Short Story: “Changeful Northern Skies”

Rot was setting in all over Toby Walker’s house. Evil, blue evil, spread like a flow tide over the wooden wainscotting and along the wooden beams. None of her efforts to get it dealt with had panned out, and even her best friend told her that her front door stank of mildew. It was the end of a very wet October, and her yard was filled with rain-speckled muted-colored leaves.

            Toby’s house, whose pipes groaned and sang with steam on chilly nights in seasons other than summer, had been in her family since 1842 and had last been substantially renovated during her early childhood. Tobias Walker IV, Toby's late father, after whom she was yclept Toby though formally monikered Tabitha, had taken seriously the history of their family and their home. He had spent tens of thousands that he had earned snorting coke on Wall Street making it a fit house for a modern family. That family’s now last-living representative strode out to the mailbox that dove-grey autumn morning over a carpet of yellow birch leaves, pale spears the shape of the population pyramid of a medium-HDI country. Black spots freckled them leprously.

            Toby checked her mail. There were three pieces of it. The first was a card asking her to subscribe to a progressive Christian magazine named Relevant. “If you have to say it about yourself,” Toby muttered, “it’s not true.” The second implored her to vote for the man who had been chair of her town’s select board for fifteen out of the past twenty-one years. “If you were going to lose then you would have by now.” The third was a letter from Rachel Dembitz, an accountant in Dunnet Landing. Toby’s accountant. Estimate $11,500 to repaint the house; $6,000-7,000 to redo the front door; another $7,000-$10,000 for the solar panels that you want. Toby said, “But do not harm the oil and the wine.”

            She sighed. The misty air cleared for a few short seconds; it was not a change for the better. Toby thought about the cost of the solar panels. This was after tax incentives; she had discussed that with Rachel before. The thought made her feel sick to her stomach; she took one cigarette out of the pack in her pocket and lit it, a bad habit that she had picked up from her grandmother. In her grandmother’s days and then in her father’s this house had been part of a farm. That farm had now been sold off, most of it; what was left was an acre and a half. What was, or were, left on that acre and a half were a couple of small yellowish cats and one unpromising-looking goat. Toby called the goat Poor Richard. She associated him, because of his name, with the Old Farmer’s Almanacs that she still bought out of habit every fall. Poor Richard and Poor Toby would, because of these solar panels, likely become poorer before much longer.

            Under a changeful sky, Toby trudged inside and called Rachel. Rachel was the only Jew who lived in Dunnet Landing, and likely the only Jew who had lived there since Stan Roth’s early death twelve years before. It was a Saturday morning, but it was unlikely that she had ventured the ten or twenty miles to drive to synagogue; the pandemic had broken down Rachel’s observance just as it had that of so many other once-religious people. Indeed, Rachel picked up her phone.

            “So we’re looking at thirty thousand or so,” Toby said. It was not a question; there was no need to confirm. Rachel’s numbers either were right or they were not.

            “We are,” said Rachel with a heavy sigh, a sigh much older than her own thirty-one years. Older than her thirty-one. Not as old as Toby’s twenty-nine. Life was full of ironies. “Do you want me to come over?” Rachel went on. “We can discuss this in person. I want to show you how I got to these numbers.”

            “I trust your numbers.”

            “I’d still like to come over, as a courtesy,” said Rachel.

            Toby sighed. “Okay. I’ll put on some tea.”

            She took her time making the tea in her chilly kitchen with its blond wooden floors and six-gas-burnered stove. She lit the gas ring under the kettle and it started to sing just as Rachel’s car pulled up the driveway. The car was silvery with a faint pungent chartreuse undertone that Toby had always found a little alarming. It was an old Subaru, as was Toby’s own car. Toby’s was dark blue.

            Rachel came to a stop and stepped out of the car. A pump-clad toe teased one of the cats as he ran up to nuzzle her. Her cumulonimbus of dark hair looking the exact same shade as her dark conservative professionalistic skirt suit, Rachel treaded over the birch-leaf carpet and knocked on the door to Toby’s mudroom.

            “It’s open,” Toby hollered, and poured two cups of cinnamon tea as Rachel came in and kicked off her shoes. Toby smiled. “You always class up the place,” she said.       

