Authors: J. Robert Lennon
I have likely given the impression that the house was entirely empty. This was not, in fact, the case. While steps had obviously been taken by the previous owners to clear out their property, some of their possessions had remained, and I dragged many of them out into the yard, for eventual conveyance to the dump. I would come to a room, remove its contents, clean it to the best of my ability, and get to work with the sander. Thus, a good deal of the former owners’ things passed through my hands.
The front room, into which a visitor arrived upon stepping through the door, was high-ceilinged, and about twenty-five feet square. High, narrow windows covered two sides, with uninspiring views of Lyssa and Phoebus Roads. When I arrived, torn and moth-eaten curtains hung over these windows, and bits of cardboard or plywood covered some broken panes. Two of the windows had been boarded over entirely. A single chair, of a simple wooden design, leaned against an interior wall, as two of its legs were missing. There was a calendar on that same wall from 1964. It was the tear-off kind, mounted on stiff cardboard bearing the name of a metal fabrication business, and the month of June was on top. There was exactly one thing written on it, in a shaky, left-angled hand:
RACHEL DOCTOR 2PM
, on Monday the eighth. On the other interior wall hung a penciled drawing of a house—or, rather, a kind of castle, made of stone and turreted, with crenellated parapets, cannon ports, and a broad keep with round-arched windows. The drawing, though clearly the work of a child, was very good, the individual stones carefully traced with mortar in between them, the lines and shadows quite accurate and consistent with a fixed direction of light, the perspective lopsided but nevertheless fairly convincing. The face of a mountain loomed up behind it, and a tiny mountain goat was perched on an outcropping, seeming to peer off into the distance. I threw the broken chair and calendar into my trash pile, but kept the drawing, slipping it in among the legal papers pertaining to the house.
Off the main room was a sitting room which faced Phoebus Road and the forest; it took up the southeast corner of the building and was not as large as the main room. Here was an overstuffed, velvet-upholstered sofa, which had been water-damaged and which stank, and so out it went. There was also a book, a storybook for older children that seemed to have been checked out of, but never returned to, a library. The spine was missing, exposing the glue that bound the pages together, and the front cover bore only an embossed illustration: a young man, wearing tattered clothes and an expression of grave concentration, climbing up a flagpole. His hand was extended, his fingers mere inches from his goal, which was a piece of wind-tossed cloth tied to the pole’s apex. This, too, I saved.
The house’s ground floor also contained a smallish study or sewing room, and a large dining room, which was next to the kitchen, in the northwest corner. These rooms were empty, though a crystal chandelier hung in the dining room, just north of center. The space underneath it was bounded by four slight depressions in the pine floor, as if a heavy table had long stood there, and the floor between them bore a haze of scrapes and gouges, evidently made by chairs being pushed toward and away from the table.
I have to admit that I found these markings strangely upsetting. Nothing, of course, could have been more ordinary—the evidence of a family having shared countless meals—yet I found myself enduring a small shiver of unease. Did the family ever imagine, as they sat together around the table, that this room might someday be empty of everything but cobwebs and dust? I tried to conjure in my mind the sounds and smells that once filled the room, but nothing came to me: the image I formed of the family was that of thin, gray figures, silently hunched over a dark mahogany table, their eyes closed, their hands hanging inertly at their sides. And I pictured them covered with white sheets, as if in storage, and the sheets furred with decades of dust.
In any event, I shook off these thoughts and set to work with gusto, obliterating with my sander the markings that gave rise to them. I don’t know what came over me—I am not of a particularly imaginative cast of mind. At any rate, once the boards had been sanded, I felt much better, and I was able to complete my work on the lower floor by the end of the day.
That was Wednesday. Thursday morning, when I arrived at the house from my motel, I found the electrician waiting for me, leaning against his van, looking at a magazine. Some of winter’s chill had returned, and one would have thought it would be unpleasant to stand still. But the electrician seemed content. He was a stocky man of about sixty, and he wore a clean tan jumpsuit, a hunting cap with earflaps, and a pair of fingerless gloves. He held a tall silver thermos in one hand, and sipped directly from the screw top, eschewing the cup, which appeared to be missing.
