Authors: J. Robert Lennon
It was a bright, breezy day, and a wind carried with it a balm, a round moistness with a hint of warmth. It was perhaps this warmth that had caused an odor to begin drifting through the rooms of the house. I suppose I had noticed the odor before—a flat, dank mustiness—but it was only now that it had grown intense enough to demand my immediate attention. To this end, I had included among my purchases from the hardware store a bag of quicklime, a bottle of antifungal spray, a respirator with several sets of filters, and a package of extra-heavy-duty plastic garbage bags. I would find whatever it was that had grown moldy, and I would throw it away.
In the back of my mind, however, and creeping ever closer to the fore, was the understanding that I would have to work in the cellar, under the disheartening glare of a single ancient bare incandescent bulb. This inevitability was causing me distress, and the distress grew more powerful with every passing moment. I unloaded my car, removed the respirator from its package, screwed in the filters, and adjusted the straps, taking as long as I possibly could, and all the while feeling my heart beat faster and harder, and my head fill up with toxic fog.
Allow me to state that I am not a coward. Indeed, I am a man of some considerable courage. This is not a boast, merely a statement of fact. I have faced great dangers in my life, have stared death in the face and not backed down. But those dangers were clear and well defined, and my superior skill in the areas of planning and prevention were able to protect me against harm. My impending journey into the cellar, meanwhile, was something different. There was no reason for me to fear it—indeed, I had been living and working above it for some time now, and had neither heard nor seen anything that would indicate danger. But reason did not come into it. My fear of the cellar was irrational, and there was nothing I could do that would erase it. I would have to carry it with me, bear it upon my shoulders as I worked, endure it until my work was through.
The time had come to act. But I dawdled for at least an hour more, making a pot of coffee, drinking a cup of it, checking the glazing on the windows, examining the winter-bare landscaping plants around the house, for buds. Eventually, though, I grew annoyed with myself. Where was my discipline, my self-control? A strong man, I told myself, did not hesitate in the face of his fears; rather, he took note of them, dismissed them, and got on with the task at hand. Disgusted by my weakness, I went back inside, put on my respirator, took up my supplies, and trudged down the rickety steps.
The steps were painted red, which paint had worn away in the middle of each from decades of tread. They creaked and bowed under my weight. My hands were full, and anyway there was no handrail, and I took each step with great care, making sure each foot was firmly planted before transferring my weight to it. In this way I descended gradually, until at last I stood on the bare packed-dirt floor.
The smell here was stronger, of course; I could detect it in spite of the respirator. My breaths inside the device were hot and damp; I had to draw them more deeply to pull the air through the filters. The cold crept up underneath the cuffs of my pants, and the furnace, a monolithic, mound-like protuberance in the ground, snaked its black tentacles all across the room. It appeared to me like a giant mushroom, some massive death cap, and as I stood regarding its great dark enormity it emitted a thunderous
clank,
and a hacking
whoosh,
like a sudden gust of wind. I could see the blue glow of the gas flame etched around the edges of the door, and I felt something turn over in my chest. Perspiration began to leak out of my pores, under my arms and in my crotch, and inside my boots my feet began to itch. I realized, belatedly, that I ought to have urinated before I came down here. But that would have to wait. I gritted my teeth and, supplies in hand, moved forward into the darkness.
The basement was laid out in a large square the size of the house, and had not been subdivided in any way. Enormously thick wooden beams supported the floor joists above, with the furnace in the center. The stairs had led me down to the south wall, and the light bulb was southwest of the furnace, illuminating the new circuit breaker box that Heph had installed. Foolishly, I had neglected to bring down a flashlight—but with my eyes adjusted, I could make out the north and east walls behind the furnace, and knew I would be able to see well enough to clear out the moldy trash.
My heart thudding, I took a few tentative steps north. I felt my entire body tighten, the skin squeezing the bones, as if it were trying to shrink me to nothing. My jaw, tightly clenched all this time, began to spasm, and I struggled to keep my teeth from knocking together. But I continued, taking one step and then another, my hands cold and trembling, my head pounding, my face swollen and irritated from the nylon straps of the respirator.
And then a familiar emotion took hold of me and my trembling subsided. Heat coursed through me. I gripped the lime bag and spray bottle tighter, crushing them in my grip, and vulgarities began to pour from my mouth.