            Rachel shrugged. “I am here on business, technically,” she said. She took a bobby pin from her sleek gunmetal-grey purse and pinned back a corkscrew of blackish hair. “So,” she said. “Thirty thousand dollars.”

            “Thirty thousand dollars,” Toby agreed. “Give or take. It’s not pretty.” She paused, then said, “Do you want to record this?”

            “I guess I should,” conceded Rachel. She pulled her phone out of her purse, set it down on Toby’s many-scarred pinewood butcher’s block, and pulled up some recording app while looking worriedly at the signs of damp that clustered like cobwebs in the corners of the kitchen’s lowish ceiling. “Rachel B. Dembitz, CPA, October 30, 2021,” she intoned. “Meeting with Tabitha M. Walker to discuss price estimates for repairs and climate-proofing on her house.”

            Climate-proofing. What a way to think of it. It horrified Toby even though it was she who had decided that it was needed.

            Rachel and Toby had met in college; they had bonded over their complicated middle names. The M stood for Mehitable, the B for Berenice.

            “The figure we’ve been throwing around is thirty thousand,” Rachel said. “This, of course, is an estimate.”

            “Yes,” said Toby. “Not even a mid-range estimate, necessarily.”

            Rachel nodded and took a sip of her cinnamon tea. It had not steeped for long enough, and the water had been a little too hot when Toby had poured it into the cup. The flavor thus was unbalanced, yet Rachel loved it. She loved visiting Toby at home. Loved, indeed, Toby herself, in ways that Toby did not love anybody. Toby’s first love was the house, the house of which she was both begetter and begotten. She inhabited the house as a place of safety, like a womb; she put work and money and feeling into the house, like a germ plasm.

            “Do your reasons for wanting to do all this work come down to wanting to save yourself and the house more money later, or is it morally imperative to you that we get it done now?” Rachel asked. “If it’s just a matter of foresight, it may be prudent to wait until you have, frankly, a stable career situation and some net worth that isn’t all in the form of the house itself.”

            Toby shrugged, thought for a second, then said, “Morally imperative isn’t how I’d put it but I do think it’s important to get it done ASAP.” She pronounced ASAP as a word rather than as four letters, the way her father and grandmother had pronounced it. “The climate itself sure isn’t waiting till my career is going better.” She reached over the butcher’s block to where the 2021 Old Farmer’s Almanac rested. She picked it up for the first time in over a month. “This thing is the least accurate I’ve ever seen it,” she said. “I only bother to read it for its har-har little articles these days.”

            “Like reading Playboy for the articles?” Rachel asked with a smirk, then, unwilling to let her friend get away with one little jab when two would do just as nicely, “When was the Old Farmer’s Almanac ever accurate anyway?”

            “Not the point,” said Toby. She set the almanac down, almost chivalrously, on the butcher’s block between them. Its off-yellow cover was rippled and pilled a little after ten months of sitting in a dank kitchen, with the rot that wound in the times between Toby’s uses of the sterilizing stove. “I think it’s urgent. Yes.” She gestured at the almanac; the hole drilled in its top right corner looked almost as if a worm had chewed through it. She gestured at the ceiling; the rot in the corners was easier to see now that the light was turning from morning to midday. “Does this not look urgent to you, Rachel?” she asked.

            “It’s not my job to tell you that, only to tell you what it will cost. Please don’t get frustrated with me for that.”

            “I’m not. I’m sorry.” Toby shook her head and lit another cigarette. Rachel noticed that she was allowing her own tea to get cold. “Thirty goddam grand,” Toby said.

            “Thirty goddam grand,” Rachel agreed.

            That should, perhaps, have stymied them, or at least given them more pause. Yet Toby’s attention was stuck, bizarrely, on that full-moon-shaped worm’s-hole bored in the corner of the almanac. It reminded her of a keyhole, a keyhole to be opened with a key to thing she longed for most. Rachel’s eyes tracked Toby’s, followed Toby’s to that hole. To it and almost down it. Two sets of eyes gazed with fixity for several seconds at that dark little corner of the world’s many-sided agony. It was a corner that seemed to hold some better possibility inside it. It felt as if there was something at the bottom, something within the lunar phases and sidereometeorological pseudoscientificities of the almanac, something brighter and sharper than the surface of Toby’s kitchen’s butcher’s block. The hole in the almanac was a black hole with promises of something radiating out of the singularity, but radiating slantwise and obscurely.