He barely spared me a glance as I pulled up, and it was only when I had gotten out of my car and approached him directly that he deftly slipped the magazine into a pocket and shook my hand. “Mr. Loesch? Paul Hephner. Call me Heph.”
“Thank you for coming, Heph.”
He tipped his head toward the house. “Bought the place, didya?” he asked.
“That’s right,” I said. I began to move toward the door, to preclude conversation. “Come on in.”
At the threshold, Heph slipped a pair of paper covers over his boots. The boots were impeccably clean, but I appreciated the gesture nonetheless, not yet having sealed the floors. “I’d like you to check the fuse box and the wiring,” I said. “The basement door—” But the electrician was already there, nudging my rock aside with an impatient foot.
“Careful on the stairs,” I called after him, peering down into the darkness. The circle cast by his flashlight bobbed, revealing a dirt floor and crumbling walls.
I stood upon the top step, listening to him move about. There was the scrape of something being dragged, a clank.
“Have you found the fuse box?” I said.
“Yalp,” he shouted. “Don’t worry about me, Mr. Loesch. Just you go about your business.”
“All right, then,” I said.
My work today would be to sand the upstairs floors, so I took a deep breath, lifted the sander, and hauled it up the steps. Each creaked deeply under the weight, but none threatened to break. As poorly maintained as the house had been, it was sturdy, and I felt a renewed confidence in my decision to buy it.
There was little to be cleared away in the bedrooms. A moldering ottoman, and a bureau that had warped and split; a small jewelry box, empty, sitting on a windowsill. In the smallest of the four upstairs rooms, I found another drawing, evidently by the same hand that had sketched the castle I’d found the day before. It was affixed to the wall with a carpet nail, and hung right next to a window. The view through the window was of the entirety of the land I had bought, and the drawing was of that same view. But the artist had altered the landscape, adorning it with fanciful details. In place of the rock that served as the centerpiece of the real landscape, there was a castle—clearly the same one as in the first drawing. Flags flew from the towers, and musical notes hung over the scene, as if some kind of celebration were under way. The sky was dotted with what I thought at first were birds, but upon closer inspection turned out to be friendly dragons, and the trees were heavy with fruit. I removed this drawing from the wall and added it to the sheaf of house documents.
After several tries, I found a working outlet in the hallway, and with my extension cord was able to use the sander in every room. In spite of the sawdust, the house seemed brighter and cleaner with the floors sanded; the boards lightened and showed their grain as I ground them down. I got through one small bedroom and part of another before I was interrupted by the electrician, whose presence in the cellar I had forgotten. I turned off the sander and asked him how things were going.
“Welp, Mr. Loesch,” he said, “you got some surprisingly okay wiring down there. The cloth insulation got worn off here and there so I want to replace some of that. And I put in fuses and tested your outlets for you and they’re all working now, but if you want to be safe I think you ought to let me put in grounded ones for you. And if you want to put the money in, I’d recommend we do a circuit breaker box. Your fuse box there is working okay, but it’s rusted half through. And in my professional opinion you could stand to get a dehumidifier going down there.”
I thanked Heph and told him that I would go ahead with his recommendations.
“Can’t get to it all till next week, Mr. Loesch, but I can do it all in one day for you, maybe Wednesday, let’s say?”
“Wednesday will be fine, Heph.”
“Glad to hear it, Mr. Loesch. You’ll be safe using the electricity until then. One other thing, though.”
“Yes?”
“It’s a while until warm weather, and it’s awful cold outside today. Looks like there’s still propane in your tank, too. You want me to try turning on the furnace?”
“Sure, Heph,” I said, “that would be helpful.”
I followed him down the stairs and into the kitchen, where he took off his paper boot covers and plunged down into the darkness. He seemed to expect me to follow, but I hesitated, as before, on the top step. When he reached the bottom, he turned to me. There was light down there now, apparently from a bare ceiling bulb, and so his flashlight was holstered on his belt.
“Ya comin’, Mr. Loesch?”
