Page 14 of Backwoods
“You’re one hundred percent correct,” Amiya said.
“But I keep it clean.” Grandpa Lee ambled to the building and swung open the door. Inside, she saw a gleaming wood commode, the lid closed.
“It’s a compost toilet, young lady,” he said. “I installed it a couple years back. It doesn’t stink one bit.”
Amiya advanced a few steps closer. She detected no foul odors. She caught the fragrance of a pine-scented disinfectant, actually, and noticed a plastic spray bottle hanging from a hook on the wall.
“That bowl’s so clean, you could eat off it,” Grandpa Lee said.
“No doubt, but I’ll pass,” Amiya said.
Grandpa Lee cackled and motioned for them to follow.
He pointed out the entrance to his storm cellar, located about thirty feet away from the house. A locked pair of heavy oak doors secured the underground chamber. Down there, he explained, he kept provisions such as canned goods, bags of rice, flour, and sugar, and other items.
Next, he pointed out the water well, located not far from the cellar. Amiya was about to voice a concern about a ninety-year-old man lifting heavy buckets of water and carrying them across the property, and thought better of it. Who was she to judge? Perhaps such physically demanding labors had contributed toward Grandpa Lee’s good health.
Farther away, he showed them another shed-like building that Amiya first thought was another outhouse, but was actually a smokehouse.
“I get my meats from the market in town,” Grandpa Lee said. He nodded toward the forested land beyond. “But the fish I catch from the lake here. Have you ever been fishing, sweetheart?”
“Once, when I was a child,” Amiya said.
“We’ll have to do that here sometime,” Grandpa Lee said.
“I’m surprised that you’ve got a lake on the property,” Amiya said. “Nick didn’t say anything about that to me.”
“Sorry,” Nick said. “I didn’t remember. I haven’t been here in ten years.”
“Let’s take a drive.” Grandpa Lee clapped Nick on the shoulder. “I’ll show y’all what we’ve got out there.”
10
The three of them piled into Grandpa Lee’s pickup truck. Grandpa Lee got behind the wheel, Amiya sat in the middle, and Nick squeezed into the final spot and slammed the door shut behind him.
Nick was waiting for the right moment to bring up selling the property. He had no idea how Grandpa Lee would respond, but his grandfather seemed to be in high spirits, eager to share his world with them, and Nick didn’t want to disrupt the mood, not just yet.
But the offer letter felt as if it were burning a hole in his back pocket.
He noticed that the Ford’s interior, like his granddad’s house, was spotless. It smelled richly of leather and a pleasant, pine-scented air freshener. The dashboard gleamed.
“What year is this truck?” Nick asked.
“It’s a 1982 Ford F-150,” Grandpa Lee said. “I’ve got a hundred and ten thousand miles on the odometer, but I bet I could outlast your high-end vehicle right there.” He snickered.
The engine started with a throaty rumble. The truck was a stick shift—Nick remembered that his grandfather had actuallytaught him how to drive a stick—and Grandpa Lee shifted gears easily into reverse. If Nick had checked under the hood he knew he would have found that the engine was as well maintained as the interior. His granddad was one of those rare guys who knew how to repair damn near anything.
“The rifle mounted on the rear windshield,” Amiya said, turning slightly to glance behind her. “Why do you need that?”
“That’s a Remington 700 rifle,” Grandpa Lee said. “I’m a country boy at heart. I keep a gun in my truck and one on my hip; always have.”
“You’ve never needed to use it?” Amiya asked. “I was thinking you might have deer or other critters on the property that you needed to regulate.”
“If I ever needed to use my gun here at Westbrook, we’ve got bigger problems,” Grandpa Lee said.
Grandpa Lee steered the truck away from the house and onto one of the narrow dirt lanes that snaked deep into the woods beyond. They bounced along the path.
“Nick told me about how you lock down the house at night,” Amiya said. “What’s that all about?”
