I’d heard him joke about certain young lady ghosts that lived around/inside the stone privy yet standing at an old girls’ academy, The Burwell School, right in Hillsborough. “The Haunted Outhouse,” Tad called it. I asked him what it felt like, his freely moving around this particular ghost-nest; his knowing that they knew that he was there, observing, enjoying. “Oh, M.E., I’d say like ‘walking through a rain of talcum powder too fine to notice but it still gets your hair feeling whitish and you can sort of smell it, dusty humany basementish almost rose-smellin’ sorta”; but he grinned as if only teasing. Even so, it stopped me, how certainly (I mean how lightly) he’d said all that.

In the car, I sat shoulder to shoulder with my friends riding west. I recalled his “They never have lied to me.”

Well, you need not be Sherlock to deduce as how this means a critical mass of earlier sightings, or promptings, promises. In the car bound home, I think we kept so hushed and a little glum, because we knew—if we hadn’t before—who he was. We knew that Tad wouldn’t make up such things—he’d never, ever lied to me, or to anybody, except out of white-lie kindness, or during something like losing at backgammon for Preservation’s sake. I chastised myself for that three-second delay in taking what he’d handed me first. But, even so, we all suddenly unwillingly knew he was going to die. Soon. Somehow his seeing the occupants of this last great house he’d saved showed us just how soon (four weeks). He’d made us start to see the bricks through him. Come to think of it, we’d always seen the bricks through Tad!

Tad’s mission (and I can use that word in good conscience here) was about so much more than just saving certain pretentious properties for a few more generations of socially ambitious Carolinians who could afford to replace octagonal slate roofing tiles that can cost, as we all know, up to $69 per. The houses whom he’d saved were suddenly extravagantly giving groundbreaking housewarming gifts back to him. Presents from Presences! Farewells. They meant, “Well done, thou good and faithful servant.”

That’s just one story about him. But it’s the one that came to me. I know there are people in historic preservation who are only interested in the architecture, in the pediments, the lemon-oiled perfectible period detail. I fear I’ve met a few. I fear I myself have been wedged into more than a few mullioned window seats with Laura Ashley floral prints and peppermint-stripe piping on the cushions under my increasingly historical whatever (and there till after 2 a.m.). These experts consider the people who actually live (or lived) in these fine places as something like the furniture—you maybe need them there to make the house seem finished, but they’re incidental to the structure’s superior claims. With Tad, the living, the livingness of the place and what went on there and what might go on there next, that was the definition of his passion, boxwood by old rose, slate by slate, mantel to passing mantel.