The Mansion on the Hill...

As a writer and most especially a storyteller you must first and foremost be a good listener and a lover of the story. While all writers are in fact story tellers, there is a category of writers who are branded as story tellers. Often it has been regarded as a derogatory term. Implying that the story is in itself trivial and of little enduring value. I beg to differ. I have been called a story teller and I wear the mantle proudly. Many of our greatest writers have been story tellers. Writers like Leacock, Greg Clarck, Farley Mowat, and even Pierre Berton were story tellers. Great Canadians and great writers all. I do not purport to include myself in their company by way of the quality of my work. I merely accept the mantle of story teller and do so proudly as there is a role, even in this fast moving, technological world, for fireside sitters who spin tales and try to inspire in a younger generation a love of the story. A thirst for the legend, for the larger than life, even for the supernatural. For a story that transcends this world and opens the mind to the possibility of something other.

So take a seat beside me on a smooth log, not too close to the fire, although you may want to slide closer as the events I relate may chill you more than your skeptical soul would like to admit. I come by this story by way of osmosis. It seeped into my skin, rather the way that a summer tan does, quite unnoticed as I toiled in the good soil of Yarmouth County, in the Nova Scotia of my youth. It was perhaps an odd place to have so chilling a past. How often great beauty hides great scars. How a polished skin hides the apples rotten core. You can understand the reason that Nova Scotians have fostered so many tales of the macabre, so many stories of the unquiet dead. She is a peninsula, thrust into an angry North Atlantic so tied to that unforgiving mistress for it's loaves and fishes. So capricious is she of the frail humans who have plied her bountiful waters to seek their fortune. Few families have not suffered at her hands. You need only to have asked my Grandmother Lillian what it felt like to have her love, a massive man over six foot four, stolen from her at the age of 32. Her life changed forever when the man, so strong she could scarcely imagine it possible, slipped beneath the frigid March waters. Newfoundland's Ron Hynes answered his own question when he said in his song "Atlantic Blue" "What color is a heartache, from a love lost at sea? What shade of memory never fades, but lingers to eternity? How dark is the light of day, these sleepless eyes of mine survey? Is that you, Atlantic blue? My heart is as cold as you."

With a name like Darling Lake you can probably imagine what kind of town this is. Especially in the 1970's before the new highway, before the process of progress sucked the life out of the town. Where once it had three thriving gas stations now it has none. The town is still beautiful, the lake seems unchanged. It appears small from the old highway, the lake is larger than it seems. It is nestled in rolling farmland. In the 70's beef and dairy cattle dotted it's pastured shores, cattle used to cross a rock causeway to a small island in the center of the lake as faces the old highway. The meadow at the center of the island is long overgrown by trees. The lake is deep in parts, very shallow in others where farmers have deposited the field stone that they have taken from their fields for centuries. Clarence Rose who I used to work for claimed they were his biggest crop. Every time you broke ground they were there, rocks. We built stone walls, graded driveways, leveled roads and filled in the lake. We filled trailers with them until the tires bulged. It was my job to follow the plow and take the stones from the furrow and pile them in cairns. We would return days later, after the rain had washed them clean to collect them and disperse them elsewhere. Go there now and the fields around the lake are lined with rock walls. We built about anything possible out of stone.

As a boy I would tie a rope around my waist and tow a red plastic canoe around as I swam the lake. I knew every point and every rock I had swum and dived in every deep hole in the lake with fins and mask. I had fished it too, avoiding the lily pads that grew up in the height of summer. The lake brimmed with perch, silver and yellow. There were eels as big around as my arm and even longer. The lake would begrudgingly give up a few brook trout. Some of decent size. My cousin Jim had caught a two pounder. As night would fall on the lake the fishing would change, like someone had flipped a switch. The perch stopped biting and slipped into deeper water. The catfish, called Horned Pout by the locals moved in and sucked up your bait off bottom. They made strange noises when you brought them up out of deep water. They had spines, too. You had to grab them just so, in order not to puncture yourself. The rumor was that they were poisonous, those spines. I think this was due to the fact that they punctured deeply and they were covered in bottom slime that must have contained millions of bacteria. Still it was another thing of beauty that hid a nasty secret. Truth was I hated catching them although I am told they are delicious.

