A Stranger's House

by Bret Lott

  “They both grew up together,” he went on, “and they played a lot together, all the time. Mainly over here, too, because Martin’s family didn’t care at all for my daddy’s family. My grandfather, the man you’re buying this place from, had a feud going on forever. It had to do with my grandfather accidentally killing one of Martin’s uncles or something by running him over. My grandfather was the first man this far back from Northampton to have a car, and he was the first one in this county to kill somebody with a car.” He breathed out what might have been a small laugh. “That same car. His claim to fame.”

  I said nothing.

  “So my daddy and Martin grew up together, and like I said, most of the time was spent over here, and most of the time was spent without my grandfather knowing any of it, him working at a bank in Northampton. In town. Gone all day. Gone all day every day, killing himself with his job. A job worrying about money, so that my daddy and Martin were always around my grandmother. My Grandma Clark.”

  He stopped and swallowed hard. “She was,” he said, his voice a little quieter now, “she was a good woman. She loved my daddy. And she loved Martin, too. I think she loved Martin more than his own daddy or mother did. Because of how much time Martin spent over here. He ate over here. He played over here. Sometimes he even slept over here, slept up in that room, the smaller one upstairs, with my daddy, my grandma knowing about it all along, even helping Martin sneak upstairs after my grandfather had already gone to bed. Martin slept over a lot in the summer. Here, or they camped out up in those woods. They were friends.”

  My eyes were on the woods right then, and for a moment I thought of two young boys taking off up into them, up to the top of the hill. I thought of them rolling out sleeping bags, a small campfire before them, sparks circling up into the night air, and I wondered what stars must look like, the millions of them, on a cool summer night in the Berkshires.

  “But that’s why he hates Martin to this day. Because Martin was of that family in Worthington. A trashy, poor family over in Worthington. My grandfather, of course, had to keep that in mind, being as how he was a banker. To have it known that my daddy, his son, was associating with that family—and with its retard son to boot—just didn’t work. It just didn’t work right for my grandfather. So, the hate. His hate for Martin, especially.”

  There was more tapping now, this time right beneath me; I could feel the hard taps in my feet, the vibrations more noticeable than the sound. I opened my eyes, and the blue sky seemed even deeper, darker.

  I said, “So you’ve known Martin all along?”

  “Yep,” he said, his voice from behind me, both of us still looking out that window. “Just like I told you. An old family friend. He was in the hospital for quite a few years until, like I told you before, six years ago when they let him out.”

  I turned to him. His arm was still across his chest, guarding him somehow, his hand still gripping the crook of his arm. He was looking down, and it looked as though his eyes were closed.

  I said, “You don’t have to answer me if you don’t want to, but—”

  “So we’ve known each other all our lives. Or at least all my life,” he nearly whispered, going on as though I hadn’t started to say anything, on as though he were trying to avoid giving an answer to the question I was about to ask. His head remained bowed. “Nineteen years. Longer than my daddy ever knew me. Longer than my mother ever knew me. And he needs me, that’s what’s fine about him. My grandfather doesn’t give a good goddamn for me, but Martin does. I have to see to it that he gets to work on time, that his clothes get washed, that he eats right. That his rent and utilities get paid at the right time.”

  At that moment my question, the one I’d wanted to ask, paled and shriveled before me: all I’d wanted to know was what exactly was wrong with Martin, whether he’d been born as he was or if his brain functions had been dimmed by a childhood disease or trauma, damaged in a car accident or something. A trivial, petty question, I saw, as this boy told me of the responsibilities he had, responsibilities for a life other than his own; and I knew that that concern of mine, my physiological, Neuroscience and Behavior Laboratory attitude had been conditioned into me, transforming me into some odd strain of heartless human, I thought, whose preoccupation was with how it happened instead of how to live with it. And I wondered how I’d ever thought I could raise a child, how I could nurture a child from birth on, when here before me was an example of what real care was, real love. A nineteen-year-old boy caring unconditionally, it seemed, for a fifty-year-old man, loving him. I felt tears well up in me, felt them brim, break, fall down my cheeks, tears that were for me, I realized, as much as they were for him. I knew truths about him he would not tell: his mother’s suicide; his father missing in action, and the unresolved hope for his father’s return he must have hidden away in him somewhere. Unresolved hope, hopeless hope, much like my own hope to conceive someday, to bear children, to love them.

