by Paul Harding
Toward midnight, one of the girls said, “Man, it’s almost twelve. I got to go; my parents will be home soon and get all over me if I come in later than them.”
The other girl said, “Yeah, me, too.” Both girls stood up and stretched and brushed off the backs of their skirts, their bracelets jingling. I heard the cork squeaking back into the mouth of the wine bottle. The girls walked back down the hill, past my family, still talking, but more quietly. They passed under the light of a streetlamp and into shadow and were gone.
THE CARETAKER OF THE Enon cemetery was named Aloysius Shank. He talked through a voice box wrapped around his neck with a cord. There was a hole in his throat, from an operation for cancer. He smoked a pipe, though, and told me once about having smoked four packs of cigarettes a day for fifty years, since he’d been eight years old.
He bubbled away at his pipe and said, “But I quit to smoking when I got that cancer.”
Although I’d hardly ever spoken with Aloysius before Kate died, I’d known about him since I could remember. He had always simply been the man at the cemetery. I remember asking my mother once, when I was a kid and had already seen him countless times, for years, as we passed the graveyard in our car, “Mom, who’s that guy who’s always in the graveyard?”
She answered, “That’s Aloysius Shank.” She chanted, “God help Aloysius Shank! His shack is cold and dank! He pays no rent, his head got dent, and one of his legs is a plank!” That was a rhyme she had learned as a kid during recess at the Bessie Boston Elementary School, the same school I went to, was probably going to, in fact, when I asked her about Aloysius, sitting on the massive, maroon vinyl back bench of the woodpaneled station wagon my grandfather, her dad, had given us—as he would continue to do with all his station wagons until he died, and the last of which was still sitting in my driveway, and still worked, fifteen years after his death, ten after my mother’s, and two weeks after Kate’s—no seat belt on, windows open, wind roaring, sun pouring in, on our way to poke around the Woolworth’s five-and-dime store—she the clothes and knickknacks, me the records in the store’s tiny music section—and after go to the drugstore lunch counter, where she’d get coffee and a blueberry muffin and I’d get a chocolate honey-dipped doughnut and a chocolate milk in a paper carton. When I asked her who’d made the rhyme up, she said that she had no idea, that everyone just seemed to know it.
It was true that Aloysius had a prosthetic leg. The original had been wooden, but it was plastic by the time I knew him, paid for collectively by the members of the Enon Fire Department, who all chipped in for it because he had been a mascot or honorable member for as long as he’d been the caretaker at the graveyard. (All the members of the Enon Fire Department were buried in the same section of the cemetery, of which Aloysius always took special care. There was a brigade of two dozen souls in the section, reaching back to the first official members of the department when it had been established, in 1821, with the purchase, by subscription, of six ladders and three hooks, according to the local histories.) He told me that he’d lost the leg when a Japanese kamikaze plane had struck the deck of the transport ship he’d been an ensign on in the Pacific during World War II. His left leg had been torn off at the knee by a chunk of white-hot shrapnel.
“Lucky it was heated,” he said, pursing on his pipe. “Cauterized the wound before I even hit the water.” (He’d been thrown overboard by the blast.) “Would have bled out right there and been fish food otherwise.”
It was also true that Aloysius had a dent in his head. “Crease” is a more accurate description. A shard from the same exploding plane had propellered its way into his forehead, just above his left eyebrow.
“When I woke up on the hospital ship, the metal was still stuck in my head. They were afraid to pull it out, were afraid it would kill me, that it was the only thing keeping my brain from spilling out of my head,” he said. “I told them take it out, I didn’t care, because living with that saw blade of a piece of Japanese metal stuck in my crown made me feel like a traitor, or like some sort of secret weapon they could hear through and send radiation waves through or something, and it gave me a terrible headache right behind my eye. So they took it out and patched over the hole with a piece of tin or something or other and that was that. The only thing that was different after is that now I can’t smell anything and green looks red and sometime I forget who I am for a minute.”
