Craig Smith - Cold Rain

Shutters dropped off or went missing altogether. Kids began using the downstairs parlour for sex and drug parties, and at least two campfires had been started on the parquet floors.

When Molly’s aunt died and Doc deeded his share of the property to Molly, Molly and I were living in town. The thought of moving out to her family farm excited us both. We had picked out a beautiful site for a new house about a quarter of a mile from the mansion. We decided to build Molly’s dream house in stages, letting us move into it within six-to-eight months. Everything was set when, as a whim, Molly and I decided to see how bad the mansion was on the inside. By that point, Molly and I had turned around quite a few houses, probably fifteen to twenty major renovations over the years. Some we had sold immediately, some we rented out. We knew a restoration would be far more complicated than the usual facelift and far more expensive too. The moment we walked into the house, it was clear the whole place was beyond salvation. The faded glory that was left only made the ruin more heartrending.

As a building site it had potential. The trouble was tearing it down was going to take time and cost money.

I remember laughing at Doc McBride’s enthusiasm for drop ceilings and cheap panelling. Everywhere I looked the original wood was cracked, swollen, or warped.

Piles of plaster cluttered the floor. Carpets were stained and rotten. I made a joke about fire being the only decent thing for it, except the place was too water-logged to burn.

Molly had a different idea. She told me about it on the drive back to town. She wanted to save the place.

She wanted to live here. I laughed at the notion. I said we could never get the cost of even a half-ass restoration back if we decided to sell it. Worse than that, it would take years to make the place liveable.

Molly didn’t care. This was the place where she wanted to live. She wanted the mansion to look like it had at the height of its glory, circa 1930, complete with antique luxury plumbing and electrical fixtures.

She had lost this house once when she had been too young to have a say in matters. This time she wasn’t leaving.

We bought a house trailer and set it up close to the mansion. Summers, weekends, evenings, every spare moment we had we worked on the house. It was nothing for us, all three of us, to have Sunday dinner seated on sawhorses, tasting sawdust or freshly buffed plaster with our sandwiches.

A stray dog showed up one day. Two more got dropped off the next summer. We fixed up a stall for Ahab, then built an arena for Lucy to ride in. Our only recreation was to drive to various horse races every weekend and let Lucy enter the junior division races. A couple more dogs showed up, and I built a kennel. The dogs all had names, Hawthorne, Melville, Emily D. and Emily B. (they showed up together), Emerson, Alcott, and Wharton, but most of them answered to Dog if they answered to anything. A couple of them had a tragic past and never really got comfortable with the concept of family or trust or, for that matter, human beings. The rest of them were okay, but not really cut out for indoor living.

A few people from school came out to the farm in those early days. They put on a good face, but I knew they thought we were crazy. That was pretty much the point of our party. I wanted people to see Molly’s vision in its finished form.

I took a couple of minutes when I first got to the farm to see the dogs. During the day, they always ran free as long as Molly was around. If she had to leave the farm, she usually put them in the kennel. So I was probably safe. They were in the kennel. They were happy to see me, most of them anyway. The sceptics, Alcott and Wharton, hung back and growled as they always did. The horses were in the pasture. I called to Ahab, and he ran across the valley and up the hill to see me. It broke my heart to see that kind of enthusiasm, especially when all I could do was clap his shoulder and tell him I wouldn’t be around for a while.

The place was empty, and though it had been home less than twenty-four hours ago, I felt like a burglar. I changed clothes, tossing my ruined stuff in the trash. I packed quickly: some schoolwork, toiletries, a roll of cash from my desk drawer, an extra pair of jeans, a change of shoes, a sweater, some shirts, socks and underwear. We had three sleeping bags stored in a second story closet. I got mine out, snagged some towels and a pillow from one of the guestrooms, and headed for the truck. I was trying to decide if I should make another run when our neighbour Billy Wade appeared at the back of the house. Wade stood close to seven feet tall and carried a broodmare’s belly over his belt. His face was long and thick, and he had a habit of letting his mouth hang open as if he had just been asked the one question he couldn’t answer.

It was my theory that Molly’s parents had moved off the farm primarily to avoid their only neighbours, Mrs Wade and her son. On the car lot, we would have called Wade a bogue. A bogue, the o pronounced as in bogus, was anyone who came shopping for wheels without cash or credit. Surprising as it may seem, a salesperson could usually count on running into one or two bogues a week. With a bad run of luck six or seven wasn’t unheard of. When that occurred we used to call it bogitus. The worst, though, was having a case of the Bogues. With a case of the Bogues every bogue who showed up pushed past every other salesperson on the lot in order to find the individual so afflicted. Even Tubs wasn’t immune. I saw him sell five cars one day, the record for that year for a normal sales day. The next morning all five deals got tossed back in his lap with credit turndowns. Milt laughed at Tubs and said it looked like he might be coming down with a case of the Bogues! After that for about a week every bogue in DeKalb came to the lot and asked for Tubs.

According to Molly, Wade was the nicest man in the world. Most bogues are, but I couldn’t look at our neighbour without thinking about bogues. As Wade was, in fact, King of the Bogues, in my book anyway, it seemed appropriate that after my night in jail he should wander across the road for a friendly chat.

Bogues always find you when you’re down.

‘You all shooting guns last night?’ Wade asked me cheerfully.

‘I lost my channel changer, Wade. What I did, when I got tired of one show, I’d just shoot the TV set and call to Molly to bring in another TV.’

Wade gave me a calculating look. He was pretty sure I was lying, but the concept of irony escaped him entirely. ‘That could get expensive real fast, Dave!’

‘You didn’t happen to think someone might have been over here trying to kill us, did you?’

Wade laughed. ‘I figure they’d line up for the chance at you, Dave, but they’re feared-to-death of Molly!’

We heard Molly’s pickup coming up the lane. At the top of the hill, she cut into the circle, instead of driving down to the shed where she and Lucy usually parked. She took a quick look into the cab of my truck to see what I had, then walked over to join us without quite looking at me. ‘Hey, Billy!’ she said.

Wade looked like a big dog that had just gotten his belly rubbed. ‘Hey, Molly!’

‘David has moved out, Billy. I don’t want him on the farm. He doesn’t have any business here. You see him around and I’m not here, I’d appreciate it if you’d call the sheriff.’

‘They disconnected my phone, Molly, but I could break his arm if you want.’

‘That’s fine with me. Just be careful it’s not his drinking arm. Poor man, it’s all he’s got left.’

Wade looked at me like I was one of the horses.

‘Which one is his drinking arm, Molly?’

Molly told the giant she was just kidding and dismissed him with a kindness she rarely offered outsiders. She needed to talk to me about something important. She hoped he didn’t mind leaving us alone, but she did want to talk to him sometime. There was a lot of work to do, she said, and she could sure use a hand. Wade said he could clean the stalls right now if she wanted. Molly said she had to think about it first. She had a few other things in mind that were maybe more urgent. This was the usual patter with Wade. Since his mother’s death two years earlier, I figured Molly was good for spending a couple of hundred dollars a month on make-believe work for our neighbour. Wade wasn’t very handy and for all his size he hadn’t much ability with a shovel. He could loiter with the best of them, though, and that was usually the job Molly hired him for.