It is a well-known truth that fear gives way to anger—we have seen it, for instance, in those diagnosed with a dangerous illness, or among citizens of an occupied state during a time of war. But in my case, the transformation was immediate. My irrational fear melted in the face of an equally irrational rage. I cursed the slovenly, careless people who had left things in my basement capable of growing mold; I cursed poor Heph for forcing me halfway down the stairs. I denounced the forest and its cruel rejection of me, its master, and I spat and seethed at the thought of my sister, the devious whore, for interfering in my life after ignoring me for so long. In short, the world was my enemy: it had driven me here, to this sanctuary, and, not having had enough, it had forced me into its bowels to clear away the miserable reek of its past. And so, fueled by hate, I made my way across the near-lightless space to the far northeast corner, where a jagged lump reshaped itself into a pile of cardboard boxes, each slumped, eaten away by fungus, and spilling books through its ruptured sides.
I gathered up as many of the books as I could carry, and then, my teeth tearing the insides of my cheeks, the taste of blood on my tongue, I roared up the stairs and out the back door, to fling their infernal rot into the brutal spring sun. I made many trips—a dozen, I’d say—growing angrier with each return, until at last I howled at the limp stinking cardboard that remained, bellowed as I scooped it up and hugged it to my chest and hauled it out into the light.
By the time I had opened the box of lime and begun dumping it on the floor, my anger had weakened, and with that task completed, my fear returned. I had time for a few spritzes of the antifungal spray before, wracked by terror, exhaustion, and spent emotion, I dragged myself at last up the creaking stairs to the bathroom. There, I tore off my mask and my clothes, spreading dust and scraps of clotted, putrid paper all over the floor, and stepped into a scalding hot bath, where I cleaned my wounds. I had gouged the back of one hand and an ankle during one of my desperate tears up and down the stairs; my face and scalp burned with scratches from who knew where, and my muscles ached from the tension at last released. From the bath I tumbled into bed, shivering beneath the blankets, and I slept until late afternoon. Then, at last, I dressed in clean clothes, tidied up the bathroom, and went out into the yard to transfer the ruined books to the trash pile.
There were several dozen of them, both hardcover and paperback, largely destroyed by the purple-black mold that had grown on them. The mold had permeated their pages, fusing them together into bulging, spongy blobs, and I carried them gingerly now, eager not to sully myself. Two of them, however, had largely escaped corruption, and after a moment’s consideration I set these aside. My constant renovation work had precluded the need for anything to read, but now that I had some leisure time, I could use a good book or two. The books seemed to be on the subject of human psychology—one of them was called
The Malleable Mind;
the other
Shaping Behavior.
I would not characterize my own cast of mind as intellectual, and these books did indeed appear to be quite dense and technical in nature. But I had never been one to resist a challenge, and of course there was nothing else to read, aside from the children’s book I had found in the sitting room. I brought these books back inside, and cleaned them up as best I could. Then I completed my work outdoors, washed my hands carefully, made myself a modest dinner, and, as the sun disappeared from view behind the hills to the west, turned in early to bed.
My plan had been to open one of the rescued psychology books at random, and read it until I fell asleep. And so I picked up
The Malleable Mind
and turned it over in my hands. Though largely undamaged, it was nevertheless redolent of the cellar, and my lips curled at the smell, and a small tremor of unease ran through me. But I was able to master myself, and I let the book fall open on my lap. The page began,
presumption of inviolability must be negated. To this end, subtle adjustments were made to the subject’s comfort and autonomy by creating a physical dependence upon the experimenter. Specifically subject was requested to bring a bag lunch to the testing location, then told it would be placed in a nearby office, from where it was “inadvertently” lost. Experimenter then promised food would be provided, which promise was then “forgotten.” When subject requested promised food, the experimenter renewed his promise and then again forgot. Water meanwhile was provided for the subject that was slightly discolored and had a bitter flavor. When asked about the water, the experimenter pretended to take a sip and subsequently insisted that the water tasted fine, and that as for the color, it was always like that and nobody else ever complained.
It was clear almost immediately, however, that the book would not have the intended effect. The writing was not especially boring or difficult, as I had anticipated, but its subject matter did not sufficiently interest me to justify my continuing to read it. Indeed, I felt a stubborn irritation and became agitated enough to toss it with some force into the corner of the room. I suspected I would do the same with
Shaping Behavior,
should I have bothered to open it, so I got out of bed, went downstairs, and collected the children’s book I had found while cleaning.
To my surprise, the children’s book was quite absorbing, and I read it with great enjoyment as a rain began to drum against the windows of the house. It was the story of an orphan boy, raised by an old woman, who is sent into the world to find his destiny, with only a sack of simple items—a whistle, a hat, a coin—in his possession. A suspicious stranger tempts the boy in an effort to convince him to give up these meager items, but the boy resists, and eventually uses them to aid him on his journey. The whistle, for instance, summons, as if by magic, a group of helpful animals, including a dog, a bird, and a salamander. In a mysterious city of gold, the boy meets a serving girl, who joins him in his travels, and in time they are trapped in a frozen wood by the stranger, and are only able to escape thanks to the salamander, which melts a hole in their prison using its uncanny ability to radiate heat. Though its pleasures were unsophisticated, the book offered a character with whom I was able to identify, and a portrayal of bravery and self-reliance that corresponded very closely to my own values. I wished only that I could send the book back in time, to my younger self, in his moments of greatest need.