            Then Toby picked up the almanac, flipped through it almost as a tic, set it down again, and the moment was lost.

            “You hoping the almanac has some financial advice in it?” asked Rachel, but it did not come out of her mouth as though it were a joke.

            “It’s not that I can’t afford the thirty grand,” said Toby.

            “No. I know it’s not that,” Rachel said.

            “You’ve run the numbers? You’ve made sure that I can, technically, afford it right now?”

           Rachel nodded. “I have and you can,” she said, “although you’re going to have to either pinch pennies or get a much better job.”

            Toby sighed. “That would be the case no matter what I did with the thirty thousand dollars,” she said. “All right. Make a note that we discussed this expenditure and I authorized it. I assume I’ll be recouping some of it come tax season, at any rate.”

            “Have you run this by Tucker and Jordan?” Rachel asked. Tucker Littlepage and Jordan Blackett were the executors of Toby’s father’s estate.

            “I did and they said there wasn’t anything legal that would tie this up,” said Toby. “So we can go ahead.” She stood up and adjusted one of the cuffs of her thick blue-black-orange flannel. “This conversation is tiring me out,” she said.

            “You’ve barely touched your tea,” Rachel said.

            Toby shrugged. “Guess that didn’t even occur to me,” she said, although it had, and she had no explanation for it, really. She picked up her cup, now closer to room temperature than hot, and drank it in three or four quick despairing gulps. She looked down at the surface of the butcher’s block again. The cup had left behind it a damp impression or allegory of a washed-out crescent moon.

            “Is there anything else that you need right now?” asked Rachel, tapping her phone for the time. “If there’s not, I’d like to get going; I want to see if the Hannaford in Deephaven has some yahrzeit candles.”

            “Oh, right, it is that time of year, isn’t it?” said Toby with a plaintive feeling. She had met Rachel’s grandfather only twice and only dimly remembered him, but for Rachel he had been a pillar of the earth for a quarter of a century before the demise.

            Sometimes Toby thought that it seemed Rachel envied her, in between the more frequent moments of pity. Here in this house she was ancestor-named and landed, undisplaceably cocooned in a soggy but history-laden husk. All around them was changing, changing, mixing and changing. Being unstable, changing and decaying. Toby guessed that Rachel might find it easy to see her, falsely, as changeless.

 ❦

Toby did not do much with the rest of the day. She had a one-hour online English class with a twelve-year-old boy in mainland China whose parents were paying her handsomely for it. It felt good to Toby to use her certification, and the boy, Weiyu, was charming and a good learner. If Toby could have had more regular hours doing this, and could have done it in person instead of on video calls, she and Rachel would not be concerned about the state of her career. But the hours were scant and the videos were laggy and Toby ended the lesson with Weiyu far more tired than she had hoped. By this time the sun was setting and it was time to take some butternut squash soup out of her refrigerator and warm it up for dinner. The soup had come out a little thinner than she usually made it, and once warmed up was better with a squeeze or two of hot sauce.

            The pipes by this point had started to sing, groaning into their song far earlier in the evening than they ought. It was usually around midnight that the teakettle-like keening started, or later even, as Toby lay wakeful in the room that had been hers since her father’s penultimate heart attack. For the singing to start at not even eight disquieted her somewhat. It seemed a little too early in the year too; the evening was not particularly cold. She hoped there was nothing wrong with the furnace. That would be the last thing she needed. What would happen to the bills alone would set her other expenses back weeks or months. She pulled out her phone and began to draft an email to Rachel about this. Then she read the email and saw that it looked whiny and put her phone aside. She was sitting on her big old couch now facing the empty table across the living room where her television had been before, on a whim, she had put it upstairs. One of the cats jumped up to sit there.