  “Hey,” I heard him say, and I opened my eyes. He was moving toward me, wavering through my tears, across this kitchen. Then he was before me, and placed a hand on each of my shoulders. I brought a hand to my eyes, blinked back those tears that still came, and gave him a feeble smile, the best I could muster. “Hey,” he said, “don’t cry. You don’t have to cry,” and that was all he said, in his boy’s voice a certain confidence emerging, letting me know that yes, I didn’t have to cry. I didn’t, and he patted my left shoulder once, twice, and brought both hands down, put them at his sides, and smiled at me.

  I took in a deep breath and quickly nodded, my eyes still wet, the edges of the room still shivering. “I’m okay,” I said. “I am.”

  He went back to the counter, leaned against it, his palms on the edge of the Formica top. He looked out the window again, and cleared his throat. “So Martin knows this house from top to bottom, knows it better than anybody. He knows it even better than my grandfather.” He was talking now as though nothing had happened, as though I hadn’t cried, as though he hadn’t comforted me.

  “That’s how he knows this place, knows its weaknesses,” he said, and stopped, the expression on his face changing to one of deep thought, his eyebrows knit, mouth pursed. He said, “But the thing of it is, is that he knows how to fix things, too. House things. That’s how come he can look at all these things in the house and sort of troubleshoot it. I figured it out, too. I’ve read some things.”

  He was changing again, not back into that pseudo-adult, but into an excited, animated teenager, the opposite of the sullen boy a few moments before. He was charged now, and his fingers on the edge of the Formica began tapping.

  I said, “What have you read?”

  “Oh,” he said, “some books, and I’ve read about these people, these retarded people like Martin. I saw them on TV a couple of times, too. There’s this one guy, he’s blind and retarded, much worse off than Martin, and he can hear a song once and then sit down at a piano and make this beautiful music, play that piano and sing that song just like the record. I’ve heard him sing, on ’60 Minutes.’”

  I nodded. I knew what he was leading up to: Martin’s being an idiot savant. He was probably right, though I’d only read case histories in textbooks, stories of mentally disturbed and retarded men and women with prodigious talents in only one certain area, whether it be sculpting or music or mathematics. Martin’s outward signs seemed true enough, too: when he was working he was doing nothing else, staring at the marble as it jogged right or left of its true path across the floor; pressing his ear to wood and tapping it, his eyes half-closed; that trancelike state.

  “It’s what’s called an idiot savant,” Grady said, “but that name they give it I hate. It’s a stupid name. I mean the idiot part. Martin’s no idiot. Not by a long shot he isn’t. You can give him a piece of wood and some nails and a hammer and saw, show him a mahogany dresser, and I’ll be damned if he won’t sit down and do his best to make one out of what you gave him.” He was looking off now, not at the window or floo
r, but just off into the space of the kitchen. “So he knows this house, and he knows how to fix things. I think this place is going to be fixed up fine. If you use him. Us.”

  I took a deep breath, nodded. “I’ve read about them, too, savants. But what I’ve read is that they have to have some sort of example, something they can imitate—”

  “Yeah, yeah,” he said, and slowly shook his head. “Martin learned all this stuff he knows from the first job he got when he was mainstreamed. He got a job as a gofer for this contractor, a guy who specialized in refurbishing. Martin starts out by just handing up pieces of lumber to these guys, and by making sure they’ve got plenty of nails at hand, while all this time he’s watching these guys, until one day, when the contractor and his crew are working on a house over on Massasoit in town, one day Martin stops the boss and shows him that there’s two or three rotten clapboards that he’s missed picking out, and things just go straight to hell from there. Martin ends up losing his job because in a month or so after that little incident on Massasoit, Martin’s now laying in parquet floors better than the guys who’re doing it professionally. So Martin gets the boot, and he gets on at Friendly’s.”

