"We'll have to walk from here. The road is washed out too much, and I think the car would drag. We don't need a hole in the oil pan here in the boondocks, " I announced.
"That's fine. We need to get some exercise anyway. We didn't make it to the gym today," she said.
The road leads down a slight grade, curves to the left, and is flanked by a forest of pines and colorful hardwoods. We locked the car and began our walk. The quiet was almost eerie. You don't notice how much ambient sound there is in the city until you don't hear it. The call of a crow in the distance broke the silence. About a hundred yards down the road there was a steel cable barring entry to vehicles. "No Trespassing" signs are nailed to some of the trees.
"Can we go through?" asks Claudette.
"Sure we can. This is our property. The hunt club we lease it to put up these signs. When Daddy was alive the managers of the property decided that people were going to hunt on it without authorization, so we might as well lease it to them. And so we did, and that provides enough income to pay the taxes and such," I said.
"Oh!"
"I'll hold up the cable so you can get under," I said.
"Then I'll return the favor," Claudette said.
After we were on the other side of the cable there was a clearing on the left and a newer appearing road to the right.
"This little road goes to Long Cane Creek. It was the border between the Cherokee Indians and the British in the eighteenth century. You know cotton was the main crop in grandpa's day. He paid his rent in cotton. His landlord was his daddy, and the old Confederate veteran never gave any of his land to his children. He rented it to them. That's why almost all of his land is intact today. I think this little road made by the deer hunters will take us to the house Daddy grew up in," I said.
"But you haven't been here since the eighties..." she said.
I thought I detected a note of doubt in her voice. After about a few feet on the deer hunters' road I saw a structure amongst the shrubs and trees. It was one of the old barns, and it was partially collapsed. The wood was weathered and the tin roof rusted. I remembered how Daddy had told me how the lower timbers on the walls that touched the ground were of red cedar, because cedar was less likely to rot on the wet ground. I had Claudette take a "you were there" photo and we continued to search for the old farm house.
"Look, there it is!" Claudette said.
Sure enough, through the trees I could see the old dilapidated farmhouse. Whenever I visit old homesites my imagination tends to take me back to the time when they were active. Here I could imagine looking slightly uphill from the barn to the house. There would have been no shrubs around it but some tall trees shading the yard of hard red clay. This was where my father grew up. We walked through the fallen leaves and undergrowth to the back of the house. I climbed over some brick to peer into the kitchen from where the chimney once was.
"What do you see?" Claudette asked. I was blocking her view.
"Not much, just an old rusted cookstove laying on its side," I answered her.
"Can you imagine how many meals she cooked for her husband and eleven children?"
I moved from the kitchen to the back of the house on my left. Through the brush and blood thirsty briars I could see a collapsed porch from the addition which attached the main house to the kitchen. Like most houses of this era the kitchen was detached. Although, in event of fire, I don't believe a three-foot gap between buildings would have afforded much fire protection. About halfway down the back of the house was a door. I fought my way through the briars with quarter inch barbs to get to this entrance to the house. Sunlight blazed into the interior from the door opposite. To the right of the entrance nearest me was a stairway to the loft. It had no bannister, and the steps were painted sky blue. I was about to step inside when I heard a voice behind me.
"You better not do that," she warned.
"Why?" I wanted to know.
"You might fall through the floor!"
"Oh...well, okay," I answered slowly. I thought she may have had a point. I may have been asking too much of this one hundred year old floor to support my two hundred plus pounds. We continued to walk around to the front of the house, peering in windows and noting architectural details. There were some old bed frames and debris, as well as a ladies white pump. The house was last inhabited in the early 1940s. The front of the house had a long porch with one end attached to a room extending out about eight feet. This extended room's wall had two windows, one above the other. The upper allowed light into the attic space. At the far right of the porch was the main entryway. This door had small single panes on either side from ceiling to waist level. I think this would have been the fashion of houses built about 1900, although I believe this one was build a few years before the turn of that century. The were two doors on the front of the house. Claudette and I navigated of the rubble of the fallen porch to the door on the left, and I entered it.
"Hey, its pretty solid," I said as I inched my way around in the interior.
"Be careful!" she said.
Inside the room to my right was the fireplace and beside it a doorway to the adjoining room. Flanking the fireplace on the right was an empty wall, but on the left was the doorway and a stairway to the attic. I walked toward the stairway and into the next room. There was a closet under the stairs. Houses built when this one was built usually did not have closets. I returned to the room I had entered and called to Claudette.
"I'd really like to have a look in the attic. What do you think?"
I did not get a response. Sunlight was streaming through the window at the end of the house. Sticking my head out I could see her. She was digging in the earth a few yards away.
"Hey! Whatcha doing?" I queried.
"I've found this little holly tree. I'm taking it home with me!" she said. I guess you can take the a girl out of the garden, but you can't take the garden out of the girl.
"I was thinking about going upstairs, but I guess that's not a good idea," I mused.
"Not a good idea," she said and added, "You've probably spent enough time in there anyway."
I exited through the door I had entered earlier and joined her beside the house. From there you could see how the kitchen was originally detached. Over the years an addition had been added to the house to extend it closer to the kitchen. The final three feet appeared to be the last modification to
I pulled out a copy of an old photo. It had been taken when my dad was a boy and included his entire family at this house. I wanted to determine the location of the picture. We speculated, but only decided where the picture was not taken. I had been working on a sketch of the house in my sketchbook while we were there as well as a floor plan, and I put the finishing touches on both. I thought we were ready to leave when Claudette announced, "I need to find a brick from here to put in my garden." And so were sought the perfect brick from the rubble. She found it of course and also found in her purse a plastic shopping bag from Walmart to carry it in. Occasionally you can find an old brick with a handprint in it, but it was not to be on that day.
It had been an enjoyable day in the woods in and around the house where my father had been born and raised. We were both delighted that the cool weather had acted as a deterrent to snakes and insects. From Daddy's home place we visited the site of the Long Cane Massacre, where in 1760 the Cherokee Indians killed twenty-three settlers during the Cherokee War.
BTW My dad was the little guy in the front on the far right.
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