“No thanks, Heph,” I said. “I’ll wait here.”
He frowned. “Welp,” he said, “if you poke your head down, anyway, I can show you how to get ’er going if she goes out. The pilot light, I mean.”
I realized that there could be no reasonable explanation for my reluctance to follow, so I braced myself with a hand on the wall, and slowly moved down the stairs. After half a dozen steps, I lowered myself to a sitting position. Heph looked at me, puzzled, and not without some amusement. But I took a deep breath and looked around the cellar.
It was not any different from any other cellar of its era. The floor was hard-packed dirt, the walls stone, their whitewashed facing dry and crumbling. A single bare bulb hung from the ceiling next to a large, filthy furnace. A heavy door, like that of a safe, was open in the side of the furnace, and wide black ducts snaked out in every direction, to disappear into the floor joists above.
“This used to be a coal furnace, see,” Heph said. “There’s still coal dust all over the place here. Somebody converted it to gas.” From his pocket he produced a packet of matches. “You want to come see how to do this, Mr. Loesch?”
“No thanks, Heph,” I replied. “You just show me from there.”
Heph leaned in the little door, and I heard a metallic scrape. There was the snick of a match against sandpaper, and the quiet gust of a gas flame igniting. Heph pulled his head from the door and shut it tightly. Beyond him, behind the furnace, the cellar seemed to disappear in its own shadows; no wall was visible.
“So alls you have to do now is go on upstairs and turn up the thermostat,” he said.
“Heph, may I ask you something?”
“What’s that?”
I pointed over his shoulder. “Can you see what’s back there?”
He frowned and turned around. “Mr. Loesch, I don’t believe I see anything at all back there.”
“There’s no wall?”
Heph laughed. “I’m sure there’s a wall there, Mr. Loesch.” He came to the stairs and climbed up, stepping neatly around me. At the top, he put his boot covers back on and beckoned for me to follow. I did so. We went into the large front room, where an old thermostat was affixed to the wall beside the door. It had the coppery look of an art deco building facade, with an old mercury thermometer running up the center, like a vein of blood.
“You want I should go ahead and give you some heat, then?”
“Yes, please do, Heph.”
He reached out and turned the little thumbwheel at the bottom of the thermostat, and immediately we heard a clank, a pop, and a rumble as the gas caught fire. A few seconds later, musty air rose from the heat registers and filled the room. I felt, for a moment, as though some animal had awakened underneath us, that we were enveloped by its hot breath, and I suppressed a shudder.
Or perhaps I didn’t quite suppress it, because a wry smile played at the corner of Heph’s mouth. “You planning to live alone here, Mr. Loesch?” he asked.
“That’s right,” I said, sounding, I’m afraid, rather uncertain.
“Lots of character in an old place like this.”
“I suppose you could say that.”
He stared at me for a moment, and I stared out the window.
HEPHNER ELECTRIC
, read the sign on the door of his van. In spite of his friendly manner, the electrician was making me somewhat uncomfortable. His backwoods charm and colloquial speech did little to dispel my sense that he was observing and testing me, gauging my reactions to his supposedly innocent comments and questions. Though his motives did not seem hostile, he put me on my guard. I wanted him to leave, and when I cleared my throat, he took the hint. “Welp, see you Wednesday, then, Mr. Loesch,” he said, and, having brought my dormant house back to life, walked out the door.
THREE
It took me most of the next week to finish the floors and walls. To seal the floorboards, I buffed in a carnauba wax blend, and the result was a pleasingly light-colored finish with a dull, almost pink, glow. After long consideration I painted the interior walls pale yellow, to match the exterior, and refinished the kitchen floor with black and white linoleum tiles.
It may seem improbable that I should be able to accomplish so much in so little time, and I will confess here that it is not without pride that I so present myself. As I believe I have said, one area of my expertise is infrastructure—its creation, maintenance, and repair—and the tasks required for the renovation of a house happened to fit neatly into my particular skill set. The fact is, I would have been perfectly able to replace the old wiring myself. But Heph had made electricity his career, and so had all the necessary tools at his immediate disposal. It was only for the sake of convenience and safety that I brought him into my temporary employ.