All the time, from almost any corner of the beautiful, pastoral lake, you could see it. The brooding, weathered clapboard mansion that dominated the terrain on the highest hill around the lake. Made even more imposing by its' fall from grace. In her day she must have been the belle of the ball. Clad in white, with lace curtained windows she is dressed for a Victorian ball.Built in 1890 by Aaron Flint Churchill a shipping magnate who had emigrated to the states from his native Yarmouth. He had it built as a summer home and had originally called it "The Anchorage" a fitting name for someone who was taking time off from a sea based life. Built in the late Victorian style the house is evocative of the era, stiff and formal, cold and austere It features a grand formal staircase and a most Maritime of features, a Widows Walk. What is a Widow's Walk you may ask (if you are from some inland location). A Widow's Walk is a place at the highest point of a house, usually the third story where a window or series of windows, or a fenced patio allows you, or more properly the wife of some sailor, to pace back and forth and scan the horizon for ships masts.Too many times they do not return, hence the name. Many stories exist in the Maritimes of a ghostly apparition waiting for the return of he who will not return, he who will never sleep as his body is never recovered. She who is left behind is doomed to pace this somber walkway forever.

When I knew her in the early 1970's she had faded from her past glory. Her dress was tattered and she had been too long at the ball. Her windows broken, her lace curtains tattered billowing in the breeze like a skirt, or petticoat. Her shutters sagged on a single hinge. Her lightening rods had braided copper wires snaking to the ground, tarnished with verdigris like varicose veins staining her faded white paint with their green blight. Her clapboard showed grey through the peeling paint, lichen crept up her stone based pillars as if the earth were slowly reclaiming her. She lay like the bones of a decaying body, waiting for the earth to swallow her. She dominated the local area, perched as she was on the hill, shrouded in trees. You could scarcely miss her. In a way that mimicked those portraits whose eyes seem to follow you around the room the house was always there.

I think that if the house wasn't haunted that ghosts would have found it . Like in the "Field of Dreams" build it and they will come. In this case it was more of neglect it and they will come. This house, once so treasured now so forlorn would have propagated tales of the supernatural. For where else would the unquiet dead want to live? One of the spookiest things about the place are the trees that surround it. Huge spruce and fir trees, over a hundred years old and forty feet high surround the property. The thing about these trees is the shape of them, they are grotesquely distorted, twisted and gnarled into unreal and other worldly shapes. They suit the old house especially as she stood in the 70's when she lay decrepit and dying. These were the features that were in my mind when I first came to know the house. The size and former splendor of the house that must have once dominated the local rural area. The dominance of the house physically as she was perched on the highest hill around. The eerie state of neglect of a house once so splendid. The spooky trees so bizarre and unexplained. This is what was in my mind when I first saw the house, close up. This and the rumors, the stories from other kids. The overheard snippets of adult conversation. Stories of a face seen in a window in a lightening flash. Stories of someone seen looking out the windows of the widow's walk when the house was supposed to be empty. There were rumors of a suicide in a barn on the property. My relative newness to the area spared me the more lurid stories. Which is probably best. Sometimes the best results come from a tiny seed. Too much information might have made me skeptical. As it was this prologue served to make me fertile ground for that seed. That and of course, what else, a stormy night!

My first real contact with the house came on such a night. The day had been dour, overcast a mackerel colored sky with clouds hugging the ground and the nearby shore, which would have been visible from the widow's walk shrouded in fog. Fog that crept and rolled across the fields closing in the house narrowing your view. Shrinking your world to just what you can see, the rest of the world obscured by a white curtain. Your world is reduced to only the things immediately before you. The rest of the world and any greater reality, my parents, other adults, logic and reason, all these things were abstract concepts as remote and distant as heaven or hell.

