Free The Good Neighbor by William Kowalski

realized now that it was only the contrast to violence and uncertainty that made it seem so pleasant. In truth, he was dying of boredom, and with scarcely a word to any one, he put on his old uniform and went to Philadelphia, never to be seen again.
    In time, his family was to learn—without much emotion— that he’d been killed in Gettysburg, a no-account Pennsylvania county to the south and middle of the state. When Hamish Mus- grove, then ten years old, heard the news about his father, he went onto the porch and lay underneath the withered Indian scalps, looking up at them as they wandered gently in the breeze. These belong to dead people , he thought, and now my father is dead. For several minutes he lay there, trying to make a connection. When none was forthcoming, he gave up. He hadn’t cared for his father very much, anyway. No one had.
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    This left Hamish, Ellen, and Lucia; the twins, Olivia and Mar garet, who would later die of influenza; and Marly. Marly cut down the Indian scalps from the rafters and tossed them onto a refuse fire, where they gave off an unexpectedly sweet, purifying smell, like burning sage. The house settled comfortably around them like a blanket. It had an air of childhood about it, a feeling of renaissance. Things had gotten lighter. Life, now that the Captain was gone, was quiet and good.
    These were the first people to live in the house, and so they are important. A house becomes like those who build it, true, but also like those who inhabit it. To take the elements of the earth and re shape them into something as magnificent and comfortable as a house is a feat of wonder. Yet creating something, or watching it be created, is not the same as owning it. It’s the spirit that comes into a house after it’s born that determines what kind of house it will be, what kind of life it will have. It’s the people who move through it day after day, like a stream of blood through a many- chambered heart, that make it have a feel and a smell and a way. Eventually, the Captain wore off, and though no story about the house would be complete without him at the beginning of it, he plays no part in the end.

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    When they were just eighteen years old, Hamish and Ellen moved first to Harrisburg and then to Pittsburgh, where they shared an apartment and did not object when people mistook them for hus band and wife. This was in 1870. After a time, they stopped com ing home for holidays, and even their own family gradually forgot about them. Lucia, their sister, later married an immigrant farmer and settled in the house, which by now had lost all traces of the Captain—a lucky thing, since he would have been mortified at her choice of husband, who had not a drop of English blood in his body, only Bavarian. Lucia had three children. Of those, her eldest
    60 W ILLIAM K OWALSKI

    son, Lincoln—survivor of the runaway-horse incident—inherited the farm and house.
    When Lincoln was put into the nursing home where he would witness the last significant event of his lifetime, he passed the house on to Helen, his oldest daughter, a beautiful woman with a taste for cruel men. Helen attempted to sell the old place several times, but she found, to her consternation, that she couldn’t. There was no explanation for it; her hand simply refused to sign the papers, time and again, until realtors and bankers began to re gard her as eccentric and manipulative. She couldn’t have known it was the pull of the old children’s cemetery, now forgotten and hidden by undergrowth, that prevented her. It still exerted its in fluence on all who shared Musgrove blood, like a small moon over a private sea. It would not be abandoned.
    Instead, Helen had Adencourt remodeled. The house had never been glorious or beautiful; it had merely been new, once. She tried to recapture that state as much as she could, replacing rotted wood and shoring up the first floor from the basement, fumigat ing for termites,