Nebula

By Kim Hayes

My mother’s childhood home was just south of a small town called Tangipahoa, Louisiana, about a little over an hour’s drive north of New Orleans. It was one of those rural towns with one blinking light and if you sneezed, you’d drive through it. The house was called Nebula. My three or four greats back grandfather, Samuel Newsom built it. The brick foundations were laid out before the Civil War and completed shortly afterwards. Nebula was my second childhood home growing up. It’s where I spent weekends and summers. As a child, it was a magical and mystical place where you could escape city life for a weekend or for a few days in the summer. 

The main house had a front porch that was wrapped around part of the house and there was a long porch in the back. The layout of the house was also typical of the time when it was built. There were four rooms in the front with a main hallway, and there was a long back porch. The ceilings were high, and the windows went from the floor to the ceiling. This was to keep the house as cool as possible in the sweltering Louisiana summers. Three of the four rooms were bedrooms, the fourth room was the parlor. The kitchen, dining room and what was probably the butler’s pantry opened to the back porch. My dad used the smaller room for his ham and CB radio.

An oil portrait of Samuel Newsom hung in the main hallway and always gave me the creeps, because his eyes seemed to follow you as you walked by. My mom once told me that was the mark of a good painting. I don’t know how true that is, but I do have a habit of looking for that if I ever pass by an old oil portrait.

The Victorian style of decoration was clear in the parlor’s furnishings. Rose-colored walls and ornate curtains adorned each window. An old, out-of-tune piano in one corner played a few keys. These four rooms each once had working fireplaces, but over time the chimneys clogged up and were unsafe to use. 

The bathroom was off my parents’ bedroom, that was added to the house when my mother was a child. There were steps behind a door to the attic above the toilet. On the other end of the long back porch was a small half bath that was probably added on when my mother was in college. 

The attic was one big room, unpainted, with two open doorways on either side that went out to the rafters. I was told to never go on those, as I might fall through. But the main room was amazing, filled with bookshelves of books, and with more trunks, mostly locked up. The walls had writing on them in chalk. My mom said she and her stepbrother did most of the writing on the walls as they were growing up. Some trunks were open, and I would spend hours rooting through what I found inside. One of my favorite things to play with were two skirts that my step grandfather found in Italy on one of his antique trips.  

The back yard had a sugar kettle full of water, filled with goldfish. I loved watching the goldfish swim around. Once, when it was chilly and there was a layer of ice on top, I was worried that the fish had frozen to death, but they were hardy little fish, and the water temperature didn’t seem to bother them. The kettle rested on a big slab of concrete that, according to my mom, sat on top of a well. There was always the implied danger of what if the sugar kettle fell in the well. 

Next to the main house, there was a crumbling brick cistern that was locked up. Cisterns held water from wells and provided drinking and cooking water for houses. I was always warned not to go near it, and I always wanted to pick the lock to see what was inside. 

In the semi tropical climate of Southern Louisiana, the kitchens were built a few yards away from the main house. The reasons were to keep the main house cooler and, of course, to reduce the risk of a fire. Nebula had such a building; the three rooms filled with old furniture and locked trunks that no one had keys to anymore. It always had a slightly musty smell to it. 

There was a small patch of fresh, wild mint growing next to this little house, and in summer, I was to pick the best mint leaves so my dad could make mint juleps. While I never cared for the boozy part of the drink, I liked the smell of fresh mint. 

As I was growing up, my parents and I would spend at least one weekend a month, and usually a couple of weeks in the summer at Nebula. It was an extensive property to maintain. There was always something that needed to be repaired and, in the spring and summer, my dad would pick a part of the area around the house to mow. Sometimes he would let me sit in his lap and I would ‘drive’ the tracker around whatever parts of the yard he was mowing.

The weathered barn that looked like it was going to fall over at any minute. I would spend hours exploring the barn. There was the loft that was only accessible by an old ladder that I would climb. My mother was always afraid that I’d fall and break something. There were a few rooms that were locked up, again, with locks whose keys were long ago lost to time. Back when my ancestors had cows, there was also a room for them to go into for when it was time to be milked. There were old milk tins scattered about, along with stools and chairs. The room was full of hay and weeds and was a haven for hornet and wasp nests. The rooms of the barn that were open had old, rusted farm tools and more trunks, again, locked up and the keys long ago lost to time. Once I asked my mom if we could get something to pick or break the locks to all these trunks with and the reply was always, maybe someday. She had no clue what any of these trunks in the attic or the barn might hold.

One of our neighbors (neighbors being people who lived about a mile away, this was a very rural area of the state) owned two horses, Lady and Maude, who were mother and daughter. The neighbor had no place on his property for the horses, so my mom said he could let them stay on the property. We built a few barbed wire fences around the barn, so they had free rein to wonder about. The horses were unbroken, making it impossible for anyone to ride them. Maude was the mother and was unfriendly and had the habit of nipping at you if you got too close. Lady was more open to at least letting you pet her, she loved apples. Maude kicked me in the shin twice when I got too close and once, when I tried to lure Lady into the barn to ride her, gave me a very loud snort and ran off. 

I always had to watch for snakes when I was outside. Southern Louisiana is ripe for rattlesnakes, moccasins, and corals. Once there was a huge moccasin snake sunning himself on the roots of the big oak tree and, since I loved playing on the roots of the tree, my mom one day grabbed her gun and shot the snake. She had a handyman come over and chop the snake up. 

