A Stranger's House

by Bret Lott

  I said, “Point of story?”

  “Point of story,” he said, “is that you know me. We’ve been through a lot, maybe even more than a wall falling down, and I’ve been here. I haven’t run out of a house on you yet, and I’m not about to. And so I’ll keep the volume on the TV down low for you, and I’ll fix breakfast for you, and I’ll bandage your hands for you, and you can quit your job, too. I’ll even send flowers to Gadsen’s funeral, if you want me to.”

  I looked up at him, too quickly. He was still looking at me. “Will told me,” he said, and slowly I looked back at my hands.

  He said, “But you’re scaring me now, because I’m not sure I know exactly who you are.” He paused. “I just want to make certain I know you, and that you won’t run out of a house that I’m in. I want to know you.”

  He waited a few more seconds, waited for me to say something, anything, I imagined, and then he pushed himself away from the wall, stood, and moved into the living room. A moment later I heard the sound of the McDonald’s bag being crumpled up, footsteps into the kitchen, water running.

  The second cotton ball I held in my hand was the same shade of pink as the first, and I threw it in the garbage. I wanted it away from me. Then I bowed my head, my elbows on my thighs, my hands out in front of me, the palms up, and I cried, cried for dead hope, for a husband who, I saw, had just surrendered in his own way to no hope, to living the rest of our lives with just ourselves, and though I tried with each breath in to make my body relax, make my muscles ease up, they did not. I sat there, the cold air of the room like an ice fire in my hands, my body wound too tight, and I cried.

  DECEMBER

  “Uhm,” Grady said from behind me. “Uh, Miss Templeton.” He stopped. “Claire,” he said. “Martin says that he thinks you’re working too hard. That you’re doing too much.”

  I had the metal scraper in my hand, shoving it up along the wall of the front room, the wall with the two windows that looked out to where the porch had been. The wallpaper solvent was working well; as I pushed the scraper up, wads of old, wet wallpaper were falling, leaving exposed the bare plaster wall, yellow with age.

  We’d finally torn off the ugly brown paneling just that morning, the three of us—Martin, Grady, and I—each with claw hammers in hand. It had taken us only an hour to get it all off, the plastic coming down in brittle shards, shapes that looked like large brown pieces of broken glass. We worked at different places in the room, me beginning at the front door and working my way across the front wall, the wall I was peeling wallpaper from right now; Grady at the other windowed wall, the wall that held the window from which I’d looked the very first afternoon we had been here; Martin had started at the fireplace wall and gone on to the staircase wall, tearing out all the little detail pieces of paneling above the mantel and on the low wall where the banisterless staircase came down into the room.

  It had only taken us that hour to get it all down, rip it from the walls to expose the ugly, pale flowered wallpaper I was peeling down now. Grady had been the slowest of the three of us, though I knew he wasn’t taking his time. Martin was in his trance, and worked as quickly and proficiently as ever. I, too, I’d realized in the past three weeks, had my own trancelike state, the mode I clicked into whenever I entered the house. Every day, now.

  Fifteen minutes more and we had gathered up all the plastic shards littered through the room and moved them to the junk heap, each of us gathering as many pieces as possible into our arms and carting them outside and dumping them. Grady had at one point taken one piece and sailed it like a Frisbee back into the trees, letting out a crazy yelp, but the piece didn’t go very far, only flipped and tumbled through the air. I’d heard Martin give a little chuckle, and Grady had turned to me and smiled. But I would not join them in their small break from all the work we were doing, and I looked down at the heap, picked up a couple of pieces of paneling here and there, and tossed them to the middle of all the junk. Grady stopped, went to find the piece back in the trees, his feet breaking dead leaves everywhere, making a rushing sound, a static of sorts, as he headed through them back to the heap, the piece he’d thrown in his hands. Without a word he dropped it onto the heap, headed past me and back inside for the next load.

  I pushed the scraper up again, and more wet wallpaper fell, cold on my arms, slipping down them and to the floor.