  He paused a moment, laughing a little to himself. “So,” he said. “I guess I lied to you.”

  I took a quick breath. I said, “What?”

  “About Friendly’s. Martin’s got the world’s record for that Friendly’s. He’s been on there for longer than I have. I’m not the record holder there. He is.” He shrugged. “So I guess I lied to you.”

  I breathed out, and smiled. I said, “That’s nothing.”

  “I’ll bet, too, you’re wondering how I know all this. I mean all about Martin and that job, right?” He looked at me. His fingertips on the Formica had stopped drumming.

  “I imagine he told you. That, or you asked.”

  “I watched,” he said, staring at me, waiting, I knew, for some reaction from me.

  I said nothing, and only gave him my same smile.

  He turned and got that thoughtful look on his face again, staring off. “I watched it all. Nobody knew about it. Not even Martin. My grandfather, he found out Martin was getting out of the hospital, and he forbid me to see him. He forbid me outright to see Martin. Like he could do that. But there was no way that old bastard could stop me from seeing. No way. So that’s when I started cutting school, to go see him work for these guys. I’d ride my bike, ride it all over hell and back, just riding. There was no way I wasn’t going to watch Martin, see who he was. I wanted to see him. I could only remember a little about him, from when I was a kid, before my grandfather had him put—”

  He stopped, startled at himself, it seemed. He pushed himself off the counter, and he was the adult again, shaking back that hair, tucking a lock behind one ear. He blinked several times, coughed into his hand, and I wondered what was going on, what had caused this, and then I realized that, of course, he’d told me something he didn’t want known, some small piece of story that had slipped away from him when he was only the boy he was, that teenager.

  His grandfather had had Martin put away.

  “Keep going,” I said.

  He kneeled and tied his shoe. He coughed again.

  “Your grandfather had Martin—” I said, but Tom and Martin came into the kitchen.

  “Speak of the devil, here he is,” Grady said, turning and standing as they came into the room.

  They were filthy, their faces and arms and hands streaked with dirt, mud ground into the knees of their pants. Cobwebs dusted Tom’s shoulders and hair, and the first thing I did was to brush them away, the delicate threads disintegrating at my touch.

  Tom said, “You should have seen us before we brushed off in the pantry,” and laughed. He kissed my cheek, and I could smell the cold, musty crawl space on him, a smell like old, abandoned furniture. I quickly leaned back from his kiss, made a face.

  “Yep,” Martin said, smiling.

  “So,” Grady said, and put his hands in his back pockets. He started moving up and down on the balls of his feet. “What did you see?”

  Tom said, “A few floor joists are cracked where the foundation, those fieldstones, are loose. No big deal, at least nothing, I don’t think, we can’t repair. A couple of bad ones, dry rot, that we’ll have to replace, too.”

  Martin, behind him, was rubbing his hair now, trying to get rid of those cobwebs.

  “It’s beautiful down there,” Tom went on. “Rough-cut oak. The support beam’s in great shape, too. The mortar on the fireplace base needs a little work, though. That’s not stuff I know much about, and so I’m not too sure I’ll want us on that. We may just want to hire that out.” He was looking at me. “That’s money we’ll have to put out.”

  I said, “We knew that going into this.”

  Martin, still behind him, grinned at me, and then at Grady.

  Grady said, “You’d be surprised at what this guy can do with a trowel and a sack of cement,” and nodded at Martin. Grady laughed.

  Tom and I turned to Martin, who, still grinning, only shrugged. He said, “Upstairs is next,” and gave Tom’s shoulder a hard pat. He moved past us and into the front room. A moment later I could hear the moan of the stairs beneath his weight.

  Tom said, “We could hear you two talking up here. Martin, I think, kept hearing his name, because he’d stop and listen a second every once in a while, then start hammering a floor joist again.” He dusted off his hands, looking first at me, then Grady.