Over the days leading up to his return, I strove to complete my basic renovations and began to think about the weeks ahead. There were things I wished to accomplish. One was to move myself out of the motel and into the house. I was growing weary of the motel’s sterility, its numbing sameness, and I had come to resent the dull and frustrating drives to and from the city of Milan. The time had come to equip my house with the basic furnishings necessary for living, and occupy it in earnest. In addition, I had spent many stray moments during my labor gazing out the windows at the woods, and had become eager to explore them. I wanted especially to trek to the large rock, and find out if it could be climbed. Perhaps, as well, the creek that formed the northeast border of my property harbored trout—and doubtless the woods were home to any number of deer, which I could hunt, and which could serve as food. I hoped to minimize my trips to town for provisions, and so I was determined to dig and sow a garden, and perhaps to find and pasture some small animals, goats I supposed, for their milk. It was with considerable excitement that I contemplated buying myself some hiking equipment, guns, and fishing gear, and placing an order for good, dark soil and compost from the garden center in Milan.
And so it was with some determination that I worked on the floors and walls, and, as I have implied, I finished them within one week. I also ordered, and accepted delivery of, a suite of basic furniture from a catalog. My only other contact with the outide world during this time came in the form of phone call.
So engrossed was I in my work and in the contemplation of the work to come, that when the caller identified herself, I had no idea at first who she was. “Andrea from Barris and Haight” is what she said, and it wasn’t until she added “The law firm? About the abstract?” that I suddenly remembered our conversation of the previous week.
“Yes, of course, Andrea!” I said. I wiped the sweat and dust from my face and walked out to the stoop to talk.
“I’m calling you back about the crossed-out name in your abstract,” she said. “I’m afraid we’ve been unable to find the name. All copies of the document that are in our records are crossed out, just like yours.”
“I see.”
“I wish I could have been of greater help.”
I could detect, in Andrea’s voice, a great relief—as if she had expected the call to be contentious, and now believed it wasn’t going to be. I decided to pursue the matter further.
“You might recall, Andrea, that I merely asked why the name was blacked out, and who is responsible for having done so. I am quite concerned about this meddling in my affairs.”
She said, perhaps a bit uncertainly, “I have no other information for you, Mr. Loesch.”
“But didn’t you do any further research? At the Henford town offices, for instance?”
Now her voice fell into the slightly awkward pattern of rote memory—she had anticipated this question and had prepared an answer. “I’m sorry, the town offices had no other information, either.”
This sounded to me like a lie. “Is that so?”
“I’m afraid it is.”
“What would you say,” I asked, “if I told you that I had been in touch with the town offices, and asked if anyone had been in to research those records, and been told that no one had asked for them in quite some time.”
She seemed flustered, but her answer was clear. “Whomever it was you spoke to, Mr. Loesch, it could not have been the person my colleague spoke to.”
“And who was that person, Andrea?”
“I don’t know, since I wasn’t the one who did the research.”
“Which of your colleagues did the research?”
“Mr. Loesch,” she said, her voice hardening, “if you wish to know more, you will have to investigate it yourself. We didn’t find the information you wanted. I’m sorry.”
“So am I, Andrea, so am I.”
“Good afternoon, Mr. Loesch.”
The line cut off before my “goodbye” could leave my lips.
Heph arrived as promised on Wednesday to replace the fuse box and wiring. He nodded appreciatively at my work. “Didn’t do all this on your own, didya, Mr. Loesch?” he asked.
“Yes, I did, in fact.”
“I can hardly believe it,” he said, and I chastised myself for thinking that I detected in his voice a touch of irony. He crouched down on his haunches and rubbed his fingers lightly against the floor. “Waxed this, didya? How many coats?”
“Five.”
He nodded. “Real good,” he said. “Real good.” Then he stood up, his joints cracking, his hands on his hips. He was wearing the same getup that he had worn last week, but the jumpsuit was light blue this time, and the earflaps on his cap were tied together over the dome, their ropes intertwined in a neat bow. “Yalp,” he said, “it’s real nice to see a house come back from the dead, as it were.”
