77 Ghosts in the Woodshed Katie Fallon The sun never hit our house on the ridge. Pine trees surrounded it on three sides, their branches hugging its dirty-white walls. The wind that whipped down the mountain shook needles and cones onto our roof and into the rusted gutters. Moss crawled up the cinderblock foundation. Fingers of cool, green mold wrapped around the unfinished basement walls. Ivy spilled down the steep hill from the house, tangling around the stones of the driveway’s retaining wall. Ghosts were everywhere —between the perfectly straight lines of apple trees, beneath the peach and pear trees, ensnared in the gooseberry bushes and the grapevines twisting up rotted wooden posts. My husband, Jesse, and I did not actually own this property—we rented it from a veterinarian friend of ours—but we had plans for it. A small barn stood about a hundred feet from the house, and we hoped to convert it into a rehabilitation area for injured and orphaned birds. Peach trees lined the grassy path that led from our house to the barn; tiger swallow tail butterflies and goldfinches crowded the high purple thistles along the path’s edge. The overgrown remains of another nearby shed, this one brick with no roof, were barely noticeable, buried in a thick patch of deer tongue and rosebushes. The path ended at the barn, which was a perfectly square structure, its dimensions about thirty feet by thirty feet, its base several rows of stacked cinderblocks. The walls and roof were scalloped sheet metal. The side facing the house gaped like a garage without a door. The vines that tangled around the cinderblocks bordering the open front threatened to spill the blocks and wreck the barn. The owner of the property told us she had let a homeless man live in the barn, but he disappeared. “Disappeared?” I asked. “Well, left without letting me know,” she corrected. Apparently the man, Carl, was a woodworker, and his presence was everywhere. Odds and ends were piled to the barn’s ceiling. At first, it all looked like junk: blue Maxwell 78 Ecotone: reimagining place House coffee cans filled with Carl’s cigarette butts, a small wooden chair with three legs, a twisted metal ladder from a pool or boat. In the center of the room, a rusted wheelbarrow lay on its side, spilling chunks of coal across the concrete floor. In one corner sat a TV missing its screen. These were all the ghosts of dreams, important at one time, invested in. What accident caused the boat’s ladder to twist like that? What child once sat in the broken chair? The room was also filled with lumber of various shapes, sizes, textures, and degrees of decay. Some of the boards looked like they’d been purchased yesterday, while others were coated in peeling paint and sported twisted, rusty nails. There were thin strips of molding, two-by-fours, and sheets of particle board, as well as chunks of expensive -looking cedar. Rolls of insulation were stacked along the back wall of the room, still in their brown wrappers. In a back corner loomed a thing that looked like a busted water heater. Above all this, packed-mud wasp and hornet nests clung to rafters. Three bird nests bunched in high corners made by support beams. We had been discouraged. Someone had lived here? Where? The barn was bisected by a particle-board wall. The door that led to the other “room” seemed out of place amid all the chaos—it was expertly made of slanted wood planks and it had an elaborate lock. To open the door, a wooden handle had to be turned, almost spun, a halfcircle . This would move the wooden bolt from the latch and allow the door to swing open. The other room was more livable, but only slightly. The front of the room, the side that faced our house, was closed in by the corrugated sheet metal, but the back was partially open to the outdoors . A door frame with a Plexiglas pane lay flat on the grass beyond the opening. This unfinished door didn’t have hinges. This other room had...
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Nov 1, 2010
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