But such fantastic notions were pointless to contemplate, and I pushed them away and soon succumbed to sleep. When I woke, I was greeted by an extraordinary sight. The rain that had begun to fall during the night had frozen, and the woods outside my window were heavily coated with ice. All the way to the rock, the trees were gleaming gray, the buds encased, the branches sagging beneath the weight.
Amazed, I dressed, shouldered on my coat, and went outside. Already, in the dawn light, the air was growing warmer, and the ice was slick and dripping, and the boughs chattered against one another in the balmy breeze. I took a few steps past the treeline, into the gloomy shade, and the air there was cold and crisp. Above me light was filtering dimly through the glassine ceiling of branches, faintly shifting, much as I had imagined the frozen branches to have done in the storybook. The wood seemed very much alive, as if it were coming awake as I had only minutes before.
I remained there, in the bramble, until the ice began to break and rain to the ground around me. Then I stepped out into my yard and listened. The wind blew, the ice fell, and the branches sprung up, their buds again revealed. I felt a deep, nervous excitement, and my fingers and toes began to itch. I was confident now: I would go back into the woods, and I would find the rock and climb to the top.
FIVE
That day, I decided to leave my hill in order to handle some financial business, and to purchase some additional tools and provisions for my trek back into the woods. I drove into Gerrysburg, parked on the town square, and walked across the park toward the bank.
Perhaps it was the season, or a renewed sense of optimism about my impending adventure, but I thought that downtown Gerrysburg looked considerably nicer and more lively than it had when I was arranging to buy the land. What businesses there were, were just opening for the day, and a few energetic-looking people strode along the sidewalks. The trees here, perhaps influenced by lower elevation and the artificial warmth of civilization, were free of ice, and had advanced farther into leaf than the ones in my forest. And the park was tidier, appearing to have just been cleared of trash. A woman stood before the war memorial, gazing soberly at the list of names, and above her the American flag flew at half-mast, for no apparent reason.
I passed the real estate office and the ice cream parlor on my way to the bank, and so it was appropriate that fate should arrange for me to see, standing and chatting in the middle of the lobby, Jennifer the real estate agent and Jeremy Pernice, the ice cream parlor’s proprietor. In Jennifer’s hand was a cell phone, which she gave the impression of just having hung up; Jeremy was holding a naugahyde zippered bag, the kind small businesses use to deliver their daily deposits. Their conversation appeared animated, and they seemed to know one another quite well. In a general spirit of camaraderie, I approached them and said good morning.
Jeremy Pernice reacted at first with momentary confusion, and then his face settled into an expression of friendly interest, as he recalled who I was and how we had met. He glanced at Jennifer, as if to gauge her reaction.
To my disappointment, Jennifer’s face registered irritation; then she smoothed her features into a mask of forced apathy. It was she who spoke first, primly returning my good morning without addressing me by name. It was obvious, of course, that she was still angry from what she had perceived, weeks before, as rudeness on my part. But since I had no control over her feelings, nor over the extent to which she acted upon them, I could only treat her with the same geniality and politeness I employed with Jeremy Pernice.
“I hope business is good for both of you,” I said.
Jeremy held up his deposit bag in halfhearted enthusiasm. “Could be better, could be worse,” he said.
“And you?” I inquired of Jennifer.
“Fine,” she replied. I nodded, accepting her answer, though I knew that, thanks to me, this had so far been a better-than-average spring, at least financially. Having spoken, she quickly looked away.
I turned to Jeremy. “Well, I wish you continued good luck,” I said. “I have some errands to run, but perhaps I’ll stop by later for a snack.”
“That would be fine,” he said.
With that, I continued to the unnecessarily convoluted maze of ropes that led to the teller window, where I waited in line behind an old woman. After a moment, I heard footsteps behind me, and found Jeremy Pernice standing there, turning his bag over and over in his hands.
“Everything going all right for you out on the hill?” he asked me. It was clear from his expression that his curiosity was intense, and that he was trying, and failing, to suppress his avidity.
“Oh, yes,” I replied. “I’ve largely completed my renovations. It’s a lovely house, and a wonderful location.”
