”
I continue flipping through the portfolio of Derek Reese's photos, and while I don't spot any more of the Mason family, I'm happy to have looked through the rest, they really are beautiful. The photos make it look as though each person in them has some particularly unique quality, something that makes you stop and give them a moment's more consideration than you otherwise would have. There's one of an old man, face and hands severely weather-worn, who looks quite out of place in an ill-fitting suit. But he's sitting on a stool, leaning one arm against a table, and looks off to one side – and there's a glint in his eyes, a hint of a smile around his crevassed face, and instead of an awkward portrait shot of a man in his Sunday suit, it's a really sweet photo of someone's father, someone's grandfather.
I move on to the next folder, and find, like the first one, a loose stack of old photographs. There are sheets of looseleaf paper set in between some, marking off different areas of the town. I flip through the first few, and see an assortment of photos of the town as it looked fifty, a hundred years ago. They're vaguely in order, with the oldest images in front of the newer ones, but the locations and subjects jump around quite a bit. Most are of storefronts, and photos taken along the length of a street in town, though some are of more ephemeral things – a hot dog stand in the park, a woman hanging clothes out on a line between two old brick buildings, school science fairs, festivals in the square, kids in parades and kids holding ice cream cones.
I skip over several sections in this folder, until I reach the section marked “town outskirts”. These skip around even more with their locations, some as far away as what's now the next town over. But the photo I want is fairly old, so it's not long before I've found it – no, found them! There are several images, and I smile fondly as I flip through them.
The first image is another general shot of the house – the trees out front are smaller, so it must have been taken relatively early on. The next seems to focus on the pattern of the brickwork, though it's framed nicely by daylilies blooming on each side of the image.
The next photo surprises me – it's a room I haven't seen before, though the back of the photo has a light pencil notation reading “Mason house – music room. Pre-1900.” The walls of the room alternate between sections of smooth pale stone (marble? granite?) and sections that have been either painted or carved, with elaborate graceful swirls and floral designs. Almost art nouveau, really, though a little less stylized. The ceiling seems to be wood, intricately carved, though the area is too much in shadow for me to make out the details. The wood-paneled floor is a striking pattern of varied lines radiating from a star at the center of the room. Low couches curl around two sides of the room, their dark cushions looking very deep and comfortable. Several sconces are set into the walls, though I can't tell if they would have been lit from within by candles or gaslight. There is a tall window behind one of the couches, and though it's partly covered by diaphanous curtains, I can see a small section of the frame – and oh, it's gorgeous! Instead of the usual grid pattern of iron frame with glass set in rectangles, the ironwork again echoes the swirls of the fence outside. There is a small grand piano set on the opposite side of the room, and several ornate music stands are set against the wall nearby. Just at the edge of the frame, I can make out some kind of stand with several shelves, and there is the glint of light reflecting off of metal tubing – other musical instruments, I'd guess. It would have been expected, of Evelyn at least, to learn the piano. I wonder what the other instruments are, and if they were all brought in by Mr. Mason and Cora, or if they were left by Meres and Celestine? I could see them having a real love of music, while the later pair of adults would have seen it more as a social status thing.
I know I shouldn't just assume the best of Meres and the worst of Mr. Mason, but it's hard for me not to. I've seen nothing but harshness and cold cruelty from Mr. Mason, and while I had only a short glimpse of Meres... I still hold to my idea that someone really mean and detached couldn't have created a place so beautiful to live in. I could see Mr. Mason filling the place with expensive things, sure, but the artistic eye that arranged everything there – that, he couldn't have done.
I still wonder that Evelyn is Mr. Mason's child, she seems so little like him. As for Evelyn's mother... the jury's still out on that front. There ought to be more information about her - probably in these archives I'm surrounded by, come to think of it! I'll have to come back another day though, I've forgotten my watch but I'm sure it's getting on in the afternoon.
I move on to the next photo, and smile as I recognize the tall, elaborate main fountain in the gardens. There's water moving over the intricate twining flowers and figures, and I think I can just make out the fish swimming in the basin. The next photograph is of the bridge I crossed one day, spanning the creek. Obviously, there's no color in the photo, but from the shade of gray, I suspect I was right in guessing that the bridge had once been a vivid red. The willow tree, just visible in the background, is so little! Its leaves are nowhere near touching the water below. The last photo is a hand-colored one, showing the rose garden – and I shiver a little, remembering the confrontation with Mr. Mason that Evelyn and I had there. But the roses themselves are lovely, and the photo shows the formal arrangement of the garden nicely. Though I think the colors chosen to paint the image aren't quite right, I remember there were white ones, right at the start of that path--- oh, they could have planted different roses at different times, I know, but I like the thought that my memories of the garden a hundred years gone have more detail than the photo taken at the time!
