Housekeeping: A Novel (18 page)

Daylight had moved up the eastern wall of the valley and shone warmly on the ragged and precipitous stands of black old trees that grew at those altitudes. Down below there was only shadow and a wind that swept along toward the lake just at the level of my knees. The lilacs rattled. The stone step was too cold to be sat upon. It seemed at first that there was no comfort for me here at all, so I jammed my hands in my pockets, pressed my elbows to my sides, and cursed Sylvie in my heart, and that was a relief because it gave me something to think about besides the woods. With effort, I began to think of other things. If I went down into the cellar hole, out of the wind, I could build a fire and be warm. This could not be done easily since the cellar had received the ruins of the old house.

Someone had scavenged there. Most of the shingles had been stripped from the roof, and all in all, the poles and planks that remained seemed much less than the makings of a house. The ridgepole had snapped, no doubt under the weight of snow. That was probably the beginning of the catastrophe, which might then have continued over weeks or years. I had heard of a family who lived some distance to the north of the lake who had been snowed in up to the eaves and whose house began to fall. They upended the kitchen table to prop the ridgepole in the middle, but the roof had pried loose from the walls at either end, admitting the wind, and the walls sagged the window frames out of square so that all the panes broke. They had only snow to stanch all these openings. They hardly dared make the fire in the
stove hot enough to warm drinking water, they said, for fear that the snow, which was all that held the house up, would sodden and shift and pull it down. There were reputed to have been seventeen in that family. They were said to have survived by stacking themselves like firewood at night under nineteen quilts and as many hooked rugs. The mother was said to have kept a stew on the stove of water and vinegar, into which she put the tongues of all their shoes, as well as the trimmings of their hair and beards and fingernails, and pine pitch and a pair of antlers and a long-handled shoehorn—and they had lived on the pot liquor, poured over snow to stretch it. But that is a part of the world where people tend to boast of discomfort and hardship, having little else worthy of mention.

The houses in the mountains of Fingerbone were generally built as this one had been, of planks nailed to a frame vertically, and strips of wood perhaps two inches wide nailed on at each seam to close the chinks. If the house began to lean, the chinking sprang loose and the pine knots popped out and as often as not the windowpanes fell and the door could only be opened with increasing effort, until finally it could not be closed. I imagine that this kind of building was a habit acquired in a milder climate. I do not know why it was persisted in, for it turned people out of house with a frequency to startle even Fingerbone. And if the way to the next shelter was impassable because of snow, the family would not be seen again until the snow melted. The woods were full of such stories. There were so many stories, in fact, that there must have been at some time a massive exodus or depopulation, for now there were very few
families in the woods, even near town—too few by far to account for such an enormous tribe of ancestors—even ancestors given, as these seem to have been, to occasional wholesale obliteration.

Abandoned homesteads like this one were rare, however, so perhaps all the tales of perished settlers were at root one tale, carried off in every direction the way one cry of alarm is carried among birds through the whole of the woods and even the sky. It might have been this house that peopled all these mountains. When it broke it might have cast them invisibly into the wind, like spores, thousands from one drab husk, or millions, for there was no reason to believe that anyone ever had heard all the tales of unsheltered folk that were in these mountains, or that anyone ever would. And that is perhaps why, when they saw me alone, they would practically tug at my sleeve. You may have noticed that people in bus stations, if they know you also are alone, will glance at you sidelong, with a look that is both piercing and intimate, and if you let them sit beside you, they will tell you long lies about numerous children who are all gone now, and mothers who were beautiful and cruel, and in every case they will tell you that they were abandoned, disappointed, or betrayed—that they should not be alone, that only remarkable events, of the kind one reads in books, could have made their condition so extreme. And that is why, even if the things they say are true, they have the quick eyes and active hands and the passion for meticulous elaboration of people who know they are lying. Because, once alone, it is impossible to believe that one could ever have been otherwise. Loneliness is an absolute discovery. When one looks from
inside at a lighted window, or looks from above at the lake, one sees the image of oneself in a lighted room, the image of oneself among trees and sky—the deception is obvious, but flattering all the same. When one looks from the darkness into the light, however, one sees all the difference between here and there, this and that. Perhaps all unsheltered people are angry in their hearts, and would like to break the roof, spine, and ribs, and smash the windows and flood the floor and spindle the curtains and bloat the couch.