We found out the oak tree in the yard was hollow after a big storm blew through and we made the trip up there mid-week, mainly to be sure that the tree hadn’t hit the house. The wind had knocked the tree completely over. We could only guess how old the tree was, probably over one hundred years. 

One summer, my half-sister and I built a fort in a small grove of pine trees near the front of the property. We found old board planks in the barn that we dragged out to the spot for the fort. We had to make sure there was no poison ivy growing around and spent one afternoon just clearing out the weeds. I think we only had a few planks to use, but we built a respectable little fort. I think it may have lasted a few months before a nasty rainstorm ruined it. 

Summer meant swimming and tubing in the Tangipahoa River. The river was about a mile east of the house. It was the east property line marker. Every year, we would drive down to the usual spot to see how much had changed since the previous summer. We would pack lunch or sometimes my dad dragged an old BBQ grill to the beach, and he would grill burgers and hot dogs. As I got older, my mother insisted that we wore battered up tennis shoes even while swimming. “You might step in glass!” was her warning. I always felt silly trying to swim while wearing shoes and would try to see how long I could go before she’d tell me to put my shoes on. The river wasn’t deep, a few feet at most. (ADD MORE?)

The railroad tracks along Highway 51 made up the western edge of the property. There were two tracks and whenever I would hear a train whistle, I’d grab pennies and go running down the driveway to see if I had the time to put the pennies on the tracks. There were daily Amtrak trains running between New Orleans and Chicago, and at least one freight train going back and forth daily. The freight trains were my favorite because they seemed to go on forever and I’d always watch for open box cars. If the train was going slow enough, I’d crane my neck from my spot in the driveway to see if there might be someone inside. Freight trains back then still had red caboose cars at the end of the train, and I’d always wave at the person in that car and loved it when they would wave back. 

No over one hundred-year-old house would be complete without ghosts. There were a couple of stories my mom had told me from when she was growing up about bumps and noises in the night. One story she told me happened when she was a child. My grandmother and the maid had gone for a walk down the driveway. There was no one else at home. As they were walking back towards the house, they heard the piano in the parlor playing. According to my grandmother, she and the maid called out as they were walking down the driveway, but no one answered, and the piano kept playing. They got all the way into the house, just outside the parlor, and both heard the piano playing. The second the maid opened the door, it stopped. 

When it was just me and my parents at Nebula and we were eating dinner in the kitchen, sometimes we’d hear a large, loud THUD from somewhere else in the house. Not all the time, but it was a THUD sort of noise. We’d always call out, ‘Hi Grandpa, we’re ok, how are you?’ Grandpa was the name we gave the noise. We joked that it was Samuel Newsom or some other relative, making sure that everything was good. We never heard voices or saw anything; it was just the occasional THUD noise. 

When I was about 11 or 12, my mom made the painful decision to sell the property. It was becoming too hard and expensive to maintain, and we could find no one who was willing or able to live on the property as a caretaker. My parents had even fixed up the three-room former kitchen building to accommodate someone to live on site. The property was too rural and too remote for anyone who lived in Baton Rouge or New Orleans to even consider living there just on weekends or a few nights a week. As a result, there was no home or fire insurance on the house or property. 

One early morning in the fall of 1981, we got a phone call from a neighbor who was in the habit of driving by during the week, just to check that everything was good. Nebula was on fire. We drove up in near silence, except for my mom, who was crying and wondering why and who could do such a thing. I remember smelling the smoke in the car when we were a couple of miles away. 

Neighbors who smelled the smoke and saw the flames greeted us. The house was too far gone to even bother calling the fire department. All that remained were the foundations and the chimneys. By the time we made it up there, quite a few people who knew us had gathered around and were trying to comfort my mom, who was by now almost hysterical. I kept on walking around the foundations and thinking of everything that had burned. 

All the furniture in the rooms, the locked-up trunks in the attic, the paintings (the portrait of Samuel Newsom was removed a few years before), gone. The front porch where I often played or just swinging from the hammock, gone. My childhood toys that I had stashed there, and sometimes still played with, were gone. All the secrets that Nebula held within its walls, gone. 

With no insurance on the property, it was a devastating total loss. In the weeks that followed, we found out someone had broken into the house and to cover up the robbery, they set it on fire. However, it had been raining, and the very muddy tire tracks lead straight to their door. My parents took the property off the market for a few months, but really there was nothing else to do. My mom reduced the price, and it sold a few months later. 

In the years since, it has changed hands a few times. The first person to buy the property built a house in the yard between where the original house stood and the barn. The current owners also fixed up the three-room building that was originally built as the kitchen. A few years ago, we drove up to see what they had done, and they were delighted to meet us and find out some of the history of Nebula. One thing they wanted to know was if we had ever heard noises or anything. We must have all exchanged a look because the husband said, “Ok, tell us, because my wife and mother-in-law have heard voices and other things.” We mentioned the THUD noises, and they said they had heard those as well, but it was mainly voices. They always called out, but no one answered. They asked who the voices might belong to, my mother said, probably a long deceased relative. 

I dream about Nebula from time to time. It’s been over forty years, and I can still see every room and where every piece of furniture was. I wish I had more physical pictures, but the memories in my mind will last me a lifetime.

Kim lives and writes in Chicago, Illinois. She works for the Chicago Cubs. Her hobbies include writing, reading, cooking and cross stitching. One of her short stories was recently accepted for publication in Corner Bar Magazine.