Entry #16
September 30, 2023 — 3:00 PM
I spent the afternoon in the side yard where the ground cups toward the house and holds last week’s rain. The sun reached over the trees but not quite warm; the dirt kept its chill. I set a shallow trench along the foundation to carry water away and knocked ivy roots off the fieldstone with a mason’s brush. The stones there are the old kind—rounded faces, lime mortar soft as cake with the paper pulled off.
Two inches above the soil, I found a line that wasn’t mortar or efflorescence. It ran long, a thin seam at a single height, dull and pale, stuck to the face of the stones as if it had been poured and then forgot what gravity is supposed to do. I thumbed it. It gave slightly, wax-slick, not flaky like salts. When I scraped it with a putty knife, it came up in rubbery curls and left a clean, wet-looking track behind. My gloves picked up a smell—candle smoke with something animal under it. The same note I had in the cellar yesterday.
I followed the seam along the wall. Where the wall steps back beneath the clapboards, the line ducked and then reappeared, as if it had been drawn with a level and the house had settled around it. At one corner, a later patch of mortar cut it off crisp as a severed string. Past that patch, it found itself again, faint, then full strength, then faint.
At one of the larger stones, under lichen, there were scratches right on the line. I wet the spot and rubbed it with the brush. Two letters came up, thin as a pin and made with a steady hand: E.B. There was a notch after it, like a short tally. It might be the mason who set that stone. Or a bored kid. Or the owner. There’s no shortage of people with those initials. I didn’t stand there guessing at names. I just noted where the letters sat—exactly on that seam as if they were meant to ride it.
I checked the height against the interior. I don’t have X-ray measuring, but I stepped it off by habit: sill plate here, stair landing there. The line outside falls where the line on the landing inside does. The wax on the basement stone sits at the same datum, if you believe in that word for old houses that never met a square corner. I went back and forth a few times, tape hanging, dirt on my boots, to be sure I wasn’t seeing what I wanted.
There were other small things. A crescent of soot under a clapboard, high enough that no kid with a candle could reach it without a ladder. A tiny round burn on the parge coat that hadn’t bubbled the lime, only darkened it. A thin gray thread caught in a spider web, slick like the seam under my knife.
I’m not making anything of it beyond this: the odd marks are not confined to one room. They repeat, and they keep a height. I’ll clear the rest of the wall this week and see if the seam runs the full perimeter or dies at the porch steps.
For now I raked the loosened ivy into a pile and packed my tools. The yard was quiet except for a crow complaining somewhere out of sight. I preferred when the house kept its oddities indoors.
— Thomas Hale