Thump

I got used to the farm quickly.

Mother wasn’t used to farms for a long time, not since she’d escaped the one she grew up on years and years ago. But I believed it was perfect, quartz and wildflowers to the cities diamonds and roses. The main farmhouse was charming and breezy, three stories tall (you hardly find anything three stories tall in New York unless it’s a crummy walk-up or a house too nice to afford) with gothic-looking trim and a turret with curved glass panes in the windows. It was L-shaped, too, so that a part of it looked straight out into the fields behind the house. Inside the ceilings were high, the floors creaky, the hinges of every door loud and complaining. There were field mice in the yard and field mice in the house. Mother asked Father, as soon as we stepped inside and set down the first round of our suitcases, how he could stand a place like this with its drafty rooms and flimsy curtains letting in all the light at hellish hours of the morning. Father told her he liked its character. Character was a word he used a lot to gloss over the leaking pipes and asbestos in the basement and the sulfurous smell of the water coming out of the taps in the bathrooms.

But the farmhouse and the property, and everything on the property, was ours now. I remember the look on Mother’s face when the executioner of Grandfather’s will told us that Grandfather had left us the property. And the murderous expression when Father told her he wanted to move there, at least for the summer, to fix up the place. After all, how could we sell it when it’s such a mess, Elizabeth?

“There are micee droppings in the closet,” Mother said. “Did you hear me, Richard? Mice droppings.”

“Part and parel with the property,” Father said. He swept through the house like a king taking in his new estate and finding it exceeding expectations. “It’s a little cold as well, but the girls will get used to it, won’t you, girls?”

We didn’t get used to it. Our rooms were drafty in the morning and arctic in the evening. Summers in the city were warm, with the heat of exhaust and the sheer number of people, and the sun bouncing off all of the high rises. Even in Central Park, in the depths of it unreachable by city life, it didn’t get this cold at the dead of night. Father gave us a few blankets and while he was fixing up the roof, Mother helped us wash the blankets that could be washed and air out the rest. She got busy with the bleach and the mop and broom while we decided that the best way to keep out some of the chill, and the light, was to string some of the blankets up in front of the windows as curtains, instead of laying them on the beds. Father wouldn’t have minded; he would have been sad to see the holes we put in the blankets to fit them on the curtain rods, but he would have bought new blankets. Mother hated to buy anything we didn’t need. It didn’t matter how much money she had now, she couldn’t forget the filth-under-your-nails feeling of scrabbling for money when she was a girl. She wouldn’t be pleased.

We made a fire in the backyard, to burn anything that we deemed rubbish. Possibly, Father should have been more specific in telling us what to burn. Possibly, we should have exercised some common sense and made a pile of things we weren’t certain about burning, to ask Mother and Father about later.  But the flames rose higher and higher and breathed foul plumes of smoke in the air. It streaked across the cornflower sky. We waved some of the smoke across the fire, to cover one another with it, keep the bugs off of us. We trampled the grass as we sprinted back and forth between one of the barns and the fire. The gasoline had long burned off but the fire kept climbing. We threw on a few things that made the fire erupt in sparks, or flicker in a different colour, as if the flames became dingy. There were a few things covered in fleas that we heaped on the fire, too. We poured water in buckets around the edge of the fire to keep it from spreading. The grass was dry, flammable. That was Bett’s idea, not mine.

Mother left the bleach long enough to come out of the house, and I looked carefully for signs that the fumes were getting to her, but she didn’t seem woozy. Just withdrawn, then tense, when she saw the fire. Bett and Moira both pointed at me, though it wasn’t my idea. I’m pretty sure.

“Father told us to burn what we didn’t need,” I said. A piece of damp wood from one of the chairs in the barn popped in the fire behind me. A cushion disintegrated.

“He did?” she said. She didn’t sound angry. She looked back at the house. She’d taken off her cleaning gloves. “It doesn’t matter. I don’t think we’ll be having lunch inside, today. There’s a table in the back yard. Though that needs to be cleaned up as well.”

Her cheeks were pale. “Is something wrong, Mother?” I asked.

“There are no spiders and too many webs,” she said.

