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Should I start this by saying ‘I’m not a believer,’ even though that is antithetical to this board? The story I have is only tenuously my own, because I don’t remember most of it, and it is more pulled together by what my mother has told me a hundred times over the years. I don’t remember it, but I am told it happened, and my mother is a believer who does not waver in what she says happened in the house on Webber.
I remember the later house, on Olive, from around the time I was five. Before that, though, my family lived in a yellow, gingerbread trimmed, two-story farm house out in the country on Webber road, set acres apart from the other houses, but not terribly isolated as I-80 hustles within eye-shot from the road, separated only by a seemingly random encircling of trees in the middle of dry yellow fields. Ask me if I ever lived in it, and were it not for the assurances of my mother, I would tell you I had not. I did go check it out a few times a couple of years ago, after it was abandoned and before it was torn down, and between that and the stories I know the house as if the memories were clear.
The house was strangely designed as it had been, as far as we know, poorly planned and then poorly modified to fit the times and circumstance of the family who had built it back in the late-nineteenth century. It was very narrow, and somehow appeared disproportionately tall, which only heightened the sense of narrowness. The main road ran east-west, but lay on the south side of the house, where a wooden archway and a stone footpath wandered up to dead-end at the outside foundation wall, where there was no door. The front door was around the side of the house, a few steps up from the ground on a squat little porch. The porch had once run along the most of that side of the house, but was chopped short by the rickety exterior walls of the only ‘indoor’ bathroom, which had been installed some decades after the house was built. Essentially, to reach the front door from the road, one would have to walk past the gingerbread fence, through the arch, up the walkway, and then hang right across grass and weeds for about ten feet to make way along the side of the house and up the porch to the front door, which was crowded by the mismatched addition of the porch bathroom.
I realize, in retrospect, I’ve never thought to ask my mom WHY we wound up in such a strange and uncomfortable arrangement, but she was raising five kids while my father served active duty in the Air Force. My guess is that the place was cheap, being ugly and rather isolated, and farm animal friendly.
The way my mom tells it, the first thing that raised hair on her arms was a very small room on the second floor set on the eastern/door side of the house, which she assumed had once been a large closet. She set it up as a small sewing room, as it was too small even to house one of us kids. However, once setting up her machine and putting up some bolts of fabric, she found she just didn’t like being in there. The room, she says, felt ‘miserable,’ and somehow ‘menacing.’ Nothing dramatic, she said, just an uncomfortable feeling, possibly due to the claustrophobic conditions. She rarely went in there, and my brothers and I didn’t either, as we had little use for a room full of old sewing materials.
Shortly after we moved into the house, the nearest neighbor came to visit, walking up the side of the house toward the door rather than taking the awkward archway walk. She waved at us as she approached, neared my mother – who was holding me in her arms outside while she watered some plants– and introduced herself. They made polite conversation and she related that there hadn’t been anybody in the house as in a few years, at least as long as she had been there. After a few pleasantries the neighbor blocked her eyes against the midday sun and waved toward the house.
“Your husband’s home?”
“No, he’s working out at the base.”
“Oh? Who’s up there lookin’ out of that window?” She gestured toward the lone square frame that peered out from the small sewing room. My mom turned, but saw nothing in the windows but the still curtains. My brothers had left for school hours before; we were alone.
It seemed like nothing at the time, she says, but over the course of the next few years she abandoned that sewing room completely, because time and again she, my dad, my brothers, friends and visitors would glance up at a small movement from the side of the house, and see a figure standing looking out that window. Sometimes it was fleeting, just a glance, and sometimes you could stand for several seconds, maybe even minutes, if the sight didn’t unnerve you, and just know that against all reason and truth, there was a woman standing in that window looking out disapprovingly.
The window woman was eerie to see, but the strangeness surrounding the house didn’t end there. On a summer evening my mother and my brother Russ – then about 13 — were playing cards in the living room while I watched and played with my toys nearby. After a bit, my mom looked up to see the screen door to the porch had blown open.
“Rusty, run on over there and close the screen before the flies get in.” Rusty was a bit of a notorious cheat, and she didn’t trust him alone with the cards. He performed the task quickly and they continued playing cards for a while before she glanced up and saw the door was open again.
She gently teased him about being in such a hurry he didn’t close the screen properly, and the wind had caught it again. As his return was even quicker the second time, she double checked that he had remembered to lock. He nodded, but seemed to lapse into an un-Rusty like silence (Russ was nicknamed ‘Taz,’ something my mom would learn later in life was actually spelled ‘ADD’), but continued to play cards, periodically looking back over his shoulder as he played.
When my mom noticed the screen open the third time, she cursed the breeze and asked Rusty to go close it again.
“I don’t wanna, mom.” In retrospect, she said, it wasn’t defiance; he was too quiet for it to be defiance. She prodded him again, and he just shook his head. Threatening to count every card in his hand when she came back, she went to the doorway and stepped out on the porch to grab the handle on the screen. California Augusts are maddeningly hot, even in the evening, and she said she was instantly struck by how stifling the warm air was outside and how the waves of heat could be seen radiating off the tall still weeds in the field. The power lines clicked overhead, but it was otherwise silent as she walked further out on the porch – past the block frame of the indoor outhouse, past the shaded overhang, and into the dull rays of oncoming twilight. Not a bird cried, and not a tree shook, so she turned on her heel, flung open the screen door, slammed the front door closed, locked it and walked back into the living room. Rusty was still sitting in the same position, watching her. They stared like that for a moment, him with an almost apology on his face, hers almost stoic before she spoke in a quiet knowing voice.
“There’s no wind.”
“I know.”
After that we left the screen open, and the door closed, but it wasn’t the end.
