Buttons and Bones (4 page)

“Honestly, you’d never think I cleared the spiders off just last weekend!” exclaimed Jill, waving her arms. Betsy admired her nerve; if she had encountered a set of spider webs, she’d have retreated to the car until someone else cleared the porch of them.

The porch was a small concrete slab about the size of a city sidewalk square, set with two slender pillars holding up a tiny peaked roof. Two long boards leaned against the outsides of the pillars, helping them support the roof. The concrete slab sloped forward just a little from the front door, making Betsy wonder about the stability of the soil under the cabin. But surely, over a century, the porch would be tilted farther down than that if the soil were really unstable.

“Ahhhh,” sighed Jill at last, dusting her hands and brushing at the long sleeves of her shirt, satisfied that the porch was clear. There were still a few webs stretched between the roof of the porch and the debarked logs of the cabin’s front wall.

Lars opened the sagging screen door and unlocked the gray wooden door behind it. He had to push hard—and he was a big, strong man—before the door opened with a groan.

Emma Beth came close behind her father and mother into the cabin, Betsy bringing up the rear holding Erik’s wee little hand.

The house appeared dark after the bright sunlight of the clearing, and they all stood a few moments to allow their eyes time to adjust.

They stood at one end of an open room twenty-four feet front to back. The walls were chinked logs and the ceiling ran up past the rafters to the boards of the roof. There was badly worn pink linoleum in the dining area and a flattened, elderly, gray-blue carpet on the living room area. The windows were small, about four feet above the floor, and twice as wide as they were high.

The adults and children were standing in the dining area furnished with an elderly card table and three folding chairs. The air was warm but musty—Lars went to pull open a window.

A pot-bellied stove squatted on a metal plate that crossed the border between the dining and living areas. Beyond it were a sofa and chair made of yellow logs, each with folded dark blue blankets and sleeping bags in lieu of cushions.

A small, seriously out-of-date kitchen was on their right—the stove actually appeared to be the sort that burned wood, and the refrigerator was an old-fashioned ice box—which explained the two large bags of ice cubes in the rearmost part of the SUV. There was a windowed back door on the far wall leading to a back porch. The place was shabby but orderly.

“Nice!”
pronounced Erik cheerfully. Though not yet two, he had a budding vocabulary.

“Are we going to sleep here?” asked Emma, not happily.

“Yes, darling. You and Erik get the bedroom; Mama and Daddy will sleep on the back porch.”

“Where is the bedroom?” asked Emma.

“Over here.” Jill led the way to the farther of two doors, which opened into a room about twelve by twelve. It had a full-size bed with a foam-rubber mattress. “We threw the old mattress out,” she said to Betsy. “The mice had made an apartment building of it.”

Emma laughed. “Apar’ment building for the mice!”

There was an ancient, dark brown wicker chest of drawers, a matching wicker bookcase, and a wicker nightstand. A battery lantern, the kind with a hard plastic shade, was on the nightstand.

“You’ll each get your sleeping bag and you’ll sleep side by side, comfortable as two bugs in a rug.”

“Bug!” shouted Erik joyously. “Bug!” He made a wet buzzing noise and laughed.

“Will we hear the loons tonight?” asked Betsy.

Emma said anxiously, “No, no, they aren’t here.”

“Yes, they are,” said Jill firmly. She added, to Betsy, “She’s heard them on camping trips and is afraid of them.”

Lars said, “If you hear them and they scare you, you come and tell me.”

“If I cry, you will make them go away!” said Emma Beth, pleased.

“No, for two reasons. Can you guess what they are?”

Emma Beth shook her head.

“First, because they can’t hurt you. In fact, they are very shy and afraid of people. They’re just birds, about the size of ducks. You aren’t afraid of ducks, are you?”

Emma shook her head, smiling at the notion that she’d be afraid of a duck.

“Second, because this is their home. You wouldn’t like it if someone bigger than us came and chased us out of our house, would you?”

