A Map of Glass - Jane Urquhart [108]
As far as Branwell would be able to tell, no reversal of fortune was ever going to take place. On spring, summer, and fall mornings he awoke to a fresh drift of sand on the front porch. During the autumn that followed Marie’s death, dunes had completely swallowed her flowerbeds at the rear of the house—having already destroyed, in summer, those at the front. Pillows of sand sat on the seats of the wooden rockers that Branwell did not bother to put away for seasonal storage as he had in the past. The boat house in which he had stored such things was half-buried in any case; there was no hope of opening its doors. The three canoes and four rowboats that he set out at the beginning of each summer had been rarely used and had disappeared under so much sand he could not now be entirely certain of where he had last seen them. The vacated stables were rendered entirely inaccessible, and Branwell was forced to enter through the hayloft in order to dig for the firewood he had stacked in a corner of the ground floor. Sand accumulated on the hotel’s windowsills and inched up the glass. Each day it was becoming more and more difficult to open or close the front door and, increasingly, lengthy ribbons of sand had slipped under this door and into the large entrance hall.
Whether the well had dried up was irrelevant in that the pump that surmounted it had utterly vanished. Three times a day, with sand capsizing like miniature avalanches under his feet, Branwell was forced to trudge with two galvanized pails down to the lake and back again in order to have water for washing, drinking, and cooking. Not that he cooked much anyway, living mostly as he did now on carrots and potatoes and sometimes an egg or two, all boiled in one pot on the top of one of the Quebec heaters. He had trouble even looking at Marie’s beautiful cook stove, The Kitchen Queen, which stood unlit in the kitchen, its decorative features and its copper boiler cold and unpolished. Furthermore, the last time he had opened one of its ovens, Branwell had been appalled by the sight of the tiny dunes that had formed inside it, and the excess sand that descended like a pale brown curtain to the floor.
Word of Marie’s death had apparently been passed from tavern to inn to tavern, in a westward direction, and had finally reached Baden about a month later. The first letter Branwell received from Ghost had mostly concerned this sad event and was filled with his memories of Marie’s kindness, her spirit, and her outstanding cooking. Branwell eagerly opened every letter he received from his friend whose unpronounceable first name was printed neatly on the back flap of each envelope as Gzsrzt Shromanov and then translated in brackets (“Ghost”), as if to make clear which of the many men of Branwell’s acquaintance who were named Gzsrzt might be writing to him at this time.
The strange thing about Ghost’s letters was that they were utterly reflective in nature and referred to events that had already happened rather than those that were about to occur. When Branwell wrote to inquire about this, his friend replied that not only had he never fully trusted the future tense in written rather than spoken English but he believed it was bad luck to commit to writing anything at all pertaining to