The Root Cellar - Part I
A novella.
I.
“Definitely a fixer-upper,” the greenhorn agent says with a smirking grin, swiping at his phone, only half engaged in the sad-looking ruins in front of us (and who can blame him): two stone chimneys rising into the sky from a charred, weed-choked foundation. Naked and crumbling, without a home to warm.
“Arson maybe?” he surmises. “Kids out here in the sticks get a little bored sometimes. Or maybe a burned-out crack house.”
“Caused undetermined, actually.” I say, taking off my sunglasses.
“Excuse me?”
As usual—when faced with having to explain the fate of my family of origin—I roll out the nutshell concoction I composed and memorized years earlier (always delivered with robotic dispassion).
“The house belonged to my grandparents. Father’s side. I read the fire marshal’s report years after it happened. Apparently, my dad, mom and baby brother and me were visiting my grandparents when it happened. Frigid night, right before Christmas 1970. Rare blizzard for middle Tennessee. They suspected faulty wiring, but they didn’t uncover any evidence. Apparently, everyone in the house was asleep when the blaze began. Nobody could get out fast enough. I was in the hospital that night, recovering from an emergency appendectomy.”
Lucky for him somebody rings in as the blood drains from his face. He steadies himself, turns his back to me and drifts towards his luxury SUV and puts his head in his hand.
Typical reaction. I’m used to it.
I take a step closer to the foundation, wondering if the rebuild is such a good idea. Wondering if a middle-aged Nashvegas city gal could supervise such a building project while living in a borrowed travel-trailer on an overgrown, ten-acre piece of remote ancestral property. As a residential architect, of course, I didn’t have any problem drawing up the plan. Simple frame structure with two gables and a wrap-around porch based on a Polaroid photo that survived the fire. Putting it up? Plumbing it? Wiring it? Roofing it? I’d need a decent contractor. I had plenty of relationships in Nashville, but none in these parts.
“You must have some good memories of this place. I mean, before the…”
“Only one. A foggy blur of my grandmother in the kitchen filling up Mason jars with this and that. Sometimes I’m not even sure if it’s a real memory or if it’s something I made up.” He doesn’t know it, but I’ve already written out the check, payable to the party who has owned the property since the fire—the Citizens United Bank. I take it out of my bag and hand it to him.
After a stunned moment, he manages to speak but with a slight stutter. “Full price?” he says, wide-eyed. He can’t take his eyes off the check. “So, okay! Whoa, my first sale ever.” Now he’s babbling. “Miss, uh, Katherine Adel. I guess I should write up the contract then?”
“Yep, you should.”
* * *
About a month after the closing, we’re here. Our first full day on the property. It’s been a long Saturday of bramble yanking around the old foundation and kaiser blade swinging along the access road. I’m sore, scratched up and about half loopy on Merlot from a coffee cup. Skip and I shared a can of Dinty Moore beef stew for dinner. Both of us now transfixed by the lightning bugs. Little flickering brush dabs of gold against the orange canvas of a beautiful Ardmore County sunset.
Suddenly, across the pasture, headlights appear at the entrance.
I look at my watch, then immediately glance at the pawnshop shotgun leaning against the stack of firewood. Wondering if I could use it. Hoping I wouldn’t have to.
As the vehicle lights get closer, Skip springs to his feet and lets out a growl that sounds more like a raging grizzly bear and less like a geriatric German Shorthaired Pointer.
“Easy!” I stand up, lunge for his collar but it’s too late. He’s off and galloping toward the headlights which are now illuminating our cozy little weekend work camp.
I side step nervously towards the shotgun, feeling my skin begin to crawl. Feeling vulnerable in the sudden wash of the headlights.
It’s a pickup truck, which finally stops about a hundred feet away in the clearing. The engine dies, but Skip is already next to the driver’s side door, his neck hackles on end, barking his head off.
Suddenly, the door swings open. Skip backpedals with a confused whimper-bark. And then the driver gets out. It’s a man. He squats slowly to the ground without fear or hesitation. Just when I start to worry Skip might do some harm with the teeth that he has left, he stops barking and starts wagging his stubby tail. He’s always been hyper-protective of me, so this does not compute. Before I know it, the man’s balled up fist is touching Skip’s nose, whose bird dog olfactory system seems to be in overdrive.
I take a few wary steps in the direction of the truck, the engine quietly ticking in the twilight.
“Sorry to drop in like this, so late and all.” Skip’s head is now burrowed under the man’s arm, his tail twitching at warp speed. “But I was in the neighborhood.”
“Not sure our paths have ever crossed.” I cross my forearms, to keep him at bay, at least non-verbally speaking. Can feel my heart pounding against my wrists.
“Sorry. Michael’s great uncle.”
It takes me a minute. “Oh, my agent!” I say, more than a little relieved there’s a connection.
“Right,” the man—tall, sandy-gray hair, mid-60s maybe, in well-worn overalls—stands up. He walks towards me with Skip trotting by his side like he’s found a juicy new toy. The man sticks out his hand. “Rick McVie.”