“It does feel good.”
“Nobody been up here for a long time. I remember hunting down in the bowl there.”
“You mean on my land?” I asked.
He narrowed his eyes. “Welp, it wasn’t your land then, now was it. We used to go shooting deer. Gave it up though. Too easy to get lost.”
“Really?” I asked, gazing out the window. “It’s not so much land.”
“Too rough. No paths. And it’s a bowl, see, you get all turned around.” He waved his hand in the air, dismissing the very concept. “Not much to shoot anyhow.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” I said.
“Oh, you’ll come across something or other,” he said. But it seemed disingenuous, and I let the matter drop.
Heph disappeared into the basement, and soon I began to hear the clanking and scraping of his labor, accompanied by a cheerful whistle. I stood rooted to the spot for some minutes, staring out the window, and a great exhaustion and sadness seemed to come over me, like the sliding of a white sheet over a dead man’s body. The landscape appeared to blur, and I felt a tightness in my throat. It was the whistling. Gentle, round, with a deep vibrato, it carried no recognizable tune, yet was deeply evocative. It pulled me out of the here and now, and carried me off to some other, watery place, where I floated, paralyzed, unhappy and slightly afraid.
After an indeterminate interval, Heph emerged from the cellar, evidently to retrieve some supplies from his van. His boot covers crunched quietly against the floorboards, a sound akin to that of autumn leaves. When he saw me standing at the window, he stopped.
“Mr. Loesch!” he said, as if shocked and disappointed. “Are you still standing there?”
“Yes, Heph,” I said without turning. “I seem to be in something of a brown study.”
The electrician was silent for a moment, and though my back was to him, I imagined that he was nodding sagely. I found myself wanting, very much, to trust him. “You know, Mr. Loesch,” he said, “it seems to me you’ve been working awfully hard. Maybe you ought to reward yourself with a little break. Me, I like to sit back and read a good magazine. Or treat myself to a good lunch.”
“It’s too early for lunch,” I said.
“You’ve lost track of time! Why, it’s nearly noon!”
I looked at my watch, and somehow the motion of my arm broke my reverie at last. “You’re right, Heph. Maybe I will take a break.”
“Seems to me all you been doing these past couple weeks is getting ready. You got to go live your life some.”
“Well put,” I said, blinking the haze from my eyes. The woods sprang into focus, each green bud visible on the trees.
Yes—perhaps Heph was right, whatever his motives for his comments. Perhaps the life I had led so far was, in fact, nothing more than a long period of wandering, after having been led astray, years before. Perhaps my judgment had been clouded. The thought, of course, was deeply frustrating, for if it were so, then I had wasted a great deal of time and effort. But I was not yet old, and there was much I could accomplish, if only I could take my first steps onto the correct new path. Maybe that path began here, in these woods.
Heph lingered behind me a few moments more, as if to make sure he had gotten through to me. Then he continued on his way. I waited until he had collected his supplies and returned to the cellar, and then gathered myself and walked out to my car.
I hadn’t intended to make much of my trip into town. But, as it happened, the closer I got to Milan, the more excited and enthusiastic I became. Heph’s words rang in my head—it was time to stop preparing and start living. It was cold today, but soon the warm spring weather would arrive, and I would go out into nature, and be a part of it. I found a sporting goods store and picked out a tent and sleeping bag, a modest fishing rig, and a pair of lightweight, waterproof boots—a far cry from the heavy, bulky footwear I was accustomed to. I then treated myself to a lunch at the local Chinese buffet, where I discovered that I was hungry beyond measure. Time and time again, I loaded my plate with steamed white rice, sweet orange-flavored chicken, fried pork dumplings, and spicy beef and vegetables, only stopping when I literally could no longer consume another bite. It occurred to me that I had been neglecting my nutrition, and had probably lost a great deal of weight over the past two weeks. As I sat there digesting, in a slightly dirty booth near the slightly dirty window, beneath a buzzing neon sign, those weeks seemed like a mere hiccup in time, a transitional period that had now come to a close. This greasy, sumptuous meal was the line that divided that period from the rest of my life, which, for the first time in recent memory, I was ravenously eager to begin living. I staggered, packed with food, out to my car, then drove to the grocery store and bought enough provisions for two weeks. I also bought seeds, tools, plastic fencing, and posts at the garden center, and arranged to have the junk in my yard hauled away. I have a very large car, but the rear was full, all the way to the ceiling.
