The Angel on the Roof

by Russell Banks

  The dog clatters its nails on the linoleum floor and waits at the door for the man to switch on the overhead light, latch back the gate to the living room, where the thick furniture and carpeting sit sanctified and permanently new, as in a department store window display, and finally open the outside door and the aluminum storm door and release the huge, lumbering dog to the yard. Nelson stands a moment behind the silvery frosted glass and tries to remember his dream of a moment ago. It was years ago, in the dream. It was like most of his dreams that way, a phenomenon that goes on disturbing him, irritating him, actually, infuriating him sometimes, because you ought to be able to move on in your dreams, just as you move on in your life. Your kids grow up, you marry another woman, you move away, come back, change, and change again. You’d think your dreams would know that and would somehow deal with that. He knows he’s not thinking the same thoughts he thought ten and twenty years ago. Why the hell, then, is he dreaming the same dreams? Not exactly, of course, but almost—and in tone and atmosphere and most of the settings and many of the people, too, his dreams now are the same as his dreams when he was a young man of thirty and forty and his kids were kids and he was married to their mother.

  His life then was loud and boisterous and quarrelsome most of the time, “a goddamned pressure cooker,” he called it, but not all bad, surely not as bad as his first wife said and as he thought then, though he was not wrong to leave her and the kids and move on to another life, another woman, who doesn’t fight him so hard all the time, who seems to like him better than his first wife liked him, or rather, seems to like the aspects of his character that he himself likes, or believes he likes. Or wants to like. His humor, for instance. He is funny, quick, and sarcastic in an intelligently cruel way that surprises people and makes most of them laugh. And his being so principled, which you might call an unwillingness to compromise, or intolerance, if, like his first wife, who did not understand a lot of things about him, you didn’t understand his belief in his own beliefs. And then there is his independence, his insistence that he needs no one’s love, though he claims to be pleased by what he’s given and says he has plenty of love of his own to give back. Still, at bottom, when push comes to shove, as he says, he does not respect love, which fact pleases him.

  He can’t see the snow falling, but he knows it’s coming down—perhaps he can hear it, flecks of white ticking the frozen ground. When you’ve lived a lifetime or nearly so within fifty miles of where you were born, your body responds to shifts in weather well ahead of your mind, so that to predict the weather you consult your body and not the weather itself. As the pressure drops, one’s skin tightens, one smells moisture in the air, hears snow flurries falling in the dark, and one knows what’s coming. The body of Nelson Painter this early morning in mid-January in central New Hampshire knows the barometer is falling, the humidity and temperature are rising, and there is a snowstorm coming from the southwest, a blizzard maybe, and as a result Nelson knows that the cord of firewood, two-foot-long chunks of maple and birch dumped in a heap in his yard beside the driveway a month ago, will be covered in a foot or two of snow by noon, which disgusts him, because the boy should have come over and picked up the wood two or more weeks ago, or even before Christmas, the day Nelson called him and told him about the wood, his Christmas present to his son. There wasn’t any snow then, and the ground, frozen solid since November, was as hard as steel plate, and the wood, dumped unceremoniously from an old stake-bodied truck by the same local man who sold Nelson his winter’s wood every year, ten cords of it, had bounced and rolled over the ground, a sprawl of a pile that instantly looked ugly to Nelson. But he thought his son would drive right over from Concord in his Japanese pickup and haul it home, so he left it there on the frozen lawn by the driveway. Then, after Christmas there was a thaw, the annual January Thaw, and the yard turned to muck, the wood sank under its own weight, and it rained, and then there came a freeze again, a hard freeze, and now the wood is glued to the yard, as if molecules of maple and birch have been welded to molecules of frozen, dead grass and dirt.

  Nelson looks into the silver layer of frost covering the storm door before him and knows that it’s lightly snowing on the other side, and he says to himself, I’ll have to call the bastard and get him over here to haul away his own damn Christmas present, or else I’ll have to see it there in the spring, coming up out of the melting snow like a damn boneyard. He closes the inner door and steps away, and a moment later he’s on his knees in front of his woodstove, a cast-iron Ranger from Sears, low and deep enough for two-footers. He crumples last Sunday’s Union Leader into balls and twists of paper, chucks sticks of kindling split off maple logs, scratches a match against the tray in front of the stove, tosses it in and clanks the door shut, and, rolling back on his heels, listens to the stove sigh and moan as the flames inside begin to catch and feed and grow.

