Читать книгу In the House of Wilderness - Charles Dodd White - Страница 10

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STRATTON BRYANT met the man who meant to rid him of the house. It was late and a crash of rain had touched off the present noise and spasm. He stood on the porch, waited to see when the headlights would flood the drive. It did not take long. As soon as the Chrysler appeared he lifted his hand. The car engine balked and stilled in the rain, ticked. The night seemed to hollow itself while he stood there against the bulk of the farmhouse. He thought of all that was behind him, all that there was still to hold on to. Only a year had gone by since Liza had died, though the time had rolled and rolled.

The silver-headed real estate agent got out of the car and came at him through the weather, snapped his hand out like some tool made to cut.

“Sorry to bring you out here in this,” Stratton told him as he took the hand to shake it. “I would have come to town to spare you the trouble.”

“Not at all. No trouble. Here, let’s step inside.”

He could hear in the agent’s voice something from up north, vaguely Midwestern. Ohio likely. Practical and measured. A man, like him, not native to the Tennessee hills. He closed the door and the din subsided. They walked up together through the hall with its bruised wood and talking floor. A warm span of light brushed across from a lamp at the living room entrance, and they went on through it into the farther darkness, the space smelling faintly of dust and furniture oil.

Stratton took him on to the kitchen where he often ate his meals over the sink, now that he was a widower and free to his own brand of neglect. He was aware of the broken puzzle of dirty saucepans and dishes on the draining board, marinara viscous as engine grease. He did not explain or apologize. He did not care to justify the way he went about hurting.

“Can I get you a coffee? I’ve got some decaf in the pot.”

“No, that’s fine, Mister Bryant. I just need you to go over these papers with me and we’ll have you listed by the beginning of next week.”

Stratton tipped the carafe above his mug and drew out a chair across from the real estate man, saw on his hand the gold wedding band with encrusted diamonds. Big and expensive but handsome. A man who wore his money like a tailored shirt. Stratton went through the papers without comment, initialing and signing where he was told.

“You’re sure this is the price you want to list?”

“Yes. I want to sell as quick as I can.”

The agent nodded, pleased.

“I can’t promise anything, of course, but we’ll do what we can. There won’t be any repairs to worry about. Maybe some paint, put down as many personal items as you can. People don’t like clutter. They like to be able to see themselves in the home. Reduce as much as you can stand. I’ve heard there’s another structure on the property. Is that right?”

“Yeah. An old homeplace. Something left over from the Great Depression. Not much more than sticks and a tin roof now.”

“Well, that’s fine. Might even be a selling point. There’s a certain type of buyer who might even find it romantic. We’ll be sure to include a note about it in the listing.”

Stratton saw the agent’s eyes take in the counters and shelves before they worked across the walls with Liza’s pictures. The burned-down mountain home up around Pigeon Forge. An orphan girl in a field of chicory. Liza’s father’s face the morning after he died.

“Your wife was famous for what she did, wasn’t she?”

“Yes,” he said. “People admired her photography.”

Neither said anything more for a while, just sat with the company of the images. When people became aware of Liza’s work it often resulted in social awkwardness. Her view of a profoundly flawed and compromised world. She’d once told Stratton she knew she had a photo right when the viewer looked sorry to have seen it. Surrounded by her pictures, Stratton felt he knew his wife better now than he ever had when she was alive.

Once Stratton had seen the agent to the front door and watched him drive off he went to the kitchen to tidy up, tossed what remained of the coffee. He tried the television but at this time of a Friday night it was all melodrama and local news. It was still too early to sleep so he went into the library and rooted through his collection of CDs until he found the Philip Glass, his Violin Concerto No. 1. He sat and tried to place himself in that soundscape of vista and repetition until there was little of this world left to him. He’d tried to explain to one of his music theory classes at the community college that there was a particular advantage in understanding what music made of the listener, what new space it could create, though he doubted that they had listened, had truly desired to understand. He was glad that he now had the summer break to escape the pressure of dealing with students and what they expected him to solve for them. This annual rhythm of teaching was strange in that it seemed he was always trying to catch something that remained elusive. The year took a lot from him and these periods at the end of a semester were a chance to collect himself, to remain beyond the scorch line of final burnout. But the breaks depressed him too, all that time without specific containment.

He woke sometime past midnight, sitting up in his chair, the tabby cat tucked into the crook of his arm as if it had grown there. He carefully lowered it to the floor, tried not to make it fuss with arthritic pain. It was supposed to have been her pet, a shelter rescue kitten from when they lived in Berea. More than fourteen years ago now, just as her work was beginning to get serious attention. Liza sneezed whenever the cat nosed her, called it “that damn cat,” which in time became its name. Now, Damn Cat was grinding his decaying teeth against kibble in the next room and Liza was nowhere at all.

He knew he should shut down all the house lights and go up to bed while he could, find the rarity of untroubled sleep, but there was a warmth in the downstairs silence that kept him there. It was in the timbers of the house, the life still locked up inside. This had been their realized hope, finding this place in the woods, with all the folded land around them, the Smoky Mountains at their backs. How was it possible for a forty-seven-year-old man to feel this old? And yet here he was—geologic—covered up like something to be excavated at a later point in time, some remnant to unlock the problem of a future history.