  “Miss Templeton,” Grady said again, and only then did I realize I hadn’t answered him, hadn’t acknowledged him at all. I was in that mode.

  I turned. Both he and Martin were standing there, Martin, as always, a few inches behind him. But he was looking at me now, the ability to look at me for several seconds without letting his eyes dart away new in him. Now that we had been working up here every day, the three of us had become closer, friends, and Martin’s looking at me and telling Grady he was concerned for me almost made me want to stop, to put the scraper away. To take a break from here, this house that, if all went right, we would be able to move into some time early next year.

  But I looked past the two of them, saw the wallpaper on the wall, on all the walls, wallpaper with a thick pattern of bouquets of brown and pink roses in rows up and down the walls, and I knew that they were wrong, that I could work harder, that I could keep going. I could.

  “I’m fine,” I said. “I’m just fine. You don’t worry about me. I’ve told you guys before that I’m fine.” I turned, placed the scraper on the windowsill, and went to the stove in the fireplace. I opened up the front, tossed in a couple of chunks of wood, and stood back from it, my hands out in front of me, soaking up the warmth.

  Tom had bought the stove last week in a costly celebration of the roof having been completed and the rotten and broken clapboards all replaced, as well as the fine brickwork Martin had done with the chimney and hearths through the house. He had been as meticulous measuring and marking the lay of bricks as he had been with the tapping out of clapboards and rolling the marble to find bad spots in the floor, and as a result the fireplace here, after having a chimney sweep out from town to clean things up, was ready for use. The stove had been a surprise, Tom last Saturday morning leaving us here to work by ourselves while he went into town. “For supplies,” he had told me, with no show of any emotion, no smile, no shine in his eyes for the surprise. Two hours later he had shown up with two men in a flatbed truck following him, the stove, huge and black and cold, tied down in back. The four of us had simply watched as the men, burly teenagers who seemed no older than Grady but who could have easily snapped him in two, muscled the stove in, set it up on the hearth, and drove away.

  I was glad for it here in the front room, the stove bulky and warm, the sky outside cold and gray and threatening as it had been most days the last three weeks, folds of gray and darker gray here and there a regular occurrence now.

  They didn’t have to worry. I was okay.

  “Still, uh, Miss Templeton,” Grady said, and took a step closer.

  “Will you please?” I said, and turned from the stove. “It’s Claire. It’s not Miss Templeton. It’s Claire.”

  “Claire,” Martin said, his voice strong and clear, and I had to pause, look at him there behind Grady.

  He was smiling at me. I said, “Martin. That’s the first time you’ve called me by my name.”

  “Claire,” he said again, grinning even bigger, showing even more of those teeth, and he looked down, moved his feet in some small, self-conscious shuffle. He looked at me again, only this time as solemn, as grave, as I’d ever seen him. “Claire,” he said, “you do not need to work so hard. Not as hard as this.” He put his hand out in an awkward gesture toward the walls, brought his hand back just as quickly.

  The Saturday after I’d quit at the lab, Tom, Grady, and Martin started in on the roof, but not before Grady and Martin had taken a look at my steps. Martin and Grady both turned first to Tom, who pointed at me.

  Grady had said, “Did you find these?” and took a tentative kick at the bottom step.

 
Tom stood with his hands on his hips. His head was down, and he stirred the leaves at his feet with the tip of one boot. We hadn’t yet spoken to each other beyond asking if the coffee had been made, what the weather for the day would be.

  I said, “All by myself.”

  Martin, smiling, not yet into his trance, looked at the steps and took the same small kick as Grady had. He turned to me. He said, “Nice job,” and grinned, and we all laughed.

  Then they were up on the roof, Martin with Tom behind him, the two of them pulling up pieces of asphalt shingles to show patches of decayed and rotting shake shingles.

  By the following Sunday night they had stripped the front half of the roof of all shingles; cut out and replaced rotten or broken rafters with new pieces nailed right in against the old, what Martin called “sister rafters”; and replaced roof boards that had been broken or mildewed with new pieces of plywood. Then tarpaper had been laid over it all.

