Revenant Rising by M. M. Mayle Read Free Book Online

money on snow removal.
    He parks at the crossroads. From the rear of the truck where they’re wedged in next to an old Coleman cooler and a few other belongings, he takes a pair of snowshoes Big Bill made for him when he was a boy. A test of the footing shows he won’t need them today, the snow is tamped down enough to hold his weight. He takes the snowshoes with him anyway. It’s better to abandon them here in a place where they have history than mix them in with the meaningless junk he’ll be leaving behind at the boardinghouse.
    About a quarter of a mile in he picks out the shape of a house in the distance. The objects around it are rusted car bodies and broken-down farm equipment, but with snow over them, they could be almost anything—prehistoric animals, downed spaceships. There’s no sign of the mailbox that once read “Floyd Jakeway and Family” in fluorescent-orange paint. That doesn’t matter because Floyd, his father, has been dead for fifteen years and the remaining family have been gone nearly as long, moved either to the reservation or scattered to parts unknown.
    Hoop makes it onto the shelter of the sagging front porch where a divan has been picked nearly clean by nest-building birds and rodents. License plates from happier times are still tacked alongside the doorframe, where he leans the snowshoes.
    Inside, he passes through a room papered with old newspapers and featureless other than for a set of antlers mounted over the door and a hole in the floor where the potbellied stove used to sit. In the kitchen, he sidesteps a battered washtub and kicks aside the broken crockery and rusted tin cans littering the space the zinc-topped work table used to fill.
    The big old cast-iron stove is still here only because it’s too heavy to be dragged off by shirttail relatives, as the scavengers call themselves. The stove appears untouched since the last time he stopped by; the kettle is still on the back burner, the other burner covers are all in place, and so is the lid to the hot-water reservoir.
    The quick once-over he gives this relic brings on another fit of remembering to rival the one that claimed him back there at the tavern. He can almost smell the thick soup his aunt made from potatoes she herself dug, and the stewed dandelion greens she always cooked together with a pig’s foot. He can almost see the old grandmother who knew to a stick of wood how to regulate oven heat so the molasses cookies came out crackled outside and chewy inside, and had the knack of making pie with home-canned applesauce when the whole fruits were withered and gone.
    “That’s enough,” he says and moves on through the kitchen and into the attached shed, where he bends to the task of opening the trapdoor to the root cellar. The door’s warped a lot worse than it was when he last checked; he’s about to give up on opening it without a pry bar when a final yank frees it, along with a spray of splinters, grit, and the husks of dead bugs. He creaks down a rickety ladder into the shallow-dug cavern and, in the light from above, locates the one keepsake he’ll be taking with him.
    He tests the bail on the five-gallon metal paint bucket before hefting its full weight and starts back up the ladder not knowing if it will hold this extra load because the bucket was empty when first brought here. The third-from-the-top rung lets go just as he’s transferring the sealed bucket gentle-like onto the cracked linoleum floor of the shed; he suffers only a scraped shin and the already dented container is none the worse for wear.
    Outside, on the porch, he sets the bucket down again—again with a gentle hand—so he can ceremoniously place the snowshoes on the skeleton of the old divan like it’s a funeral platform, and the past comes for him once more.
    In the echoes of his mind he hears the tagline of a story the old uncle told whenever children grouped together on this porch. None of the children, including Hoop, ever much knew what