Counted Corpse

1 I tucked my crowbar under the wood and began the dance of prying it off without breaking it. As I worked, I let my mind play back through my memories. I practically grew up in the manse, the pastor’s house, at the church my parents’ attended when I was a kid. The pastor’s daughter, Sue Ellen, was my best friend, and since my mom was the church music director and the manse was next door, I was there on the church grounds most days. Sue Ellen was a bit more of a girly girl than I was, or at least her mama thought her one, so she had all these creepy, pristine porcelain dolls that sat on high shelves in her third-floor bedroom. Their frilly dresses and lace caps always puzzled me because it made no sense to me to have toys that you couldn’t play with, but Sue Ellen knew better. She knew that some of her role as the pastor’s kid was to be a show piece, just like those dolls. That’s why she stifled most of her screams when her mother dragged a stiff brush through her, curly, coarse blonde hair on Sunday mornings so that it would look perfect in braids. I never had that pressure to look perfect, maybe act perfect, but never look, and today, as I tightened the bandana over my hair and prepared to pull down the crown molding in this other pastor’s house near Bethel Church, I was grateful. My job as an architectural salvager didn’t leave much space for primping. This job had been a long time coming. The deacons at the church had asked me to come in and salvage some key pieces that they wanted to put into their new church addition, and if I would, they were happy to give me anything else I wanted from the hundred-year-old house. They wanted the simple chandelier from the front foyer, the mantel from the parlor, and a lovely old door that led to the dirt-floored basement. Everything else was mine, and I was determined to make the most of this gift. I’d already hauled out the door and chandelier, and I was just waiting for help from my friend Saul’s crew to get out the heavy wooden mantel. Meanwhile, I was doing what I could on my own and popping off as much of the simple but lovely woodwork as I could without damaging it. This molding and the baseboards would be lovely in a farmhouse, and what wasn’t salvageable for architecture, Dad would use to make vintage picture frames that I could sell at my soon-to-open salvage store, Paisley’s Architectural Salvage. Architectural salvage had been my career since I had my son and my marriage fell apart more than a year ago. It was flexible in hours, made use of my background in history, and let me feed my desire to go into old buildings without putting me in danger of breaking the law. This latest job was special because I was, as of two weeks ago, the only white member of Bethel Church, a historically black congregation, and I was eager to do a good job for my new church family, especially after they’d welcomed me so full-heartedly into their pews and hearts. “Do you want me to try to get this wainscotting down?” My friend and fellow Bethel member Mary Johnson shouted from around the corner in the dining room. “It’s pretty, but do you need it?” I walked through the cased doorway from the study to the dining room and could almost imagine the large, farm table where the pastor and his family had Sunday lunches with different church members after services each week. Mary was poised with her crowbar ready to pull off the dark walnut veneer, and I smiled at her commitment. Mary and I had become friends when an earlier salvage job had brought me into her life because of her history with an old store in our county, and since then, we’d just grown closer and closer. Now, since she loved this old house and had spent a lot of time here as a child, I’d asked if I could hire her for the day to help me salvage. She had refused payment, but I had a scheme involving an old Singer sewing machine I’d found a couple jobs back and some vintage quilts I’d bought at a flea market. The gift was waiting on her porch, thanks to the generosity of my dad and step-mom, Lucille, for her to find when she got home. “Yeah, let’s see if we can get the pieces off whole,” I said as I joined Mary with my own prybar. “If we can, they’ll sell for a pretty penny, or maybe the church would even want them for the new fellowship hall?” “Now that’s an idea,” Mary said. “We’re already putting the mantel in there, so this would make for that cool, old-study feel, wouldn’t it?” I smiled and gently slipped my bar beneath the chair rail at the top as Mary did the same. She was really a natural at this work, and before long, we had gotten all the rails and baseboards off and were well on our way to salvaging more than half of the wainscotting. It looked like the church would have beautiful walnut walls if they wanted them. As we were about to tug off the last sheet, Saul called from the front door, “Muscle men reporting for duty.” I laughed at my best friend Mika’s uncle and put down my tools to meet him. He was alone in the door, and I said, “Are you the muscle because no offense—” “Stop right there, young lady. I’ll have you know I can still pick you up and throw you over my shoulder like a sack of potatoes if you don’t mind yourself.” He smiled. “Right, respect my elders. Got it.” I laughed as Saul glared at me. “Thanks for coming. The mantel is this way.” I led him through another cased doorway into the small parlor that sat opposite the study, and he whistled. “What a beauty,” he said as he ran his fingers over the fine oak grain in the delicately carved wood. “They went all out on this one.” Mary joined us and said, “They did, but the members did all the work. The church records show that the tree from which this mantel was made was felled from a member’s land, and one of the congregation’s founding members had become a master carpenter when he was a slave. So he did the carving.” I took a deep breath. “I didn’t know that. Wow.” I joined Saul in caressing the wood. “Let’s take extra care, okay?” Saul nodded. “If it’s alright, I’d like to have the piece professionally cleaned for the church, nothing that will change the finish or take off much of the patina. Just shine it up for the new addition. Would that be alright?” Mary laughed. Saul was always doing very generous things like this, and we had all learned to give him the joy of accepting them without fuss. “Of course, Saul. Thank you. I’ll let the deacon board know.” Two young, muscular men walked in, and I said, “Ah, finally, some muscles.” Saul scowled at me and then smiled. “Gentlemen, take care with