What took me out of the barn, where we had worked all day, out into the mists and wet of Yarmouth county, was the cattle we had down the road at a local field belonging to Clarence's friend and his Daughter-in-law's Father. We had worked all day indoors, cleaning the barn, sharpening tools, re stacking the hay mow. After supper chores were done and we were just getting ready to head in, for the night, to warm up and watch the news. A fire was on in the furnace which was odd for the time of year but the dampness needed to be burned off. The Roses' house was itself over one hundred years old and was a huge rambling farm house. The fire would take the edge off. The phone was ringing when we came through the door. It was cold and damp but not yet raining. Gertrude, Clarence's wife came toward us with a disappointed look.. "I'm sorry, honey." She said with a voice that mirrored her expression. "But the cattle at Bob Porter's have gotten out of the field, someone left a gate up or something." Clarence looked pained. He had a bad back and was always in pain, never more than at the end of a hard, damp day. This is what I was here for, this and the hope that a summer of work would make me a better son and give my beleaguered parents a break. "I'll go!" I said enthusiastically. Clarence looked at me his jaw clenched as he did when thinking. "Sure." he replied, "See what's happening, if a fence needs mending let us know." I hadn't taken my shoes off yet, so I stepped out into the night. There wasn't much for street lights in those days, a couple in front of Clarence's farm and his son Jim's next door. Beyond that there were our fields. I walked the edge of the road, along the rock walls. After the fields ended there were the trees that surrounded the Churchill estate. Here the road forked. The main highway went along the shore of the lake and the road that lead to the mansion, and to Bob Porter's field, went up the hill.

The rain that had held off all day began to fall, slowly but steadily. I was dressed, as usual, in jean jacket and jeans, my prized Caterpillar trucks hat on my head. Soon I was soaked. I could see little except the trees and the road. The outside world was only a concept. What was real was the crunch of gravel under my feet as i left the highway and stepped back into time. No street lights here to pierce the gloom. Only the crunch of the gravel and the beat of the rain on the leaves. I kept my gaze on the road at my feet. It was impossible, though not to glance at the mansion as I passed. The ghoulish form of the trees loomed out of the fog. Her lichen covered walls gave a further look of decay. Still I had a goal, to find the cattle and get them safely penned for the night.

I could hear the cattle before I could see them, happily munching the long grass along the road, very much in danger of getting hit by a car in the gloom and the fog. They were a collection of heifers (young females being raised to replace the existing milk hefrd) and some steers being raised for beef. There were seven of them and they were all in one group. I drove them in front of me, down the road toward the field. The gate post was broken off, I drove the cattle in and propped the post up with some heavy rocks. We would need to replace the post as it was rotten. I inspected my work and was pleased with it. I was now thoroughly soaked and quite cold.

As I started for home, I pulled my hat brim down and put the collar of my jean jacket up. The night seemed even colder when I saw it. Looming in the mist was the house. There were no other homes opposite it. she was alone in the night, in the rain, in the fog. It seemed to radiate cold. I shivered as I looked at it. The gnarled trees seemed to be reaching out for the house, reaching out for me. My world had closed in, the only landmarks were the trees, the road and the house. Whereas on the way in, my mind focused on the task at hand, there was only the sound of my footfalls on the gravel, and the rain on the leaves. They were like white noise. But now I could hear her, I mean it. The house. Though empty and forgotten she was not silent. The wind swung a shutter its' hinges moaning like a wounded soul. Her power lines whistled flatly in the easterly wind that blew from the sea. Somewhere in the night a door slammed intermittently, randomly punctuating the sounds of a dying home, a dying era. Her last founding member having just passed away. Aaron Churchill had built the place for himself and his wife Lois and his niece Lotta May (Lottie). Aaron and his wife died in the Twenties and ownership went to Lottie who died in 1971.

