“No, but I can help get things sorted out with the county. These structures need to be formally condemned before they can get taken down. It’s what these folks want, and they don’t have wherewithal to do it themselves. They just want to live in that new house out there, with everything new.”
Sally looked over at the shiny mobile home. “You’ve been inside?” she asked.
“In and out, most of the afternoon. Everything is spic and span in there. This mess is something they don’t want to even think about.”
Sally shook her head. “So, you’re going to be like their social worker?”
“If I have to be,” Harriet grinned. “I got an old highboy in the barn that’s one of the best I’ve ever seen. I got three tables at least that my friend in Deposit will want for his shop, and I’m only halfway in. They have no idea what’s in there because they don’t care about any of it. If I told them something they’ve got might be worth a fortune, I don’t think they’d believe me.”
Sally was having trouble breathing. There seemed to be a path of sorts, further into the hallway, but it ended at a staircase that tipped upward and disappeared. She wanted to go there, but she wasn’t at all sure she could get there. Another moment and she had to reach for the doorframe to steady herself. “Can you…” Sally felt backward. Harriet took her by the wrist and pulled her back out onto the doorstep.
“Uh-oh,” she heard Harriet say. “I shouldn’t have let you stay in there. We’ll need boots and masks when we come back.”
Sally was breathing deeply, hands on her knees, concentrating on getting the air in. “Back?” she managed, finally.
“It’s a three-day job, minimum. Drew’ll keep working as long as there’s light, and he’ll stay over at the Quality Inn in Horseheads, but this is enough for me. I can come back tomorrow. You can, too, if you like.”
Tomorrow was Sunday. Of course she wanted to come back. With boots, this time, and rubber gloves. And her hair in braids, under a bandana.
In the end, she spent nearly a week on the site, missing two meetings of her Writing and Sexual Politics seminar and a precept for her English lit survey, and helping to excavate a veritable catalog of eighteenth-and nineteenth-century American furniture, much of it （not surprisingly） in pieces and all of it in need of TLC in one form or another. But even Sally, by now, could see the many forms of value contained in these things. Bringing a seven-foot-long harvest table into the light, taking a rag to its surface, and showing its pale limbs to the sun for the first time in many decades—that felt like a form of spiritual midwifery. There was an early wing chair some animal （or generations of animals） had nested in, but when Drew cut away the fabric and webbing the skeleton of it was beautiful. Inside a high chest so dark it wasn’t immediately clear its surface had been japanned, Harriet showed her the ghost of a signature （Eliphalet Chapin） and a date, 1787.
The woman in the mobile home was named Mary Willit, but she asked them to call her Merry because everyone did. She came out every couple of hours with mugs of coffee, sweetened with some pumpkin-flavored concoction Sally found vile, and something newly baked on a tray, which she left on the hood of the car. At first, Sally had wanted to cover up whatever treasure had just emerged from the barn, worried that the glory and the value must be obvious to anyone, in or out of the profession. Certainly the Chapin chest or the harvest table would give anyone pause, no matter how anxious they were to get the buildings cleared out and possibly even demolished. But no: to Mary/Merry Willit, every single object not already transferred to her sparkling mobile home was ancient junk, and Sally, Drew, and Harriet were angels from the planet Ithaca, come to remove a hundred shades of eyesore from her property—all for free. One day, when asked how she’d managed to unpack her massive barn and clear out her foul-smelling old house, she would offer up the name and number of Harriet Greene, that pleasant and hardworking lady who hadn’t charged her a cent. And so it would continue, farm to homestead to crumbling manor house, all through the valleys and canal towns and farmlands of the Empire State.