            Toby’s cats were named Simpkin and Tom Tildrum, on her distant cousin Mattie’s recommendation. Jordan Blackett called them Infer and Imply because he couldn’t tell them apart. Toby could tell them apart because Simpkin was a little lighter in color and behaved somewhat more respectably; Tom Tildrum cavorted and gamboled, not so much almost like a dog as almost like a pony. He was doing just that right now on the ratty rug between Simpkin and Toby, and watching him do it was getting on Toby’s nerves.

            Toby refilled the cats’ dry food and slouched up to her bedroom. There on her narrow bed lay a stack of papers that she had found in the attic yesterday. They were old, from probably around the time she had been thirteen. Aced English assignments, journals from family trips to Disneyland and England, fanfiction where Toby was secretly Maximum Ride or a fourth Baudelaire child or an Eva pilot. All mildewy and smelly. Rank, flecked, sloppily bound and interlaced with evil like the interlaced buriedness of last year’s layer of leaves.

            She went downstairs and came back up again holding the yellowish almanac. She flipped through it a bit. September and October will be cooler and rainier than normal, said the forecast for the Northeast, and Oct. 2021: Temp 44° (4° below avg.); precip. 5.5” (2” above avg.). 1-9 Rainy periods, cool. 10-12 Snow showers, cold. 13-19 Rainy periods, chilly. 20-23 Sunny, cool. 24-31 Periods of rain and snow, cold.

            It was not entirely wrong. It had indeed been a drippy autumn so far, though not a cool one. But there had been no snow showers and no cold to speak of around Columbus Day, and in the middle of the month the temperature had now and then scraped seventy-five. There had been a couple of hard overnight freezes within the past week, but only overnight and only a couple.

            Toby lifted the almanac up in front of her and, through the hole bored in it, looked at the stack of childhood papers on her bed. She wondered if this was the image of the keyhole that she thought she had seen earlier. Perhaps it had had to do with looking through that hole at a part of herself and a phase of her life that she had, so to speak, loved and lost. Yet she did not think so; the papers on her bed just looked like papers, not like the kind of inexhaustible treasure hoard that dragons guarded in old-fashioned picture books.

            She wondered if the almanac itself had more to say, perhaps, about some other world than this. Maybe somewhere far beyond whatever walls separated this universe from void, in some nearby universe some other Tabitha Walker was looking at an almanac identical to this one. It was even possible, Toby thought, or hoped, that her other self in that other world had for the past year been looking out her window or going for walks or bike rides or swims in the weather that that almanac described.

 ❦

And indeed she had. As Toby Walker drifted off to unpleasant sleep on one side of the great divide, the barrier of the walls of spacetime billions of parsecs away, another Toby Walker on the other side of that divide stood out in her front yard in the vague light of a distant telephone pole, smoking a cigarette and peering at the stars. The streetlight was further from her house than from that of her counterpart, and the light it cast was warm and pointed solely at the ground; the stars were brighter where they had just come out from behind the flurrying clouds. The ground under that Toby’s feet was the yellow-and-black carpet of leaves that neither Toby had raked in several days. Yet on this side the yellow and black were freckled with thin silver snow.

            She could see the Andromeda Galaxy, very near the zenith, flanked by Alpheratz and Schedar. Towards it her grey-blue cigarette smoke rose palely. The Andromeda Galaxy was, for Toby, a difficult object; she had to tilt her head back and forth to make sure that it was not a smudge on one of the lenses of her glasses. Alpheratz and Schedar looked brighter than usual, likely because the select board had voted recently to further dim down the streetlights on the roads leading away from town. Toby checked her watch. It was a little before eleven. She thought she should probably go the barn and make sure the chickens were settled in for the night before she went to bed.

            The chickens were at this point the main part of the Walker Farm that was even slightly profitable; most of the rest was either protected wetland or preserved in amber as a sort of petting zoo or living museum of Toby’s grandmother’s time, which suited Toby just fine. The Partial Hydrocarbon Ban Treaty had been controversial in her area for all sorts of reasons, and had indeed had serious negative effects on its agricultural productivity in the traditional sense, but the agrotourism had helped offset that and now that Toby’s house was in a few different guidebooks she could usually count on giving three to five tours of it a week.

