I remember the canning episode in particular because the science and aesthetics fascinated me. Baskets of colorful, ripe, healthy produce were reduced to rows of sparkling glass jars on a shelf right in front of my eyes. At that point in my life, I didn’t know where I was going to wake up the next morning—and this woman was preparing for a dinner six months from now. It was mind-boggling.
Which was why, that first summer on our farm, I’d decided that I was going to “put up” bushel after bushel of garden produce. I wanted to prove that I too had gained some sort of foresight with age. As opposed to my reckless youth when I wasn’t sure I would survive past any given Sunday, I now felt a sort of middle-aged urge to make gestures toward my immortality—or at least six to nine months hence. And I felt the best way to do that was to be able to open a jar of my own canned tomatoes in January.
So it was appropriate that my first attempt at canning would be accompanied by a hangover.
Brent and I headed out to the garden to gather our harvest for canning. Because of work, we’d both missed coming up the previous weekend, and we were shocked at the sheer quantity of cucumbers, tomatoes, and green beans hanging from the plants. The last two weeks of August had been like steroids for the garden.
“This is amazing. It’s a jungle. Can you believe all this food from one tiny plot of dirt?” I asked, smiling. Bubby joined us and nudged at my shin. I picked him up and threw him over my shoulder. “Look at all this, Bubs. You and me did this. Told ya it would work.” He fixed his gold eyes on mine then nuzzled my neck.
“What are we going to do with everything?” Brent asked.
“Well, we’ll pickle the cucumbers. And some of the beans. We’ll make sauce out of some of the tomatoes using the herbs. Then we’ll can some whole tomatoes plain. Oh, and some salsa…we’ll use the peppers and cilantro to can with them. And we’ll juice the ugliest tomatoes for Bloody Marys come the holidays.”
“Bloody Marys don’t seem particularly holiday-ish,” Brent noted.
“Hey, you celebrate your way. I’ll celebrate mine.”
We quickly ran out of baskets to carry the tomatoes, and took turns ferrying them into the kitchen, unloading them of their produce, and returning to fill them again. By noon, we’d barely made a dent in the harvest.
“You’ll never get all this done,” Brent said.
“If Martha can do it, I can do it,” I replied confidently.
I’d done much of my canning research online, but quickly found that in the world of home canning, there was no one right way to do things. But however different the various instructions were, each claimed that if its directions weren’t followed meticulously, the dreaded Clostridium botulinum spores would take up residence in my pickle spears. One of the sites even took the trouble to illustrate the spore, giving it a sickly green-mottled coloring, hairy arms and legs, and a nose shaped like a barbed javelin. It was obvious one shouldn’t mess with Clostridium botulinum or it might poke you. Hard.
Working systematically, Brent and I ran load after load of jars through the dishwasher to sterilize them, and methodically dipped each Mason jar lid in hot—“but not boiling”—water.
Finally, the counters were lined with sparkling clean jars and lids. We could begin.
According to Martha’s Web site, our first task in canning the tomatoes would be to skin them. Brent filled every pot we owned with water and brought them to a boil. We started by patiently dipping them in the roiling water one by one, watching their skins split, and then immediately transferring them to the sink full of icy water, which was supposed to “shock” them right out of their skins.
At this point, according to the video I found on Martha’s Web site, the skins were supposed to slip right off. Of course the tomatoes she used for her demonstration were perfectly smooth and orblike. Our heirloom tomatoes came in all shapes and sizes, with bulbous protrusions and deep crevices that bordered on pornographic. While Martha’s skins fell off her tomatoes like a silk slip off a supermodel, our skins got caught in the deep folds and stuck stubbornly. It was like trying to peel leather pants off of a sweaty, hairy, fat guy.
Our patience wore thin within the first couple of hours. We never got the skins to peel off cleanly, and we wound up ripping each tomato to shreds. Two piles started to form: one of clumpy seeds and pulp, and the other with clumpy skins and meat. The kitchen looked like a wartime operating room.
