The Crow's Nest 4

4

            The mother’s purpose of my call to the home was to purchase the “antiques” for “money” and leave.  My quick scan of the offerings would, with luck, show as many as three items out the usually ten to twelve selections as possible purchases.  The rest had to be rejected, one by one.  That ritual never ceased.  Disappointment and resistance was usual from the mother but I, as an antiques dealer, stuck from the very first visit to a “no mercy purchases” policy that… saved me from acquiring ANY of the mother’s unacceptable crud.  She, with her scanty antiquarian knowledge, self denotations of “old”, quest for cash and Yankee trader skills, was formidable.  “NO” and “NO MONEY” were the brutal praises I adopted and kept up from the very first.  Even the few “possible” items were usually marginal.  About every third visit a “something” did appear but that was not an informed discovery by the mother.  A “visit” came increasingly often as the mother determined I WOULD actually buy something.  Through three seasons they approached once a month.  During the summer season a visit was rare.

            The mother was all business, a business woman true and a Yankee true too.  I quickly determined that her offerings where both residue chosen from the bowels of the home and… her recent acquisitions.  She purloined anything, some how got it to her barn, sorted it, hid her selected plunder in her… fence post… and contacted me.  Only the need of money brought forth anything.  Her fence post was the region in the older back section of the home that ascended off of her dining room and was called “up the back stairs”.  This true back stairs, distinguished from the front stairs that ascended off of the front parlor where I sat, led to a series of four small rooms “upstairs”.  Generally referred to as “back bedrooms”, these rooms had… excepting the one room furthest from the top of the stairs and toward the front of the home that the mother used as her bedroom…  become packed with the mother’s plunder that is better described as her rubbish.  I was never allowed into this region of the home until the mother was dead.  This fence post and it’s trail allowed the mother to gather, store and review her plunder obsessively and privately from when she arose at dawn to when she retired.  Choice morsels from this fence post would be selected for me to …purchase.

            I was able, in most cases, to denote what she offered as a “she found” or as an “old family” thing.  I could sense it, smell it and usually SEE it.  She either never detected this skill or simply Yankee tradered forward by never acknowledging it.  Probably the latter for she was skillful.  It was only the pitfall of her lack of professional antiquarian knowledge that occasionally left her…pasture gate open.  Sometimes I simply hopped over the gate with glee.

            What caused that was the few times when she actually found something good and …didn’t know it.  We must return to the location where we were seated to understand this well.  From the front door to my seat in the parlor, we passed up and turned right off of the “front hall”, this very concisely named.  Along each side of this hall was packed more of her antique clutter.  It would pass as a collection but as it was a mish-mosh and mounded assemblage with, in the end, no truly fine object gathered, her antique clutter best describes it.  All was “not for sale”.  All had a hideous tale of acquisition, tale of heritage, tale of value and tale of why it was “there” and “not for sale”.  For example, a mangy trunk full of “old papers” and tied with an old silk ribbon would be exacerbated orally as so & so’s Civil War trunk “he brought home” with the papers being “his papers” even though a briefest scan would show that they were nothing but 1890’s grocery receipts from the local country store and that WHOSE papers these papers were was doubtful while the trunk itself had been “cleaned” by the mother, was ugly and never saw any Civil War anywhere but was… NOT FOR SALE.  This directive found in object after object continued up both sides of the hall, included the wall hung iota, the “under the stair” in a darkened space and climaxed at the upper hall end by a wide and cheaply made wicker bookcase, circa WWI, that the mother had actually purchased “at the train station” to hold her extreme prizes.  These included a “Civil War” sword, numerous natural history items like a single mountain sheep horn and… old (“RARE”) books all… NOT FOR SALE.

            The back edge of this sharp saber of a collection was that, to a passing professional antiquarian, it showed concisely that “this lady has no idea what she’s doing”.  Therefore… and one day, I entered the front parlor and there in the middle of the room on the ratty Victorian carpet sat, among ten other objects, the most outstanding 1750’s crown & heart cut crest banister back arm chair with a beautiful and perfectly worn original black painted surface AND …beautiful and perfectly worn original woven splint seat AND… beautiful and perfect …original height.  I said, moved, touched, breathed, peeked and fumbled NOTHING.

            Within ten minutes I owned the chair for a modest $125.00, a coolly calculated purchase price based on a “she probably paid twenty” rock skip across the water of RISK ALL guessing merged with that “no idea what she’s doing” noted above.  WE moved right on to the next …little hand painted late Victorian HAIR RECIEVER that I HATE but actually BOUGHT during that aura of giddy that overcame me; a …mercy purchase.

            I got that chair out of there and it remains to this day the “best” notch on my antiquarian stick for the “BEST BANNISTER BACK ARMCHAIR” I “found” “ever”.  HOW she got it… to the center of the parlor upon that rug… from the first seemed a… must be an eternal darkness.  I did suspect right away that somehow, somewhere in her travels… locally… she “FOUND” that chair, an obvious “escape” from a southern coastal New England colonial SOMEWHERE …that had been carried by ox cart up into middle-of-no-where-Maine during that colonial era, become outdated and put away and… stayed that way for a century or TWO until THIS WOMAN somehow got it before her and… bought it.  This last is crucial.  As she had, I guessed with my rock skip, actually paid money for it, the chair became indiscriminately “FOR SALE” due to this capital outlay.  It MUST BE SOLD to get back that outlay so even though understood to be a “good” “old” “chair”.  The dollars spent stopped there until my rock skipped one hundred dollar clear “PROFIT” relieved this… crisis situation.