  “We were just talking about him, about his fixing things,” Grady said. He stopped bobbing, and glanced at me.

  I said, “He’s a savant. With wood. With building and repairing things.” I reached up and dusted off Tom’s shoulder again, though all the cobwebs were gone.

  He said, “I can believe it.” He started through the kitchen, but paused just before the doorway into the front room. “He’s a good man,” Tom said, and disappeared into the room.

  I looked at Grady. His mouth was open, but he smiled, closed his eyes for a moment before heading after them.

  Martin was squatting on the hearth in our bedroom, the marble already coursing along the linoleum toward the far corner of the room, once again rolling around bubbles before it made it to the baseboards. But this time, once the marble had stopped rolling and was sitting there at the wall, Martin went to it, picked it up, and walked over to Tom. He held it out to him.

  Tom, who stood next to me just inside the doorway, looked at Martin, almost bewildered, his eyebrows high. Slowly he reached out and took the marble from Martin’s hand. He held it up to the light for a moment, the sun falling in from the one window to fill the glass ball.

  Martin, his movement as stilted and awkward as ever, let his hand drop to his side. He turned and walked back to the hearth, where he squatted again. He looked up at Tom, then pointed at the bricks next to him.

  Tom smiled. He walked across the room to the hearth, and kneeled. Slowly, gently, he placed the marble on the floor, let it roll. A few feet out it hit a rise and rolled away.

  Martin nudged Tom with his elbow, and Tom looked at him. Martin nodded toward where the marble had rolled out, and then Tom said, “Oh. Bubble.”

  Martin burst out with laughter, slapped his thigh hard so that the clap of his palm shot through the room. He laughed, his eyes nearly closed, his shoulders heaving.

  Grady was laughing, too, his arms crossed in front of him. And I laughed, too, Tom smiling and shaking his head, looking at the floor.

  “That’s funny,” Grady said. “He’s teaching you. That’s what’s so funny.”

  “That’s what’s so funny,” Martin managed to choke out, his eyes wet and full with laughter.

  When we were done in that room—Martin had tapped out the paneling, cracked back a corner to show bare green wall, opened and closed the window several times and touched and poked and prodded the mortar of the fireplace—I went down the stairs to the landing and up the other set to my room.

  I was fir
st in. We were all having fun by that time, Martin and Tom laughing and making jokes about bubbles, Grady with his arms crossed, saying “That’s funny” every once in a while, and so I entered the room, the others behind me, and I raised up my arms as if to touch the ceiling. I said, “This room is miner!” and then let my arms fall around me so that I was holding myself in the room. I turned in a circle, my eyes up to the ceiling, and I stopped.

  Tom was behind me, and put his arms around my waist. We were facing the window now, the barn outside in shadows that had shifted as the day moved on, shadows lighter now that the sun was directly overhead, shadows more buoyant, moving with the breeze that had picked up, the branches nearly empty of leaves, but still filled with color this autumn.

  Tom said, “All yours.”

  “Excuse me,” I heard from behind us, and Tom let go of me. We turned to see Grady standing just inside the doorway.

  “Excuse me,” he said again, and moved to one side. Down on the landing stood Martin, his hands clasped in front of him. His eyes moved up to us and down, up and down, and the sunlight from the window cast a white sheen over his skin as he stood in the near-dark of the staircase. His skin looked gray and shiny, and I knew he didn’t want us to see him.

  Tom said, “What’s wrong?”

  “It’s just,” Grady said, and stopped. He held out a hand palm up as though to explain, but let the hand drop. “It’s just that he won’t go into this room. That’s all.” He shrugged, blinked. “He just won’t He never has, either, as far as I can tell. Just look at that window. It’s not nearly half as clean as old Martin gets them. That’s because I’m the one who does this room.” He smiled, shrugged again, and moved back into the doorway so that we could no longer see Martin. “So I guess you’re on your own with this room. You got the marble?” He put his chin out, squinted and nodded toward Tom.

  He put his hands in his pockets, brought from the left one that marble. “Right here.”