Conrad managed to smile. 'Anything else I can do for you today, Leon? No? Good.' He grabbed the crate and turned for the door.
Laski spoke in a low, slithering voice. 'You got kids, boy?'
'What was that?'
'I hear dem mutts tearing up your floors in dare, but I don't see no kids. Appears you don't got none yet, but what I mean is, you plan on having any?'
'No, we - why would you ask that?'
'Just curious.' Laski pointed one thick finger at Conrad's front door. 'You have yourself a nice life in 'at old house.'
Before Conrad could reply, Laski wheeled on his dirty boots and knuckled down the walk, flicking his toothpick in a high arc as he disappeared around the corner, his vehicle out of sight or non-existent.
Conrad slipped inside and summoned his courage to open the crate.
6
Alice and Luther pogoed at him as if he'd abandoned them for weeks instead of hours. He set the crate on the coffee table and rolled around with them, letting them slobber on his face. There wasn't a pill on the market that cured mild depression - or just a shitty day - as fast as these two dogs.
Then he quit stalling and went to the crate. The covering was indeed felt, but thick as a shroud. As he lifted one corner he was overcome by an irrational thought: what if it's a trap? Like the kind used to catch badgers or snap my hand off at the wrist? But that was ridiculous. Nothing more than his imagination blowing off steam.
Wedged inside the crate was a large portfolio or scrapbook. It was heavy. Maybe five, six pounds. Why in the hell would Laski think this belonged to him?
Conrad examined the cracked spine and yellowed paper edges. It wasn't a book. It was an album, but photo albums had ten, maybe twenty cardboard pages. This thing had fifty or more, some thin, others not.
The first page had pinpoints of black mold in the crease, but he could see the rest well enough. It was a charcoal sketch. Bare land, the lines done over and over, mostly grass and a few shrubs and a single sapling with no leaves. The plot of land stretched back over a rolling slope, narrowing on the page to give depth to the short horizon. Deeper, 'over' the rise of the land he could just make out two slashes of the artist's pen. At first he thought it might be another tree, but no, upon closer inspection, his nose almost touching the musty paper, he could see the clean lines, one shorter and horizontal over the taller vertical.
A cross.
And why not? Black Earth, like a lot of Middle America, was full of devout Christians and probably had been more so a century ago.
But why did the rest of the sketch seem familiar?
'Hey - shit.'
He backed out the front door and up the cracked sidewalk to the street. He looked at the book and then back up at his house. His house and the lot. Standing next to him, almost exactly one third of the distance from the western property line, was a tree that topped out at least twenty feet higher than Conrad's roof, its trunk as thick as three men. The house was two and a half stories with the attic - the tree was pushing fifty feet. He looked back at the drawing, then back up at the tree. The huge tree stood where the sapling in the drawing stood, and the slope of the land in the sketch matched Conrad's yard.
'How 'bout that,' Conrad said, smiling for the first time all day. It wasn't quite like discovering buried treasure, but it still gave him a child's satisfaction. If the MLS printout had been accurate, this tree was, like his house, over one hundred and forty years old. 'The house's birthday tree.'
The next page wasn't a sketch. Pasted to the stiff yellow paper was a photo of unusual size, roughly seven inches high and nine inches wide. The light looked rusty, the photo developed in sepia. The framing and scale matched the sketch, but that was where the similarities ended.
The people gathered in front of the completed house looked cold, arms crossed, angry that they had been called out for this impromptu Kodak moment. All were women, late teens to geriatric and everything in between, garbed in the frumpy black dresses and white bonnets of maids or nurses. Little Midwife on the Prairie. Maybe a family . . . no. They all wore such dour expressions and pale countenances, he was unable to imagine them as anything other than employees. He didn't think more than a few of the women were relations; their size, shape and facial features were too diverse to be of the same stock.
Relations, stock.
My God, he thought, I'm musing in the vernacular of their time just looking at them, and it feels right. No, it feels proper. And what is, what was, the purpose of this gathering? If they were marking some special day, why the pug chins and hunched backs? The tired boredom in their sunken black eyes? Some of them were looking away from the lens, as if someone or something on the street had captured their attention. Or maybe they had simply refused to look into the camera. This made more sense because they were looking in different directions, not focused on any one point of interest. The women had no shape except bulky, even the one with the breasts.
'No, they were bosoms back then,' Conrad said to the book. 'Bosoms or teats, depending on the company you ladies kept.'
Another woman, this one in her twenties or thirties (it was hard to tell; for all he knew women had aged twice as fast at the turn of the century), was holding her skirts above the ground as if preparing to step over a puddle. Another stood ramrod straight with a broom clutched in her thick fists.
Wrapping up his inspection, Conrad found only two common details uniting these women. They all wore black boots that rose above the ankles, mannish in their thick soles and metal eyelets and pointed toes. The other was that none was smiling. Not all were sour or angry. It was simply that happiness, even a forced smile, seemed a foreign thing to them.
His thoughts turned to the unseen photographer. Would he have been their employer, the owner of the house? A doctor? Or a hired man, a local with the equipment and a knack for taking pictures? Conrad guessed the latter, for it was clear even to his untrained eye that, grim as its subjects were, the photo itself was quite good. Nothing you'd want to hang on your staircase wall (it might give someone cause to fall down the stairs), but a strong piece of work nonetheless. In its own droll way, it was almost lovely.
Who said the owner was a man? Maybe the house had been full of women, and only women.
Midwives, wet nurses.
Mothers, daughters, granddaughters.
What if some of them are still here?
He went over them again one by one, his nose close enough to the warped paper that he caught the scent of a sun-dried milk carton.
Roaming, searching . . .
His eyes locked on the one he had missed, the one standing behind the first row, elevated in her stance on the porch step so that only her face was visible between the shoulders of the other women. He saw her clearly then, recognized her open mouth, the teeth exposed as if preparing to bite.
No. Not possible.
But there she was, hollow-eyed and waxen like the others. The tall raven-haired woman in the photo stared back at him with something akin to hatred, and he recognized her, of course he recognized her, for hers was a face he had come to know intimately. She of the compressed lightning bolt of a scar, the lovely fissure running from under her nose to her lip.
An involuntary cry escaped his throat as he ran into the house, leaving splayed on the sidewalk the album containing a century-old photo of his wife.
7
Conrad stood in the front sitting room, looking out the window to the album on the ground. Twenty minutes had elapsed since he'd fled the scene. What if the neighbors had seen that little show? What were they thinking of the nice young couple from California now, 'Rad?