I arrived back at my house as the sun was setting. Heph’s van was gone from the lot, and his bill, complete with a self-addressed envelope for payment, was wedged into the crack between the door and its frame. Inside, the house was warm and inviting, and filled with slanting evening light. It was dinnertime, but I had eaten enough to last until dinnertime the next day. I realized suddenly that I did not want to leave—that I was going to sleep here tonight, for the first time. I called my motel and settled over the phone; I had left nothing in my room. When I hit
END
, I realized that I had made the break. I was living here now, in my house on the hill, and felt, at long last, that I was ready.
I have to admit that I had great difficulty getting to sleep that first night. A mind accustomed to stimulation, and left without, will create its own—and in my empty house, in the moonless, deathly silence of night, mine was madly racing into the early hours. The house creaked in a wind, and the furnace shuddered and clanked as it regulated the temperature. I thought that I smelled flowers, and then gunpowder, and then burning wood. Ghostly flashes burst at the edges of my vision. I believed, several times, that someone was walking stealthily through the rooms, and I crept downstairs, knife in hand, to investigate. But no one was there, and I never discovered the source of the sound, if there had ever really been one.
Worse yet, when at last I did fall into an uneasy, shallow sleep, my dreams were strange. I stood in a desert as a sandstorm swirled around me. I collapsed in exhaustion, cupping my hands around my mouth to keep the sand from my lungs. Then I was digging, digging like a dog with both my hands, and I uncovered a wooden trapdoor, which led to an iron ladder. I climbed deep into the ground, eventually dropping into a tunnel, lit by bare incandescent bulbs and supported by thick wooden beams, like an old mine. The walls slanted, the ceiling sagged, and I walked through the maze of corridors in search of the source of the voices I heard—familiar voices, those of people I knew, though I couldn’t tell who. And then, suddenly, the voices were behind me. I was leading those people somewhere, but I couldn’t turn to see who they were. They chatted and laughed: only I understood the grave danger we were all in, that death lurked around every blind corner, and I tried in vain to quiet them. There was light ahead, and heat, and terrible peril, and the rifle I carried had turned to rubber, and then to something like licorice, because I was eating it, ravenously, as I had eaten my lunch at the Chinese buffet. I woke before dawn with tears in my eyes and my hand in my mouth, having actually drawn blood in a semicircular pattern of marks, like the rough stitching on a rag doll.
But daylight soon began to trickle through the windows, and the dream faded away into abstraction. The terror and madness that made it so real now seemed like ridiculous clichés, the scar on my hand a small embarrassment. I sat on the floor, rested my arms on the sill of the east-facing bedroom window, and watched the sun come up over the trees. The forest was still gray, but green had begun, ever so faintly, to creep across its surface, like a mold. The sight of it filled me with determination and excitement. I rolled up my sleeping bag, put on my clothes, and packed a bag with fruit, trail mix, dried meat, and a bottle of water. It was time to go for a hike.
Considering the amount of time that had passed since the house had last been occupied, the edge of the forest where it met the yard was strangely well defined. The house gave way to hard-packed gravel and dirt, which sloped down into rough, woody weeds and shrubs; then, about forty feet from the northeastern corner of the house, the treeline began, a wall of tightly packed maples, birches, ashes, and pines. The trunks were high and narrow, the light beyond them dim despite the scant foliage. Peering into the forest, I could make out a tangled canopy of thin branches overhead. Heph was right—it was indeed rough. I walked back and forth along the treeline, searching for, if not a path, then perhaps the ghost of a path that must certainly once have existed. The deer, at the very least, had to have a way in and out. But no entry point looked better than any other, and so I took a deep breath, raised a leg high into the air, and stepped in at random.