  A moment later, Nelson stands up slowly, shambles from the stove to the sink, reaches into the overhead cabinet on the right, next to the small square window that looks into the darkness of the backyard and field and woods beyond, and he draws out the bottle of vodka. With his other hand he reaches into the overhead cabinet on the left and plucks a juice glass from a stack and places it on the drainboard. His right hand trembling only slightly, he fills the glass with vodka, recaps the bottle, and places it back inside the cabinet, and now he enjoys his first drink of the day, a deliberate, slow act as measured and radiant as a sacrament, as sweet to him as the sun rising over the winter-burnt New Hampshire hills, as clean as new frost. That first drink is the best drink of the day. It’s as if all the others he drinks from now until he falls back into his bed tonight he drinks solely to make this first drink wonderful. Without them and the need they create in his blood, this first drink would be as nothing, a mere preliminary to preliminaries. With them, it’s the culmination of Nelson’s day. He sips at the vodka steadily, as if nibbling at it, and his gratitude for it is nearly boundless, and though he appears to be studying the darkness out the window, he’s seeing only as far as the glass in his hand and is thinking only about the vodka as it fits like a tiny, pellucid pouch into his mouth, breaks into a thin stream, and rolls down his throat, warming his chest as it passes and descends into his stomach, where the alcohol enters his blood and then his heart and brain, enlarging him and bringing him to heated life, filling the stony, cold man with light and feeling and sentiment, blessing him with an exact nostalgia for the very seconds of his life as they pass, which in this man is as close to love as he has been able to come for years, maybe since childhood.

  Outside, the dog scratches feebly at the door, almost apologetically, and Nelson, after first rinsing the glass and placing it back into the cabinet, finally turns and lets the cold animal in. She’s abject and seems eager to stay out of the man’s way, which is difficult, since both of them are large and the room is small, but when he crosses to check on the woodstove, the dog limps quickly away and stands by the sink until he returns, and then she moves back by the door, where she watches, waiting until he sets the coffeepot on the electric range and sits down at the Formica-topped table at the far wall. Finally, as Nelson unfolds yesterday’s paper and begins to read, the dog circles and lies down next to the woodstove, arranging herself in an ungainly heap of legs and tail, neck, muzzle and ears, a collapsed, fawn-colored tent.

  The sound an hour later of Nelson dialing the telephone wakes the dog. She lifts her heavy head and watches him at the table dial the phone on the wall beside him. The room is filled with white light now and smells of coffee and toasted bread and woodsmoke. Nelson holds the receiver loosely to his ear and lets it ring, eight, nine, ten times, until his son answers.

  “H’lo?”

  “Good morning.”

  “Oh, hi, Dad.”

  “Wake you up?”

  “Well—yeah. It’s what, eight? No. Jesus, it’s not even seven-thirty. What’s up?”

  “You, now. Want me to call back later? You alone? You got somebody th
ere?”

  “Ha. Not very likely. Yeah, I’m alone, all right. No, no, you don’t need to call back, I can talk, I’m awake. I was just up late last night, that’s all,” he says. Then, with great heartiness, “So—what’s happening? How’re you doing?”

  Nelson says fine and comes right to the point of his call: “You got a cord of firewood sitting out here in my yard, Earl, and the snow’s starting to fly already, so if you want to burn any of that stuff this winter, you better drive over here and get it out this morning.”

  Earl says damn, but quickly assures his father that he’ll be over in a few hours. “Be good to see you, anyhow,” he adds. “I haven’t seen you since what, Christmas?”

  “Before.”

  “Right, before. Well—we got to catch up.”

