A Memory of Auneau

Across the front hall, wide cypress floorboards showed their age. In the hundred years since leaving Florida, they had stretched and shrunk endlessly. Now, in the dead of winter, there were quarter-inch gaps by the door, where a cold draft snaked through. Every so often a piece of mail dropped through the letter slot in the door, caught that draft just right and sailed cleanly through a gap in the floor. Mr. Harris never noticed.

He had been known as Mr. Harris ever since he came home with the Major in 1946. If he had a first name, nobody knew it. On a warm August morning, near the village of Auneau just east of Chartres, Mr. Harris had saved the Major's life. They were fighting a German rearguard as the Allies approached Paris. Dreux, Chartres and Orleans had already been secured. On this bright Saturday morning, with the enemy in disarray and artillery quiet, a group of riflemen were enjoying fresh eggs for breakfast just yards from the Major's tent. Somebody had unearthed a henhouse during the night. Sentries were posted, but the tension of the last few weeks was quickly dissipating in the warm sunshine. In less than a week, GŽnŽral de Gaulle would walk through the streets of Paris from the Arc de Triomphe all the way to Notre Dame, in front of cheering crowds. Liberation, a whisper just a month ago, had now become a chorus.

Mr. Harris stood downwind from the group, immersed in the aroma of frying eggs. His eyes were riveted on a tree line to the north. Oak, beech and shimmering poplar reached through a pillow of bushes, while sunlight played upon their leaves. How he missed his trees! And then his eyes saw another flash - the play of light on steel. He raised his binoculars and trained them on the crotch of an enormous oak. At first he saw nothing, and then he noticed that which did not move. Behind leaves dancing, there was a patch of darker green that was not part of the tree. When the sniper changed position, the sun's low angle caught the nozzle of his rifle. Mr. Harris lowered his glasses and looked for an officer. The closest one was the Major. He would have preferred an NCO.

As he walked toward the Major, a hole appeared in the tent, just to the right of the officer's head. A second later, Mr. Harris heard the shot. He broke into a run, leaping at the Major and knocking him to the ground. As he watched the Major fall, he felt the second bullet enter his back.

Almost two years after Auneau, Mr. Harris drove the Major's car through the wrought iron gates of Seven Oaks. A crushed limestone driveway skirted a brick and tile gatehouse and meandered through trees for a quarter of a mile to the main house. Mr. Harris took up residence in the gatehouse and lived there for forty-one years. He drove the Major everywhere, accompanied him on excursions abroad, bore his guns on hunting trips. He was both companion and manservant, but his real joy was in managing the woods within the walls of the estate. Nineteen glorious acres with over two hundred species of trees. For generations, the Major's forebears had returned from every corner of the globe with specimens of exotic arboria - moso bamboo and Caribbean pine, monkey-pod, camphor and satinwood. Even a pink ivory tree from Rhodesia. Many had succumbed to the harsh winters and some had been remanded to the sanctity of a large Victorian arboretum behind the main house. But for every one that perished, dozens had survived in the gardens and woods that separated the inhabitants of Seven Oaks from the decades passing outside their glass-topped, granite walls. And while those with a tropical lineage often grew stunted and meager, others defied all reason and raised their heads majestically above the canopy of native oaks, maples, birch and cherry. Mr. Harris was a happy man.

Once, as they drove home from a convention in Indiana - and this would be 1963, not long after the assassination - the Major asked him if he thought he'd ever marry.
"The reason I ask," he said, "is that I'd like to deed the gatehouse to you. It actually sits on its own acre of ground, you know? My grandfather built it for a tutor he employed, but before the title passed, the tutor was dismissed. I never learned why, exactly. There have always been rumors..."

The subject came up again during the 1972 election. Bobby Shriver was a personal friend of the Major and to everyone's surprise he ended up as McGovern's running mate. The Major had never in his life even considered voting Democrat. On a long drive to Cleveland for a fundraiser, he invited Mr. Harris into the decision. Mr. Harris had no interest in politics, as long as they didn't concern his trees. The Major would not, could not accept that a man who had served his country, a man with a heroic streak and a love of nature, had no political philosophy. He became quite agitated when Mr. Harris revealed that in all of those times he had driven the Major to the polls, he had never actually voted himself.

"I'm not so sure," the Major said, "that a man who doesn't vote actually has the right, the moral right, to own property." And some minutes later... "I don't think such a man should be allowed to enter City Hall and file a deed." And half an hour down the road... "Let's get you registered to vote, Harris, and we'll see about the deed to the gatehouse, shall we?"