this beauty. Paisley, you already detached it?” “All but this one place. I didn’t want it falling over. Just a sec.” I slipped my smallest pry bar behind the mantel and gently wiggled the final nail from the plaster. As the mantel began to tip forward, the two men took hold of it and lifted it between them with, it seemed, no strain. The piece must have weighed four-hundred pounds, but the two of them carried it out with less effort than it took me to wield a fifty-pound bag of chicken feed from the farm co-op. With the mantel loaded and off with the chandelier and door to a professional architectural restorer – Saul insisted on having everything cleaned – Mary and I finished up the wainscotting, loaded the used moving truck that I had bought at auction for hauling my goods, and decided to do a final walk-through of the house. I’d carefully scoured every room on my past visits, but I had, for reasons involving spiders and damp and too many scary movies, avoided the basement. Mary had assured me there wasn’t much down there, but I still felt like I needed to take a look, just to be sure. Now that Mary was with me, it seemed kind of silly that I hadn’t done it before, especially since the demolition crew was set to come and clear the ground in three days. Nothing like waiting until the last minute to scour a full thousand square feet of space. Mary and I went down the creaky wooden staircase and stepped into a slightly musty but otherwise completely pleasant basement. The dirt floor was hard-packed and felt like concrete, and the spiders were really minimal. Mary was right, though, the space was mostly empty. There were a few old wooden shelves that had probably once held jars full of pickles and canned tomatoes, and I made a note to carry those out and clean them up since they’d look great in Mika’s yarn shop. I felt the twinge of heartbreak when Mary cracked open the rounded top of an old steamer truck and watched it crumble to dust in her hand. The trunk was empty, though, so while it was sad to not have the vessel itself, it didn’t hold any secret treasures like rare carnival glass or something. Otherwise, the space was empty, and I felt a pang of sadness that we hadn’t discovered a trove of old family treasures stored below ground. It was just as well though because the damp would, as the trunk revealed, destroy most everything. We were just about to go back upstairs when Mary said, “Hey Paisley, look at this” and pointed to what appeared to be a half-size door just under the upper part of the staircase. I hadn’t even noticed that part of the underside of the stairs was closed off since most of them were open to the air below. But this was clearly a storage room, a sort of closet. I immediately thought of Harry Potter and both hoped and dreaded that we might find a small boy living under there. But when we opened the door, we didn’t find a person. Instead, we found a cedar closet, and it was full of leather-bound books, all tucked neatly into shelves and perfectly preserved. “Wow,” I whispered.” “Wow is right,” Mary said. “These are amazing.” She turned to me. “You want them, right?” “Well, someone needs to have them, so let’s take them out and figure out who should keep them. They might belong to someone in the church.” Maybe one of the pastors or a member of one of their families had kept diaries, decade’s worth it seemed like. I’d have to look at the church history to see who was here long enough to accrue such a collection of writings. If the church granted permission, this would make a great story for my next newsletter. As we pulled the books out – about four dozen of them – we saw what had preserved them. Behind each set of books on every shelf were small bundles of white chalk tied with twine. They must have used the chalk to absorb moisture, and between that and the cedar, the books were in great shape. The paper and leather alone was gorgeous, and I knew that whatever was written inside would be priceless, especially to the members of Bethel. I ran out to the truck and got some of the recycled cardboard boxes I hoarded for situations just like this. We loaded up the books and carted them out. Then, by unspoken mutual agreement, we each took one out and began to read. My journal started, “May 1908 – Today is sunny, and I should be happy. But I can’t help think about what secrets lie buried beneath us, about what we had to hide in order to thrive.” I paused, took a deep breath, and watched Mary. Her eyes were wide, and when she looked at me, I thought she might cry. “Listen,” she said and swallowed before she read: July 1910 – Every day I think of what we have kept buried. Every day, I wonder if I should say something. Every day, I start to tell. But then I can’t figure out who to tell because what authority in this town will do anything just with what I say. We are just a bunch of colored folks, the bottom rung of the ladder, and no one but us cares about us. The problem is we have to care about the secrets we keep and the people we keep them about, too, and we don’t know how to do that, not in this world, not in the way it is now. Mary and I sat quietly for a few minutes on the truck’s bumper. I stared at the open journal in my hands and then looked back at the three full boxes of books behind us in the truck. “I guess I know what we’re doing for the rest of the day,” I said. She nodded and closed the book in her hands. “I don’t think it’s wrong to say that we need to know more before we tell anyone, is it?” I shook my head. “No, right now what we know is that we found a bunch of journals and that the person writing them is struggling with something. That’s not enough to really share, though.” “And we don’t even know if this is really fact, right? She – you think it’s a she, right?” I nodded – “might be writing a novel or something. Maybe she’s inspired by Daphne du Maurier.” I smiled. “Or Henry James. Is it a ghost or not?” Mary laughed. “Oh, the turn of the screw grows ever tighter.” She put her journal back in the box. “Let’s get to your place and get reading.” I followed suit, and after we secured the door, locked the house back up, and texted Saul to say we were headed to his lot to unload, we climbed into the cab and drove silently to my new workspace, where we’d left our cars that morning. Fortunately, my son, Sawyer, was with his dad this weekend, so Mary and I could spend the rest of the weekend reading the journals. So by Monday, we could have a plan for what to do and who to tell what. But first, we needed lunch . . . and reinforcements.