To the right of the entrance, a homemade wooden ladder descended into the room. It led up to a small bedroom, anchored with a rusty metal bed (“pulled from my grandpa’s chicken barn,” Aaron boasted) covered with a patchwork quilt. Beneath the loft sat a vanity, with a shadowy mirror and a chipped enameled washbasin on top. I guessed that that was the bathroom.
Aaron built a fire in the woodstove in the center of the house and dropped a pile of snowy logs at my feet, on which I propped my boots to let them melt off. Outside, the sun was dropping. He lit an oil lamp, tinting everything orange. I shivered, not with cold but with the engrossing weirdness of the place. If I hadn’t known him and his family all my life I’d have thought I’d just entered a madman’s lair.
I looked up. The flat ceiling, fourteen feet up, was covered with overlapping pieces of rusty sheet metal (“the backside of old trailer house siding,” he said). The blotches of maroon, orange, black, and pink swirled into a surreal pattern like the one that forms on the back of your eyelids when you squint in the dark. The house was sided with rough board-and-batten, but the interior was made of shiny logs, which he explained were the extra slabs that he’d taken home from the mill, stripped of excess bark with an axe, varnished thickly, and nailed onto the walls to create a faux-log-cabin effect. Though he’d fully intended to put down a wood floor over the wide plank subfloor, he fell in love with the dirty patina the floor had taken on during the time he’d been working on it with his muddy work boots, and instead decided just to preserve its finish with four layers of heavy varnish. In the flickering firelight from the oil lamp, the dark pine boards shone like lacquered dry coffee in a forgotten cup.
Nearly every inch of space on the walls was filled with stuff: paintings, photos, iron tools, lake buoys, record covers, deer hides. Crude handmade wooden weapons hung ominously amid the sculptures and paintings. The tables held a granny’s menagerie of tchotchkes—trinkets, figurines, little glass boxes with taconite pellets, quirky old coasters, brooches, geodes, music boxes with yellowed gloves draped over them—a nice collection of everything you might have felt like buying in an antiques store but put back at the last minute. Each treasured knickknack held its own orderly slot. Everything wore a lacy shawl of dust.
The nearest electricity box was more than three miles away. He poured me a glass of water from the jug he’d brought in and explained that there was no running water, either, because the pump he’d attempted to pound in the kitchen had come up dry. And no phone. He laid the eggs and the bacon, the loaf of bread and the coffee on the kitchen butcher block. We were marooned, with just these resources. And yet it was the coziest place I’d ever been, like the fantasy house that children dream about as they sit in their forts, wishing them to come to life. Most adults forget about those places as they grow older, but not him.
We slept there that night, crawling the ladder to the loft bedroom. I pulled out the lace-up petticoat top I’d bought in a vintage store, which suddenly felt a little too historically accurate. My fantasy is out of the bag now, I thought, as I fastened the long line of pearly buttons and crawled into bed. Aaron piled the heavy quilts on high. When we turned off the oil lamp for the night the mice began to play a game of pinball in the rafters, and immediately Aaron corrected his mistake.
“I always play night music to drown out the mice,” he said as he went downstairs to put a Fritz Kreisler violin tape into the boom box. The high notes of the violin kicked in, swirling into the dark like a voice. We lay there, taking turns rolling over toward the window to look out at the soft drifts of moonlit snow.
Aaron said, “Ever since I was a kid, I’ve been afraid of the dark. I used to think it was a monster”—he held his arms up—“chasing me.”
“You’re not afraid now, are you?” I asked, a little scared myself.
“I’m starting to get over it,” he said. “It’s better with someone else out here.”
The next day when we were ready to go, we let the fire die down, shut the door, turned the latch, and hung the open padlock on it. As we walked back to the road in yesterday’s trampled footprints, I turned around. The loft window formed one eye and the window in the door another, making a crooked, lovable face. It was hard to believe we were going to leave the house out there all alone. It was already a character.
And although Aaron hates it when I say this—because it’s so sugary—when I looked back at the house, I thought its board-and-batten siding made it look just like the one on Little House on the Prairie, ladder to the sleeping loft and all.
—
A few months later, the long, record-breaking cold winter of 1997 came to a close. To celebrate the temperature’s rise to zero, we drove around with the car windows down. The sun was shining, and in an instant we were old-timers, happy, and constantly together.
I was graduating that spring but hadn’t yet formulated a plan. Many of my friends were moving to New York, and others were headed on to more school. I figured I’d work a year in Minneapolis, then probably go to grad school myself to become a professor. The English department felt more like home to me than any other place. I knew Aaron intended to keep making art and that he’d want to move back into his empty house in the woods that summer, but he was keeping his specific plans for the future close to his chest.
Then one day, as I was sitting on my bed reading The Making of Americans by Gertrude Stein—a famously unreadable book, but one that effectively drills the dream of the pioneers into your head over the course of two thousand pages of repetitive nonsense—and Aaron was sitting in the wooden chair next to me, embroidering a tiny baby-quilt art piece with the logo for the fictional Two Inlets Knife and Gun Club, his absurdist ode to the rack-and-gun culture of our home, I started to cry, my tears projectile.
Aaron kneeled by my side, imploring me to tell him what was wrong. What was it that he had done?
“Nuh-thing!” I wailed. I didn’t know. Or I couldn’t say. I couldn’t see. I finally coughed it out, the words that hadn’t yet gone through the pipes of my brain but had been keeping me from breathing deeply.
“I wanna go up there!”
“You want to go up where?”
“I wanna move up to the house with you!”
“My house? In Two Inlets?” He was honestly shocked.
“Yes!” I shouted, wiping my face. I glared at him through puffy eyes. “Why didn’t you ask me?”
“I—I don’t know. I didn’t think you’d want to live up there.”
He looked at me, slumped on the bed, fully depleted and about as unvarnished as I’d ever been with him or anyone else. “All the guys up there told me that I’d never get a woman to live at my place,” he joked.
“Some guy says women can’t live in the woods and you believe them?”
“I’m sorry! I didn’t think it was really your thing. Honestly, I thought I’d have to build a rambler at the front of the road to get you to move there with me. The road is so long and terrible.”
“It’s terrible,” I agreed. “But I don’t care. I want to go up there.”
“You really want to live up there, sweetie?”