by Paul Harding
When I reached the back of the meadow, I cut into the woods at the Tucker family burial plot, which consisted of four headstones enclosed in an iron-railed fence. The woods felt strange and oddly open. I kept having the sensation of being approached from behind. I wanted to turn back, but I felt ill from the lack of drugs and so I continued picking my way through the dark.
When I reached the edge of the woods, at the border of the Wallaces’ property, I knelt for a moment, steadied my breathing, then put on the rubber gloves and scuttled across the lawn. A mudroom off the kitchen led to the inner door. I oiled the door’s hinges and handle, opened it, and stepped inside. The room smelled like clay and cold mud and sweet, damp newspapers. There was a shallow bench and a coat stand, from which hung a flannel shirt worn through at the elbows. Three kitchen trash barrels were lined along the wall opposite the bench, labeled, GLASS, PLASTIC, and CANS. A plastic tub stacked with copies of The Wall Street Journal and the Enon Daily Bread stood next to the barrels. Just inside the threshold was an iron doorstop shaped like a bullfrog wearing a footman’s coat and black shoes with white spats. He had one arm tucked behind his back and the other extended in front of him. I picked the frog up and propped the outer door open with him.
My head and hands and legs buzzed and trembled worse than ever, and I was nauseated enough that I worried I might begin retching. I could barely concentrate on anything other than the need to stuff my mouth with handfuls of pills and I nearly sobbed out loud at being so strung out, sweating and scuffling at some poor, rich old couple’s back door. I still had enough sense, though, to know that I fully deserved being brained with a poker or perforated by buckshot. In fact, the only way I’d gotten up the nerve to commit the crime in the first place was to have half-convinced myself that I would be caught and that would be justice, and that getting away with the drugs would be an absurd, almost malevolent turn of events.
I imagined Kate standing at the top of the hill, under the occluded sky, drawing her hair back because the wind kept blowing it across her face, looking across Enon to where I crouched at the door.
“Mr. Wallace had an operation, Dad. He needs those pills.”
“I know, Kate. I’m sorry.”
The moon shone above the hill for a moment and Kate turned away and disappeared down the back slope.
I pushed on the kitchen door with my left hand and pulled on the doorknob at the same time, so the door would not swing when the deadlatch cleared the strike plate. My hands sweated in the rubber gloves and felt clammy.
This is all just so ridiculous, I thought. The cool, fresh air gusting into the room smelled minerally and wholesome, and I wished that it contained all the nutrition I needed, that the spices distilled into the wind from the water and salt and rocks and earth and foliage of Enon could be the food that sustained me and the medicine that healed me. I cursed my loopy imagination and my weak will, the cramps knotting and unknotting in my guts, and inched the door open a crack.
Even in the dark, the kitchen glowed white. It was a large, tiled space, full of large white cabinets and old industrial-grade white appliances. The white enameled-iron sink was practically the size of a bathtub. I tiptoed over to the kitchen table. My eyes acclimated to the dark, and the objects on the table resolved themselves against the tablecloth, which had a blue-and-white alternating pattern of springer spaniels, mallards, and cattails. A gold pair of wire-rimmed spectacles had been placed on top of a couple of garden catalogs. There was a lined notepad, with a pen laid next to it and a note written in clear, elegant handwriting: Amanda and kids, Fri., 1:30, grapes for Arthur. I felt like a ghost, listless and confined, wandering in a house that had been mine a century ago, relegated to examining the details of the lives of strangers.
The refrigerator motor started with a clank and a man’s voice called from deeper in the house, “Joan?”