  Nelson agrees, and the men say good-bye and hang up. Then Nelson gets stiffly up from the table and tosses a log from the woodbox into the stove, goes to the cabinet over the sink, and brings down the vodka bottle and juice glass and pours his second drink of the day. The dog watches, her yellow and brown eyes drooping from the heat. Then she closes her eyes and sleeps.

  The woman in Nelson Painter’s dream is sometimes his first wife, Adele, who lives out in San Diego now, alone, and sometimes she’s Allie, his second wife, who lives with him in this house, where as town clerk she runs her office from the room he made out of the shed that connects the house to the barn. In the dream, it doesn’t seem to matter, Adele or Allie; they behave the same way—they scream at him, a roar, high and windy, a frightening mix of rage and revulsion that blames him for everything in general and nothing in particular. The dream always takes place in New Hampshire, though sometimes it’s set in the tenements and trailers he shared with Adele when they were young and raising their three kids, when Nelson was an apprentice and then a journeyman carpenter, working out of the Catamount local; and sometimes the dream is set in this house, a renovated nineteenth-century farmhouse that he bought when he married Allie and started making good money running work for the state and large, out-of-state contractors building New Hampshire dams, hospitals, and now the Seabrook nuclear power plant. Nelson is no longer running work, of course, no longer a foreman, for it has gotten too complicated for someone without an engineer’s degree, and he can’t concentrate like he used to, but even so, he is making good money, thirty-six grand last year, more than Earl with his schoolteaching in Catamount, more than that bastard Georgie down in Rhode Island, working for the state as a fancy-pants counselor but never writing his own father, never returning calls. He acts like the old man is dead, for God’s sake. What’s wrong with a kid like that, a man in his thirties who won’t speak to his own father? At least Earl deals with him, more or less, though you’d have thought, if one of the boys was going to hate the father, it would be Earl, the elder, who was so much closer to his mom and was twelve when Nelson left them and thus probably was her confidant during those years when she was mad at Nelson for leaving them and not sending more money. But Georgie, he was always the easy one, the friendly one. It didn’t make sense. Any more than his dream made sense, the dream in which Nelson strolls into the room—a kitchen, a bedroom, it’s one or the other—and the woman, Adele or Allie, looks up from her work, ironing, putting away dishes, unpacking clothes from a trunk, and recognizing him, she points and starts screaming at him, as if to say, “He’s the one! He’s the one who killed me, murdered my baby, slew my mother, father, sister, brother! Him! Him!”

  Despite its insane fury, the dream doesn’t weigh on Nelson so much as it angers him. He knows it’s about guilt, not redemption, and he’s said to himself at least a hundred times that of course he feels guilty for the way he’s treated people over the years, his wives, his children, others, too, old friends who won’t talk to him anymore, sisters, brothers-in-law, bosses, even strangers, guys he meets in bars after work and drinks late with and then somehow gets to arguing with, and before he knows how it happens, it has happened again, and there he is, being pulled off some guy and hustled out the door or picked up off the floor and aimed by strangers toward his car. Then he weaves across the lot to his car, gets it started, and drives slowly home, where for years Adele and now Allie wait for him, wait to shout at him, or if not to shout, then to glare and snub him and show him her back, until he gets mad all over again and wrecks the careful affection he’s built up between them since the last time. Oh, sure, he knows that once every few years he loses control and hits his wife across the face or pushes her away too hard. But he isn’t a wife beater, one of those guys who takes out his frustrations on someone who can’t defend herself. No, he just loses control once in a while, once in a great while, dammit, when he’s been hounded, nagged, criticized, picked at, until he just can’t stand it anymore, so he lashes back, pushes her away, gets himself left alone, for God’s sake, so he can think.

