Spectre
One time Atticus said you never really knew a man until you stood in his shoes and walked around in them; just standin' on the Radley porch was enough. ~ Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird
My children, J. and C., and I are squeezing beneath the fence. 8-year-old C. is holding back the rusted barbs just centimeters off the seat of my Wranglers warning, “Careful, Mom, careful,” as I wriggle through, slower than everyone else. We’ve ridden the horses past this old ghost of a house a hundred times, but this afternoon curiosity has gotten the better of us. Matilda-the-tenacious-heeler, who is forging ahead, turns to wait for us at the edge of the fallen-down yard.
We hold hands. Approach the phantom house through weeds and prickly pear cactus.
J (whispering): How old do you think it is?
Me: I don’t know. I'd guess over a hundred years.
C: Can we go inside?
Me: No!
C: Can we go on the porch?
Me: No! Look at all of those rotted boards. You might fall through.
Matilda leaps onto the porch. The blue heeler dog trots back and forth across the sagging planks, confuting my motherly words of wisdom.
The house is boarded up─blind, deaf, and dumb. “No one’s lived here for years,” I say. Still clasping hands, we skulk like cats through the buffalo grass, slowly around the perimeter of tangled barbed and chicken wire, filled with the unspoken and slightly thrilling dread that we’ll awaken a sleeping dog or something else. On the eastern side, where the shadows are lengthening, the house’s wooden ribs bulge out between the crumbling plaster and mud, an old flesh wound.
We peer through the broken kitchen window, tattered red and what was once white wallpaper hangs from the walls and low ceiling. “Wow, they had wallpaper?” J. asks. I shrug my shoulders, surprised at that little nicety out here in the middle of nowhere also, and point to a hideaway bed with water-stained blue and white ticking shoved up against the stove.
Suddenly emboldened, J. and C. race ahead of me, peering into an antique blue refrigerator (I wonder where they got ice?), what’s left of the root cellar, then disappear around the corner. "Careful, careful, careful," I say, pretty much to the wind. I place one boot tentatively onto the ramshackle porch, gauge the creaks, groans, moans, and then step up, immediately relieved that the boards don't cave in and send me tumbling into the nest of spider webs and other unimaginable things below.
The skeleton of a horsehair sofa waits, mute, in the corner. I suspect it's been a long dry spell since company. I place my hand on the moldered arm and wonder who sat there, gazing beyond the sun decayed porch rail. Was his life hard out here? Did he see the same piñon and juniper sprawled before the snow capped mountains? Feel the early spring breeze that’s warm and chilly at the same time on your face? Fall asleep at night to the sound of the train rumbling past like I do?
C. appears from behind the well house toting a chipped enamel wash pan, Matilda trailing behind in a state of dog sniffing euphoria. J. is tugging my sleeve excitedly, “Mom, come see this. Come see this!”
I follow my daughter towards the weathered outbuildings. I'll bet there were some horses here once.
A thin wind blows through the piñon trees.
