The Cabin Off Schuster Road

It was a blazing hot day. Maybe the hottest of the late summer of 1968. Vietnam raged on and a trail of body bags became tradition on the evening news. Unrest was everywhere.

Unrest was me.

I came to the address on the outskirts of my small Tennessee town because I was told to do so. For many, that makes no sense, as it was for me in the beginning. But the voice persisted, and over the last few weeks it became insistent. And I had to put an end to the haunting.

A small cabin off Schuster Road. A shack if you will with a door that was unlocked opening to a single room with two windows so chocked with dirt no light broke through the panes.

The single room was dark. Empty and waiting for me to revisit loss. My devastation. I could smell it. Taste it. I had been living out a death sentence long enough to recognize the signs of my own desperation.

The open door cast no light into the darkness, and yet I could see.

I could make out the shadow of a chair settled in the middle of the room. I paused, now more concerned than curious as I had been the preceding days. I closed the door behind me and looked around at nothing to see. An empty space with a chair that looked like it needed more help than I did.

We all need some kind of help, and at a certain age even more. I reached that point a few years back and saw no way out. Only a future without time. I was summoned here for a reason. For a purpose. I believed the chair and I shared the same reason. And we both had little left to lose.

The wood planking underfoot creaked. Every step an aching, tired groan that echoed the song of my bones. A kindred spirit underfoot. I took to the old wooden chair. Besides the two dark windows there were no other obstructions that broke the weathered surface of the four walls.

I’d been in this fringe of the county a few times. All too recently, when my son was too stricken to survive, I walked for days after his passing. Though I walked this way, I don’t recall this cabin.

I walked and walked without drinking or eating or thinking until I collapsed in the dirt. I had been torn. That’s what happens when you love someone so much and you lose them. They take most of your soul with them.

I cursed myself for not being able to save him. I cursed myself for every time I rode him too hard. Always trying to make him a better child so he would grow up a better man and not like me.

A stranger drove by. She called the police. Later she said she thought I was dead. I wasn’t dead, on the outside, but there was nothing left of me on the inside. Daniel was everything to me after his mother left us. When I lost my ten-year-old, I was gutted. A handful of years since then now, and I remain a fragile, hollow vessel.

“Now what?” I said. An unplanned evocation. “You have been after me for weeks.”

There was a noticeable scent in the air. Something between a natural smell from cooking and something from the deep earth. I felt myself unwind. Now, weeks short of my fifty-eighth birthday, I am driven by curiosity and the unnatural nature of this calling.

“You have heard my voice.”

I swung about in the chair only to realize the voice was coming from everywhere. It was male. It sounded like a priest that had been part of my early church years when I was an innocent believer. I shed that folly and faith long ago. I knew better. All religion is a foolish answer to a foolish question.

“What do you want?”

“I want for nothing.”

“Well, I could use a cup of coffee and a cigarette.” Whatever charade or fanciful magic this was, I wasn’t having any of it.

“That’s not true. You have been longing for a reason to live. You have been longing for that since forever.”

The familiarity made me suspicious. What’s in my head and heart and soul is mine, not something open to conjecture or judgement. I do not share my suffering. It is all I have left. My unease became unbearable. I got up and slowly made my way to the door. It wasn’t there. I pressed my hand along the wall where the door was centered. The surface was flat and featureless.

“Let me out.”

Nothing. Silence.

“There, it is as it was.”

I found the doorknob and gave it a sharp turn. A sliver of afternoon sun cut the room in half. “I don’t understand.”

“But I do,” the voice said.

Silence followed. I waited.

“The fact that you trusted your instincts to get this far was sign enough.”

“And would you have stopped calling if I continued to refuse you?” I said.

“I asked you to come once. Just once.”

Air gushed out of my lungs as though it had no reason to be there. My knees gave way. I slumped against the door, shutting it closed.

“Just once.”

“You have been haunting me for a month. Every god-awful day for a month.”

“I called to you once. I never call twice.”

Sweat broke out on the back of my neck, quickly soaking the collar of my shirt. I believed him. You would have too if you heard his voice. There was an honesty, a siren’s clarity I never heard before.

“Don’t be frightened. There is no need for it. You’re free to go anytime. Though we have much to accomplish if you stay.”

“I don’t understand.”

“It was faith, not curiosity, that brought you here. It was faith that heard my voice resonate in your heart. You have always possessed faith. It was just something beyond your grasp.”

“Who are you?” I said, regaining some composure. I stood up, still leaning against the door.

