Tenant A Cape Cod Journal. The Novel

By Elizabeth C Ward

SUMMARY:

Truro, Cape Cod

The tenant arrived out of nowhere like some odd migratory bird blown off course, alighting briefly on this small, wind-swept spit of land, and then disappeared as mysteriously as she had come. 

T

• Language: English
• Publisher: Elizabeth C Ward
• Release date: Dec 6, 2021
• ISBN: 9781087919218

Book preview

Copyright © 2020 by Elizabeth C. Ward

First Edition

ISBN: 978-1-0879192-1-8 (e-book)

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons is entirely coincidental.

For my mother and father

CONTENTS

Summer

Fall

Winter

Spring

SUMMER

J. Thaw

Winthrop Academy. MA

1993

The tenant arrived out of nowhere, like some odd migratory bird blown off course, alighting briefly on this small, wind-swept spit of land and then disappearing as mysteriously as she had come. Why she chose to come to this house and this particular hollow or chose me to be the recipient of her many gifts, including the modest journal left behind on the writing desk for me to discover when I opened up the house the following summer, is as mysterious to me now as it was then.

The woods along the Pamet are filled with ghosts. I do not believe in the supernatural, of course, but even I, on my solitary early morning walks, when I - unguarded and most vulnerable, sense some invisible thing moving through the dune fog, hear a whisper no louder than a breath, mocking me. Are there recalcitrant souls left accidentally behind? Does on occasion one of them slip through the crack between life and death, return for one brief stretch of time? Is that why Isabel sensing that her tenancy on the Pamet was brief, attempted to draw from each moment every sharp pain and joy of experience that her innocent heart could bear?

I leave you to decide.

Mother was the first to hear and was waiting for me the moment I opened the door, a bit breathless from my climb up the hill from the fields at the preparatory school where I was, to my misfortune and theirs, the girls’ hockey coach.

Someone is camping out in the Pamet house!

Nothing goes unnoticed in Truro when the summer people go home and Mother’s small and loyal group of friends who remain for the winter, are not shy to report it. We, of course, spend the winter a hundred miles and a two-hour drive away outside of Boston.

Hunters. Every house in the woods has them.

Not hunting season.

I sighed.

Squatters, then.

Squatters?

Agnes says there are lights on in the house. A car on the verge. She has alerted the neighbors.

That’s nice of her.

Jonathan!

All right. I’ll go down this weekend. Saturday. I’ll turn off the water while I’m there. Might as well.

Perhaps you should take someone with you. Just in case.

Who would you suggest?

Isabel's Journal:

"The Cape is deserted; a Wyeth landscape. There is the palpable presence as though someone has just left the scene, as though someone is about to enter.

[Thus begins the tenant’s journal. It was the only thing she left behind when she departed suddenly and without warning the following May.]

Turnoffs appear in sudden cuts in the trees: Sandwich, Barnstable, Brewster. A salt marsh. A cranberry bog. At Orleans the car is captured by the rotary and flung north past Nauset Harbor, Salt Pond. The briny tang of sea drifts in the window. Life rushes in after it. Fish and chip shops are boarded up, motels strung along Route 6, abandoned now, acres of empty parking lots. Forty miles later, Wellfleet. The road plunges again into the trees. Just over the Truro line, Jack’s Gas, the pump and shack exactly as Hopper painted it, and then down to the Pamet River. The two-lane road winds up and down through wooded dunes. Three quarters of a mile it plunges down into a hollow. And there it is! The yew hedge. The modest Cape Cod house, white shingled, dark green shutters, above the road. I've made it! Oh, I'm here!

J. Thaw

Did Isabel know, when she wrote this, that it would be read by anyone? By me? And now by you? Or was it meant to be private, only for herself, meant, after she was gone, to collect dust with the books in the small shelf in the borning room where she wrote? I struggle with this as you would but then feel that to put this journal aside, something so personal and alive, would be to lose her entirely.

The house is alive. I can feel it as I step over the sill and enter the keeping room. The house is still as though it has been shocked into silence. There is the sense of some intangible presence suddenly whisked away. Hello, I call. It’s me, Isabel! There is no answer. Why should there be? I open a window. The soft air rushes in, the faint murmur of the sea.

I move hesitantly through the house. Trespasser. It is built to a rigid plan as though by a modest seaman, small rooms, tight closed like ship cabins; the keeping room at the center of the house, the other rooms clustered around it. The parlor, facing the road, is stiff and formal, a chair in each corner, a chest under the window Twin to it on the other side of the front door is the bedroom. A small side window brushes up against the woods that comes down from the behind the house. I find linens in an old chest; make up the beautiful old four poster bed with the white down comforter. I slip my nightgown into a drawer of the ancient dresser. A chair and a rocking cradle just big enough for a newborn are on the hearth by the fireplace. For a moment I just stand, afraid to breathe for fear that the room, the cradle, the house in the hollow might turn out not to be real, whirl up into a dust mote and vanish through the window out into the growing dusk.

Late afternoon.