  I had watched most of it, not able to do much, but wanting to. Martin, as always, was doing most everything, from working the Sawzall quicker and more proficiently than Tom, to laying out the odd pieces of plywood, to nailing them onto the rafters, his hammering strong, two hits and the nails driven deep and solid into the wood. Tom seemed almost an assistant, Grady when on the ground only handing up pieces of wood, when on the roof only throwing down broken, replaced pieces.

  In my frustration to start working, to start up again, I decided I would form the junk heap, the boards from the porch before then only strewn around the front of the house. The broken, stiff asphalt shingles and the rotted shake shingles beneath them seemed to have rained down before the house, Grady almost gleeful at times in throwing them from the roof in twos and threes.

  The first thing I had to do, I knew, was to find where I wanted to put all the trash, all the junk, some of it salvageable—a lot of the wood would be good for use this winter—some of it, like the asphalt shingles, useless. And so I went around the house, the sky still gray, gray all weekend long, gray every day since I’d done perfusion, and for a moment, just a moment, I thought of Mr. Gadsen, and of Chesterfield, and I tried to imagine who would be at the old man’s funeral. Will, Sandra, Paige, and Wendy. Those people. But not me. I was working.

  I walked around the house, trying to find some cleared area that would hold all this trash until we had somebody come haul it away. To the right of the house was out; the trees were thick there, and as I looked back into them and away from the house, some dark feeling fell into me, and I thought for a moment that it was a cramp. But the darkness of that feeling—a low twist, not an ache—told me that that wasn’t it.

  I stared back into the woods, and felt at the base of my spine, the skin on my back tightening up, the beginning of a shudder, and I looked down, took in a deep breath, my skin prickling over.

  I went around to the rear, and I could hear the men working up on the roof, Grady saying something about a custom skylight. “I’ll just put my foot right through this roof board,” I heard him say, “and presto, custom skylight.” I heard him laugh, heard Tom give a small chuckle. I heard nothing from Martin.

  The area behind the house was clear, just ground covered with leaves and gray, dead grass for about fifteen yards, then trees again. To the left was the narrow trail back to the barn.

  I heard from the front of the house more shingles falling down, slapping onto those already lying on the ground.

  The barn would be just as good a place as any, I thought, and I headed back, walked the hundred yards or so along the path over-grown with tall, dead weeds, trees on either side shoving into the trail, trying to take it over.

  I had my arms crossed, holding myself, as I came up to the barn. Nothing was any different now than when I’d first been back here with Tom the day we were here alone, and my curiosity came back, the wonder at why Martin and Grady would not come out here, at why they seemed to freeze up when mention was made of the barn. They were glad to do anything else, eager to work, to be at this house, and yet they would not come out here.

  I started looking at the barn, watching once again the rafters and the thick, black beams, and I thought for a moment of the barn with the patterned slate roof, the one Tom and I had stood at and cried. The barn that would never come down, I knew, ever, simply because the roof had been built right. Our own barn was nothing compared to the grandness of the other.

  I went on inside, the world growing darker because of the clouds and the black wood around me, darker than any day here yet, and I looked back to the house, just to see it from here now that all the leaves were gone, now that the sky was gray. I wanted to see the house framed by the open barn door, a black frame that would surround the house, hold it down to size, make the work that needed to be done seem possible.

  From where I stood, the open barn doors framing the house perfectly, I could see my window, the window on the room that would be my own, the room I had not long ago believed and hoped might someday be a nursery. But the window was black and empty, the room inside the same, I knew.

  I looked at my window, at its emptiness, and suddenly I became aware of what was behind me as I stood staring: nothing, only the emptiness of the barn, beyond the broken planks of the back wall only woods on up the hill, beyond the hill more trees, and more nothing. I was afraid to look behind me, to see that nothing, and yet I looked.