Aloysius had the habit of running one of his forefingers up and down the crease when he was concentrating. It was impossible to tell whether the injury had done anything else to his personality. He did belch, fart, and pick his nose freely, in front of anyone who happened to be nearby, no matter what the occasion—funeral, Memorial Day speech, or smoke break. Sometimes, when I thought about the plate in his head and his old wooden leg, which I fitted in my mind with rusty metal hinges and braces, and even that piece of shrapnel, which appeared in my imagination as a table-saw blade sticking up out of his head like a steel rooster comb, it seemed that Aloysius was in fact some archaic military experiment gone awry. He was like a vacuum tube Frankenstein. When the Japanese had tried to make a double-agent robot to sabotage the enemy, they had succeeded only in creating a pipe-chomping gravedigger who saw the lush green lawns of the cemetery as blood-red and who had an abiding love for firefighters.
My mother got to know Aloysius when my grandfather died. After my grandfather’s ashes had been buried, my mother walked the two and a half miles from her house to the cemetery so that she could put her hand on top of his stone and talk with him. She wiped pollen and dirt off the top of the stone with the tissues she kept in her purse. Every spring, she planted red geraniums in front of the stone, in time for the Memorial Day parade. She overwatered the flowers, but since the grave was several feet up a slope, the water drained away and didn’t drown them. My mother had spent her whole life in the town, so she knew many people in the cemetery. Besides her father and mother, her paternal grandmother, Kathleen Crosby, was buried there, as well as both of my grandfather’s sisters, Marjorie and Darla, who had followed my grandfather down from Maine and lived within a quarter mile of him until they died (Marjorie of lung cancer, Darla of a stroke, although my grandmother always said that it was a stroke if by stroke you meant gin). Many of the people with whom my grandparents had been friends when my mother was young were buried there, too. My mother could offer a census of the old neighborhood; she knew where every person from her parents’ group of friends was buried, and once my grandfather was there, and soon after my grandmother, too, she regularly planted and tended flowers at their stones as well. Since she spent so much time in the graveyard, she and Aloysius got to know each other. When she died, Aloysius planted geraniums in front of the headstone for the first Memorial Day parade after her death. I felt embarrassed, and when I saw him at the ceremony, I thanked him for remembering my mother and for planting the flowers, and said that I’d make sure to plant them the next year.
He said, “We all end up here sooner or later. Your mother was a nice lady.”
I BEGAN TO WALK the length and breadth of Enon every day, as late summer turned into early autumn, wandering paths and the old railroad line, where deer grazed and coyotes sometimes commuted. Since I’d broken my hand so severely, I’d been able to refill the prescription for painkillers. In order to conserve the pills, I got into the habit of taking one in the morning, when I started my walk, then two or three at once later in the afternoon, and abstaining from taking any at night, drinking whiskey until I fell asleep, to get me through to the next day. After wandering all morning, at noon I would sit against the trunk of a hemlock or chestnut tree and eat an apple and a chocolate bar, or whatever I had found scavenging through the increasingly bare cabinets at home, and drink rusty-tasting water from an old tin canteen. A breeze would rise and I’d fall asleep watching the traces it made among the ferns. I would awaken curled up on my side, warm against the ground but chilled down my back. I would curl up tighter but be unable to warm mys
elf. It would be late afternoon and the warmth gone from the sun, and the sun’s light would knife through the trees sharp and gold. As chilly as it might be, I did not want to return to the house. The idea of returning to the house, cold, too, my steps echoing through its empty rooms, the plates and glasses in the sink clanking as I lifted a dirty bowl from the pile and swabbed it with a dirty dish towel and poured stale corn flakes into it and poured water from the tap onto them because the milk was sour and looked for a spoon that didn’t have old food cemented on it and couldn’t find one and so just tossed the bowl of cereal into the sink, where it split in two and shattered a juice glass, and so on, until I had swallowed enough pills and drunk enough whiskey to get past the rightful despair at the condition of the house and myself in it, that idea—the idea of that sequence of acts—was intolerable.