“Katherine. Adel.” Just as I shake his hand he swats a mosquito on his neck with the other and wipes the remains on the bib of his overalls.
“Michael said you, uh, might need a little help.”
I lean down, grab Skip by the collar and snatch him towards me. He looks up at me like I’m spoiling his birthday party.
“Help? Well, lots of men have tried to help me over the years, but all of them discovered I’m pretty self-sufficient.”
“What I mean is he said you plan to build here?” The man glances around nervously, as if he’s looking for an answer in the general vicinity. “I’m a retired contractor. But I still dabble. Done a few local projects with the Amish guys.”
“So you’re asking to bid my job then?” Finally, someone poses a direct question.
Suddenly the cicadas in the trees whir to an almost ear-piercing crescendo.
“Something like that.”
“Well, I don’t know. I guess we’d have to have a conversation. I’d need to check your references. You know, in the light of day.”
I’m not smiling, but he is. Sheepishly so.
“Of course. Not to be pushy. But, like I said, I was in the neighborhood.”
“Come by tomorrow. We’ll talk.”
“Sure thing. Noon-ish work okay?”
“Noon-ish works.”
As he turns to walk back to the truck, and when I think he’s at a safe enough distance not to hear it, I murmur. In the neighborhood my ass.
* * *
Sunday morning broke clear and cool, with a refreshing breeze out of the north. As I sip coffee and listen to Skip crunch down his salmon kibble, I survey this cool, green place and ask myself some very important questions, i.e., what the hell is it that I’m trying to do here, exactly? Undo a great tragedy? Relive a past that wasn’t in the cards? Conjure the ghosts of my real family, who I barely knew and remember, in order to compensate for a lukewarm-ish, solitary childhood and life with my adoptive parents? Not to say things would’ve turned out differently. But okay, I’ll buy the ghost conjurer thing for now. Maybe they’ll come after I finish the house. Like bees back to the hive.
A couple of hours later, after a claustrophobic experience in the Winnebago’s tiny shower and dressing myself, I wander back outside and rip into a bag of granola.
Skip is nowhere in sight.
Wherever he is, he’s dragging a rope and the stake I thought I’d pounded far enough into the ground.
In a panic I start yelling for him while sprinting down the access road with a wet bangs flapping against my forehead. Jesus fuck. So many distractions! Birds and squirrels and butterflies and worse still, overgrown fence lines that probably hold an entire banquet table of Bobwhite quail.
“Skip, here boy! COME!” I look across the pastures and into the woods hoping to see a speckled, Hersey-bar colored streak trotting along with a stick in his mouth or chasing a rabbit. But nothing—that is until I reach the gate and see a pickup truck coming up the county road with its turn indicator blinking. When it gets closer, about to turn into my entrance, I notice two occupants inside. Relieved that the one in the passenger seat has droopy brown ears, a fluorescent orange collar and a long pink tongue.
I’m a frazzled, out-of-breath mess when the truck pulls through the gate and stops. The driver’s window goes down. Skip looks at me with those sweetly apologetic if somewhat guilty eyes.
“Found him back down the road,” the man—this Rick McVie—says. “Chasing a heifer.”
“Skip, you are a mess!” I say, venting my lungs and my anxiety over almost losing the best husband I never had. Then I look at this Rick man. I’m barely conscious of the fact that I’m touching his forearm, but there it is. “You don’t know how much I appreciate this, Rick.” But I am conscious of the fact that my dog has taking a liking to a total stranger, a behavior not typically in his canine DNA.
“Don’t mention it. Shall we?” He points up towards the property. I hop in the passenger side beside Skip. A couple minutes later, we’re back at the Winnebago and Skip is siphoning water from his bucket like he’d just crossed the Gobi Desert.
A few minutes later, after he donned his tool belt stuffed it with a tape measure, hammer, flash light and a few other contractor-guy type tools, Rick and I are standing in the front of the old house foundation. A few hundred feet over our heads, buzzards riding an updraft are painting a black circle on a clear, blue sky. Which I’m trying to convince myself is not a bad omen. Every now and then, Rick shakes his head and steals a glance at me which I can see with my peripheral vision. Glances of skepticism I have a feeling.
“I admire your vision,” he says, looking at the elevation blueprint I created for the house. “I really do.”
Oh, God. Here it comes. He’s about to give me a hundred reasons why everything in the plan won’t work. I’ve heard it a million times from these level-headed, practically minded contractors always over-focused on the executional details.
“And?”
“Well, I was just thinking about what happened. Your story, Michael told me. I’m so sorry.” Rick squatted at the old foundation, unfolded a pocket knife and starting scraping away some soot. “It’s a nice tribute. What you’re doing. Maybe a catharsis.”
Because I’ve never heard a hard-boiled contractor use the words tribute and catharsis in the same breath—let alone either one of the words individually—I get a little limp in the thighs. Which I hope Rick doesn’t notice. Apparently, he gets it. Maybe even understands more than I do about what I’m doing.