A flash of lightning lit the side of the house in blinding clarity. Like a flashbulb it temporarily blinded me, stopping my progress. The rumble of the thunder echoed off the not too distant lake. I crossed to the far side of the road, giving the old place as wide a berth as the narrow lane allowed. Water came in sheets off the old roof cascading to the stone patio below. The slamming door was not on this side of the house. I had always waned to look in the windows, but not tonight, not in this. I found myself walking backward staring back at it. I couldn't take my eyes off her. In the weird way that an accident scene attracts our attention, I was transfixed. For a few minutes I did nothing, just staring. Finally another blinding flash brought me back, back to reality, back to the rain, back to the cold. By now my shirt was soaked and I was getting more uncomfortable. I was drawn to the house, drawn to those windows. I wanted to look in to see if there was anything there. Who was the apparition that people had seen? Was it Aaron, was it Lottie? I could imagine a man like Aaron Flint Churchill staying on in this world after his time. I could imagine so forceful a man in life dominating the small town even in death. I could also imaging Lottie staying on in this place she loved so much. She had been raised by her Aunt and Uncle and they had thought so much of her that they had left her "The Anchorage" was she simply looking after it even in death?

The thunder was almost immediate, meaning the lightening was right on top of me. It was the thunder that started my feet moving again. But just before I turned my head one of the lace curtains billowed and moved behind a closed window. Was there a draft from an open window somewhere else? I wasn't waiting to find out. Somewhere in the night there was a house with lights, with family and with dry clothes and a warn fire. I wanted it more now than I could ever remember. My hands were wet and red. I had no dry pockets to put them in. my runners squished as I walked. I turned my back on the house. Turned my back on the trees, their outstretched limbs beckoning me, come take a look, satisfy your curiosity. It's a long walk home, just come under my eaves to get out of the rain. Take a lo0k in that window that fascinates you so much... I wheeled. tucking my cold hands under my arms I put my head down and stared a hole in the road. I didn't look back not even when the door slammed just as another flash of lightening lit the sky. The water was bouncing off the highway as I hit the fork in the road. Ahead was the street light, the house and warmth. I crossed the distance in near record time. Clarence was putting on his coat as I came in dripping, to the porch off the garage. "I was just coming to look for you." he said, obviously concerned. I glanced at the clock, I had been gone almost 45 minutes, much longer than I had thought. I told him about the rotten post and that the cattle were safe for the night. He put a hand on my shoulder and told me to change "There's hot chocolate and ginger snaps in the kitchen." I said nothing about the house, about the weird pull it had exerted on me. Soon I was enjoying the sweet cocoa and the dry clothes. I cradled the mug in my hands which were returning to their normal color. "You must be frozen!" Gert said as she watched me, I must have seemed unusually quiet. My mind was elsewhere. I was still wondering whether I should have gone, should have looked in that window. Was someone in there beckoning me?

I spent three summers on the farm. Three summers to watch the house decay. Three winters to wonder about that night. Some years later I spent a week in Darling Lake on my vacation. I drove past the old place. It was the early eighties. A gentleman by the name of Robert Bensonhad bought the place .He had restores the place to its' former glory. It no longer looked decaying. It had a new lease on life. It is now an Inn where guests can stay and also enjoy a meal. I think old "Rudder " Churchill would be pleased.I talked to Clarence about the place one time. He seemed to dismiss the stories, though he did admit some strange things were said about the place. "The trees?" He said when I asked about the strange shapes of these weird sentinels. "They used to be a hedge. In its' hey day they paid local people to keep the hedges trimmed. But when the place went downhill the trees grew up. They were deformed from years of being kept trimmed." That explains that, I guess. I have been back a number of times since. I have never looked in a window, though I would love to. I want to stay there sometime, to wander the fields of my youth. To wet a line in the lake. To answerthe call of whatever was beckonning that night...

ATLANTIC BLUE by Ron Hynes

What color is a heartache froma love losr at sea

What shade of memory never fades

But lingers to eternity

How dark is the light of day that sleepless eyes of mine surve

Is that you Atlantic Blue

My heart is as cold as you

How is one heart chosen to never lie at peace

How many moments remain is there not one of sweet release

And who's that stranger at my door to haunt my dreams forever more

Is that you Atlantic Blue

My heart is as cold as you

I lie awake in the morning

as the waves wash on the sand

I hold my hurt at bay I hold the lives of his children in my hands

And who's plea wil receive no answer

Who's cry is lost upon the wind

Who's the voice so familiar whispers my name as the night comes in

And who's wish never fails to find

My vacant heart at Valentines

Is that you Atlantic Blue

My heart is as cold

Mr heart is as cold

My heart is as cold as you