“I guess you’re getting to work, then?” he asked. “On… whatever it is you’re doing?”
“I suppose you could say that.”
He waited, obviously hoping I would continue. But, eager as I was to be a good neighbor, I was not interested in discussing my activities with him. Luckily, the old woman completed her business at that very moment, and I was able to move to the teller window and attend to my own business without Jeremy Pernice’s interference. The teller, however, a middle-aged woman wearing a large, stiff permanent, seemed unusually attentive, watching me fill out my forms with a disconcerting level of interest. I wondered, idly, if she was a friend of Jennifer the real estate agent’s, or of Jeremy Pernice’s; if they had told her about me, speculated with her about my doings. Perhaps Jeremy was standing behind me right now, watching her reaction to my financial activities. The thought irritated me, and I vowed to give him a piece of my mind, should this prove to be the case. But by the time I was through, he was gone; indeed, the bank was empty of customers. As I returned to my car, I ventured a glance into the ice cream parlor, and saw Pernice behind the counter, talking to his employee, the girl I had met there weeks ago. The two looked up as I passed, and stared at me with obvious curiosity.
I drove to the sporting goods store and found a nice, sharp hatchet, a collapsible saw, and a compact one-man tent with a waterproof rain cover. I then summoned a sales clerk—a muscular, outdoorsy-looking young man—and asked him what I would need in order to do some rock climbing.
He leaned back slightly, crossed his arms over his chest, and asked, “What kind of rock climbing?”
“Oh,” I said, “just your standard rock climbing.”
“Going up the Adirondacks?”
“No, no, just climbing locally.”
“So nothing too challenging, then,” he said.
I found something vaguely insulting in his manner—an overconfidence and imperiousness that I doubted were supported by actual life experience. To move the conversation along, I said no.
The young man led me to the climbing supplies, and instructed me to buy ropes, carabiners, a type of anchor he called a “draw,” climbing gloves, and a pair of specialized shoes. I gestured toward a small rack of smooth plastic helmets, and asked him if I shouldn’t buy one of those, too.
“Nah,” he said.
“Really?”
The young man shrugged. “Nobody uses them.”
“What protects them,” I said, “from a fall?”
“Not falling,” was his reply.
It is perhaps a fault of mine that I find it difficult to conceal negative emotions from those who have elicited them, and rather than make a futile attempt to do so, I now chose to make my feelings known directly. I placed my hands on my hips, looked the sales clerk straight in the eye, and assumed the attitude of authority to which I was accustomed.
“I regard your cavalier attitude toward climber safety to be foolish in the extreme,” I said. “I knew a young man about your age, at one time under my immediate supervision, who held similar views regarding the recommended safety equipment of his trade. He was in the thrall of his own youth and strength, and believed himself to be invincible. Any realistic assessment of the dangers he faced would have shown him the folly of this position, but he refused to make any such assessment, and the result was disaster. He was killed.”
The clerk’s smug expression slowly dissolved as I spoke, and reconfigured itself into one of affronted anger. When I was through, he wordlessly reached over my shoulder, plucked a climbing helmet from the wall, and shoved it into my supplies-laden basket. “Any other questions?” he inquired coldly.
“None.”
His mouth fell open again, as if to speak; the muscles of his face tightened, and his eyes snapped into focus. But a woman came up behind him and tapped him on the shoulder with a question about a skateboard, and he thought better of whatever it was he had been planning to say.
For my part, I calmly walked to the counter and paid.
When I emerged from the shopping plaza that housed the sporting goods store, I saw that it was already past noon. The sky had clouded over again and a light rain was falling. There would be no time for me to return to the hill, prepare my equipment, and embark upon my expedition today, and the weather was serving as a further disincentive. Thus, I was left with a “free” afternoon.
I decided that I would return to downtown Gerrysburg and treat myself to lunch and an ice cream. And indeed, it was toward downtown that I now aimed my car. When I reached Main Street, however, I did not turn left, the direction that would lead me to the town square. Rather, I turned right. The road brought me past rows of dilapidated homes and empty shops, and to the cul-de-sac that served as the termination of both Main and Jefferson—the street I grew up on. I turned onto Jefferson and slowed my vehicle, peering closely at each house, the warped and peeling clapboards, the rusted wrought-iron railings, the cracked and crumbling cement stoops. Some of the bright canvas awnings that I recalled from the days of my childhood still remained, decades out of style, grayed and stained by the years.
