into se 82nd. There was a mailbox at the end, but the lettering had long ago worn away and had never been replaced. “Mamma never believed in doing any unnecessary work,” Amy said. “Everybody in both towns knew her, so why bother putting a name on the box?” The mailbox was empty.
A dirt road wound back into the trees. The woods were thick and undisturbed here; the road was rutted and muddy from last week’s rain. I didn’t see a house anywhere, but soon it appeared as we bumped our way through the brush. A clearing opened and a ramshackle building shimmered in the distance like a mirage. There had once been a fence, but it had long ago crumbled, falling section by section until now only a few rotting posts and an occasional tangle of wire marked where it had been.
“Welcome to my castle,” Amy said. “The only real home I’ve ever known.”
I pulled into a dirt yard, slick with mud and ringed by weeds. The house was indeed in a sorry state. “I just don’t know what to do with it,” Amy said: “it’s become a white elephant. I’ve been told the land’s worth something, but not as much as Mamma owed. I doubt if I’ll break even when I sell it, if I can sell it. I’m having a real problem with that, you know. How do you cut your losses on a piece of your heart?”
She got out of the car and stood looking at it. “The last big thing she went into debt for was a roof. Right up to the end, she wanted to protect all that stuff in the attic, make sure it didn’t get ruined by a leak. So about five years ago she borrowed the money and had a guy come out and fix it. She’s been paying the interest on the loan ever since, but hasn’t made a dent in the principal. So what we have here, ladies and gentlemen, is a ten-dollar tablecloth for a two-dollar table. Let’s go inside.”
We picked our way up to the porch, where she found two notes taped to the door. On one was scrawled the word
I heard the jingle of keys. She opened a door, which creaked on rusty hinges, and I followed her into the most jumbled, crowded, disorganized room I had ever seen. “Don’t say you weren’t warned,” Amy said over her shoulder. “My mother was constitutionally unable to throw out anything. This is just the beginning.” She turned and leaned against a doorjamb, watching me as I beheld it. The first problem was the magazines—years of such extinct publications as
“The funny thing is, she really did write for some of these magazines,” Amy said. “She really was a good writer, she just had trouble deciding what to write, and then making the time to do it. She got five hundred dollars once from one of these jobs. I think that’s when she began to talk to Gray son about doing his life in a book. She had worked for him, you know, she was the first person he hired when his shop began doing so well back in the fifties. She answered his phone, wrote his letters, kept his business records. And at work she was neat as a pin…or so she said. She never left work without putting everything where it belonged, then she’d get home and throw her own stuff on the nearest pile.”
She led me through the hall to the kitchen. The cupboards too were clogged with papers, magazines, clippings.
“Happy New Year,” she said.
She pointed to a stair that led down into darkness: “Cellar. More of the same down there. Whatever’s there is pretty well ruined by the moisture…the whole place has got a mildewy smell. I never go down there without getting depressed and wanting to douse the whole thing with gasoline and burn it to the ground.”
The kitchen opened on the other side into a back bedroom. There was another short hall, with steps to the upper floor.
“What you want’s up there. You won’t even need a flashlight on a sunny day like this. There’s a big window in the attic that faces east, and the sun’ll light you up like the Fourth of July. Do you need me for anything?”
“Let me go on up and see what I find.”
“I’ll putz around down here. Stomp on the floor if you want me.”
Sunlight beamed down the stair like a beacon. The air was heavy and filled with floating dust. I went up past the second floor, up a narrower stair to the top. Light from the east flooded the room, giving you the notion of being a sample on a slide under a microscope. It wasn’t an unpleasant feeling—after the days of rain, you were willing to be a bug if it bought you a little sunshine—and I stood there for a moment with my head poking up into the attic before going the last few steps. The attic felt crowded, like the rest of the house, but the room was small and an immediate difference was apparent up here. There was order…there was purpose…there was care. The boxes were all of one size, fitted together in one large block. They were neatly stacked on pallets in the center of the room, far away from the walls. Each had been wrapped in polyethylene and sealed with clear tape; then the whole bundle was covered by a sheet of the same plastic, making it as nearly waterproof as possible.
It was one of those moments that only a bookman can appreciate, that instant of discovery when you know without opening that first box that you’ve just walked into something wonderful. Your mouth dries up and your heart beats faster, and the fact that none of it belongs to you or ever will is strangely irrelevant. I walked around the stuff, taking its measure. It was a perfect cube—four high, four deep, four across: sixty-four cartons of Grayson lore.
I stripped back the plastic cover and leaned down for a closer look. I could read the words she had written on the cardboard with a heavy black marker.
