No Stone Left Unturned

by Kenneth Ramsley

Two in the morning and I’m watching Spiderman getting his ass kicked by “Doc Oc.” Besides the guy having four extra arms, the movie is all wrong. Doctor Octavius is possessed by his machine and needs to be freed – not defeated.

“Just shoot him with a tranquilizer dart!” I yell out – too loud. He’s not wearing any armor – it’s just a lab coat!

“Harry – will you please go to bed!”

“I am in bed!”

I can’t make a sound inside this old ‘farmhouse’– not with these paper-thin walls.

‘Quaint and charming?’ – that’s how Mom likes to see it.

I don’t say anything.

Once daylight arrives I’m half awake dreaming about Beacon Hill in Boston. Until a few years ago we lived two blocks from the Statehouse. Dad kept drinking until he finally lost his job – taking our home with it – and that’s when we moved out here to this old farmhouse with its old barn, and old fields, and endless woods too old to call ‘old.’ In a normal family, grandparents would’ve helped us. But I live in a crazy family where Dad didn’t have a drinking problem – his own parents called it ‘a sinful life’ and threw him out of their house. And Mom’s side of the family is even worse – shunning her for ‘marrying outside the faith’ – whatever that means! So here we are – on our own with nobody to call ‘family’ – not even Dad because left years ago.

I’m moving out, too – though just across the driveway and only for the summer, sleeping nights in the barn where Mom parks her car and all the old junk collects. How cool is it to live like Clark Kent before his Metropolis days? Of course, I’m missing the whole Superman routine.

Spiderman grew up in New York City. Superman, on the other hand, is more of a small-town hero and seems more at home in decrepit places far from civilization. He didn’t mind the nighttime darkness with no city traffic and honking car horns – or driving everywhere in a car because nothing’s close by and everything you need is across some dusty dirt road. But I’m just kidding myself. I belong here about as much as the squirrels in Boston Common where ‘woodlands’ means trees planted and pruned, and wild animals so tame they’ll take peanuts right out of my hand.

Out here in the ‘real woods’ the tamest squirrels I ever see hide upside-down forty feet overhead clinging against the opposite sides of sugar maple trees – their feet itching and scratching at the loose bark ready to flee. In these real woods there’s a ridge of pines not far from here perched above an old apple orchard – where we build ground forts most summers. This past winter I talked about adding solar power, car batteries, and AC converters – but we never did anything about it because nobody wanted to spend the night out there, even if our parents said it was okay – which is wasn’t.

Mom says she’ll let me sleep in the barn as long as I clean the place out first. But after a quick look from a cleaning standpoint I’m already beginning to wonder if this wasn’t her way of saying ‘no.’ My friends offered to help, but when the time came, nobody showed up, and I guess I can’t blame them. The place is chock full of old junk left behind by a dozen families going back two hundred years, and this is going to be a ton of work.

I’m depressed when I pry the cellar door open – made for the horse so they could run straight into the back field behind the barn. Guessing from rust on the latch and the creaking hinges, the horses lived here a long time ago. Inside, a few old-fashion light bulbs are all the light I have, and the air smells like it hasn’t moved since the last of the horses died. One foundation window is boarded up, the other has cracked glass, and in the gloom I can’t say where the stone foundation of barn ends and the loose rubble that’s always been down here begins.

As my eyes adjust, I find an old lawn tractor parked right where Dad left it years ago. He bought it from a neighbor when we moved in here hoping to mow the back field grass, but it died the first time out and hasn’t run since. Alongside the tractor I notice rotten feed bags split open and slumped into a mixture of loose hay and horse manure. And as my eyes adjust to the deepest darkness far into the shadows I recognize horse stalls in need of a good shoveling – which is not going to happen. Mom says she wants a good look at everything I might find before anything gets thrown away. But for her sake and mine, I’m not about to shovel out fifty-year-old horse shit for a detailed inspection, so I’ll be leaving this for another day – something like how Dad left the tractor.

For now I’ve decided on a tour of the main floor – just to see what’s up here without worrying about where it should go. This in not a big barn – especially not compared working farms in the area with barns big enough to service a passenger jet.

Above the cellar, the building stands two stories tall, thirty feet long, and twenty feet deep. There’s a main floor, two haylofts at different heights, and a regular peaked roof above those. The north and west walls are plastered in black and grey tar paper while the sides visible from the street are covered in faded brown cedar shakes. Doors are cut into most of the east-facing driveway side while on all four sides a half dozen random sized windows are scattered without any particular alignment or purpose – like collected from some old house and hammered into place more or less as a matter of practical lighting than any sort of design.