Adrenaline burst inside me, and the cravings that I’d forgotten for a moment rang and buzzed again, and I nearly screamed and began rampaging through the house, knocking over vases and chairs and smashing through cupboards, so whoever had spoken would know for certain that he had heard another living person in the house, a stranger, an intruder, and not have to wonder whether he’d heard a ghost. But then I saw a lazy Susan on the countertop next to the sink with twenty or thirty prescription bottles on it. Nothing moved, and the voice did not call again. Euphoria swelled over me and, after peering through the telescoping doorways and rooms beyond the kitchen, I treaded to the bottles in a kind of antic half-fit. There was also a small silver tray with another dozen of the white-capped, brown plastic bottles, a sheet of paper on which a dosage schedule was printed, and a large diamond ring. I checked the bottles on the tray first. There was a prescription for fifty muscle relaxants and, a miracle, a prescription for seventy high-dose instant-release painkillers. I stuffed the bottles in the pockets of my sweatshirt. They rattled like little maracas and I shook them in my pockets, once, twice, three times, and whispered, “Cha, cha, cha, I’m Car-men Mir-and-a.” I didn’t recognize the other drugs, so I gave the wheel of the lazy Susan a quick quarter turn and looked at the next batch. There was a bottle with forty Valiums, past their expiration but still potent. I picked up all the bottles from the middle of the wheel and lined them up along the counter, as if they were on a production line in a factory. There were more muscle relaxants, a couple dozen more Valiums, and another forty less potent and, as I thought of drugs past their expiration dates, somewhat stale painkillers. I opened the cabinet directly above the pills. It was full of expensive vitamins and supplements and a bottle of cough syrup with codeine, which I pocketed. Some inexplicable, pathetic, giddy sense of respect seized me and I began to put the other medicines back on the wheel. I was shimming the last couple of bottles in among the others when the man called out again—“Joan?”—directly behind me. I startled and the bottles scattered across the table.
“Joanie, hon? The dressing is all messed up again.”
I turned around, terrified, certain the police must already be pulling up to the house. An old man—Mr. Wallace—stood, bowlegged and bent forward, with his two hands holding his stomach under his pajama top. He seemed so much older and thinner and frailer than I had remembered him. I hadn’t seen him in six or seven years, since I’d taken care of his lawn for that one summer. His mouth hung open, slack, and a last few wisps of white hair stuck out from the sides of his head. When he saw that I was not his wife, his expression didn’t change.
“Are you my brother?” he asked.
“No,” I whispered. “No, I’m not your brother.” His expression remained the same.
“Are you my son?”
“No; no, Mr. Wallace. I’m not your son.”
“Are you my neighbor, with the barking dog?”
“No, Mr. Wallace,” I said. “I’m Charlie.”
“Oh. Charlie. Huh. Charlie, I’m awfully sorry, but I don’t remember you. It’s the old noggin; goddamned screen door.”
“Water through a sieve, Mr. Wallace,” I whispered, and tapped the side of my head with a forefinger.
“Say, Charlie, could you help out an old fellow airman? The woman who lives upstairs is out, and I’ve got this damned dressing messed up again, and these staples.”
Mr. Wallace lifted his pajama top, and I could see a large bandage that he had managed to peel half off. There seemed to be fresh blood on the bandage and blood soaking the elastic waistband of his pajama bottoms.
“I think you need to sit down, Mr. Wallace,” I said. I peeled off the rubber gloves and wiped the sweat off my hands, took Mr. Wallace by an elbow, and guided him to the kitchen table. I helped him onto a chair. The bandages smelled sour.
“It’s these staples. I don’t know how they got here, but they need to be out,” he said. A line of staples held together a black incision along his gut. Blood seeped from the cut and some of the staples looked crooked, as if Mr. Wallace had been trying to excavate them.
Why the hell is this guy ho
me, I thought. There must be a nurse here, or somebody. How the hell is this guy sitting here alone in his study or whatever it is back there, picking at these staples? It struck me what an awful thing it was to be stealing this man’s drugs. Worse, it struck me that it hadn’t struck me before, that I was so caught up in the undertow of narcotics and alcohol and grief, I hadn’t even thought about the actual person in actual pain, from whom I was stealing. I’d imagined Kate thinking of it, and reminding me, but I’d even ignored that. I made a quick calculation that Mrs. Wallace would call the police no later than, say, seven or eight in the morning, if Mr. Wallace didn’t wake her after I’d left, and that she’d be able to get a new prescription by no later than noon, and probably earlier.