            The chickens were good and fed. She went into her yellow kitchen with its flickering lamps and its oven hot with the heat of roasting winter squash. Outside the snow was starting to drift down again. She was glad that Rachel had come to visit earlier in the evening and was probably back at the train station by now; it was not the kind of night to get caught outside late in one of the traps that the train station provided these days. Toby still had a car and would have been able to pick Rachel up and get her back to the train station herself, but it would have been a pain for Rachel to get in touch with her to inform her that she needed her to do so. She anticipated a phone call from Rachel when she arrived back home safe in Dunnet Landing, or from somewhere in Deephaven if she still needed to make a late-night run for a yahrzeit candle there.

            Eventually she did call, but by that point it was very early morning. The sky was as dark as it was going to get and about to start getting lighter. Briefly Toby resented Rachel’s call, but then she remembered that at any rate she would have had to get up in ten minutes anyway if the big rooster Fabio had anything to say about it.

             “I’m in Deephaven,” Rachel said, “safe at Peri Oler’s house for the night. Remember her?”

            “I do,” said Toby. “You used to date her, didn’t you?”

            “That’s the one, yes, although right now she has me on an air mattress, which I think is reasonable,” Rachel said. “I got the yahrzeit candle right before the coast bus stopped running. Now I’m just out in her garden looking at the stars.”

            “Not snowing there like it is here?”

            “No, although it was a few minutes ago. I can see this very faint trail of stars in the middle of a sort of…it looks a little like an L or a right triangle. The trail of stars is the hypotenuse. That’s Coma Berenices, isn’t it?”

            “It sounds like it, yes,” said Toby, and smiled. “The Tress of Berenice is what Joyce calls it in Ulysses. The ‘heaventree of stars’ scene; do you remember?” Rachel made a murmuring, affirmative noise; they had met in a modern Irish lit elective. “Berenice,” said Toby, “like you.”

            “We made a pact!” Rachel said. “I was going to learn to like Berenice only as long as you learned to like Mehitable.”

            “I have learned to like Mehitable. I even put flowers on old Mehitable Smead’s grave in the graveyard on my walk the other day,” Toby said. “Dried annual honesty; seasonable.”

            “Fair’s fair, I guess. Just don’t make that crude joke about Peri’s name.”

            “You were the only one who ever found ‘Peri Oler’s areolers’ funny, Rachel; not me,” said Toby, and Rachel laughed.

            They chatted for a while longer and then Toby went out to the barn to try and make Fabio shut up. Then she went back inside and went through her mudroom into her chilly back-house. There she stood looking east over the fields at a long low line of fluffy sheeplike clouds underneath which the sun soon started to rise. They drifted on, pale dusty purple limned with pinkish gold. Japanese irises under warm-colored stage lights, perhaps, or a rose-gold wedding ring on the finger of a frost-giant bride.

            Pinkish gold, too, was the snow that had fallen during the night. There was about half an inch of it, coming partway up the sere leaves of faded green grass. It was rheumy and so thin that it would all but certainly be gone by the time she went to vote on Tuesday even if the temperature did not rise overmuch. Yet something about having snow on the ground on Halloween morning made Toby think that the world had a seemliness to it at the moment.

            She wondered at the fact that Rachel had been able to see Coma Berenices from Deephaven, especially in the pre-dawn hours. It was possible that the sky had been lightening somewhat even then. More light began to enter the sky before one tended to notice a change in color, and Deephaven was more than dozen miles to the east. On top of all that, Coma Berenices was not a particularly bright constellation, and she remembered that when they had been in that Irish lit class together reading the scene in Ulysses Rachel had remarked that she was astonished that Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus had been able to see it from a house in the middle of Dublin. That had been in the days of unrestricted streetlight use and almost-constant nighttime driving even around Orono, in the relative wilds north of Bangor. Toby and Rachel had themselves had to traipse out into the woods and crane their necks right at the zenith to see the Milky Way, back then. They had been good nights, but cold ones.