“Does it matter?”

“It does if you want me to believe in you.”

“Call me a spirit. A spirit who might be able to help you.”

“I don’t need anyone’s help,” I said, then remembered leaning over Daniel’s last moments in his hospital bed. The poor child was ashen with foreboding and tethered to the deafening silence of tubes and electronics. Everyone was trying to keep him alive. The fire of darkness was just too powerful, and he was just too weak to hang on to life. “How?”

“By letting you know that in time faith will begin to mend your broken heart. That’s all.”

Faith, from the faithless. Wine from a stone.

A splinter of light cracked the side of one of the windows. Then another broke through. And another, until the small room was filled with a torrent of yellow. The chair had vanished. The door released itself from the doorframe and swung open.

I stepped back, uncertain of what was going to happen, until I realized that what was going to happen had already done so.

The room I had feared was just a room. And yet I had come here with the darkest of expectations. I walked out onto the rickety porch. The front of the small home looked like it would fall apart at any moment. I stepped down into the dirt and parched grass and walked around the house. It looked every day of two hundred years.

I stood in front for some time, expecting something to happen. Until, finally, it did.

The voice I heard, that found me, returned soft and distant. A wisp in the wind that asked me to believe. Daniel believed in me to the end. I couldn’t save him, but maybe I could save the home of his spirit.

I’ve been a carpenter all my life. I love and understand wood; it’s beauty and strength. I am connected to its soul. Nature at its best.

For a man struggling to find himself, this could be a first step. I drove home in half the time it took to get here. I had a lot of work to do. I needed to check the town records and find out who this place belonged to, though I was positive my search would be fruitless.

I was filled with promise and purpose. I would work to resurrect the place into a beautiful home until someone stood in my way, and even then, I wouldn’t relent. I might never have understood what the word “faith” meant, and that was fine too, just so long that I stopped denying myself.

I made it home later that afternoon, knowing details of what I had experienced were continuing to slip away. At first, I was unsettled at the possible loss of my experience. The spirit, or whatever that was, still rang in my head, though the image was fading.

I spent much of the next few days gathering tools and what lumber I could scrounge from around the town without drawing attention to myself. By the third day I had enough to cram into the back of my old truck. The drive back took more time, as the exact location was now a distant memory.

Finally, some familiar signs along Schuster caught my attention. My heart raced with anticipation and belief. I wasn’t a new man, just an old one with less doubt. I made a sharp turn in the road and traveled half a mile toward the clearing that surrounded the cabin.

I stopped. Got out of my truck and looked around. The cabin was gone. I recognized enough of the surrounding thickets and trees and horizon. Where the cabin had been three days ago was a patch of lush green grass. I knelt and dug my hand into the soil. It felt like it was just planted.

There was no cabin to repair. Nothing for me to help or improve. There was no cabin, but there remained enough of a memory and still the voice to make me believe what I had experienced was real. Restorative. A blessing.

I squatted there for a while, getting my bearings. I made a mental note of every tree, outcropping, and rock.

“Okay, then if you’re not here, I will make you here.”

I returned to my truck and slowly drove away. When I got home, I wrote down everything I could recall in case I woke up one day and couldn’t account for any of it.

The next morning I drove into town and checked the Land Registry. There was no record of any home or cabin located in that outlying part of the village. I gave the clerk a deposit and reserved a ninety-day option during which I could formally submit a bid on a half-acre of land that would be my new home. A place where I might comfort others who suffered from a loss of faith.

For whatever reason, I was dedicating myself to helping others. What little I had saved was going to be used for the greater good of friends and neighbors. A house of no particular faith where anyone could rest and find hope.

For those who walked and walked without drinking or eating or thinking until they too collapsed in the dirt.

I never felt stronger, more comfortable, in my own bones.

And I was happy. A feeling I had long lost and believed I would never find again.

I was certain Daniel would have wanted it that way. I could almost feel him at my side, urging me on to make a difference.

End

Arthur Davis is a retired management consultant who has been quoted in The New York Times and in Crain’s New York Business, taught at The New School and interviewed on New York TV News Channel 1. He was featured in a single author collection, nominated for a Pushcart Prize, received the 2018 Write Well Award for excellence in short fiction and, twice nominated, received Honorable Mention in The Best American Mystery Stories 2017. Additional background at www.TalesofOurTime.com, the Poets & Writers Directory, and Amazon Author Central.

Image credit: Kelly Wright via D-ALLE, Ideogram, and Midjourney