Praise for Rules for Old Men Waiting
“Mr. Pouncey writes with enough style and elegance to bring envy into the heart of many a good novelist.” —NORMAN MAILER
“Rules for Old Men Waiting is luminous and lovely, a book deserving of the word noble.” —The Palm Beach Post
“This is a wonderful novel of a man’s experience, and it touches every chord: a wholeness to which each incident crucially contributes so that wars and loves and losses, and mortality itself, are lived by the reader. The book is charged with the excitement of intelligent existence—and distinguished, above all, by its great humanity.” —SHIRLEY HAZZARD
“Written with admirable restraint and composed with sturdy, elegant prose, it’s an object lesson in the fact that, sometimes, less can be more. Human and moving, this is the portrait of a once-quick man grown slow and old, raging against the dying of the light.” —London Daily Mail
“A deeply sensual, moving, thrilling novel that calls for a second and third reading—it is that rich.” —FRANK MCCOURT
“A stunning piece of work, beautifully composed and finished. It’s very much its own thing, but in its reach, intelligence, and power it recalls Lampedusa’s The Leopard and Marai’s Embers, along with something of Norman MacLean. Old Men belongs on that same shelf.” —WARD JUST
“[Rules For Old Men Waiting] is an elegant work, written with both cold-eyed accuracy and sympathetic understanding, which for once lives up to the promotional claim that it is ‘a classic in the making.’ ” —The New Zealand Herald
“A tender, beautifully expressed rumination on love and loss by a highly intelligent and marvelously brave old man.” —LOUIS BEGLEY
“[Rules for Old Men Waiting] confronts its primal subject with a lucidity and plainness that seem to be descended from the historians and poets we have labeled classical. . . . The result is a book of restrained and compressed imaginative authority on a theme that can be neither avoided nor resolved, a deepening current through the middle of our lives.” —W. S. MERWIN, The New York Review of Books
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
2006 Random House Trade Paperback Edition
Copyright © 2005 by Peter Pouncey
Reading group guide copyright © 2006 by Random House, Inc.
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House Trade Paperbacks, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
RANDOM HOUSE TRADE PAPERBACKS and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc. READER’S CIRCLE and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
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eISBN: 978-0-307-43172-1
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Table of Contents
Praise
Title Page
Copyright Page
CHAPTER 1 - Rules to Stop the Rot
CHAPTER 2 - Hatching the Plot
CHAPTER 3 - Characters
CHAPTER 4 - The Young Star-Captains
CHAPTER 5 - The Art of Seeing Differently
CHAPTER 6 - Trophies
CHAPTER 7 - The Last Pulse of Reverie
CHAPTER 8 - Going Down in the Mud (Part 1)
CHAPTER 9 - Going Down in the Mud (Part 2)
CHAPTER 10 - The Promise Canceled and Restored
CHAPTER 11 - No Glorious End for Warriors
CHAPTER 12 - The Deserter in No-Man’s-Land
CHAPTER 13 - His Own Quietus
Epilogue
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Rules for Old Men Waiting - PETER POUNCEY
A Conversation with Peter Pouncey
Questions and Topics for Discussion
About the Author
And it shall come to pass afterward, that
I shall pour out my spirit upon all flesh. . . .
Your old men shall dream dreams,
your young men shall see visions.
Joel 2:28
CHAPTER 1
Rules to Stop the Rot
The house and the old man were well matched, both large framed and failing fast. The house had a better excuse, MacIver thought; he was eighty, but the house was older than the Republic, had been a century old when Thoreau walked the Cape, though he couldn’t have seen it tucked away in the nondescript maze of scrub oak. It had been the willful seclusion of the place that had appealed to them when they first saw it—that and the equally hidden pool, about two minutes away through their woods, which must have decided the builder to choose the site. The oaks grew more substantial as they approached the pond, but the casual visitor would not have registered their rising height as the ground fell away down to the water. But when the path did its last little jink through the thicket of spare mossy trunks and last year’s leaves, you stood on the edge of something suddenly spacious. A stretch of almost two hundred yards of water, more than fifty wide, a glade of water, fringed at both ends by sedge and reeds, shaded along the sides by the larger oaks. Bird-loud by day, redwings and warblers in and out of the reeds and busy water-traffic of ducks, and even, for a few seasons, the stately progressions of a pair of swans; owls with their fluttery hoots at night, and very often at the far end beyond a fallen log, the hunched figure of a black-crowned night heron, the grim presiding judge executing sentence on a surprising number of small fish and frogs.
Margaret and he had watched the pond over the years at every hour in every season. In summer, it was their swimming pool, where they swam naked at any time of day. Often on hot August nights, they would have a last dip before bed. They would take one towel between them, and no flashlight, because the night sky overhead was bright enough to light their way down the faint, twisting path. MacIver, an energetic but clumsy swimmer, would thrash the water into turbulence out into the deep and then make for shore, and try to use the towel as little as possible, to leave it dry for Margaret. She would go on a while longer, parting the water gently in her rhythmic breast-stroke, the moonlight playing on her wet hair with each forward surge, a sleek and quiet otter. He would lose her in the shadowed background at the far end, and peer with great concentration into the dark, to catch the first ripple of her return. When she finally waded towards the bank where he was standing, he would stay motionless trying to register the first moment when he could see into her silhouette, and detect the dark roundness of her nipples and the triangle of her pubic hair. Then she would let him dry her off, and they would go home to bed.