That made us all stop and think for a moment. I tried to dissect what she’d said in little pieces, as though it might translate better in parts than in a whole. But in simple words it was still as confusing as a sum. I asked Mother what she meant, if she’d found a nest of spiders or a spider sack. The smoke was still rising above us, and now the cinders were shifting a little in the wind. It was not much of a wind. Nothing blew very much in the farm, even across the flat ground. Mother didn’t give us a definite answer until we spelled out her words for her and asked her what she meant. She gave us a look, as though we were vexing her, and went back into the house. We didn’t follow. We didn’t want to inhale any of the same bleach fumes she was.  

Father went in and out of town. He didn’t take Mother, though she desperately wanted him to some days. He told her the house still needed a good clean, that he would be back quickly, that it was no use bringing the both of them when he only had so much room in the car and more than a week’s worth of groceries to collect for all of us. He was always delighted to come back to the loud doors and warped floorboards, and to complain about the city. Mother listened to him speak and looked bleaker every time.

“Cheer up,” Father said. “The girls are having fun, aren’t you, girls? It’s an adventure. Not everyone from the city gets to see these wide open fields. Do you like them?”

We replied that we did. I told him that I’d gone all the way to the edge of the property.

“What did you find there?” Father asked.

“Cow patties,” Moira said, wrinkling her nose and glancing at Mother, whose expression shifted from bleak to hopeless. It was no use telling her that the cow patties were on the other side of our neighbour’s fence, with the cows, and that we couldn’t reach them and they couldn’t reach us. The very idea of them offended her.

“This is an awful place,” Mother told us all.

“Oh, Liza,” Father said, which once was endearing and now just made Mother turn her head away when he said it. He didn’t look at her; there was strawberry rhubarb pie for dessert that day and it took up all of his attention. “Just the summer. You should like the peace and quiet.”

Moira and Bett shared a room, the larger one, and because Mother hadn’t had a chance to clean the second room, I was sharing it with them. There were only two beds but we pushed them together and I lay in the small dip between mattresses, hoping that the beds wouldn’t somehow slide apart in the night and I’d find myself on the mouse-droppings-and-dust floor, looking up between their beds. I was glad we wouldn’t share the room for all of the summer. But what if Father wanted to stay longer? Bett and Moira would only put up with sharing with one another for a few months at best. We talked about it a little, then we listened to the crickets cry and the cicadas buzz. The insects were bolder, bolder than any I’d heard before, as loud as though they’d all crowded outside our window.

I was nudged awake by Bett’s sharp elbow and Moira said, groggily, “Mother’s not right.”

We ran down the hallway in our nightgowns and cardigans. The floor was cold as an ice flow under us, and half-asleep we stumbled as though we were on the deck of a ship. Mother was in one of the spare rooms, which we’d half emptied of rubbish. She’d been crying out a moment before, but not now. Now she had a hand jammed against her mouth, as though to stop any sound coming out of it entirely. Her shoulders quaked.

“The webs were moved. Something behind them,” Mother said, pointing at the spider webs on the wall in front of her. They were partially stretched over the post of a bed frame that had been separated from the rest of the frame, but she was looking at the thick web on the wall. It was more like a cobweb, thick and cottony, than a spider web, but there was nothing between it and the wall.

“Something moved,” I said, and reached out to prod the web. Moira and Bett made disgusted sounds, but it was dry and spider-less. I hadn’t actually seen a single spider since we’d moved in, though there were dozens of ancient dead flies on the window sills and lots of webs in corners.

“Stop that,” Mother said. “It isn’t there anymore.”

“Was it there in the first place?” Father said. He was standing in the doorway, in a shirt and robes. He didn’t look like he’d gone to bed. He didn’t ask Mother why she’d been in the spare room instead of in bed. He looked at the wall, skeptical. There were an awful lot of webs, but nothing behind them.

“I’m going to stay in a hotel,” Mother said. “In town.”

“Elizabeth.”

Father tried to persuade mother to bed, and when that didn’t work he told her they’d decide on it tomorrow and that she couldn’t drive this late at night anyway when she was so obviously unwell. This did prompt her to bed. Then he prompted us back to our room. Then I heard him prompting himself to the kitchen for a glass of scotch.

We listened to the crickets and cicadas warring outside again. It was a different sound from the city, but just as loud.