I began pulling loose planks out of the cellar hole, the right corner at the front. They were splintery and full of snaggled nails, but I pulled them out and tossed them onto the ground behind me, for all the world as if I had some real purpose or intention. It was difficult work, but I have often noticed that it is almost intolerable to be looked at, to be watched, when one is idle. When one is idle and alone, the embarrassments of loneliness are almost endlessly compounded. So I worked till my hair was damp and my hands were galled and tender, with what must have seemed wild hope, or desperation. I began to imagine myself a rescuer. Children had been sleeping in this fallen house. Soon I would uncover the rain-stiffened hems of their nightshirts, and their small, bone feet, the toes all fallen like petals. Perhaps it was already too late to help. They had lain under the snow through far too many winters, and that was the pity. But to cease to hope would be the final betrayal.

I imagined myself in their place—it was not hard to do this, for the appearance of relative solidity in my grandmother’s house was deceptive. It was an impression created by the piano, and the scrolled couch, and the
bookcases full of almanacs and Kipling and Defoe. For all the appearance these things gave of substance and solidity, they might better be considered a dangerous weight on a frail structure. I could easily imagine the piano crashing to the cellar floor with a thrum of all its strings. And then, too, our house should not have had a second story, for, if it fell while we were sleeping, we would plummet disastrously through the dark, knowing no more perhaps than that our dreams were suddenly terrible and suddenly gone. A small house was better. It broke gracefully, like some ripe pod or shell. And despite the stories I made up to myself, I knew there were no children trapped in this meager ruin. They were light and spare and thoroughly used to the cold, and it was almost a joke to them to be cast out into the woods, even if their eyes were gone and their feet were broken. It is better to have nothing, for at last even our bones will fall. It is better to have nothing.

I sat down on the grass, which was stiff with the cold, and I put my hands over my face, and I let my skin tighten, and let the chills run in ripples, like breezy water, between my shoulder blades and up my neck. I let the numbing grass touch my ankles. I thought, Sylvie is nowhere, and sometime it will be dark. I thought, Let them come unhouse me of this flesh, and pry this house apart. It was no shelter now, it only kept me here alone, and I would rather be with them, if only to see them, even if they turned away from me. If I could see my mother, it would not have to be her eyes, her hair. I would not need to touch her sleeve. There was no more the stoop of her high shoulders. The lake had taken that, I knew. It was so very long since the dark
had swum her hair, and there was nothing more to dream of, but often she almost slipped through any door I saw from the side of my eye, and it was she, and not changed, and not perished. She was a music I no longer heard, that rang in my mind, itself and nothing else, lost to all sense, but not perished, not perished.

Sylvie put her hand on my back. She had knelt on the grass beside me and I had not noticed. She looked into my face and said nothing at all. She opened her coat and closed it around me, bundling me awkwardly against her so that my cheekbone pillowed on her breastbone. She swayed us to some slow song she did not sing, and I stayed very still against her and hid the awkwardness and discomfort so that she would continue to hold me and sway. My grandmother used to forget that she had stuck straight pins in the bosom of her dress, and she used to hug me much too closely in her arms, and I would be as still against her as I could, because if I squirmed at all she would put me off her lap and muss my hair and turn away.

For some reason the inside of Sylvie’s coat smelled of camphor. The smell was pleasant enough, like cedar pitch or incense, curative and elegiac. Her dress was of a staunch, dry-textured cotton, and over it she wore an orlon sweater. The dress was surely brown or green, the sweater pink or yellow, but I could not see. I crouched low enough so that Sylvie’s coat prevented even the seep of light through my eyelids. I said, “I didn’t see them. I couldn’t see them.”