But he didn't. Mr. Harris duly and dutifully went to the courthouse and registered as a Republican the very next morning, but that was the last he ever heard about the deed. And now the Major was dead. After forty-one years, Mr. Harris was being told to leave his home. He had been drawing a small pension from the estate for the past couple of years, since his sixty-fifth birthday. It was enough to live on and even enjoy a few small luxuries when combined with his Social Security check. And he had some savings in his rainy day fund, which would pay his way should he ever be hospitalized. Beyond that, he had his books, a few pieces of furniture, and his beloved trees. Now he was being separated from those.

The new owners were a couple in their late forties. He sold used cars from a corner lot in Ashton that was lit up at night so brightly it could be seen from the main house. She wore tight black pants with red sweaters and screamed at her teenage children. Decades of seclusion were demolished in a moment the day they took possession. It took them a week or so to notice the gatehouse, which their designer immediately decided would make a wonderful guest apartment. Their accountant was surprised to discover that the current tenant paid no rent. An eviction notice was sent. Mr. Harris had thirty days, it said, to vacate the only home he had known since the war. And while he was looking for alternate accommodations, the note continued, the new owners needed to access the property to carry out needed repairs.

They arrived on a Monday. Several trucks pulled up outside the gatehouse with the names of various Ashton trades people painted on their sides. Mr. Harris retired to his bedroom while they removed walls, fireplaces, light fixtures and even his cast iron claw foot bathtub - all most of a century old and gone in minutes.

The new owners showed up to supervise. She toured the upstairs rooms with a painting contractor and he headed for the cellar with an electrician. Alone, so completely alone in his bedroom, Mr. Harris heard every word she said. It had taken him three winters to restore the quartersawn white oak fireplace in the east bedroom. Two carved Italian marble sprites danced beside the flames while ebony and rosewood inlays ran around the mantle. He had paid an ironworker to repair the basket and a tile setter to rebuild the hearth with specially fired tiles to match the original ones. She called it gaudy. A pair of trollops, she said. It wouldn't be needed with the new forced air heating, and the chimney could be used to house some of the metal ductwork. They could patch around the rest of the opening and cover it with plaster. The tin ceiling would have to go, too. Mr. Harris covered his face with his hands. He rocked silently back and forth on the edge of his bed.

The flooring contractor was a young man, barely thirty, who had been named Bartley because his father was late to the christening. His instructions were to remove the aged cypress floorboards and replace them with tongue and groove plywood. This in turn would receive linoleum. This was, after all, 1987. There was some decay near the front door, close by the sill where a winter draft had carried in small amounts of rain, snow and sleet. This was a good place to start, he thought. The boards might be soft and the nails rusted through.

Bart began to explore with the end of a large screwdriver, and soon had a hole large enough for a claw-foot crowbar. He tapped the tool in place, stood to gain leverage, and removed the first board. The second one was a bit more stubborn. Held in place with hand-forged cut nails, it had never been exposed to moisture and was as sound as the day it was installed. When he reached down to get a better grip on the crowbar, he noticed something bright below the boards. Dropping to his knees, he found several pieces of mail, some old and yellowed with age and others clean, white and obviously recent. They had all, at various times, ridden that draft and slid between the wide-spaced floorboards. Bart gathered them up and went in search of Mr. Harris.

He found him in a back bedroom, his eyes red and his hair mussed when he answered Bart's knock. He took the letters in a daze, thanked the contractor and closed the door. Having met Mr. Harris a few times before, Bart wondered what had happened to the old gentleman. He was always dapper and well groomed, wearing a shirt and tie even on the warmest days of summer. Now he looked dejected, tired and so very old. So it was a surprise for Bart when, just a few minutes later, Mr. Harris literally ran through the house, jumped neatly over the hole in the floor and made a beeline for his car in the driveway. He wasn't sure, but Bart could have sworn that the old man was laughing.

Mr. Thomas Harcourt, a senior partner at the firm Powell, Harcourt & Lowell, had been handling the Major's affairs since his father retired from the practice in 1971. Over the years he had taken care of a couple of small, routine items for Mr. Harris as well. When Emily knocked on Tom's office door and informed him that Mr. Harris was in the lobby and insisted on seeing him immediately, the attorney just nodded. He had no appointments until late afternoon, and he knew that old Harris wouldn't waste his time.

He recognized the envelope immediately--it was one of his own. Inside was the deed he had executed sometime around the Nixon administration, giving old Harris title to the gatehouse.

What, he asked, was the problem?