“Should we eat dinner?” Brent asked as the sun started casting long shadows across the room.
“Just grab a handful of green beans,” I answered, wiping the sweat off my brow. “We’re going to be up all night at this rate.”
We pressed on. We cut twenty pounds of cucumbers into spears for pickling. I minced armfuls of cilantro for salsa, while Brent chopped up the habanero peppers. I warned him to wear gloves while cutting, since habaneros have ten times the amount of natural capsaicin as a cayenne pepper, or so I learned online. One swipe across his eyes or nose would unleash a furious burn. Brent, who had the natural God complex that comes with being a doctor, shunned gloves.
Finally around midnight Brent snuck off to bed while I was setting up the pressure cooker. I didn’t even realize he was gone till I heard a yelp from upstairs.
“What’s the matter?” I yelled into the darkness of the hallway.
“The peppers!” he yelled back.
“Just rinse your eyes under the faucet.”
“It’s not my eyes!”
“Whatisit?”
I heard the shower come on full blast.
“I PEED BEFORE WASHING MY HANDS!”
I spent the rest of the night trying to make a dent in our harvest. Since our time is so limited at the Beekman, I knew that whatever food I hadn’t sealed in jars by 5:45 on Sunday night when we left for the train would have to be composted. The thought of taking even a single tomato out to the compost pile filled me with dread. It seemed like such a waste after all of the tilling, and planting, and weeding, and watering that I’d sweated through this summer. To then take the fruits of my labor and simply turn them back into dirt again was out of the question. If it meant I needed to stay up for thirty-six hours straight to add a speed bump into this circle of life, then I would.
By the time Brent came down in the morning, I’d managed to work my way through about half of the tomatoes. I’d given up skinning the most stubborn ones and instead decided that a few peels would add a certain “rusticity” to our sauces. The windows in the kitchen were so steamed over from the constant boiling that I couldn’t even tell what the weather was like outside. In fact I barely knew dawn had snuck up until I heard the familiar choruses of HERE COMES THE BRIDE, IT HAD TO BE YOU, and PAPA DON’T PREACH over the hissing pressure canners.
“Man. What a mess.” Brent said, entering the kitchen in his robe. “What’s for breakfast?”
“Breakfast? I’ve been up all night. Why don’t you make me something.”
Brent looked around the messy kitchen. Even if he wanted to cook, he’d have to spend an hour clearing space.
“How about I go get a doughnut for you down at Stewart’s.”
“Whatever. Just hurry back and help. There’s still a lot to do before we head back.”
While Brent purposefully wasted the next hour getting coffee and doughnuts, most likely trying to avoid me, I finished the third big batch of tomato sauce. The filtered sunlight from the steamy windows made the finished jars lined up on the counter glow like a photo in a magazine. Like a photo in Martha’s magazine.
By 7 P.M. I’d barely processed half of our week’s tomato harvest.
Brent wisely avoided the kitchen all day. With only thirty minutes left to make the last train back into the city, he was outside sitting in the truck, repeatedly honking the horn for me to join him. I’d decided to carry the remaining bushels of tomatoes into the basement and was stuffing them as fast as I could into the chest freezer—whole, unpeeled, complete with leaves and bits of stem.
I would not w
aste this food.
I couldn’t.
I’d worked too hard. I dug up bones for that garden. People died for these tomatoes.
I was clearly delirious from lack of sleep and food. All I’d eaten the entire weekend was one doughnut, scraps of tomato skins, and habanero pickles so hot that my tongue had blistered.
Brent continued honking the damn horn.
Didn’t he understand? I couldn’t leave while there was a single tomato left on the battlefield. I would win this war. We would have tomatoes in January. We would be immortal. Martha had promised me as much in a vision many years ago.
“I’m coming! I’m coming!” I screamed, squishing tomatoes into every available space in the freezer.
He couldn’t hear me. I knew that.
But the tomatoes could.
And they knew that they’d been vanquished.
