Down the road from here there's a worn, tar paper shack. It has the gently sloping roof that hangs off the front to form a covered porch that's common of older houses in this area. There are two doors, two windows and a chimney at the side.
Everything about it is dingy, the porch slides off to one side, the windows are little crooked, the tar paper is falling off like birch bark. There's no road to it, it just stands alone in a corn field. It appears to be completely empty.
Opposite it is a way side bar, nothing more than a rectangle painted black with a beer sign in the window and packed dirt beside it where the trucks and cars are parked, even in the early afternoon.
That particular bend in the road never fails to stirs up my imagination like a hive of bees that's been hit with a rock. Who lived in the tar paper shack? Was it a tiny school house for the community around it-maybe that would explain the two doors. But it's so narrow how could anyone fit in it?
Was it a poor laborer and his family? Did they lay their corn shuck mattresses on the front porch to sleep at night and eat their cornbread at a rickety table inside? Was there a black wood stove with a narrow stove pipe jutting out the roof? I could imagine the thin, worn woman wearily sweeping the floors, a baby wearing a dirty cotton dress sitting in a basket, their faces glossed with sweat, a spare set of clothing hanging limp from a nail on the wall.
Maybe they didn't own the land, maybe they were just renters, a losing proposition if ever there was one.
I don't know why it summons up such a potentially sad history in my mind, maybe it's some one's homestead and they keep it standing to remind themselves of how far they've come in the succeeding generations. But it just seems to be steeped in sadness, verging an despair. It's a worn house all sunk into itself, like a mouth with no teeth.
When we were driving through South Dakota for my brother's wedding in Minnesota, I saw a deserted house high up on a ridge. In South Dakota the sky is vast, an open canvas of light and cloud. The land stretches almost as far, but it rolls, sometime serenely, majestically and sometimes with jagged, sharp edges, a sharp fall.
It was evening as we drove past to the east of the house. The land fell away from the ridge on all sides, fell away and away and away into the dusty horizon, dust brown. The gentle curve of the highway caused the sun to swing past the house and for a moment, the rays shown right through the windows, lit the whole house up from the inside and threw the hillside before it into shadow.
I felt a shiver run right up my spine. I turned my head to watch the house fall back into shadow as the sun came around to the side of it, quiet, shuttered and dark. I felt it resented the light that had shown so revealingly through it.
"That house is haunted," I told Keith, out of the blue.
"What?" he asked, sharply. "What house? How do you know?"
I didn't know. It was just my imagination. But I felt that house reach out of the dark, felt it watching as we drove away. I watched for it when we were driving home, but I didn't see it again.
