My grandfather published his last full-length novel when he was seventy-four years old. It wasn’t his longest, it wasn’t his most intellectual, but it would become his most well known. It was a work which would bring him critical acclaim, and it was precisely this attention which would ultimately push him all the way down the rabbit hole of reclusion. He died alone in these woods, continually hounded by various media outlets, and a troupe of university students hunting him down for a where-is-he-now documentary. They had it all written, all planned out, all they were missing was their subject. He was dead and in the ground for about a week when the students finally located this little cabin in the woods.
Walking around his cabin now, the floorboards creak and moan in spots as I step, each plank cut and planed flat by my grandfather himself. The walls are thick logs cut from great, old trees and chinked with a homemade cement of clay, wood ashes, salt, and water, all mixed and applied by his hands. It’s all still in perfect condition. As always, I’m struck by the austerity of the interior. There’s very little here. The walls of the living room are lined with bookcases, still crammed with the works of his favourite authors: Kafka, Poe, Dickens, Dostoyevsky, Goethe, Bradbury. There’s an armchair in the corner, its chocolate brown leather still supple and smooth after all these years, well cared for by the cleaning staff. On a tiny wooden table to the side, his reading glasses, a coaster, and a plain white coffee mug. By the front door, a black, iron wood stove squats, radiating heat.
The kitchen is similarly sparse, featuring an old stove, a bit of counter space, and a small table for two. Past this, through the back door, one could walk straight out, around seventy feet, and come to an outhouse at the edge of the woods. Though covered in a thick blanket of snow now, in the summertime, the caretakers keep the grass around the property cut, and the bushes trimmed back. Flowers, an assortment of zinnias, Californian poppies, and daylilies, will grow alongside the house in handmade wooden boxes. That outhouse by the tree-line, it hasn’t been used in nearly forty years, but the structure is still sound, its door still hanging straight. Instead of the traditional crescent moon cut into the door, there’s a letter K. No-one knows why.
The third and last room in the cabin is a combined bedroom and study. The room is clean and still, smelling of lemon-scented wood polish and cotton. The pale winter sun filters through the aqua chiffon curtains giving the room something of an otherworldly glow. There’s a small bed in one corner, and a desk in the other. The bed frame was handmade by my grandfather, and the desk was purchased at an antique shop sometime in the 40s. Even then it was old. Atop the desk is a typewriter, a baby blue Smith-Corona from the 60s. It was with this machine that my grandfather wrote his last novel.
As I do every time I visit, I pull the little straight-backed wooden chair out from the desk, savouring the scraping sound of wood on wood. Taking a seat, I open a drawer, the drawer still sliding smoothly despite its great vintage, and pull out a piece of paper which I stick into the typewriter behind the platen and roll into place. Then, I sit, hands in position. I don’t type anything. Not a word. I just sit there, still, at my long-dead grandfather’s typewriter with my hands on the cold metal keys. I’m imagining what it must have been like to be him. I don’t type because nothing I could ever write would ever compare to what this machine has already seen.
Existing in a time when the literary greats clustered together like algae in a still pool, schmoozing at fancy parties, lecturing at universities, travelling the world, my grandfather lived alone in these woods far removed from the intellectual echo chamber. He was building this cabin, growing his own vegetables, hunting his own meat. Perhaps his greatest work wasn’t his last novel, or any of them for that matter. Perhaps his greatest work was this cabin.
My hands on the keys of this old typewriter, I look through the gauzy curtains to a large oak tree fifty feet beyond, its branches bare of leaves. Beneath this tree lurks a craggy grey boulder marking my grandfather’s grave, at its base, a smattering of smaller black stones. Perhaps his greatest work was an honest life; not a whirlwind, but a still one.
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