The Painted Drum Read Online Free PDF

rain that falls will turn to slush and send us swerving back into the cold exhaustion that was February. We are over halfway done with March. April, though fickle, will inch us toward May’s tender, budding, bug-hatching glory.
    The Tatro house is not grand anymore. The original nineteenth-century homestead has been renovated and enlarged so many times that its style is entirely obscured. Here a cornice, there a ledge. The building is now a great clapboard mishmash, a warehouse with aluminum-clad storm windows bolted over the old rippled glass and a screen porch tacked darkly across its front. The siding is painted the brown-red color of old blood. The overall appearance is rattling and sad, but the woman who greets me is cheerful enough, and the inside of the house is comfortable, though dim. The rooms are filled with the odor I have grown used to in my work. It is a smell that alerts me, an indefinable scent, really, composed of mothballs and citrus oil, of long settled dust and cracked leather. The smell of old things is what it is. My pulse ticks as I note that even on the ground floor an inordinate number of closets have been added during some period of expansion. Some run the length of whole walls, I estimate, roughly noting the room’s proportions.
    The niece, whose name is Sarah, surname also Tatro, is an RN at the hospital just north of here. She is a pleasant, square-jawed woman, hair of light brown and eyes of blue, a woman in her midthirties, years younger than I am, the sort of mother who volunteers to supervise recess or construct grade school art projects. The sort of community citizen who campaigns for historical preservation and school bond votes. I know the type. I have attempted to be the type. So has my mother. But our fascination for the stuff of life, or more precisely, the afterlife of stuff, has always set us apart. Mother started the business and we have run it jointly now for nearly two decades. We are fair, discreet, honest, and knowledgeable. We are well-known in our part of New Hampshire, and well respected I think, although I’ve always known that we do not fit in. There is a certain advantage to our gender. More often than not, it is the women of the family who get stuck dealing with the physical estate, the stuff, the junk, the possessions, and we are also women. We understand what it is like to face a mountain of petty decisions when in grief. As I sit down with Sarah, formalizing things over a cup of coffee, I feel that comfortable and immediate sense of connection that one can have with other women in this time—sympathy, of course, but also some relief. Finally, to get on with things! There is even some excitement at the idea of the task ahead. Cleaning out a house is bone-numbing work, but there are always discoveries along the way. Some are valuable—under a coat of milk paint an original Shaker table, Herter Brother chairs, a fabulous porcelain or saccharine but valuable old Hummels amid chipped salt and pepper shakers. Once, an old bucket forgotten in a pantry corner turned out to be a hand-painted Leder, worth thousands. First editions turn up, first printings, a signed Mark Twain, a Wharton, a pristine Salinger—you never know what will surface from even the most unpromising pile. And, too, some discoveries are revelatory—diaries, packets of love letters, a case of antique pornography featuring trained ponies, death certificates that list surprising causes, unknown births. The contents of a house can trigger all sorts of revisions to family history.
    There is also, in my eagerness to take on the Tatro estate, a thread of personal connection that reaches back several generations. It is nothing my mother or I would have pursued while either of the Tatro brothers was alive, although it has to do with our specialty—Native American antiquities. In The History of Stiles and Stokes , a book published on subscription by our local historical society, there is an entire chapter devoted