“You wouldn’t let them!”

“Well, if they were bigger than me—”

“Nobody’s bigger than you, Daddy!”

Lars laughed. He was six feet, six inches tall and proportionately broad, a blond Viking with narrow, sea gray eyes, and perhaps a touch too much jaw. “That’s mostly true, I guess. But people here have agreed to share the lake with the loons and the ducks and the turtles. And what does that mean about the loons?”

Emma conceded, “We don’t bother them. But they bother us!”

“No, they bother
you
.
I
like them.”

Emma turned to her mother with a pleading face. “No, honey face,” said Jill, “I like them, too.”

“Nice!” contributed Erik, unsolicited.

So Emma turned to her godmother. “Do you like loons?”

Betsy said, “I don’t know. I want to sit up tonight and listen for them. Then I’ll tell you.”

Jill said, “I think that’s a good idea. Now come on, I’ll show you the rest of the place and tell you our plans for it.”

The bathroom had been furnished in the fifties with a secondhand pedestal sink and a toilet with an overhead tank—which actually put them right back in style. Without electricity to operate a pump, there was no water. Lars tried the toilet, which obediently flushed. But the bucket on the floor clearly indicated where the water for a repeat performance came from.

“That old-fashioned pump out in the yard is currently the sole source for all our water,” said Lars. “It’s good water, doesn’t taste of iron like a lot of water up here.”

Jill said, “We’ll have electricity soon, and we’ll install a hot water heater and a new kitchen stove operating off a propane tank, which we’ll also install.”

Lars said, “The water pump is in, it just needs electricity to make it work.”

Jill smiled. “I want to replace that tub with a shower. Wait till I show you the catalog photo of the tile I want to use in here. Meanwhile, this weekend I think we should get rid of the carpet.”

“It is kind of musty in here,” said Lars. He stepped back into the bedroom to open the window over the bed. Like those in the rest of the cabin, it was double paned to swing inward from the middle, and screened on the outside. A welcome pine-scented breeze drifted in.

The back porch ran the width of the cabin and had large windows. Amazingly, the screens were intact, if rusty, which was great because the windows were unglazed. The porch was furnished with a daybed, settee, chair, and rocker, all made of small yellow logs.

“These were all covered with quilts,” noted Jill. “Ancient, faded, moldy quilts.”

“Oh, too bad!” said Betsy. “I love old quilts.”

“Mama said the mice weed on them,” said Emma Beth in a low, scandalized voice.

“Yes, they did,” said Jill. “And chewed them just about to ribbons. We had to throw them away with the mattress. But look here.” In a metal-clad chest under a window were more quilts. Protected from rain and sun, all they needed was a good airing.

“I’m going to go get the ice put away,” said Lars, “and start bringing in the luggage.”

The top quilt, a twin size, was a double wedding ring pattern, worked in still-bright shades of red, purple, green, and blue. “You can sleep under this tonight,” said Jill to Betsy. The one under it was full size, in a pattern called log cabin, made of blocks of narrow brown, gray, and tan strips, each block having a traditional red square in its center. Very likely the quilter made this one especially for the cabin, thought Betsy. And under that—“Hey, where are the children?” asked Jill, missing their chatter.

As if in reply, there came a loud, high-pitched scream from outside.

Four

BEFORE Jill could get to the back door, Lars came rushing through from inside the cabin. Betsy turned to look out one of the big screened windows, with Jill suddenly beside her.

The screamer was Emma Beth. She was standing on the top of the switchback path leading down the steep hill, making a sound like an overheated teakettle. And rolling away from her down the trail was Airey, his red hair flashing in the broken sunlight, emitting a thin, uneven wail.

Lars ran after him in a series of huge plunges. Emma Beth’s shrill cries cut off when she saw her father in action. He leaped over his son as he neared him. As he slid to a backward stop, Airey rolled onto his boot tops. Lars swooped him up. The baby shed dead leaves, pine needles, and bits of weed as Lars held him dangling at arm’s length, but after a moment’s shocked silence Airey said uncertainly, “Nice?”

