The House

By Dawn Natelle

The penultimate chapter: Dawn

Chapter 37 – Preparations

Over the next two weeks the men of the House worked hard in the forest and at the mill, creating lumber for the new barn. Dan looked after the cattle at the farm after driving Cindy to work, and also started looking at the old barn, trying to plan how best to dismantle it. He tore down a few boards and brought them back to the House. He also rooted around inside the barn junk pile with Sun, and found more than a few treasures. One was a cement mixer. Sun had already taken the motor and transmission of the old three-ton truck apart, and planned to have it ready soon for work in moving both lumber and cattle.

John had been busy after the murder, and contacted the judge in Belleville, telling her about the Ridge House center. He noted that while the inmates to date had been younger, it would be an ideal place for Jerry Whitewater to await trial. While it was unlikely that he would be allowed to stay in such a low security site if convicted, John convinced the judge that it would be an ideal location for him to reside while waiting for trial, assuming he couldn’t make bail.

The bail hearing was held the next day, and a $100,000 bail was set. Since Jerry couldn’t afford even a $100 bail, the judge ordered him to Ridge House, and the next day two sheriffs came to deliver him.

The next morning Grey took him out to the camp and the Grove, and the following morning they went to the river for dawn feeding time. Jerry came back to the house knowing that his spirit animal was a deer, and that his First Nations’ heritage was important, after hearing all the stories that Grey told him around the campfire, and while walking through the Grove and forest.

Dary was now the official photographer of the house. She used her camera to take pictures of the barn board that Dan had brought over, and had it listed for sale on eBay, with considerable interest in the wood happening almost immediately. The few boards were sold at what Dan considered a ridiculous price by auction, and word was spread online that there would be more planks and beams available for the end of August.

Grey had built Dary a darkroom in the basement of the house, and she was spending most of her afternoons there. She had taken pictures of everyone in the house except Belle, and had many pictures of the young ones: the babies and Billy. The puppies were also photographed many times.

The boys: Ron, Don, Jerry, and Red, were using the backhoe to prepare the ground for the new barn, just north of the stables. They wouldn’t be allowed off the property to work on demolishing the old barn, so they took the lead in building the new one. It would use spruce logs from the forest in most areas, but Grey had determined that one of the maples in the Grove was ready to harvest, and it was felled, yielding four separate 4x6 beams 20 feet long, as well as more lumber besides. Those beams would be the main structure for the barn. The cement mixer would be used to create the floor, so the boys started by clearing the soil and bringing stone and sand from the forest to make a base for it.

Then an expected bug happened: Cindy was at work in Belleville and felt a first contraction. She called Dan, and he got to her quickly enough that they decided to drive back to Tweed hospital instead of using the Belleville hospital. Cindy really wanted Nora to make the delivery. That evening, just after 8 p.m., Dan phoned the House where everyone was eating, and announced that Daisy Ann Smith had entered the world and was doing fine. There was so much interest in going to the hospital that the bus was used so all could attend, except the boys who were amazed to find that they were left alone and trusted to look after the house.

At the hospital, there was an assembly line of people going into the room to see Cindy and little Daisy. Eventually everyone had gotten his or her fill of the newborn, except maybe grandma Lois and Daisy, who fell instantly in love with her namesake.

Dan missed working at the farm for a few days, first looking after Cindy at the hospital, and when she was released he spent time with her at home. Grey took over tending to the cattle, except those days that Tanya’s boyfriend Paul was at the house. As a dairyman he had experience with cattle, although not beef.

When Dan was ready to get back into it there was a major effort to bring down the old barn. First the newly tuned three-ton brought several loads of junk over to the House to be piled next to the mill. Before winter they would be moved again: into the new barn.

The barn boards were pulled down and stacked onto the truck, and brought to the mill. Some of the thicker boards were run through the mill, and ripped so that two boards were gotten out of one.

Finally the roof was taken off. Most of the cedar shingles were old and ruined and put into a trash bin that Dan had ordered in. The roof rafters looked salable though, and finally only the shell of the barn was left. Grey was intensely interested in the construction of the frame, which he wanted to duplicate in a slightly larger size with the new barn. The frame had been built without nails, using dowels and mortise and tenon joints that would never rust or weaken. Nails had only been used to attach boards to the frame.

Near the end of July the barn was gone entirely, and the farmer who was planning to sharecrop the land the next year went over it carefully and determined that he could harrow it and seed it without worrying about his equipment being torn up.

Dan had already found a tenant for the house, a young man who wound up working on the demolition with Dan, Grey, John, and Sun in return for a discount on his first month’s rent.

In August the work turned to the new barn. The boys had laid a fairly level floor with four inches of concrete. Cooper had been their supervisor. The frame was made of the maple beams and some recovered beams from the old barn. John reasoned that no one would want to buy massive heavy beams, and they used the old mill to rip four planks from the sides of each big beam, resulting in salable lumber and a smaller beam for the new barn. These recovered beams and the maple beams were soon erected by the entire crew. The backhoe and the power of the three ton were both used to help lift the heavy beams into position, and in almost every case the maple dowels Grey had made fit snuggly into the holes drilled for them.

In late August plans were being made for school in September. Dary was to catch the bus at the store. Technically, the bus driver would pick her up at the gate, now kept closed to keep the cattle off the road. But Willow knew the bus driver, who stopped in for a coffee and a roll after her morning run, and made points for Dary by arranging the pickup at the store, so the driver could pop in and get a coffee and a pastry in the morning when she stopped for Dary.