Chapter Twelve
The first frost fell like a guillotine at the Beekman.
While people in the city were still wearing shorts and shirtsleeves, Sharon Springs ushered in its annual flannel fashion season almost overnight. Down at Stewart’s, the talk around the registers was all about the upcoming hunting season and new snow plows. In the fields, some crafty farmers painted the ends of their rolled-up hay bales to look like jack-o-lantern faces. I bet Martha never thought of that.
The sky had lost all of its summer milkiness, and the row of ancient sugar maples in the front yard glowed so brightly orange that all the rooms in the front of the house looked to be on fire. After endless weekends of weeding, mowing, harvesting, canning, and freezing, October brought a lull so deep it was almost disconcerting.
In the vegetable garden, the frost had broken down the cells of nearly all of the various stalks and stems, so our once tall tomato, bean, squash, cucumber, and melon plants had drooped over, lying prone on the ground, ready to be smothered under months of snow. Bright orange pumpkins and great gray-green winter squash lay exposed to the sky, dotting the ground like deflating water balloons. Other than picking a few fall raspberries and leafy greens, our garden chores had ended for the year.
I felt as bittersweet as I was relieved. The only activity we had planned for this weekend—our one-year anniversary of stumbling on the Beekman—was our ritual chore of sweeping up piles of dead flies.
Against all logic, our zombie flies seemed to be growing in number once it turned cold outside and the windows were shut. We realized that they must be coming from somewhere inside the house.
“There’s got to be something we can do about these flies,” Brent said, running the Dustbuster along the bedroom windowsill for the second time since we’d arrived three hours ago.
“Just come to bed and don’t fret about them,” I said.
After a long week of work, Brent tended to fall asleep the moment he crawled under the covers. I usually wound up reading all hours into the night, trying to clear away the spiderwebs of client conference calls and failed advertising concepts from my mind. Brent had been asleep for only about ten minutes this particular night when the noises started.
“Do you hear that?” I asked Brent, nudging him awake. He rolled over and propped himself up on his elbows. After having had to respond to hospital beepers for years, he’d developed the skill of being perfectly alert from the very moment he opened his eyes.
“Yeah. What is it?”
“I dunno.”
The noise was coming from downstairs, maybe the kitchen. It was intermittent and sounded like a wooden spoon clanging on the side of a pot. Sometimes there was a noise like plates being set on a wooden table. And, though incredibly faint, I thought I heard sounds of a woman laughing.
Brent and I lay motionless in bed, listening for several minutes. At one point I heard a floorboard creaking that I recognized as the one that divided the kitchen from the dining room. It was unmistakable.
“Someone’s broken in,” I whispered.
“Why? To make themselves a midnight snack?” Brent answered.
“You should go check it out,” I finally told Brent.
“Why?”
“We can’t just lay here and do nothing,” I said.
“Actually, I think it’s generally best to do nothing about nothing.”
He had a good point. The amount of noise our visitor was making ruled out the possibility that he or she might be a cat burglar. It was clearly something otherworldly. And if it wasn’t real, what was the point of investigating?
Even more than the supernatural noises, the moment was surreal. I’d never been the type to tell ghost stories, let alone be in one. But I’d always assumed that if I were to have an otherworldly experience one day, it would be fleeting and frightening. In reality, this was neither. The noises continued for at least five minutes as we calmly listened in. We found ourselves in the strange predicament of either going to check out thin air or going back to sleep, which we finally did.
The next morning I reminded Brent of our midnight visitation.
“It was probably just a mouse or something,” he said.
“Banging on pots and laughing?” I asked.
The truth was that up until that night we’d been sort of disappointed at our lack of firsthand paranormal experiences. Nearly everyone in town had at least one ghost story to tell about the Beekman. Some people claimed that lights moved from window to window during the years it had been abandoned. The renovation contractor told us he’d seen a small girl giggling at him one night when he was working late by himself. Earlier in the summer, the woman who made the soap from John’s goat milk, Deb, brought her friend by the Beekman to “read its spirits.”