Lars laughed his big laugh and hugged the boy. “Very nice!” he declared. Then he looked him over for injuries, finding nothing but a few scratches. “You were very brave, Airey,” he declared. “But don’t go outside again unless we come, too, okay?”

“ ’Kay?” echoed the uncomprehending toddler.

“And you, young lady,” Lars added in an entirely different tone, starting back for the top.

Emma Beth said hastily, “I din’t know he’d fall. We just wanted to see the lady. I thought she was a bear but she was a lady.”

Jill said from the doorway, “If you look out and see a bear, you’d better stay in the cabin. Don’t go near it. Bears think little children are delicious.”

Emma Beth disagreed, shaking her head. “No, no, if you are a good girl, you can pet a bear.”

“Only with a hand you don’t want anymore,” said Lars, reaching the top and touching his daughter on her fair head. The touch was gentle, but his expression was very firm.

Emma Beth looked up at him, her eyes gone large and round. “He would bite my hand off?”

“Truly. And then your ears, and then your nose. Bears around here aren’t tame and they aren’t nice.” He looked hard at his son. “Bears are not nice,” he repeated.

“No’ nice,” said Airey. “No’ nice,” he repeated to his sister in a firm voice.

“Oh-kay,” said Emma Beth, discouraged. She brightened. “But it wasn’t a bear, it was a lady.”

“Where did you see a lady?” asked Lars.

“Over there, in the middle of the trees.” Emma Beth pointed to a place at the top of the steep hill where the trees were thickly clustered.

“What did she look like, darling?” asked Jill.

“I don’t know. She was just a lady. She had on brown so I thought she was a bear. I couldn’t see her very good.”

“See her very well,” corrected Jill.

“See her very well,” repeated Emma Beth obediently.

“Did she say anything, or wave?”

“No, she saw me seeing her and went away.”

“Did she run away?”

Emma Beth thought. “No, she just walked away. I thought she was a bear. Mama, are all bears naughty?”

With her eyes, Jill was searching the area Emma Beth had indicated, looking for the brown lady. She said, “I’m sure the bears don’t think they are being naughty. They’re just hungry.”

Emma Beth looked around, drawing up her little shoulders. “Maybe we should go home now.”

Lars laughed. “No, it’s all right with the animals if we come for a visit. But don’t touch. And if you want to go out for a walk, you must bring Mama or Daddy with you, all right? Or you might get lost, or see a bear and accidentally bother him, and he wouldn’t like that.”

“Bears won’t eat mamas or daddies,” concluded Emma Beth.

“That’s right. Now, how about I set up the grill and cook some hot dogs for you and Airey?”

Later, over grilled hot dogs and potato salad—they’d found a crumbling picnic table in the shed on an earlier visit and dragged it out now—Betsy asked, “Why Airey? Why not Ricky?”

“Emma Beth started calling him Airey,” said Jill, “and like a lot of fond, doting parents, we thought it was so cute we imitated her. And now it’s stuck. Of course he knows his full name, Erik Sigurd Larson, after his two grandfathers, because that’s what I call him when he’s misbehaving.”

Betsy nodded, feeling grateful on behalf of the toddler that at least one grandfather had a name that could pass muster in any company. Knut and Bjorn were not uncommon names among old-fashioned Norwegians, nor was Swan. Somehow Betsy did not think Erik—Airey—would thank his parents for naming him Airey Swan.

All the leftovers were scrupulously gathered into a plastic bag, which would be taken away when they left. “People around here have some strict rules about it,” said Lars. “No one wants the bears to learn that humans are a source of food.”

“Bears like hot dogs better than noses,” declared Emma Beth.

“It’s possible they do,” said Lars, nodding.

“Nose!” Airey said, pointing at his own tiny appendage, and broke into loud laughter.