“We can rebuild on the old foundation, but we’ll have to do some underpinning. Lots of cracks.” The foundation is a near-perfect rectangle. Forty feet long by twenty feet wide. Tiny by today’s McMansion standards. But tiny is perfect. Authentic. At this moment, it’s all choked with weeds, vines and small saplings wanting to become big trees. So I have a lot of clearing work to do even before the construction starts.
Rick stands up and walks slowly around the ancient rectangle, kicking his way through the brambles. Skip and I follow. On the backside, right along the edge of the foundation, Rick stops suddenly in one spot and begins bouncing on his feet.
“Interesting,” he says.
“What?”
“Stand here,” he says, stepping away, pointing to the spot where his feet were.
After feeling the spot give myself, I say, “That’s not terra firma. Wonder what it is?” I hop up and down a couple of times. Whatever’s under my feet makes a metallic wobbling sound.
“One way to find out.” After I step off, Rick puts on a pair of leather gloves, bends over and starts yanking the briers and weeds away until something unusual begins to reveal itself when he brushes away the dirt in one spot: DRINK SUN-DROP GOLDEN COLA…as refreshing as a cup of coffee!
Rick looks up at me and smiles like a little boy unwrapping a package on Christmas morning. “Old metal sign. I love these things.”
“Well, help yourself.”
“Thanks!” he says, trying to lift and pull the sign without a lot of success. I bend down and grab the edges myself and after a few seconds we manage to free the sign from the weeds. It’s heavier than we imagine—a huge, rusty oval. We lean it against a tree behind us. When Rick and I turn back around, Skip is standing at the edge of what appears to be a hole in the ground where the sign used to be. He’s sniffing the dank earth, tail wagging curiously. The top of the hole is covered in thin net of delicate white roots. Rick squats and pulls them apart, as I look over his shoulder.
“Ah,” he says.
“Ah, what?”
“Cellar, looks to be.”
“Storm cellar?”
“That, or more likely a root cellar.”
Inside the hole several moss-covered stone steps lead down into the ground. At the bottom, there’s an old, whitewashed door with a porcelain knob. The cool, musty smell wafting up and out of the hole is overpowering, like a well-fed compost heap but thankfully with the sweeter notes of jasmine and honeysuckle.
“Shall we take a look?” he says, standing up.
“Sure,” I say, surprised at the revelation that I have my very own King Tut’s tomb. Hopefully without an embalmed body guarded by a nest of deadly cobras.
Rick steps down carefully to the bottom. After jiggling the door knob a few times and putting his shoulder into it, the door opens half way. Then, with one last shove of his shoulder, the door swings all the way open.
“Be careful,” he says, looking up at me. I follow, feeling my feet squirm on the slippery moss steps.
A few seconds later, we’re both standing inside the dark chamber. The air so thick and musty it’s like trying to breathe mud. Dingy light is shining through a shoe-box-sized window neither of us noticed on the outside. Rick turns on the flashlight anyway and shines it around, the beam slowly illuminating dusty mysteries. The space is about ten feet long, maybe eight wide. Supported by vertical beams made from small cedar trees. Wooden crates cover the bare dirt floor, each one filled with what looks like petrified sweet potatoes, turnips and radishes. On the walls, shelves made of old planks hold a few dusty Mason jars, all empty. Just as I take a step closer, the beam of the flashlight lands on a bundle of some sort on the far end of the top shelf. It’s a burlap chicken feed bag, cinched with twine. When I pick up the sack—which is heavier than I imagine—the twine falls to dust in my hand. I peek in and find several, pint-sized Mason jars, all full.
“Trash or treasure?” Rick asks, leaning over and aiming the flashlight into the bag as I pull it open.
Momentarily transfixed by the objects, I speak but don’t answer his question. “It’s real.”
I bring out one of the jars and put it on the shelf.
“Yep, looks real enough to me,” Rick says, a little perplexed.
“No, I mean the memory. I mentioned it to Michael. The only memory I have of this place is of my grandmother in the kitchen filling up Mason jars. But I’ve never been sure if it was in fact real or imagined.”
I pull out the other jars—nine total, all labeled and dated—and line them up on the shelf.
“Interesting flavors,” he says, shining the light on one label at a time which also illuminates the contents of the jars—reds, oranges, pinks, greens, blues and dark purples.
HAPPY - August 25th, 1919
EXCITED - March 13th, 1954
SAD - January 3rd, 1921
HOPEFUL - December 21st, 1970
DESPAIRING - May 24th, 1930
JOYFUL - April 14th, 1966
SURPRISED - October 15th, 1933
AFRAID - July 4th, 1937
ANGRY - August 10th, 1941
I’m curiously delighted, intrigued. Almost speechless (a rarity), but I do manage something even if it’s a tad pessimistic. “Surely all rancid by now.”
“Maybe,” Rick murmurs. He picks up the HOPEFUL jar and shakes it next to his ear like it’s a telephone call from the past. “I guess there’s only one way to find out.”
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