I’d always pictured psychics and paranormal experts to look something like Stevie Nicks circa Fleetwood Mac. But the woman accompanying Deb was wearing a beige sweater and faded jeans. Her hair was cut short and neat, and she was wearing conservative wire-frame glasses. She reminded me of a woman you’d meet at a Lutheran church’s basement potluck supper.
“Hi, I’m Gwen,” she’d said, holding out her nicely manicured hand.
“Gwen is an energy reader,” Deb had explained. “She’s been wanting to come by the Beekman for many years. I hope you don’t mind that I brought her by.”
“Of course not,” I’d answered. “Just keep the really scary bits to yourself.”
As we walked toward the house, Gwen told us the story of how for many years she’d spotted the spirit of a black man limping down the road in front of the Beekman. When she pulled over her car to “talk” to him, he asked if she knew “where the lady of the house is.” Apparently whichever Beekman woman he was searching for had a healing balm for the bruises and welts covering his legs. Gwen assumed that he may have been a runaway slave who was seeking shelter at the Beekman—a theory that would make some sense given the mansion’s history as a stop on the Underground Railroad.
Once inside we asked Gwen if we should be quiet or wait in another room while she did her work. I pictured her walking from room to room speaking in guttural tongues. Perhaps levitating every once in a while.
“No, you guys can just keep talking with each other,” she answered. “Just do whatever you’d normally do. I’ll just wander around and see what hits me.”
A few minutes later, as Deb, Brent, and I chatted about soap making, Gwen wandered into the dining room from the kitchen.
“So sorry for interrupting,” Gwen said, “but I’m picking up a spirit in here. A man. He’s dressed in buckskin and is very angry about something. It looks like he’s shouting.”
“What’s he saying?” Brent asked.
“I’m not sure,” Gwen answered. “Sometimes I’ll just get one or two senses. A smell. A picture. Sounds. With this man I can only see him.”
She returned to her wandering and the rest of us continued our small talk about the weather. She began climbing the stairs.
“Oh look!” she said at the top, as if we too had a window into the great beyond. “There’s a woman, very tiny and dark. West Indian, I f
eel. She’s walking back and forth, across the hall, from that room to that room.” She was pointing between the master bedroom and the guest room. “She has a fireplace poker. I think she’s checking both of the fires. Perhaps she’s a char maid.”
Gwen continued to roam. She seemed disappointed by the attic. Apparently she’d heard many stories over the years about a teenage girl who’d been scalped on the stairway while fleeing from attacking Indians. But all she was able to pick up was the faint sound of a woman humming distractedly. She turned to head back down the attic stairs.
“I guess that’s it. I thought I would pick up more. I apologize,” she said, as if taking personal responsibility for the paltry haunting of our house.
But as we began to say our good-byes by the back porch door, Gwen stopped. She looked down the wide center hallway toward the front of the house and let out a small laugh.
“I knew someone was following us,” she said, staring in the direction of the front door. “I see you,” she said, smiling.
“Who?” I asked.
“There’s been a little girl, following us everywhere,” Gwen began. “She seems small for her age—maybe four or five years old. Maybe six. I kept spotting her out of the corner of my eye in the doorways. She’s wearing a little bonnet and standing on her tiptoes. She giggles. And she seems to be pointing at you and Brent.” I got a little chill. “I think that you guys are her imaginary friends.”
“We’re her imaginary friends?” Brent asked.
“Something like that,” Gwen replied. “I find that most spirits aren’t aware that there is another plane going on around them. They just go about their business. But some, like this one, can see us just as we feel them.”
“Is she looking at us now?” I asked.
“Yes,” Gwen answered. “She keeps poking her head around the dining room door.”
“Can you tell what her name is?” Brent asked.
“Hmm,” Gwen said, closing her eyes. “I don’t know. I’m sort of feeling an ‘M’ sound.” She paused, as if listening, then shook her head. “No. That’s all. Just an ‘M’ sound.”