The Gauis Turner Diary

 Here's some fiction I submitted for a local paper's Spook Story series  October 2017

Earlier this month when the impressive house finally came up for tax sale by the Minister of Finance office in Fredericton, I was beyond excited -- We’d heard the amazing history, learned about the significance of the landmark and about the contributions of the shipbuilding industry in Albert County -- and now we were the proud owners of what everyone else called the Turner House at ShipYard Park.

Unfortunately, since the last time we’d been in the house about two years ago,, it had suffered from the hands of thoughtless vandals whose ignorance of the value of the 200-plus year old structure was clear.  Beautiful antique porcelain bathroom fixtures were smashed, doors and windows broken, and the previous tenant’s contents strewn about with apparent reckless abandon -- books, papers, photographs, journals, videos, and artifacts, leaking roof peaks had allowed rain, snow, and probably creatures to invade and contribute to the decay and destruction.

There was a ton of work just getting things organized and cleaned before we could set to the task of repairing broken plaster, re-glazing smashed windows, fixing and replacing bathrooms, kitchen appliances and getting electrical and plumbing reconnections working safely.  It was exhausting, daunting, and I just didn’t remember it being so bad when we first saw the abandoned home.  

With broom, shovels, rubber gloves, and dust masks, we started filling rubbermaid trash bins with the mildewed books and ruined photographs intending to burn them, but as we scooped pile after pile of nasty, damp, and black mold paperwork I saw a leather-bound book with very old fashioned writing on the cover, and thought it was probably a special keepsake Harry Potter type book of some sort, since it looked newer and undamaged unlike all the others we were obviously going to destroy.

When I opened the cover, my heart started racing when I read the hand-written words:  To a keen pair, suitably matched, joined today, 16 August, in the year of Our Lord, 1876.  Gaius Samuel Turner and  Lucy E. Stiles.  May you find each day forward a gift and of accomplished industrious purpose. 

We stopped work immediately, and promptly sat down among the debris and started turning the pages that displayed intricately cut out his-and-her silhouettes, unfamiliar ingredient lists for short recipes reading: build a bigger fyre box than usual for a very hot oven and add several soft pinches of asafoetida to a spoon-drop dough.  

Though the writing appeared to be feminine, it became more clear the more we read on that it was Gaius’ writing, as he logged and accounted lumber orders, railway schedules, the death of his mother:

 “Elizabeth Colpitts, kindest model of motherhood and goodness has most dearly departed, I shall not bear witness to another woman as fine save my own dear Lucy, who shares this day’s sorrow with me.”

Page after page of daily notes, meals shared, notable neighbours, kindnesses extended, weather anomalies, trade business, lazy workhands on the property and at the shipyard, and then we read words of increasing desperation as he described Lucy’s failing health, including Dr. visits, elixirs mixed, tinctures administered and finally her quietly slipping into an “unwakeable slumber” when she was pronounced dead.

“I feel she hasn’t yet left us, she is now utterly still but I cannot accept that my soul is not somehow still attached wyth her.  How is it possible to not acknowledge what I have been told as fact, and begin to wonder if I, too, am facing such a journey as grief has gripped me in mind and body this cold spring of 1892.”

Entry after entry describes how he implored the Doctor to revive her, that for several days before her burial he felt certain she was in a fast, deep, sleep, and that he was determined that she could be woken.

“My mynd is not so beset with denial.   Though my education did not benefit from study of the human body, I surely must be intelligent enough to know her spirit has not left, so must trust that quackery does not confound the good Doctor to know that her life has ended, as mine will one day, too.”

It was sad to continue to read, as he described his own failing health, his time in General Assembly and the distractions in Fredericton that served to take his mind away from Lucy’s impending burial. 

“To bury a wife who in death is still vibrant is an abomination -- I am told tyme and tyme repeatedly that she is gone but how is it to be that our bond was too strong to allow me to believe it is not so, or for anyone else to think I’m not mad with grief to consider it true -- she did not perish; my final kiss to her cool, not death-cold, forehead still returned her familiar loving connection.”

He wrote less and less, and final entries in early April, 1892, were becoming more scant -- Then blank, and we remember we learned in the archives that was the year he died -- after a “lengthy illness”.  How grief takes its toll.  

We put the special book aside, a treasured keepsake to be sure.  And talked about how powerful the mind is to allow him to continue to believe that she never really died, and drove him to near madness which in those days most certainly must have contributed to what was described as his lengthy illness.

We resumed our task of cleaning, sorting -- now with a more careful eye to treasure hunting hoping to uncover more valuable archives.  We filled the bin and took it out back to dig a burn pit.  Using an old maddock found in the shed, and a brand new shovel from Kent’s we both set to breaking up the overgrowth and dig down a safe distance from the neglected back lot behind the house, careful to spread dirt wide so the dry grasses wouldn’t catch fire.  The new shovel was more helpful than the maddock and each dig produced good moist soil to pile to the side of a trench we dug to dump the burnable house debris.  

A loud CLUNK stopped us both short on our efforts and we realized we were hitting wood not rock.  Worried that we’d unearthed the top to an old septic or cistern we brushed away the dirt and found that more of its length was still under more soil, so we cleared away several rocks, cut off a few hindering roots and realized it was all very thick plank wood.  More treasure?  We jumped to the immediate conclusion that it was ship board from the shipyard, and used the shovel to dig under its edge to see if we could pry it out!

For this, the maddock was of more use, so with its broad flat curved end we wiggled it under the longest edge of the plank and levered and leaned and pried back and forth until it SPRANG up with a crack so loud it startled us with its surprising release and we both fell backward on the freshly created mound of dirt behind us.

What we thought was just a long and wide plank of ship building material was anything but.  What was revealed was instead the lid of a coffin and its contents. Not a skeleton like you see in movies, cartoons, or halloween decorations but a cluster of bones, cloth, hair and STINK.

We just sat and stared.  It was too unbelieveable.  After the plank so quickly popped up,  time just seemed to slow down.  The smell slowly assaulted us, the vision took some moments to realize, the reality of what we were looking at didn’t set in for several minutes.  We held hands and just took it in.

Then we saw it.  The underside of the plank.  The deep scratches in the wood that were NOT caused by the maddock.  The gouges, the splinters, the broken finger bones, so many broken finger bones…..Gaius was right….Lucy hadn’t been dead, afterall.