The next photo is one of a bed and breakfast a little ways outside of town – though, of course, it was someone's home at the time of the photos, not a home-based business. I flip lightly through the rest, but there's nothing more of the Mason place. I set the photos I found carefully aside to be copied. Though only the music room is new to me, they're still really pretty pictures, and I don't have any photos yet of the gardens as Evelyn saw them. (Here's hoping that the distortion that happened to the camera files is the same each trip – I feel so lucky to have found the solution this last time, I'm terrified it'll take something even more complicated to fix them on subsequent visits back there!)
Just as I'm closing the folder, Susan lets out a triumphant cry, and closes a file drawer with a flourish. “Found them! “Miscellaneous People, 1850-1900” and “1900-1920”. Alphabetical by last name inside each folder, with ones we couldn't identify at the back of the folder.”
“Awesome, thanks!” I reach over to take the folders from her, and as she leans forward, she takes note of the photos I've set aside for copying.
“Found some you like, I see?”
“Definitely!”
“You want me to get started on the copies, while you skim through these last folders? It'll take the machine a little while to warm up if no-one's used it in the past few hours, but it's a fantastic near-photo quality thing, so it's worth the wait.”
“I'm so glad to hear it – I was worried I'd be getting blotchy old-school xeroxes.”
“Nope! ...now, if you'd stopped in, say, two years ago? You'd have been lucky to get a blotchy print, or anything at all to come out of that old monster. But we worked over our budget with a fine-tooth comb, and with the help of one of the professors on campus who's obsessed with Derick Reese's work, we managed a lovely new behemoth.”
I've handed her the folders with the photos I've already picked out, and she flips through them curiously. “Oh! Is this one of the Masons?” She flips the image of the young man over, and notes the blank back. “If you're reasonable sure, I'll label it – it would be fantastic to have an unknown one filled in! Do you think it's the one who died in the fire?”
I shake my head, my words coming slowly, unsure. “I'm not totally positive, but, I think it's actually the first Mr. Mason, the one who built the house.”
“Really? That's fantastic! We have so little information on him... oh, and won't Mary Sueter love this photo,” she adds with a grin. “Just her sort of romantic image, with a dark and handsome young man.”
I grin back – both at the jest, and in relief that she hasn't asked me how I know, or even guess, at the man's identity. I nearly told her I saw some similarity between this man and Mr. A. Mason, but remembered just in time that someone told me there were no known photographs of Mr. Mason. Still, the more I look at the photo, the more I felt sure, it's an image of Meres. Those eyes... they couldn't be anyone else's. I've run that brief scene of him and Celestine at the fountain through my mind a thousand times, and while the images blur a bit with each repeat, I'm almost positive this is him.
As Susan leaves the room, I open the first of the two folders she handed me. I skip directly to the M's – realizing as I do so, that I have no idea what Cora's maiden name is. I should see if I can find that out. It's not likely that there are many younger photos of her, since the farther back in time, even by only a decade or so, the more rare photographs are. I doubt there's any hope of finding out Celestine's maiden name, but somehow I feel like she wasn't a local girl anyway. The seclusion she and Meres seemed to have sought out wouldn't have been really possible if her parents lived a short drive up the road.
There! The first image in the M section is the photo of Cora that was in the town history book. And--- oh! The picture behind it is the children! Well, Avery and Evelyn, anyway. Evelyn looks to be about five or six here, Avery probably about ten, so Calvin wouldn't have been born yet. She looks as cute and charming as ever, despite the solemn expression on her round face. She's dressed in a frothy concoction of white lace, with her curls accented by a large white bow that sits behind them. Avery is pretty adorable too, he looks like such a miniature man, dressed in a very sharply-cut suit, which he looks surprisingly comfortable in. He has one hand on Evelyn's shoulder, and looks straight ahead into the camera, with almost a bit of menace in his eyes, as if daring anyone to harm his little sister. His hair is darker than hers, though nowhere near as dark as his father's, I don't think. It's cut short, and carefully combed and slicked back into place. His face is very handsome, having lost some of its childish roundness, the features gaining the first strength of young adulthood.
Avery's eyes... there's only the faintest hints of their father in either of their faces, but Avery's eyes have by far the strongest of those hints. In place of the coldness, there's a fierce passion lurking there, but there's the same strength, the same intense insistence that the world is going to do what he demands of it. Though in Avery's case, I suppose it's more of a defense mechanism, than his father's sense of entitlement.
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