Tanya was headed back to school in Peterborough. She had finished all her summer courses in mid-August, and was again at the top of her class. Her professors were thrilled with the papers she had written about the seniors she had visited, as well as a major report she had done on the boys in the correctional system.

Her boyfriend Paul was going to Kingston to university, but planned to get to Peterborough whenever he could. It was more likely that it would be Tanya spending weekends in Kingston though. Sun had renovated an old AMC Pacer so Tanya could return to at least the House on weekends. Most weekends she passed the house in her Pink Pacer and picked up Paul from Kingston, so he could visit his parents and then come over to the house for the bulk of the weekend.

Red was also going into Grade 9, and Cooper arranged for him to be home-schooled as a part of the same class as Dary, so the girl could bring home papers from class, which Cooper then incorporated into lessons for the boy. John had plans to apply for parole for him in the winter term, so he could go to school in Madoc with Dary.

The boys, Ron and Don, would also be homeschooled by Cooper for the fall term, with their one-year sentences over early in February. Then they were to finish Grade 12. Both wanted to go to community college in Peterborough, with Ron interested in auto body after working with Sun, and Don wanting to take cabinet making. Between canoe building and working on the instruments with Red, he felt a career working with wood was in his bailiwick. So far Red was on his fourth guitar, and had sold the third one for $300 to a lad in Tweed. His earlier models were a bit too primitive for sale.

It was November when the next big event happened at Actinolite. Frank and Miriam from the store had taken holidays around Victoria Day, Canada Day, Heritage Day and Labor Day. They were very happy with Willow running the store and gas station. Imperial Oil supplied Esso gas to the station, and had received so many complimentary notes from motorists about the store that the company decided to take it over. They made a huge offer to Frank, and he jumped at the chance to take an early retirement.

Willow was still manager, but there was a ‘merchandiser’ who took over much of the operations, particularly buying.

The first change was that he stopped buying bread from the House bakery. He wanted to use the cheaper Wonder Bread. Of course no one bought bread at the store anymore: you could buy Wonder Bread anywhere. A good number of the former store customers now came to the house and bought bread there.

The next change was to stop selling home made pies and pastries. Andrew, the ‘merchandiser’ said that factory pies and pastries were half the price. Then he complained to Willow when sales in the store went down.

“We should be making a killing on pies,” he said. “These pies only cost us a dollar wholesale. Cutting into 6 and selling them for $3 means we should be making $17 a pie.”

“Yes,” Willow said. “But the pies are smaller, and they aren’t as tasty. We used to sell a homemade pie for $2.50 a slice or $15 a pie. Our profit was probably $8 a pie, but we sold more and it made people come in and buy other things.”

“Just you wait, Andrew said. “In a few months this will be the best store in the system.”

The place had been renowned for its pies, and people driving the highway would stop in to gas up and get a meal, with pie for dessert. When the luscious homemade pies disappeared, so did the traffic. Both gas and store sales dropped significantly.

Just before Christmas, Willow was fired as manager. Her job had been eroded away slowly anyway, with less and less duties. The entire staff of the store quit as well, and the ‘merchandiser’ found himself pumping gas. The store itself was closed for two weeks, to the chagrin of Greyhound, who decided to move the meal stop on the route to Havelock, just down the highway.

The store was reopened just after Christmas, but the man running it had trouble keeping staff, and sales continued to drop as more and more traffic found out about the store-bought pies and boring sandwiches, which were now delivered in rather than being made fresh for the customers. The meals portions of the café declined as well, with no experienced cooks.

Another decision Andrew made was to stop selling native crafts in the store. He replaced the hand made canoes with fiberglass ones from Toronto, and the Dreamcatchers with ones made in China. The same canoe that he had on display in November was there in June the next year, while the House canoes, now sold at the Mill, seldom were on display more than a week. And most of the canoes were made on order, not casual purchase.

Over that winter the men of the house moved the fence back to the rear of the Mill and the House, and put a gravel parking lot in front of the Mill. Then they built a strip of buildings at the front of the Mill, and Willow opened the Old Mill Café and Bakery there, with a huge billboard touting “Homemade Pies” facing the highway.

It took some time, but slowly people started making this their feeding stop on the highway. The result was that soon there was no traffic at the store, and even the gas business dried up. It would last another year, until Imperial decided to close the underperforming location.

The Christmas festivities at the house that winter were special. Sun had invited the parents of all the boys, so that Ron and Don, and Jerry all had family come, who were impressed with the House, the Grove, and especially the mature attitudes of their sons, who all vowed never to break the law again.

There were fewer homemade gifts this year, but one person who went all out the way was Dary, who made her new photography hobby pay off. Daisy was in tears when she was presented with old two picture enlargements from the negative collection that had been found in the basement. One was her entire family, including herself as a cute little girl of about four. Another was a headshot of her beloved brother, who must have set the camera up and used the timer, or had someone else click the shutter.

She also drew tears from Lois, for a color photo of her baby granddaughter. Dan and Cindy also got a copy, but their tears didn’t match those of Lois. Sun got a nice shot of her holding her two tots on her knees, and Grey and Belle got a prized shot of Billy sitting on Grey’s knee, listening to a story and looking up at his ‘father’ with eyes full of love.

Red made the frames for all the many photos that Dary had shot and presented, some with intricate carving.

The fourth day of the celebration, when the kids got their presents, was bedlam, now that there were three tots running about. Billy could run and the twins, at a year and a half, were not far behind him. Don had a little sister who was two, and she was right into the mix.

In the middle of the chaos, Grey heard Daisy tell Lois: “This is what a Christmas should be. All these people, these babies, they are my family. This is what I dreamed for when I was alone all those years.”