Upstairs, he took the pistol out. Studied it as if it belonged to a symbolism he couldn’t quite solve. The ritual: the loading and unloading, the snug clasp of the magazine into the receiver, the snap of chambering, the cool kiss of the muzzle against his temple. Then he placed it on the pillow beside him, the pillow where she’d lain her head, available if he decided he had no other choice but to follow her.

HE DROVE in early the following morning to gather what he would need to dress up the house. The roads were emptied of commuting traffic and it was easy to slip into the Lowe’s, where he wandered around for a few minutes in its sheer warehouse enormity before he began piling paint buckets and brushes into his cart. His hand fell to whatever brightly advertised itself as a bargain. He considered it a virtue to trust in the marketing that had gotten the product this far, considering he had no expertise to rely on.

On his way back, he stepped into the Hardee’s just off the I-40 exit and ordered a coffee and sausage biscuit. Inside, there was a clutch of retired men wearing caps with stiff brims and glasses held in place with nylon cords or rubber bands. They were tacit and workmanlike about their meals, hands smoothing wax paper on tables, eyes sidling even as they spoke to one another. They discussed upcoming planting schedules, the chances of a furniture factory moving into Jefferson County, the Braves’ likelihood for a wild card berth. He caught himself thinking absently about Liza, was confused by it for a moment before he realized it was because she would have loved to have come out here and talk to them, follow them back to their homes, their lives, and photograph what she found there, either good or bad. Odd that he had never told her about them, about this quiet routine he played out when he was on his way up to the college to teach. He wondered why he left certain things a secret between them, covetous of something that could never belong to any single person.

By the time he got back to the house it was already hot and the cicadas were screaming. He carried all the supplies to the front porch and went inside to pull the furniture away from the living room walls. There was no air-conditioning in the old farmhouse and within minutes he was slick with sweat from the work. He went back to the bedroom to change into a faded pair of swim shorts and sandals, threw all the doors open, swept what he could.

By noon he had cut in the corners and rolled a clean coat over two walls, careful that Damn Cat didn’t scamper through the paint tray and leave his signature on the tongue-in-groove floors. Stratton acknowledged his progress with a tallboy of Budweiser and a half hour sitting on the shady side of the house while he watched songbirds at the feeder. Finches mostly. The infrequent Carolina wren. He crushed his can and cracked another one open as he kept working through the long green heat of the afternoon.

Later, he got around to bracing himself for what he meant to do. In the carport he turned up a couple of broken-down cardboard boxes that he shaped and duct-taped into solid cubes. From the recycling he gained a short stack of old newspaper to use for wadding. He worked through the living room first, taking down the pieces that were some of her most famous works. Teenage Girls Skinny Dipping on Troublesome Creek. Dulcimer Burning. Old Preacher at His Pulpit. Unsolved Arson. King Coal. As he took each one down and wrapped it in the paper, he tried to keep his eyes on the next picture, wary of being drawn into contemplation, but he found that nearly impossible. It was like taking down parts of Liza’s mind, this purging, this deletion by his own hand.

It took both boxes to finish the den and he hunted around for a while for a place to put the rest, but he would have to buy some more boxes. There was just too much to store and he didn’t want to risk the framing by trying to fit too much into a tight space. He took down all of what remained, spread them out on the sofa and kitchen table, any surface at all until he had succeeded in bringing down the walls to the bare paint which he would need to repaint. The whole house would need a new skin, and it would be so much easier now with the pictures gone.

Knowing that he was too tired to face it but unable to resist the pull, he went into her study, stood in the darkened doorway for a while before he gathered himself and crossed to switch on the desk lamp. The desk was all in a jumble, just as she always left it when she worked—pieces of correspondence, travel receipts, promotional material for photography equipment, all turned over by the circumstances of the moment. Her hands always busy as a sewing machine, selecting the next project by a need for perpetual motion. It had been her way of retreating from obligation, and, he suspected, the routine of him.

He sat at her desk and studied the twinned specter of himself in the window pane beyond the burning cone of light. This was the version of his appearance he liked best, this hologram compressed into two dimensions. Perhaps this inclination was a vanity, though he doubted himself capable of something so material. It was this second self in a middle space of canted light that suited what he had become, an image outside of form, incapable of the many small concerns of being fully realized within its frame.

In the top drawer he found the picture he had first seen there last winter but not looked at since. It was in black and white, heavily shaded by what appeared to be evening sun coming through a background balcony window. Liza rarely shot interiors, preferring the bold and vivid play of outdoor lighting on her subjects. A realistic way to lift the varnish of habit, she’d explained in one of her guest university lectures. The harshness of nature held up to itself as proof of what time costs the human heart.

The trick of the photo was the way in which it held the viewer’s gaze into this rich background light, obscuring for several seconds the concealed subject, the shadowed figure that stood blocking the left third of the composition, golem-like, shoulders dipped from holding something in front of its waist, suggesting an appendage of wings. Only by close scrutiny could one begin to make out the musculature of a bare chest and legs, and the towel hanging from the midsection of a young man. His face was smeared, of course, a simple monster in its anonymity. In the bottom right corner she had penciled in its title: Adultery.

He returned the photograph to its place and slid the drawer shut, committed this part of her to a place he would not touch.