  I saw nothing, and I shuddered, this time all the way down and into my arms, and I ran, ran as fast as I could, the distance between me and the house seeming to grow as I ran, the trees all pushing toward me as I ran along that path.

  Finally I made it to the front of the house, where shingles still came down, two, three, four at a time. Tom and Martin and Grady were out of view, from above me merely the sounds of hammers and the low screech of nails being pried up. They were no longer talking.

  I picked up a piece of plywood, pulled it away from the house to where the trees were not so thick. I pulled the piece of plywood as far as I imagined was necessary, just far enough to get it away from the house, to keep it from making the place look like the town dump. I let the piece drop flat on the ground, the whoosh of air from beneath it sending up dead leaves that collected over the tops of my shoes. Quickly I knocked those leaves away, went to the pile of junk, and started moving things.

  But I could not shake the fear I had had of almost losing myself in the barn, the feeling of the forest closing around me, just as the garbage bag in the perfusion room had swallowed up Chesterfield’s carcass. That would have been me, I knew, if I’d waited in the barn any longer. And I thought I knew then why neither Grady nor, especially, Martin would go out there. It had been that feeling of being swallowed, I thought. Of being lost.

  That night, after Tom and I had dropped them off at the Friendly’s, I had asked Tom if Martin and Grady could work weekdays on the house. I told him I was going to be out there anyway, that I might as well have company, and company that would work.

  He looked both ways down Route 9, waiting for traffic to clear, and pulled out of the Friendly’s parking lot.

  I said, “Tom?”

  “I heard you,” he said.

  He was quiet awhile, and in the darkness I saw him shift in his seat. These were the most significant words that had passed between us since he had watched me cleaning the blisters on my hands. My hands were still bandaged, and I had worn canvas work gloves all weekend long, hauling those pieces of wood and shingles. My hands ached as I sat next to him, waiting for an answer. But I did not mind. The ache was for a good reason. We had gotten work done.

  We were almost to Cooley-Dickinson Hospital by this time, but I did not look for the maternity wing, would not stare back at the window of the room Paige had stayed in when Phillip was born. I would not do that anymore, and as we passed the hospital I kept my eyes on the road, listening for an answer.

  I said, “You guys are almost done with the outside. You just have the rest of the clapboards to go. And then. Then comes all the inside stuff, and
you know I need the help. I can’t be out there all day by myself and expect to get much—”

  “The money,” he interrupted.

  “The quicker we get this work done, the better,” I said, “and let’s be honest, those two aren’t nearly as expensive as what we’d be paying otherwise.”

  “We’d be doing it ourselves otherwise,” he said quietly.

  “That’s the point,” I said, surprised at how quickly and efficiently my words came from inside me, as if it weren’t me doing the planning, the calculating. “We’d be taking forever to get all this stuff done, killing ourselves all our weekends. And I don’t expect they’ll turn us down, either, even though they’re working week nights. I don’t have to stay out there all day. We can cut off around three or so, and I can get them back here to town so that they won’t miss work. I think they’ll say yes. So the quicker we get the work done the better.” I paused, took a breath. “The quicker we get it done, the sooner I’ll be able to go back to work. At the lab, or wherever. Then the money will be coming in again. And the work will be done already. Except for, you know, things that we’ll do next summer, like painting.” I paused, took another breath, this one deeper, the air colder inside me. “And the money we have already,” I said, “is from my mother. It’s from her house, for our house. That’s what it’s for.” I was looking at my hands, at how the plastic Band-Aids reflected light from streetlamps we passed under. My hands seemed plastic in places there in the dark, all gray and shiny. They seemed artificial.

  He turned and looked at me a moment, and turned back to the road. He hadn’t looked at me long enough to allow me to turn to him, so that when I did his face was away from me, looking out his side window.

  He had said no more, and I took that to mean what I wanted it to mean. Two days later—a Tuesday—I dropped Tom off at the newspaper, then picked up both Grady and Martin in the cold early morning of the Friendly’s parking lot.