The next day Mother expected more from us than setting things on fire in the yard. Father had repaired the roof, mother had swept out an entire floor, so we collected all of the dust and dirt on a huge rug, tied it up, and brought it outside to dump. Then we went around putting new screws in several of the doorknobs. Then we unscrewed light fixtures, emptied them of bugs, and screwed them back in over the bulbs.

In the late afternoon, when the heat was just beginning to fade, there was a thump from inside the house. A sort of someone-has-fallen thump. I was sent in to look in on Mother while Bett and Moira bared their arms to the sun in hopes of getting darker. I could tell them both they were going to burn, it was all that Anglo-Saxon blood in us, Father always said, but I just went inside to find Mother in her and Father’s bedroom. It was the cleanest room in the house. Clean enough that when Mother had fallen onto the floor she didn’t seem too inclined to get up. I leaned over her and looked around to see what she’d fallen from, but there didn’t seem to be much, unless she’d been standing on the bed.

“What happened?” I asked her.

“It thumped,” Mother said. “In the walls. It tried to get past the webs.”

I wanted to get Father, to collect her off the floor and make me feel like it wasn’t my job to tell her why it all sounded so implausible. But Father had moved on to the other barns and was spending a peaceful day there, undisturbed. He only had so much time and patience in him to called her Liza and explain that we were here all summer and she should cease complaining. So I looked up at the webs between the wall and the wardrobe and saw that they were thicker than the webs in the rest of the house. And they weren’t flat.

They looked like a sheet pulled tight and pushed against, though they couldn’t have been that strong. If something pushed against them, I reasoned, the webs would give way immediately. Spider silk was fine and fragile, but this didn’t look like spider silk. It was thick and stretchy as skin. I couldn’t fathom how many spiders and how much dust it would take to make a web like this. There was a lot of space between the web and the wall. If a shadow moved, I thought, it would look as though there were something on the other side of the web.

“Did you fall?” I asked Mother. “When you were frightened by the web?”

“It knows we’re here,” she said, voice trembling. “It wants to get past the webs, now.”

“Maybe you should dust in this room, Mother.”

Bett and Moira came in them, to see what had taken so long or because they were hungry, maybe. But they saw the web on the wall and recoiled, as though it really had reached for them. There was something disconcerting about it, about the way shadows fell across it when none should have.

We didn’t tell Father, and neither did Mother, when he came back and found all of us in the living room and told him that Mother wasn’t feeling well enough to cook. That was the final straw for his long day of avoiding us. He collected a glass, a bottle of scotch, and then collected himself off to the front porch. Bett and Moira and I were quietly discussing what could be wrong with those webs and whether or not ordinary cleaning would be enough to get rid of them.

When Father and Mother had a row that night, none of us were surprised. We lay awake and listened as the crickets and cicadas screamed and the tall, black grass outside pressed against out window.

Mother was crying. “Nothing is going to fix this house, Richard!” she said.

This might have been true. There was quite a lot to do, and we’d already been here three weeks. My Father was the only one who really knew how to fix things. My sisters and I had never had to fix a thing in our townhouse in New York. Father made a sound as though he didn’t agree. There was a thump against a wall. Any wall, we couldn’t tell which one. We heard Father say, “This damn house makes all sorts of noise. You just can’t stand old places, can you. And what about the dusting? It needs to be done? There are cobwebs everywhere, Elizabeth.”

“I’m not getting rid of them,” Mother said. She was weeping now. “It’s the only thing keeping it in there.”

“I’m not playing this game,” Father said. “You can’t stand to be back in this house, is it? Even for your family? For me? I didn’t marry you to get you away from this place, Elizabeth. This isn’t about the webs, is it?”

There was a silence. An absolute silence. As though all of the cicadas and crickets were holding their breath. It was the first moment of real quiet we’d had since coming here. There was a cobweb in the corner of our room, and I watched it in the dimness. It didn’t sway, like an ordinary cobweb. It was pulled taught over the wall. It hadn’t been so thick the other day. I pushed myself up onto my elbows.

Bett and Moira had their eyes open too, fixed on the web. There were five points of dark on the web, like the touch of fingertips from the other side of it.

Then, there was a thump.

Art by Eevien Tan

Text by Lucie MacAulay