  Around eight, Nelson takes his third drink. Then, passing from the kitchen through Allie’s cluttered office, he goes into the cold, dark barn, where his ten cords of wood are stacked in neat, head-high rows along the near wall from the front to the back of the large building. When he returns, chilled, with an armload of wood, he sees his wife at the range, boiling water for tea. Her short, blue-gray hair is wet from her shower and slicked back like a boy’s, and she’s dressed in her usual western clothes, jeans too tight around her big hips and legs and a red-and-white-checked shirt with pearl buttons. Her clothing annoys him, though he never says so directly. “You dress like you want people to think you keep horses,” Nelson has told her. With most people (though no longer with him), Allie affects a manliness that Nelson finds disturbing—a hearty, jocular way of speaking. She’s a back slapper, a shoulder puncher, characteristics that, when he first took up with Allie, attracted Nelson. Long before that, he’d come to despise Adele’s whine, her insecurity and depression, so that Allie’s good-natured teasing, her tough talk, released him from guilt for a while, maybe a year, maybe two, until he began to see through the bravado to the strangely fragile woman inside, and when he hurt her with his hard, unexpected words and once in a while with his hands, too, he began to feel guilty again, just as with Adele. You think a woman’s strong, that she can take it, so you treat her as an equal, and before you know it she can’t take it, and suddenly you’re forced to tiptoe around her as if a single hard step would break her into a thousand weeping pieces. More and more, Nelson believes that being alone is the only clear route to his happiness. It’s coming to seem the only way to avoid hurting other people, which in his experience is what gives them power over you. Look at Georgie, his son. The boy has a power over Nelson that comes from his belief that he was hurt by Nelson over twenty years earlier, when the boy was only ten. Earl, now—he’s different. Earl’s made of tougher stuff. You can’t really hurt him; he’s like his dad that way. He won’t let you close enough to hurt him, and consequently he never obtains any power over you, either. That’s the kind of love Nelson both understands and respects. It’s what he had with his second wife in the first year or two of their marriage and what he misses in her now.

  “You’re up, eh,” he says to Allie’s back and dumps the wood into the woodbox, startling the dog awake.

  “Yep.” The dog gets to her feet and crosses to Allie, shoves her head against the woman’s hand until she strokes it between the long, floppy ears. “Ah, you big baby,” Allie says. The dog leans her weight against Allie’s thigh, and she goes on patting the tall, ungainly animal. It’s Allie’s dog, not Nelson’s—he insists that he doesn’t like animals. He’s been this way for as long as he can remember. He doesn’t know why he is this way, and he doesn’t care anymore, if he ever did. It’s too late to care. It’s how he’s survived, and thus it’s who he is. Let other people adjust to him—Allie, Earl, Georgie, everyone. If, like Georgie, they aren’t willing to adjust, then fine, go away, leave him alone. Alone to think.

  “Paper come yet?” Allie asks him.

  “You feel like going out to get it, it’s there.” Nel
son has sat back at the table and faces the woodstove, rubbing his hands before it, to get rid of the chill. He’s a large, fleshy man, and he looks like a bear cleaning its paws after eating.

  “You gonna get dressed?” she asks.

  “Eventually. It’s Sunday.”

  “I know. I just—”

  “What?”

  “Nothing.” She walks to the refrigerator, pulls a tube of frozen orange juice from the freezer, and goes to the sink to prepare it.

  “Earl’s coming by,” he says. “He can bring the paper in from the mailbox.”

  “Oh? He coming for the wood? It’s snowing.”

  “That’s the point. He don’t get it now, it’ll be there in April.” Suddenly, he stands up, and the dog clatters away from the sink, and Allie looks over at him.

  “What?” she says.

  Nelson is looking intently out the window next to the stove, staring at the driveway and yard, where his son’s wood is heaped up.

  “What?” she repeats. “Who is it?”

  “Leave me alone. For God’s sake, leave me alone. I’m trying to think.” He moves closer to the window and peers out, as if searching for someone in the snowy distance.

  Allie goes back to breaking the frozen orange juice into a green plastic pitcher, and the dog sits on rickety haunches and watches Nelson at the window. “Maybe I should get dressed,” he says in a low voice. “So I can help Earl crack that wood loose and load it. Stuff’s frozen into the ground, most of it.”

  Allie says nothing.

  “Maybe I’ll call him again. See if he’s left yet.”

  “It takes a half hour in good weather. He’ll be an hour today,” Allie says without looking at him. “You got no hurry.” She speaks carefully, slowly, in a deliberately quiet voice.