“Oh, no. No, Mr. Wallace,” I whispered. “You can’t pick at that. The doctor says you have to keep the dressing on. You won’t get healed if you keep pulling at it.” (I’d said the same thing to Kate many times, when she’d been a little girl and had had a hysterical, irrational terror of bandages, and had preferred to let her cuts bleed, no matter how bad they’d been, rather than cover them.) I grabbed around in my pockets and found the bottle with the strongest medicine. I tapped eight pills onto the table. I opened another of the bottles, poured the remainder of the strong prescription into that, plinked the eight pills back into the first bottle, and placed it on the table.
“Are those the vitamins?” Mr. Wallace asked.
I said, “Mr. Wallace, if you pick at those staples, you’re going to get an infection and that’ll be twice as worse, and you’ll have to deal with all that mess even longer.”
Mr. Wallace took one of my hands in his, squeezed it, nodded, and said, “You’ve always been such a good son.”
A woman’s voice called from the top of a servants’ staircase I hadn’t noticed at the back of the kitchen. “Arthur? Ms. O’Keefe? Arthur, are you down there?” Footsteps started down the stairs.
Mr. Wallace answered, “Joanie, I’m here in the kitchen. Kyle’s here. He’s helping get these staples out.”
The woman, Mrs. Wallace, called from halfway down the stairs, “Arthur, stop!”
Mr. Wallace looked back at me. His confused, uncomprehending look vanished for a moment, and he cradled the back of my head with his free hand, squeezed my hand even tighter, smiled, and said, “You were always such a good brother, Warren.”
Mrs. Wallace reached the bottom of the stairs, saw me in my dark hood crouched next to her husband, and began to scream.
I raised Mr. Wallace’s hand to my lips and kissed it and said, “You were a good brother, too, Art.” I ran across the kitchen, through the mudroom, and bolted across the lawn, back into the trees.
After crashing through the woods for ten minutes, tripping over fallen tree limbs and getting my hands and face lashed with thorns, I stopped to catch my breath and listen for anyone pursuing. The sirens and shouts and barking hounds I feared never came. Except for my own gasping, the night was quiet. Clouds still covered the sky, and the temperature had cooled almost to freezing. It took me a moment to figure out roughly where I was. I’d often daydreamed about the earliest beginnings of Enon, before there were roads, the general sense of direction or proximity to a homestead indicated by marks carved or burned into some of the trees. There must have been few trips at night, through the dense, original forests, the world so quiet back then that the open space above the lake a mile away could be heard. The first glimpse of light from a house through the trees would mean a return to food and warmth and shelter that would not have been taken for granted. But as I imagined myself a man returning to his home through the woods in the cold four centuries ago, I understood that those comforts were given meaning only because Kate and Susan were in the house, Kate perhaps already in her bed, which had been placed nearer to the fire than usual because of the terrible cold spell that had gripped Enon since the New Year, Susan sitting in a plain, hard chair placed on the other side of the hearth, darning. Susan and Kate in the home catalyzed the potencies of the light and warmth and food. But with Kate dead and buried in the hill across the village and Susan gone back to her ancestral home, and me stumbling away from robbery, light and warmth and food lost their meanings, and there was no reason anymore even to try to find that Puritan home in the darkness. There was no reason to prefer that idea of home to a cleft in an oak or a hollow beneath a granite boulder. The house fell dark. It went cold. Rats ate the apples in the basket and the wheat in the sack. The house became a dark box of wood in a dark clearing and it was best to look at it from the dark trees. Raising the house had been audacious and the blessings it had been meant to preserve—to hoard, it seemed in retrospect—had not simply vanished but decayed into cursedness. The house had not merely lapsed back into the equilibrium of the woods but was blighted, as if inside it did not contain a hearth and a chair and a bed but my cankered heart. Or I carried the blackened house inside myself instead of a heart. The idea of entering the house and walking over the dark threshold and sitting in the dark room, on a dark chair, by the dark hearth, and looking through a window with broken panes, back out at the perimeter of dark trees, seemed like damnation.
