When the House at the End of the Track Slipped Through the Crust of the Earth
It was as though the hilltop had opened and closed like the mouth of a great fish. All that remained was a spine of slate roofline, a chimney from which a rook eyed the cautiously approaching farmer.
The abandoned house had stood on his land since long before he’d arrived a decade ago, beneficiary of a relative he’d never met. He’d asked in the village, but no one had known the people, nor even their names. Anonymous. It surprised him at first, that anonymity was possible in a village of this size; but he himself had been anonymous these ten years, since the day he’d stepped off the train, undernourished, barely twenty. Incomer.
The chimney stood unblemished, the rook at eye-level. The farmer pictured the old house intact beneath his feet, its windows open on fossils, hearths ablaze with fireweed, rooms crowded with transiting, burrowing creatures. The rook hopped down to bother a clod of earth. The farmer, pressing his ear to the chimney pot, heard the sea.
In the days to come, he missed the house. The glow from its stones in fair weather, acrobatic starlings wheeling around its gables, late afternoon sun winking through empty rooms. In foul weather he and the house had hunched together, stoics. How often his eyes had searched out those two dark front windows on the face of his silent companion.
One evening at dusk, turning the final row on his tractor, he glanced to the hilltop and saw a cone of light shining from the chimney. Far-away sounds drifted on the wind. A fiddle. The hollow bell of a wooden spoon on the rim of a crockery bowl. The unmistakable aroma of frying onions followed. That night he dropped a tentative note down the glowing chimney. Hello. The next morning there were new sprays of yellow alyssum rooted in the stonework. His second note – thank you – answered in the three green-blue eggs under the rook’s ebony breast. Sitting against the chimney in the evenings, he filled his eyes with moonlight, while his ears and nose kept company below. A child laughing. Footsteps quickening to still a kettle’s whistle. The smell of dumplings – fat and brown, dripping with melted butter.
He left his work early the next day. Shouldered his gun into a copse of copper beeches, returned with a rabbit. At home he cleaned it, piled wood in his stove. The match sparked memory: a scrubbed oak table under his resting chin, five years old, his mother cooking rabbit stew. She’d died so young. Now her hands guide his knife. Together they jointed the rabbit, sliced the onion just so, plumped raisins in hot water, measured out salt, butter. He caught himself humming, took a tentative jig-step.
When the dish was bubbling under and over its dumpling top, he lifted it into a willow basket. He was nearly out the door when he turned back, took his mother’s photo from the mantelpiece and placed it in his shirt pocket.
The rook was grateful for her dumpling, shook it to crumbs, devoured every morsel. Eyes closed, the farmer ate, hearing the breeze stir the grasses, hearing the swish of his mother’s skirts. Down below, companionable voices, coffee, a cake in the oven.
He would move his house to the hill. He would tractor the stones room by room and he would never be lonely again. The thought brought him to his feet. He pulled his mother’s picture from his pocket. Then he dropped it, an offering of gratitude, down the chimney.
The light below lurched, and went out. The rook, with a great caw, wingflapped into night. He grasped the cold stones of the chimney, peered into blackness, silence, a stench of damp earth. The air rumbled and cracked. Scooping the nest and its three eggs to warmth under his coat, he sank painfully to the ground. Through the night, ghosts came. Fossils and bones, sea glass, animal horns and snail shells, an endless parade before desolate eyes. By dawn, fists of earth were falling around him.
The house had risen. Roots swung from its sills, grasses feathered down from its roofline, a snow of chaff. The chimney loomed two stories above, the rook winked down at him. He pulled her nest from under his coat, held it in a cupped hand as she swooped to land on his shoulder.
At the front of the house, a window was thrown open, then another. The farmer rose to his feet, dusting his coat, as the front door swung wide.
When the House at the End of the Track Slipped Through the Crust of the Earth
was first published in Ambit, issue 238, autumn 2019.