Susan had been gone for more than a week. I wanted to call her, to hear her voice. The idea of hearing her became a little like being able to call Kate, wherever she was, and hear her voice and be comforted by it. But I didn’t call. Poking the numbers on the keypad and hearing the ring on the other end of the line and having Susan or Kate answer would have split something that had already begun to skin over. The idea of hearing Kate’s voice was already an instance of the kind of daydreams I’d begun to give myself over to. (What if there were to be a phone somewhere in the woods, a chthonic hotline made of dark horn, resting on a bone cradle, that patched me through to Kate in her urn?) Calling Susan seemed increasingly impossible, too, though, because after she said hello, after she had answered the phone, or her mother or father had, which, I thought, might even be worse—having to say hello to her mother, for example, and having to ask if she could get Susan to come to the phone, when maybe she wouldn’t, when maybe the phone call would even end with that, with her saying, “No, Charlie, I don’t think that would be good for Susan right now,” or something equally gentle and negative—after Susan had answered the phone, and there was that open sound coming over the handset, that white noise that old phones pick up from the ambient commotion of the planet, what would I say? What could I say? What word could I utter into that rushing silence that would change things, that would bring Susan back to Enon, that would bring Kate back to the both of us?
OUR HOUSE WAS RAMSHACKLE and had old plumbing that smelled ammoniac in hot weather and heating that clanked all night in the winter and ancient horsehair plaster on the walls that crumbled if you tried to tap a picture hanger into it. We’d bought it just after Kate’s third birthday, with help from my grandmother and my mother and some from Susan’s parents out in Minnesota as well. It consisted of two smaller structures, neither originally built on the site, joined end to end. The back part of the house had been a seamstress shop originally located a mile away, at the crossroad in West Enon, where two hundred years earlier it had stood facing a one-room schoolhouse and the long since demolished home of a man named Ebenezer Cross, who’d acted as the caretaker of the school. It had been constructed in 1798 and had low ceilings and small windows, and when we first moved in and I was poking around in the attic space above the kitchen, I pulled back some of the old lathing and found it insulated with crushed seashells and balled-up newspapers from 1807. The front part of our house had originally stood a mile away in the opposite direction, on the road north to Hillham. The man from whom we bought the house, a widower named Roberts, told us that the front part of the house had been built by a young husband for his wife and child—a young family like ours—in 1880. When they had raised a family of three boys and four girls and the husband and wife passed away, both within a month of each other, in 1950, the farmer who owned all the orchards around the property had the house moved to its present location, along with the old seamstress shop, which had belonged to one of his great-aunts. The front part of the house had high ceilings and tall, drafty windows that Susan and I both loved because they let in so much light. There were two rooms on the first floor—a dining room and a living room—and two bedrooms on the second floor. The two halves of the house were connected by a single low doorway between the kitchen in the old part and the dining room in the newer part.
Houses retain traces of the people who have lived in them and I feel those traces immediately whenever I step into one. When Susan and Kate and I looked at the few houses within our price range in Enon, there were times when my stomach soured and my head ached before I had walked through two rooms. A given house would seem like a repository of misery, a deliberate prison in which successions of families had huddled and cowered from one another for decades. It seemed criminal for the real estate agents to talk up such miserable wrecks, as if they could ever be homes again for reasonable, peaceable souls, as if they should not have been demolished and the land on which they stood rededicated in special, purgative ceremonies. The agitation I felt in those tomblike buildings felt like contagion, as if the frequency and amplitude of the woe vibrating through the boards and pipes and wires of the house immediately began to affect the synapses in my brain and interrupt the beat of my heart. Susan experienced this, too, and the two of us passed silly, exaggerated looks behind the real estate agent’s back as we allowed her to give us the complete tour, having agreed after the first time this had happened that we were too self-conscious to stop the agent short because the house had bad vibes. Susan would squinch her nose, as if she smelled turned milk; I’d hunch my shoulders and limp like Quasimodo; she’d put her hand to her mouth and nod a couple times, miming laughter; I’d raise a fist and tilt my head, roll my eyes back and loll my tongue, mimicking the hopeless father who had hanged himself in the basement.