By the time I arrived home from breaking into the Wallaces’, I was in a state that felt close to the onset of real withdrawal. Damned or not, I entered the house and went straight to the living room and sat on the couch and emptied all of the treasure I’d found from my pockets and laid it all out in front of me across the coffee table. I opened the bottle of cough syrup and took a large swig from it. I lit a cigarette and took a swallow of whiskey from the bottle. I took a muscle relaxant and ground two of the instant-release painkillers with the bottom of a highball glass. I rolled up a dollar bill and snorted the pills. I emptied the rest of the pills onto a magazine and ground them up, too, and put the powder into a small plastic bowl and added a couple teaspoons of tap water to it and mixed it together and put it in the freezer.
I went back to the living room and sank back on the couch and had another pull from the whiskey and surveyed my take. The drugs began to take effect and I did not think about the poor Wallaces or the dark house or my dark heart but only about how set I was for a while now. I thought about that in wholesome terms, as if I were for the time being out of danger of something like malnourishment or from a debilitating disease for which I needed a great number of powerful and usually prohibitively expensive drugs. I compared myself to an innocent, sick child while I finished the whiskey and took a couple more pills and had another shot of the cough syrup. I compared myself to an impoverished, desperately sick orphan and I did so with the purest sincerity and charity toward myself until I lost consciousness and fell off the couch.
I woke up on the floor the next afternoon, vomiting. I lurched to the bathroom and finished being sick and drank water out of the bathtub faucet and stuck my head under the water. Volleys of pain exploded through my head, and my stomach felt as if it were knotted full of writhing eels. Shame overwhelmed me, and a line from a poem I could not recall, about remorse being the adequate of hell, repeated itself over and over.
11.
RUMMAGING THROUGH THE GARAGE ONE NIGHT SOMETIME later in the spring—one morning, really; it must have been around four—for what I no longer remember: a monkey wrench I had suddenly been convinced I needed, an orange extension cord—I found the old fishing gear we used to take up to Maine when my grandfather was alive. The equipment had been my grandfather’s, and when he died I had held on to it, intending to take Kate up to the camps we stayed at and to teach her how to fly-fish for brook trout. There was a mustard yellow tackle box, full of reels and leaders and small folding knives and needle-nose pliers, line cleaner and fly dressing and the metal tins in which we kept our fishing flies. There was an old cardboard file box, full of survey maps of where we fished, which were so detailed that we could even find the cabins we stayed in on the pond, and outdated Maine atlases and rain ponchos and a pair of wool socks and a couple of flattened baseball caps, and the fishing vest m
y grandfather had always used, which was fitted with a carbon dioxide canister so that, if he ever fell out of his boat into the pond, he could pull an orange rip cord at the front and it would inflate into a life jacket. The inside of the garage felt cool and clean. It gave off a clean, chaste smell that I attributed to the whitewashed drywall and the smooth concrete floor. The backyard was still draped in darkness but pitched just on the bevel of sunrise. I stepped over boxes full of old clothes and dishes to the front corner of the garage, where the fishing rods in their aluminum tubes leaned in a pile. There were ten tubes, each about chest-high. Each had a screw-top cap. I pulled the tubes toward me in a bundle and looked at their caps and found the one etched with the words To Geo. W. Crosby, from “Skunk” Morell, 1983. My grandfather’s closest friend, Ray Morrell, had made the rod for my grandfather, out of graphite, with which at the time both men had been enthralled, and for which both immediately forsook their older English and Scottish cane rods. I leaned the other rods back in the corner and unscrewed the cap of the case and drew out the nylon sheath in which the two pieces of the rod were bagged (my grandfather and Ray had both been smitten, too, by nylon, although I always liked the faded brown, quilted, cotton rod bags in which the older rods were stored). I slid the halves of the rod out of the sheath. The rod was a green so dark that it looked black unless it caught the light at a certain angle. My grandfather had taught me to always take the ferrule at the base of the top half of the rod and place it alongside the outside of my nose and give it a couple of turns because the oil from your skin helps the pieces fit together and prevents the bottom half of the rod from splitting when you join it to the top half. Rolling the ferrule upside our noses was, I imagine, as practically useless as it was religiously observed every time we fished.