At the end of the third block, where Jefferson crossed Madison, the street turned to dirt. When I was a boy, it had continued for three blocks more, and ended at a small body of water officially designated Reese Pond but popularly known as “The Swamp.” Those blocks were gone now, the pond filled in. The abandoned high school stadium site was all that remained, a large area of churned-up ground surrounded by bent and crooked chain-link fence. Hillocks of excavated earth bore violent little clumps of spiny weeds. Pieces of rebar rusted in puddles, and the burned-out husk of an old car slumped in the center, its wheel rims blackened and mired in the wet ground.
I parked at the side of the road and circled around the fence on foot until I reached a flattened section. Slowly I paced out the distance from Madison, looking over my shoulder as I went. A few moments later, my boots half sunk in mud, I stood on the site of my childhood home.
It had not been a large or impressive house, 414 Jefferson. But it was here that I had formed my imagination, and developed, in solitude, the skills I would one day strengthen and refine into my professional accomplishments. It was here in the backyard, in the garden shed, that I learned how to use tools, and how to build, modify, and repair the accoutrements of childhood play. I maintained, and eventually customized, my bicycle; I built a ramp and, later, a bicycle stand, using my father’s arc welder and some scavenged aluminum pipe. It was from my father that I inherited my handiness and organizational acumen—he served for many years as the head custodian at the SUNY in Milan. My mother, meanwhile, was often tired and weak from the unhappiness that today we would call chronic depression, and left me largely to my own devices.
I developed a reputation among the neighborhood children as a solver of problems, but except for the occasional request to patch a ball or adjust a pair of skates, I had little association with them. I preferred to keep to myself. That shed was my sanctuary, both from my mother’s mood swings and from my sister’s mockery and intransigence, and there were times when I spent the entire night there. The only member of my family who ever visited me in the shed was my father, and his interactions with me there were only, as far as I could tell, coincidental to his real aim of retrieving a hammer or other tool from the elaborate and useful pegboard rack I had made.
One side of the shed had been taken up by deep, painted pine shelves, and I had left this area entirely to my father’s possessions. Most of these were magazines—back issues of handyman and do-it-yourself publications, and (I eventually discovered) a small cache of pornography, about which he seemed to have entirely forgotten. There was, however, one curious item shoved into a shadowy corner of the shelves: a handmade hardwood box about the size of a large dictionary. The box was held shut by a heavy latch with a lock on it. I was curious about this box, of course, and attempted many times to figure out what it held. It was rather heavy and solid-feeling, and it made no sound when shaken; the hinges, latch, and lock were extremely sturdy and well fitted. The only way into it would have been to break it, and my curiosity was never so great as to drive me to that extreme. Every now and then my father would enter the shed—he never knocked, as he rightfully regarded the shed as his, and my tenancy a condition of his generosity and good will—and remove the box from the shelf, and at these times I would always study his face for clues to what was inside. It was almost always in the evening when he came to take the box, and usually when my mother was asleep and my sister out somewhere, carousing. He would always return it within the hour.
Over the course of my childhood, I must have spoken with my father many, many times. But these exchanges are vague in my memory, his deep voice little more than a smear of sound. Instead what I recall is his silent presence, and my own reciprocal silence. I would not call it companionable, but neither would I refer to it as tense; our closeness was never deliberate, though we made no effort to avoid one another. But neither did we entirely ignore each other. We were like two discrete parts of a personality, taking up residence in the same brain—our proximity was unavoidable but we had little to say.
For all that, however, I never truly felt I understood my father. I do not fully understand him today. There were, however, times when I felt like I
was
my father, when I could sense his blood flowing through me, his expressions on my face, his anxious, hangdog stance in my bones.
But now, ironically, he felt very distant. And when I returned to myself from my reverie, and looked around at the gray skies and muddy ground, I could sense my memories draining away, pouring through me like rain off a mossy roof and into the earth. I was no longer sure about where I was standing—perhaps this wasn’t the former site of our house, after all. Perhaps we’d lived closer to the swamp—or maybe farther in the other direction, nearer to Main Street. In any event, it was all mud and weeds now.
I returned to my car and drove away. And after several false starts, I was able to find the municipal cemetery where I had last seen, and argued with, my sister, before her recent appearance at my house. It was at the edge of town, on a woody rise around which the county highway curved. Unlike the church cemeteries that dotted our town, this one was ill cared for, the grass long and gone to seed, the ground littered with dead branches and trash blown from the road. The headstones leaned, and the graveled paths were cut through by runoff. It took some searching, but I was able to find my parents’ graves. They were not buried together. My mother’s bones lay beneath a willow tree. This is not as idyllic as it sounds, because the tree was old and half dead, having apparently been split decades before by lightning; and just beyond it ran a low, cracked, graffiti-covered cement wall, over which the road could clearly be seen and heard. Her stone was simple, bearing only her name and dates: 1937–1981.