UNCLE TIM

UNCLE TIM

Every house out here on the island has a history; some are modest, others less so; some shameful and widely known; others buried by the occupants, sometimes literally. The whole town has buried some histories while others are boasted about. There are names for places too: Stoney Lonesome, The Music Box, Rabbit Lodge, Tickler’s Revenge, Whistler’s Gate, the Bucket—short for the Bucket of Blood.  That’s where I lived for six years from ten to fourteen. The moniker had been attached to the house for so long that it had completely lost its grisly appeal. Everyone just referred to it as the Bucket and had for so long that the blood part was nearly forgotten.

Back then, in the 50’s, someone gave us a discarded old black-and-white and nearly useless TV. On Tuesday nights, by brother Dick and I would, around five-thirty, begin pleading with my father to get ready for The Lone Ranger. That meant he was to climb up on the roof and sit astride the ridge holding a rabbit ear antenna until we, sitting on the floor in front of the TV in the living room below, could recognize a form, a shadow—anything so long as it could be distinguished from the snow and vertical roll. As six o’clock grew nearer, we’d wail out plaintive appeals to move the antennae this way or that. By six o’clock, when a snowy manifestation of atmospheric disturbance we knew to be the Lone Ranger rode up over the ridge with his squiggly companion Tonto, and when the man with a voice like hot fudge said, “Return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear,” our devoted father would have found a comfortable position on the roof, now and then moving the antenna a little as required to keep us entertained.

The Bucket is on the north shore of Indian Creek, in and around which Dick and I played continually. Fairly shallow, maybe ten feet out in the middle at high tide, it’s just a fifteen-acre mud flat when the tide is out. The mouth of Indian Creek is mostly sealed off with quarry tailings, but through a little opening under a footbridge, the tide, and now and then an outboard, come and go. The little footbridge was once a railroad bridge; the little train carried granite from the East Boston Quarry to shipment from Carver’s Harbor. From the Bucket—and particularly from the roof—there was a nice view across the creek, over the bridge to and between Pogus Point and Lane’s Island, and to the ocean beyond. Dick and I and some other kids had treehouses over on the other side of the creek on the eastern flank or Armbrust Hill. We maintained a flotilla of flotsam shuttling provisions and ourselves to and from our summer encampment. Treehouse is a broad term encompassing nearly any kind of construction aloft, ranging from rickety platforms of driftwood and scavenged material to more sophisticated dwellings usually just high enough to require a boost.

Kitty and Frank Hopkins, an older couple, our neighbors, had a cow. Sometimes it wandered over and stepped up on the porch. From the kitchen table at the Bucket, with their backs to the wall, my folks sat where they could look out through the top of the Dutch door or the windows on either side at the familiar waters of Indian Creek or at the cow, who sometimes put its head in and looked at us.

One night, my father came down from his Tuesday-night perch, a little stiff from thirty motionless minutes but oddly quiet. Later, as Dick and I huddled under a blanket over the floor register in our baby brother’s room to listen in on my folk’s conversations below, we heard him describe to Mom what it was that had put him out of sorts. Sitting on the roof, trying to hold the antenna motionless, he’d been idly gazing across the creek and over the bridge, watching a big ship on the little window of horizon beyond Lane‘s Island. At the ship, fifteen or twenty miles distant, a speck had separated and distinguished itself; just a dot, but in the waning light of a late-summer afternoon, discernable; yet not really identifiable as anything in particular. It began to move forward, and in no less time than it took Dad to determine the thing was moving, it became equally clear that it was coming straight at him. Although it covered the twenty miles from the ship to the creek in just seconds, it didn’t grow much bigger, remaining just a spot, distinctive primarily in the degree to which it contrasted with everything around it. Had it been a bird, it would have become a bird by this time, but it was still only a roundish tiny thing; it might have been a bug or a fly….but how to account for being able to see it at such a distance, let alone from the moment it launched itself from the ship?

When it got to the bridge, the speck touched down for a moment then launched again and veered west to the treehouse encampment, settling in the crotch of a skunk spruce once struck by lightning, yet spared, saved, and ever after extending its arms heavenward in grateful appreciation, thereby providing the anchor for our treehouse. Presently the speck began to hum—or maybe just vibrate, Dad said. It did something; he couldn’t tell if was a noise or just a motion, to distinguish itself from the treehouse, like it was being recharged. Suddenly, it shot directly at our house, at the Bucket, coming so quickly that its launch and landing were of one moment, and it settled there, somewhere in or on the house, he couldn’t tell where, it happened so quickly. No time to speak of, just a few seconds, had elapsed from its departure from the ship to its arrival at the Bucket, at our house.

The next evening, still quite a bit of daylight, seated at dinner, we heard footsteps upstairs in the little attic directly over the kitchen. There were only five of us at the time, Dick and me, my folks, and Dave, who was a toddler, and we were all sitting at the table. There was nobody missing. Every step taken by any of us in this old house transmitted itself through planks, framing and other sistered components to every corner. These were footsteps, casual, purposeful, not tip-toe-ing, but sequential and progressive, one placed after the other. We all looked up at the ceiling, and our five pairs of eyes followed the steps’ progress across the attic floor and then down the attic stairs until they stopped just the other side of the plank door. Our eyes fixed on the thumb latch. It lifted and the door opened. A second later, there was a modest thud and a little cloud of dust and stuff fluttered around where the unseen being had sat down on the tread at just that point where the steps turned ninety degrees to exit into the kitchen. It was watching us, we could tell, could feel it. Where its body might have been there was a disturbance in the air, a clear contrast between the air in its presumed space and the undisturbed space around it. He, his gender an assumption, joined us thus for dinner may times after that—not always, but often. He never did anything else, never frightened us or made any noise, never put in an appearance anywhere else that we knew of except one evening when he came into my folks’ bedroom and pulled my mother’s toe. She’d left the iron on.