We went outside and made our way around to the back of the house. The golden sunshine poured down on our shoulders like molten rain. A heavenly host of birds sang in harmony from the treetops. A gigantic black and orange monarch butterfly flitted past.
Standing in the long grass, I ran my eyes over the house.
The black asphalt shingles on the roof looked intact. There were only a few bricks missing from the chimney. Since the windows were boarded over, I hoped that none of the panes were broken. But what did I know? I needed to find someone who could do a proper assessment and tell me whether we could actually live in this place, and the sooner the better.
I hoisted Bridget onto my back and hurried to the car. We sang “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” Obviously, Bridget had forgotten about the grasshoppers.
I was quiet on the drive back to town, mulling over everything we had seen. Bridget, on the other hand, chattered happily like the squirrel we had heard in the big poplars at the edge of the yard.
When we came into the hotel, I went straight to Edna behind the front desk. “Is there a building inspector in town?”
“No, ma’am. Somebody from the city comes around whenever a new house goes up in Juniper. But you can ask Old Joe Daley. He knows pretty much everything there is to know about house construction.”
August
Standing knee-deep in weeds, Old Joe held up his hands and put his thumbs together to make a three-sided square, squinting at the corners of the house. “She looks pretty straight,” he said. “When the walls start to sag, you can usually spot them in a jiffy.”
“Old” Joe couldn’t have been more than fifty. He had arrived at the hotel in a work truck with his son, predictably called Young Joe. Bridget and I rode out to the farm in the back seat of their king cab. I dreaded Bridget’s reaction to the two burly men, but luckily neither of them paid her the slightest attention. The adults chatted while she huddled in the corner and looked at her books.
“Get the crowbar and uncover the windows,” Old Joe now directed his son. “Let’s have some light on the subject.”
Young Joe opened the big metal tool box sitting in the back of the truck and produced a crowbar. He climbed the steps to the overgrown verandah and started prying boards off the front window. The rusty nails tore through the wood with a tremendous screeching sound.
I watched anxiously as the main-floor windows on each side of the front door were uncovered. These were adorned with smaller panes along the top in a pretty green and gold checkerboard pattern. It seemed as if the house’s eyes were opening after a long sleep, blinking and drowsy, heavy-lidded with coloured glass like green and gold eyeshadow.
Young Joe returned to the truck and pulled a metal extension ladder off the roof rack. He moved around to the side of the house facing east, toward a waist-high tangled mass of weeds and shrubs in the corner of the yard, presumably the former garden. Jutting out from the eastern wall was a three-sided bay window, covered with plywood sheets. Young Joe climbed the ladder and began to tear them off.
While he worked, his father clambered through the undergrowth surrounding the house until only the branches waving overhead revealed his whereabouts. At last he emerged, brushing off his pants, a leafy twig sticking from his flat tweed cap like a jaunty feather.
“The foundation looks solid, what I can see of it,” he said. “Let’s go inside.”
I checked on Bridget to make sure she was still happy sitting in the truck and pretending to read her Dr. Seuss books, which consisted of turning the pages and saying the memorized words aloud. Then I followed Old Joe into the house.
When I stepped through the door, I exclaimed with pleasure. The entrance was now illuminated with sunlight from the main floor windows. The wooden staircase leading up to the right was the colour of cinnamon, rich and glossy, with turned spindles and a round newel post worn smooth by human hands. A crystal and brass chandelier, wreathed in cobwebs, hung from the nine-foot ceiling.
“George Lee had nothing but the best.” Old Joe followed my eyes with an expression of pride, as if he were showing off his own home. “He bought this house from a mail-order catalogue and then hired a pair of carpenters from England, two brothers who knew their craft, to put it all together.”
We turned left into the living room. What I hadn’t seen before in the darkness was a fieldstone fireplace against the far wall, flanked with built-in bookcases. Above them were small rectangular windows bearing leaded glass panes with a stylized tulip pattern.
Old Joe looked around with satisfaction. “You can see the mice haven’t gotten in here, nor the squirrels, otherwise you’d have a real mess. There aren’t no bugs around here either, not the kind that eat wood. It’s too cold for the little buggers up here.”
So there were some advantages to this climate. Coming from a place where every household carried on a constant battle with cockroaches and termites, this was welcome news.
Old Joe opened and shut the living room door, and it swung soundlessly. “Another good sign. If the wood was warped, the door would stick.”
He lowered himself to one knee and turned back the corner of the Oriental carpet, which was obscured by a mask of grey dust. Underneath the carpet, the floor was gleaming. “You can’t buy wood like this no more,” he said. “First-growth Douglas Fir, shipped here from the West Coast. Tongue-and-groove boards. There was no plywood then, or any of that newfangled laminate.”
He thumped his knuckles on the fir boards. “Almost a hundred years old and hard as iron. The dry and the cold have preserved it, petrified it, you might say.” The foot-high baseboards and trim around the windows and doors were made from the same rich russet-coloured wood.
Old Joe reached into the tool belt slung around his waist and pulled out his level, a piece of wood with a tiny floating bubble suspended in the centre. He set it on the floor. The bubble didn’t move. “Yep, that’s what I thought. Straight as a die.”
He hoisted himself to his feet and ran his hands over the walls, papered with delicate sprays of green leaves and white flowers on a cream background. “The plaster is in good shape, too, nice and smooth. You know, this whole house was built with hand tools: hammer and handsaw, plane and level and square. There weren’t no power tools back then. A carpenter sawed hundreds of laths — those are strips of wood — and his helper nailed them, side by side, across the supporting beams. Then the third guy dipped his trowel in a big tub of plaster and coated the whole thing by hand. When the plaster was smooth and dry, you could either paint it or paper it.”
“I think the wallpaper is lovely.”
“Your great-aunt was partial to wallpaper. If you cut into this wall, you’d find umpteen layers, each one with a different pattern.”
As he walked around the room, Old Joe explained that the house design was called a foursquare, for the simple reason that it had four outside walls of equal length, with four rooms on each floor. Even the roof had four equal panels, covering an attic with four dormer windows facing in all four directions.
He stopped at the front windows, shaking his head. “Here’s the weak point in these old houses. They were good windows in their day, but they didn’t do much to keep out the cold. Now we have double-paned windows and insulated glass, but all they had back then were storm windows.”
He took a jackknife out of his pocket and tested the putty around the panes. “Good, just like concrete.” He snapped the blade shut. “You’ve got one thing going for you, this house has been sealed up tight as a drum. One of the neighbours, Roy Henderson, he comes over every month to make sure the house is airtight. He promised Mrs. Lee when she left for the last time, and he’s kept his word all these