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By Root 785 0

by the bank. The water had to be tested. The Boy Scout officials and their legal counsel had to give their approval. They came out twice to inspect their future camp. Arnold L. Reesman III visited several times in his Eddie Bauer outdoorsman costume to walk the property. He confided that his mother knew what she wanted within five minutes of laying her eye on a thing, and that it was his job to do the delving. They’d looked at quite a few properties, he said, most of them farther away from the city, in crowded lake communities, or in distant tracts of dense woods that offered little more than ticks or mosquitoes. His mother had a knack for spotting quality, and although she was usually right about her decisions, there were exceptions. Take the row houses on the east side of Milwaukee, for instance, that she was just about to sign on when he’d discovered radon so thick in the basement the air was yellow. I didn’t talk much beyond pointing out the interesting geological features of our farm. I didn’t say that radon is invisible. The exertion of walking under the summer sun in pants and hiking boots brought color into Arnold’s pallid face and left him panting. He had a clean handkerchief in his pocket to wipe the fine beads of sweat from his brow.

He conceded that the farm was an excellent property. He was going to get a lot of enjoyment out of it once he hacked some trails here and there. I wondered how long the land would sustain his interest before he was off on one of his exotic fishing vacations. I had once, in a moment of sentiment, almost told him about the teamsters, about the fellow who built the house, the boy who fell off the hay wagon. I half wanted to show him the abstract and the journal. In the next instant I thought about the trunk. I realized then that those things in the trunk belonged to the farm and that it was only right to leave them for Arnold to discover. He could go down for coffee at Del’s and get the whole story. I would leave everything to chance, to what, in my younger days, I’d thought of as, “the Guiding Hand of Chance.” Perhaps, if Arnold was subject to whimsy, if he was a closet sap, the relics would tickle his fancy. The objects in the trunk, after all, and the trunk itself, were not much without the associations: the barn, the fields, the hint of wagon-wheel ruts that a person could still make out if they wanted to enough. The trunk was like a fish out of water by itself, something that was dead.

I’d mentioned to Arnold that I had burned out milking cows, that I couldn’t make enough at it, not with milk price supports what they were. I lied and said I was going to take it easy for a while before I looked for gainful employment. On the final visit he thrust his bony hand into mine and said, with the heartiness and sincerity of a good Eagle Scout, “Well, best of luck to you.”

“Same to you,” I said.

In my negotiations with Mrs. Reesman she had agreed to let me use the chicken shed for storage through Christmas. I hauled some of the furniture that was not going to fit in the apartment down there. We might someday want the old dining-room hutch, the extra bedsteads, the mahogany chest of drawers, and the kitchen table. Although the table was as much a part of the house as the trunk, I knew the Reesmans would sell it, or have the help hack it up for firewood. I could justify taking it along. The fact is I needed it. I thought of it as having an eye. It had seen the Indians up in the township of Winston. It had been witness to countless disasters and fewer triumphs. Its virtue lay in its inability to speak.

On the morning of the auction, September fifth, we escaped to Spring Grove and set up house in the apartment. There were fair skies across the state. I guess it’s accurate to say that I had been in a frenzy as the sale got closer. I’d packed up in boxes everything we wanted to keep, and organized the rest into categories on the lawn. If it had rained that Saturday it would have been the last bad joke of the summer. Dick Smelts, the auctioneer, had come over twice to help me. I had spoken