Centered above the driveway, a hayloft door is nailed shut above the sideways-rolling garage-door used by Mom for her car. To the left of the garage door, a normal-sized door is made from wooden planks leading into a workshop. And to the right of the garage – two giant hay wagon doors stand almost to the roof swinging from massive wrought iron hinges. Cut into one of these giant doors, a smaller opening is just big enough for me to slip through. And of all the doors in this barn, this door-within-a-door matters most because it leads straight into my summertime hangout where I’ll get to stare at exposed beams supporting a skeleton of timbers holding foot-wide planks and breathe the smell of a farm long since abandoned.

Wandering around the main floor and into the workshop, I realize how the room is hardly wider than a hallway – and made even narrower with variety of cabinets and shelves and wooden benches pushed against the entire south wall. A broken vise is bolted to one bench near the middle of the room, and beside that, a old fan belt connects an older electric motor to a worn-down grinding wheel powered by bare wires connected to nothing at all. Against the opposite wall, a large tool cabinet stands floor-to-ceiling and on either side I see paperback-book shelves holding glass jars and pocket-sized chewing tobacco tins. Most of these containers once held screws, nails, and other sorts of hardware – long since raided for ground forts and home-repair projects, but there’s still plenty of hardware on the upper shelves I’ve never touched.

There are also three trap doors—one under a rug in my new hangout, another that’s nothing more than a floorboard section in the workshop that can be pulled up near the outside door, and a third in the ceiling at the back of workshop swinging up into a hayloft.

From the shop, a small enclosed staircase turns to the right rising steeply up the back wall to a second-story walkway. Here a six-pane window is on my left – the only window on this level. And to my right stands the central hayloft while straight ahead under a crossing beam, a smaller and lower loading loft is set just seven feet above the main floor overlooking my summer hangout.

In the corner of the main hayloft – directly over the workshop – someone’s added a storage room enclosed in chicken wire – including chicken wire door – and I’m guessing the wire is mostly there to let sunlight in rather than to keep any chickens cooped up. Inside the coop, shelves are made from wooden doors lying sideways and these are stuffed with dusty boxes. Some of the boxes belong to us – others are much older. And below the shelves, sitting on the loft floor almost out of sight, six ancient trunks sit like an Egyptian crypt – covered in a skin rough and irregular like alligators.

Dad once called these ‘steamer trunks’ and said they’d probably been here a hundred years at least. For now they’re locked and too heavy to move, so I’m leaving them no matter what Mom says about all the junk in this place. In fact, I’d like to leave most of this alone, because after a good look, it seems that everything in this barn belongs here like its the soul of the place – and pulling everything out floor-to-ceiling would be like ripping timbers from the walls to sell for firewood.

“It’s just old junk Harry…” I hear Mom reminding me from a previous conversation. And after a day of moth-eaten clothes, moldy blankets, and trash that should have been thrown away years ago – I’m beginning to see her point.

Mom called tonight to say how she’ll be late for dinner and that I should go ahead without her. Someone didn’t show up for work again and she’s covering the second shift until they can get someone else to show up. Not again! But I don’t say that. Instead I tell her it’ll be okay. Lot’s of kids live like this – so I’m not about the cry over it.

It’s light outside when I see Mom’s old gas-engine car pulling into the barn followed by the sound of the garage door rolling and rumbling on its metal wheels. Through a kitchen window I can see her crossing the driveway in her nursing home outfit tired and worn down more than usual. She opens the back door and after a short hallway sees me standing at the window. I wish I could help with the money but she doesn’t want me flipping burgers. Someday I’ll have a job, but until I’m sixteen she wants me to be a kid. I argue, but not too hard.

“Just 20 hours a week. Mom… I’ll buy my own clothes and…”

“– ‘and’ nothing!”

Sometimes I tell her she should marry somebody. But she doesn’t seem interested in finding anyone, and I’m not sure what’s holding her back. Maybe she hoping Dad’s okay – that they’ll track him down and get him back into treatment and the whole 12-step thing – maybe… just maybe – the same ‘maybe’ I’ve heard for years.

Ten minutes later, Mom’s in the shower when I notice a cruiser pulling up the driveway. I watch as it noses and rolls to a stop, then wait as the cop climbs out walking like he’s dragging chains to our doorstep. He’s smaller and older than I remember – and not in the greatest shape anymore – a longtime townie named Kenny Davis – the same cop who delivered Dad to this same doorstep for several years. Out the corner of the window I watch him standing there on the other side of the door. He pauses a second or two, then reaches for the button as I hear the ‘dink-donk’ of our crummy old doorbell.

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