The road outside leads to the sea. I leave the house behind and follow it to the end. It winds up through oak forest, curves past the house on the hill, the two Ainsworth houses, the one in the meadow, the other perched high on the hill. It circles the bog and then suddenly emerges over a hill and there in the hollow between the dunes, is the sea. The coarse sand beach, narrow, shadowed by high dune cliffs, stretches empty in either direction. Waves break far out, in tiers, hundreds of them tumbling shoreward in a chaos of white. The air fills with the sound of them, a low drumming as they fall, one after another, on the sand. The echo blows inland, is swallowed up in the silent dunes. Vibrates in the hidden caves and shallows of my mind.

J. Thaw:

There was no car on the verge when I reached Truro around noon and drove down into the hollow. The house was empty, the door was locked, the key hanging in its proper place just inside the cellar door. A small jar of Rosa rugosa, the wild beach roses on the table in the kitchen was the only sign of trespassers. I made my careful way through the rooms, calling ahead so that anyone secreted there should know I meant no harm. The four poster in the bedroom was made up, covered with Mother’s old fashioned white spread. A spiral notebook lay open on the desk in the borning room, a woman’s handwriting covering the front page from which I conscientiously averted my eyes. For some reason it embarrassed me. I felt aggrieved yet foolish as though I were the interloper.

No one came to the house for the few hours I was there. I unlocked the pantry and did some restacking of the original Thomas Thaw china which I had put off during the last days of summer, and checked that the raccoons had not gotten in the tool shed up on the slope. In the late afternoon I walked up Pamet Rd. for a chat with Ted Ainsworth. He had seen a young woman on the dunes but had no idea where she was staying. She looked harmless. I walked down past the hostel to the sea and then for an hour along the beach, passing no one before returning to the house which I had inherited and which, unexpectedly, I realized I loved. I decided not to turn off the water until the traditional Columbus Day in October and left the house as I found it.

When Mother asked I told her that everything was in order and that if anyone had been there, they were now gone.

Night.

Dark falls suddenly into the hollow, blackness filling up a well. Woods press up against the windows. No friendly light winks through the trees, no car on the road below the house, only the hostile dark. It comes now, the familiar panic. The urge to escape. But the darkness outside seems more frightening than the darkness in the house.

The radio is in the keeping room on the old chest by the stairs. The Chopin Preludes – Martha Argerich, I think – tumble out when I turn it on and fill the house with sound. I switch on the lamp in the parlor. The glow reflects off the walls, the old wallpaper, the white of the wood paneling around the fireplace. The light in the kitchen falls over the oilcloth on the kitchen table, gleams back from ancient copper pots that hang behind the stove. I unlock the back door, step outside onto the slope and look back at the house. The house glows like a light box into the woods. Music drifts faintly out across the hollow. My heart leaps with happiness. I turn back into the house.

Midnight.

A scratch. Nothing human. A scrape across the attic floor. A branch, I am sure of it, flung against the roof by the wind rushing down the Pamet Valley. Still, I don't remember a tree on that side of the house. I fall into an uneasy sleep.

The portraits of Thomas and Elizabeth Thaw who built this house in 1835, stare sternly down from the wall in the borning room. This was, I was told later, where mothers went to give birth and to sleep through the winter months with their babies close to the keeping room and the constantly burning fire. The desk beneath them is battle scarred, with lots of pockets and little drawers filled with paper clips and postcards, some of them a century old. I set my workbooks down firmly. Position dictionary and Thesaurus on the shelf above the desk. Arrange pen and ink in the small hole provided for them. Store paper and notebooks under the bed. Open the curtain. A black phoebe flies out of the lilac bush. A shadow passes into the room. Doubt trails behind it.

I'm trespassing. I know that. I'll be gone soon enough. I refuse to feel any guilt.

A Canadian goose today in the pond at the end of the road. He was just floating there in the exact center, moving without a ripple across the dark water. The black head, the white stripe under his chin, the cream colored breast feathering to the softest greys and browns. Just floating, mirrored in all his beauty. Hello- I call through cupped hands, down into the sump. Oh, hello

J. Thaw:

It’s a California car. This from my Mother in her usual chair Oh? I was making up a reading list for my Advanced Lit class debating between Conrad’s Heart of Darkness or the more difficult Nostromo, wondering if they were ready for Moby Dick.

License number - and here Mother referred to her notes, 1DAW425.

I gather you and Agnes have been at it on the phone again.

We should call the police.

I’ll take care of it. I’m going down again this weekend. A chore left undone. Mother pursed her lips firmly and went on with her knitting.

The attic is dark. The chimney goes up through the center. Old trunks too heavy to move, lie abandoned at odd angles across the central passageway. Behind them, through narrow entrances, long spaces disappear into darkness under the eaves. Cobwebs drape and sag like curtains from the rafters. A door leads into an abandoned bedroom. The air is still, faintly hostile. I have the distinct sense that I am intruding.

Intruding on what?

It was father’s idea that we should come to Cape Cod. He had discovered Henry Beston’s 1932 Outermost House and, nothing would do but that the four of us should travel across the continent to see the house and the beach where the naturalist lived alone for a year and recorded the change of seasons, the migration of birds, storm, tide, the arrival of spring.

We caught the first thrilling glimpse of Nauset Beach as we raced by on our way to Provincetown where Father was late for his meeting. Shortly after that Father made the wrong turn and we found ourselves, after much wandering through piney woods and sparsely populated dunes in front of the house with the yew hedge where the sun splashed in gold puddles