“I know, I know,” she said. That was the song she
rocked me to. I know, I know, I know. She crooned, “Another time, another time.”

When we got up to leave, Sylvie slipped her coat off and put it on me. She buttoned it up, bottom to top, and pulled the wide man’s collar up around my ears, and then she put her arms around my shoulders and led me down to the shore with such solicitude, as if I were blind, as if I might fall. I could feel the pleasure she took in my dependency, and more than once she stooped to look into my face. Her expression was intent and absorbed. There was nothing of distance or civility in it. It was as if she were studying her own face in a mirror. I was angry that she had left me for so long, and that she did not ask pardon or explain, and that by abandoning me she had assumed the power to bestow such a richness of grace. For in fact I wore her coat like beatitude, and her arms around me were as heartening as mercy, and I would say nothing that might make her loosen her grasp or take one step away.

The boat was already in the water, bobbing about at the end of a short rope that Sylvie had weighted down with a stone. She pulled it in and turned it so that I could step over the gunwale without getting my feet wet.

It was evening. The sky glowed like a candled egg. The water was a translucent gray, and the waves were as high as they could be without breaking. I lay down on my side in the bottom of the boat, and rested my arms and my head on the splintery plank seat. Sylvie climbed in and settled herself with a foot on either side of me. She twisted around and pushed us off with an oar, and then she began to reach and pull, reach and pull, with a
strength that seemed to have no effort in it. I lay like a seed in a husk. The immense water thunked and thudded beneath my head, and I felt that our survival was owed to our slightness, that we danced through ruinous currents as dry leaves do, and were not capsized because the ruin we rode upon was meant for greater things.

I toyed with the thought that we might capsize. It was the order of the world, after all, that water should pry through the seams of husks, which, pursed and tight as they might be, are only made for breaching. It was the order of the world that the shell should fall away and that I, the nub, the sleeping germ, should swell and expand. Say that water lapped over the gunwales, and I swelled and swelled until I burst Sylvie’s coat. Say that the water and I bore the rowboat down to the bottom, and I, miraculously, monstrously, drank water into all my pores until the last black cranny of my brain was a trickle, a spillet. And given that it is in the nature of water to fill and force to repletion and bursting, my skull would bulge preposterously and my back would hunch against the sky and my vastness would press my cheek hard and immovably against my knee. Then, presumably, would come parturition in some form, though my first birth had hardly deserved that name, and why should I hope for more from the second? The only true birth would be a final one, which would free us from watery darkness and the thought of watery darkness, but could such a birth be imagined? What is thought, after all, what is dreaming, but swim and flow, and the images they seem to animate? The images are the worst of it. It would be terrible to stand outside in the dark and watch a woman in a lighted room studying her face in a
window, and to throw a stone at her, shattering the glass, and then to watch the window knit itself up again and the bright bits of lip and throat and hair piece themselves seamlessly again into that unknown, indifferent woman. It would be terrible to see a shattered mirror heal to show a dreaming woman tucking up her hair. And here we find our great affinity with water, for like reflections on water our thoughts will suffer no changing shock, no permanent displacement. They mock us with their seeming slightness. If they were more substantial—if they had weight and took up space—they would sink or be carried away in the general flux. But they persist, outside the brisk and ruinous energies of the world. I think it must have been my mother’s plan to rupture this bright surface, to sail beneath it into very blackness, but here she was, wherever my eyes fell, and behind my eyes, whole and in fragments, a thousand images of one gesture, never dispelled but rising always, inevitably, like a drowned woman.

I slept between Sylvie’s feet, and under the reach of her arms, and sometimes one of us spoke, and sometimes one of us answered. There was a pool of water under the hollow of my side, and it was almost warm. “Fingerbone,” Sylvie said. I sat up on my heels. My neck was stiff and my arm and hand were asleep. There was a small, sparse scattering of lights on the shore, which was still at a considerable distance. Sylvie had brought us up to the side of the bridge and was working the oars to keep the current from carrying us under it.