It is an indefinable scent, really, made up of mothballs and citrus oil, of dust and cracked leather. The rooms were filled with an odor I have grown used to in my work. The over-all appearance of the house was ramshackle and sad, but the woman who greeted me was cheerful enough, and the interior was comfortable, though dim. The siding was painted the brown-red color of old blood. The building was now a great clapboard mishmash, with aluminum-clad storm windows bolted over the old rippled glass and a screen porch tacked darkly across its front. The original nineteenth-century homestead had been renovated and enlarged so many times that its style was obscured. Spring in New Hampshire can be disorienting-virginal and loudly sexual all at once. Making my way up the flagstone walkway to where the Tatros' grandniece waited, I stopped a moment, caught in the vehemence. Once I stopped, the frogs began trilling again. As I bounced along, the frogs quieted momentarily, so that I seemed to be continuously pushing against a wall of sound. Overgrown swamps and ponds lapped close to either side. The Tatros had always been too cheap to keep up their road, and the final quarter mile was partly washed out, the gnarled bedrock exposed. I kept the windows slightly open as I drove the back roads to the Tatro house, and breathed in the watery air. The sky was a threatful gray, yet the willows blazed in tender bud, and drifts of wild-apple blossoms floated in the cavern pines. I went to make my appraisal of the contents of the house on an overcast morning in spring. I was called upon to handle the estate of John Jewett Tatro just after his Presbyterian funeral.
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