House on the Hill (adapted excerpt from upcoming novel)

Sunset yellow fields rose and fell against a stark sky, no clouds, with “V”s of Canadian geese flying south across parallel borders of territories, provinces, states, and countries just before the first snowfall. If I laid with my back on the ground, toes facing straight up and my eyes tracing the flight patterns of the bowling pin-shaped birds, I might guess it summer. Below me would be a different story.

South and west of the “thumb” jutting into Lake Michigan lay countless miles of marshland. From an airplane in the sky looking down, the only difference between the early October corn plots and the wetlands were pockets of brown and green water, standing there as resolutely as if you were about to plunge a waiter-covered foot into it. You could press your thumb against the pressurized glass and smash it back and forth, and it still wouldn’t move. From up there or down below.

Sometimes the geese stopped in that marshland for days or weeks, maybe to rest their wings on their hundreds-of-miles-long journey. They squawked—”hhhhh-hugh, hhhhh-hugh”—in the morning and at dusk, cutting into the croak croaking of the fat bullfrogs near the rivers and the crickets’ incessant chirping. Then, one morning, they’d be gone.

North and east atop a hill a half mile from where, every year, just such a flock of Canadian geese found respite for three weeks, a house stood guard for a patch of marsh. Unassuming. Dilapidated. About a hundred years ago someone built a fieldstone basement in a pit in the ground, covered it with cedar wood planks, and built a clapboard house atop it. Some years later, they added a brick fireplace to burn wood to keep warm against a furious winter. Some time later, a brick expansion to the left if I’m facing north, and off-white fiber cement siding went over the thin, worn wood.

The Wisconsin First might have just deployed to Camp Cuba Libre as the house’s inaugural inhabitants erected it from the woods and remains of the lowlands’ glacial past. Just like the Green Bay Lobe damned water flows, gorged valleys, and reworked and reshaped the floodplains of south central Wisconsin, these homesteaders ravaged the fields and moraines and hilltops to force together a shelter between them and the realities of the North.

They had no children, nor the next residents, nor the next—seemingly barren like the untapped maple tree sprouting in the yard, barely producing viable whirligigs in April and giving birth only to the suckling growing at a forty-five degree angle three feet from the base of its trunk.

In 1991, the very last childless couple left the confines of the House on the Hill, one moving just too fast down the stairs and snapping his neck at the bottom, and the other of a (allegedly) broken heart at the Shady Downs Nursing Home, clutching a crucifix to her wasted chest and pruning to the CNAs.

But these next owners were none too auspicious in their attempts to rid the homestead of its primitive past, both in life and death, and in suffering, whether contained inside the smoke-stained walls or out of them. Just as swirls of smoke would waft from the cherry of a long burning cigarette resting inside the semicircle glass cutaways of a Gold Strike ashtray, myself and another little yellow-haired girl—my sister—screamed with joy as we ran through the adjacent forest playing make-believe versions of our favorite stories. Picking small sticks from the ground, whittling them down against a rock to make a smooth surface, we would pretend to be wizards with wands, or make up stories of super-powered heroes saving the world, or make cars out of boxes and go on road trips along the self-forged paths through the woods and up and down the front of the corn fields. In winter and spring, our Moon Boots returned with us to the front yard bogged down with mud and field manure, and we would scrape them off against a rock or the edge of the cement slab just outside the porch door, leaving chips of dirt and streaks of gravy-like mud.

Our voices, as we played and laughed and fought and made up, like sisters do, hung in the clouds, got carried away and dragged through the moraines while the rain came in and washed it out. But the smoke, yellow streaks of nicotine dripping over white drywall and wagon wheel trimming glued around the kitchen, was never quite wiped away—the last stubborn frontier of an otherwise stripped-naked wasteland. Or was it the other way around?

Most of the time I couldn’t see the jets as they flew overhead, 30,000 feet up. On a clear day though, I might have been able to watch while one, two, three, even four passed by on their way to Milwaukee, Detroit, Toronto. Always going one way or somewhere or another.