KATE AND I SOMETIMES took walks along the Enon Canal. We reached the canal by a dirt access road that ran between my old friend Peter Lord’s house and the estate of a widow named Hale. I had met Mrs. Hale twice. The first time was when Pete and I were boys, maybe eleven or twelve, and had been sledding down the hill on her property, which was called Hale’s Hill and was the third-highest hill in the village, and the highest down which a sled could be run. We had not asked permission to be on her property. She must have seen us from one of the third-story windows of her mansion, just visible over the east slope of the hill. When we saw her marching across the deep snow toward us, we thought she was coming to scold us. Being brought up in Enon, neither of us had the inclination to run away. We were well used to taking scoldings from elderly women. Mrs. Hale was tiny, barely five feet, and as lean as rope.
When she was within a few yards of us she said, “You sled like girls.”
She reached us and grabbed Pete’s sled from him.
“This is how you do it,” she said. She dropped the sled, knelt, and lay belly down on it, face-first.
“Push,” she said. I leaned down and took the sled by the backs of its runners and inched it toward the brink of the hill.
“A real shove,” she said. “Shove me right down the thing.” So I gave her a heave and down she went. The snow was packed and hard where we’d been making our runs, so it was like an ice chute. Mrs. Hale went down the hill as fast as if she were on a luge. There was a swamp at the bottom, full of trees and shrubs, and we always bailed off our sleds before the ends of our runs, so that we would not be dashed against a tree or shredded up in the briars. Mrs. Hale must have seen us flopping off our sleds before we hit the swamp and been galled by it because, when she hit the bottom of the hill at near-Olympic speed, she simply rocketed ahead. We lost sight of her past the tree line, but we heard the racket of the sled as it clattered among the trunks and frozen tules. We ran after her, convinced that she lay broken and dead, headfirst among the bulrushes and alders. But before we were halfway down the hill, she staggered out of the swamp, dragging the sled behind her, hat askew. She stomped up to us and handed Pete the tether.
“That is how you sled,” she said and limped away back to her big house behind the hill.
The second time I met Mrs. Hale I went to her house with my grandfather to fix one of her clocks. Her house was the sort
about which I have always had dreams. Maybe hers is the house that prompted them.
When my grandfather was alive, and whenever I had a hard time during college making enough money to pay rent or bills or to buy groceries, he paid me to help him with his clock-repair business. He had been a machinist at a shoemaking factory for years when he’d been young and then taught mechanical drawing at the vocational school the next town over. He cut new gears for broken clocks in his basement workshop and used a slide rule. I had no aptitude for numbers and was useless when it came to making real mechanical repairs. But I had a pretty good feel for taking the works apart and finding out what was wrong and then putting them back together and oiling the pinions after my grandfather had done the skilled work and I had cleaned everything in an ammonia bath in the ultrasonic cleaner.
Whenever I worked for him, my grandfather made me get to his house by seven in the morning. I’d find him at his kitchen table reading The Wall Street Journal, because he had a few shares in a couple of utility companies, and my grandmother clearing his breakfast plate and coffee cup.
“Behold!” he cried when he saw me. “The flower of Enon village!” I groaned, sleepy, and tried to smile. He folded his paper and rose from his seat and said to my grandmother, “Well, never mind the wood, Mother.”
I finished, “Father’s coming home with a load,” and we all laughed and my grandfather and I went down to the basement and went to work, him at his old school desk that, in order to get it into his basement, he’d had to cut into pieces and reassemble, and me at the workbench, puzzling out the guts of a carriage clock.
