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By Root 928 0

” he would say, having secretly never fully stopped blaming his son for the greed, for the barley, for the sand, for the death of his wife, and knowing full well that whatever it was they were going to view would not be an improvement on what he had left behind on this February day. When they arrived at the spot, they would have to climb a dune in order to enter the hotel by the door that had led to the upper veranda. They would crunch along the sandy second-storey hall as far as the central staircase, which Branwell would begin to descend, stopping on the fourth step down. The sand would have almost entirely filled the first floor by then; only the turquoise skies of Branwell’s murals would be visible. Branwell would think then of all that was buried: sofas, tables, chairs, umbrella stands, mirrors, door stoppers, Marie’s copper pots, the cook stove, and he would turn to his son, who remained blinking at the top of the stairs. Shaking his cane at him he would shout, “You are a creator of deserts!” On the way back to the cabriolet, descending the dunes, Maurice, the now influential politician, dressed in his waistcoat and top hat, would become caught in a slide and would fall directly on his backside.

But now, during his last few days at the hotel, Branwell became involved in a frenzy of essentially useless activities. He touched up certain areas of the murals that had become chipped and cracked over the years, he cleaned out the closets, and shook sand out of the bedclothes stored in the linen wardrobe. He puttied several loose window panes, oiled hinges that had become tight and difficult, took the carpets outside and beat them, and, as a last gesture to Marie, he polished up the Kitchen Queen. Then, after packing a few items of clothing in a leather valise and putting all of his paints and brushes into a wooden box, he placed these two pieces of luggage on top of a drift just beyond the porch. When he re-entered the hall, he looked for some time at the panoramas he had painted. Then he turned away from the fantasy of his landscapes and swept a quantity of sand—and himself—out the front door, leaving the broom standing upright in the snow like a scarecrow, or a kind of sentinel, guarding the empty hotel.

The new Baden Tavern was made of brick, not logs, its windows were surrounded by decorative moulding, and there was a large wood-burning furnace in its deep cellar. These architectural details would be the only differences, as far as Branwell could tell, that would enable him to separate his current stay in the district from the one he had endured ten years before. Each day, he pulled aside the burlap curtains in his room and stared, as he had in the past, into a sea of swirling white. Each evening he fell asleep to the sound of howling winds tearing around the snowbound village, and each night he was awakened intermittently by the moan of train whistles. Kelterborn was gone; Lingelbach, the present owner, was so like Kelterborn, both in his taciturn manner and in his physical appearance, that he hardly qualified as a noteworthy change.

Ghost, however, who had wandered all over the townships, insisted that there were changes. More than one track, a proliferation of new farms, villages like New Hamburg to the east and, now that the Irish had arrived in droves, places called Dublin and St. Columban were appearing to the west. “My father would have been beside himself,” Branwell told his friend, all the while thinking as he had in the past, Why these European names? Almost everyone had horses and buggies now, Ghost explained, and several blacksmiths shops had opened as a result. The gorgeous mansion going up across the street was said to have ten marble fireplaces, all made in Italy, and the two painters Fryfogel Junior had referred to were, indeed, painting naked ladies on the walls, “ladies so real you almost thought you could touch them.” He paused here, closed his eyes for a few moments, then said that he didn’t see Branwell painting naked ladies in the future, mores the pity. “General stores in every village,”