            Toby glanced up at the clock that she had put up in the back-house back when she had given up on trying to slow it down. It read about seven-thirty, which meant that it was probably about quarter past. At this point it was unlikely that she would get back to sleep. So she traipsed into the kitchen and put on a teakettle. The sweet smell of the purplish gas that her stove now ran on flitted into her ear like a singing bird. It reminded her of an automaton, or of Pinocchio or the Tin Woodman maybe. It was a conquest of nature that was also a surrender to nature, or a return to it anyway. She lit the gas ring with a long wooden match, extinguished the match by waving it around absentmindedly for a few seconds in the kitchen’s chilly air, and lowered the kettle gently onto the flame.

            “Need to buy the new one,” she muttered to herself, looking at the 2021 lunar phase calendar that was thumbtacked to the bulletin board that hung next to the kitchen sink. Toby’s interest in stargazing came and went; it was not as much a part of her life now as it was of Rachel’s, which was another good reason why the stars were so easy to see from Deephaven and from Dunnet Landing now. Even so, when she was interested, it was nice to be able to tell at a glance what the moon be bright enough to drown out, and the moon itself seemed lovelier as she got older. It was loveliest on evenings where it rose full above the sere eastern fields. Toby liked to plan to be home on those evenings.

            Moreover having a calendar like this in the kitchen was something that her father and her grandmother had done, another small piece of whatever heritage she had from them. More and more these days she felt that thin warm line connecting her back through time, and yet more and more she felt almost as if she did not need it, as if feeling that connection made her more herself in a way that lessened her reliance on things past. She guessed that this was what people meant when they talked about “living in the past” versus “living in the moment,” and it surprised her sometimes that she was drifting in one direction rather than the other as she got older. She wondered if she would feel the need for the moon calendars more if she was not such an early bird about getting them, if it would feel less like a mildly obnoxious chore and more like a dangerous and high-stakes imperative if she had started thinking about this in the middle of December rather than at the end of October. It wouldn’t surprise her at this point in her life.

            Rachel had said recently that she too had of late felt calmer, more relaxed, and less like she was on the brink of something disastrous that she was running out of ways to forestall. She felt more at-home in the world too, something that she had once, when younger, despaired of, because it was the backcountry and there was antisemitism around. With Rachel, in addition to whatever social or political peace of mind she had come to nowadays, it maybe had to do with the fact that her career was going pretty well. Todd & Dembitz was now Dembitz & Associates, because Rachel’s mother had been able to talk her out of naming it Go Time Accounting instead.

            At about nine o’ clock, with Toby still musing on Go Time Accounting and what a dumb name it would have been, the phone rang. Toby answered. It was the woman herself. “Did you sleep?” she asked Rachel.

            “Yes, a little,” Rachel said. “I’m on the bus back to Dunnet Landing now. I still need to actually do the…” She stammered a little, tongue-tied probably from the lack of sleep. Toby assumed that what she was trying to articulate was something about the yahrzeit for which she had bought the candle. She had given up trying to understand some of the reasons behind Rachel’s comings and goings. It often seemed that the woman had taken slower and more complicated means of travel as a challenge and a call to adventure rather than an inconvenience. Toby envied that; not even she had been able to do her likewise.

            “Please tell me you’re planning on getting more sleep tonight,” said Toby, feeling a little like a prudish mother, a role that, truth be told, she found it fun to play sometimes. Rachel thought for a theatrical moment, laughed, and told her so. Toby was glad to hear it; she was glad to hear it after the stage pause too. That showed a playful attitude that, until recently, Toby had worried that her friend had lost a long time ago.

            “I probably shouldn’t spend a ton more time on the phone right now,” Rachel said. “I’ll call you when I get home safe.”

            She hung up. Toby spared a moment’s thought, maybe prayer but maybe not, for her safety. She did not normally do it, and Rachel did not require it, but right now it felt appropriate somehow. Then she went out to check on her old car and her gasoline allotment and took a drive into town. The general store was open from nine to one on Sundays and they would probably have the 2022 moon calendar and the 2022 almanac still. It would be good to have those on hand before November started.

            Toby pulled her old green Chevy out of her long gravel driveway with its dusting of morning-lit new snow. She set off down the road between trees with frost-rimmed branches and leaves that were rufous and gold.

Note: June 13, 2022: I gave this story a new title two weeks after running it. It was written, and initially published on this site, as “The Old Farmer’s Almanac.”