In other seasons, dressed for the weather, they would take their station under one of the oaks, his back to the trunk, with Margaret sitting between his legs, and simply let the life of the pool evolve around them. They had seen families of deer come down to drink, they had seen a raccoon balance on a log and try to fish with his paw, and one evening in the last of the light, they had seen a great horned owl sail out from the tree above them and swoop on a small rabbit on the other side of the pond. They had heard the short squeal, and seen the inert furry bundle dangling from the bird’s talons as he passed over them on his return. Many foxes, and once he would have sworn a bobcat, though it can’t have been, padding along the far bank and back into the trees. You never knew what you would see. MacIver named the pond the Blind Pool, from a favorite boyhood story, though it was called Frog Pond on his geodetic map, and Margaret had called the house Night Heron House in honor of the constant sentinel standing by his fallen branch; she did a fine woodcut of him, too, which still hung inside the front door.
It was a traditional Cape house, but on a larger scale than was usual, a bold architect’s airy enlargeme
nt. The front rooms were high ceilinged and framed with more massive beams, and instead of the usual chicken-run stairs inside the front door, there was a handsome Y-shaped staircase down a wide hall, breaking at a little landing halfway up and then splitting to left and right for the upper rooms. A Victorian owner had widened the two front windows and bowed them, letting in more light, and then had built a porch between the two bows, with central steps up to the front door and a simple railing on either side. The house stood by itself in a clearing, which you had to maintain vigilantly: half a summer, and the locust, oak, and birch sprigs would be crowding onto the grass. Original glass in many panes; the shapes of things outside alternately clouded and cleared as your eyes moved across the windows. Original two-foot-wide floor-boards and paneling on the walls, flouting an ancient Massachusetts statute reserving such width for the absent king. A cool, self-possessed house of mellow resonance, as if you were living inside a spacious cello. Nothing too decorative.
They had three and a half decades to set their rhythms, coming and going to their secret fastness, the Night Heron House with its woods and pond. When Margaret fell ill and the doctors said they could do no more for her, they had moved to the Cape, as they had always planned in such a case, “year-round”; in fact, she had three seasons left, fall to spring, 1986–1987. At first the house had seemed to banish sickness. They had moved their bed into the living room, so she would not have to manage the stairs, but in the large, airy space she bustled light-footed as ever; she set up her easel, and started a series of tree-scapes framed by the windows at different times of the day. The trees on the canvas got barer, MacIver noticed, as the season turned, but the paintings got lighter, at first because the angle of focus was raised to allow more cloud and sky, and at the end, in the unfinished ones, because the marks on the prepared white canvas, while precisely made, were fainter, less assertive: the effect left on her only viewer was of being pulled in her art past the blank of whiteness to the vanishing point of thin air.
As winter approached, they would still visit the pond on good days, though they didn’t stay long to absorb its more furtive movement; they would come out at the end of the path and stand a few moments looking, an old couple supporting each other in a lover’s stance, heads inclined towards each other, his rangy arm around her frail shoulders, her mittened hand around his waist. Then they would work their way back; she only needed a sighting, it seemed. Things were moving faster for them now, forcing changes they could not plan. In no time the number of hours she could be up each day, the number of feet she could walk, were shortening on them. By the end of February, she was confined to bed, daily falling further away from him deeper into sickness. He was ill himself, he knew, but nothing to this. First weekly, then twice a week, he would make grim sallies to the drugstore for the morphine prescribed from New York, and come back as fast as he dared, fearful of finding another visible weakening. There was no talk of going somewhere else for final care. It would end here, in this room. He would read to her, coax her to eat a little, play Mozart to her, spin new tales she would like about his boyhood on Loch Affric, and games and battles farther afield. When she drowsed, he would stay sitting on in the bentwood rocker through the fading afternoon. She would wake up and read his unguarded face; she could see her fierce old Scot being gentled out of character by his own secret illness, never to be mentioned, and by grief.
It was all grotesquely new to him; he was not a man who had ever willingly let things be taken out of his hands. Sometimes she would send him on small missions, to shake him out of his spellbound broodings. She would ask him to go down to the pond, “and report back on your findings.” At first in the winter, he would have to work hard for interesting gleanings to take back to her—animal tracks on the frozen pond, an air bubble caught in the creamy ice inshore around the heron’s branch, the number of trees deep he could count in the leafless screen of woods across the pond, viewed from the oak where they hung the towel. When the grudging days of early spring arrived, and the trees were fretted more with undergrowth, the views foreshortened, but there was more to report. One day in late April, he had taken her back a box turtle, patterned in a smart brown and yellow plaid, but built a little too high off the ground, like the old Volkswagen Beetle, to be aerodynamically sound. MacIver had put him on the quilt, and the little fellow had finally stuck his head out of his shell and taken a couple of steps, before pooping quite impressively right there on the bed. Margaret had given him the Scottish name of Archibald, and insisted that MacIver take him back to exactly the same leaves in which he had found him, with the added gift of a lettuce leaf for his pains. She died three days after that, on the first soft day that promised full-blooded spring.
As Margaret had feared would be the case, MacIver did not do well after she had gone. He let himself go, and he let the house go. He knew it was happening and he felt badly about it as far as the house was concerned, but he didn’t seem able to do much about it, except fitfully. His concentration was gone, along with the object of his attention. There was a backlog of work due on the house; they had loved it and cared for it year after year, as it needed and deserved, but in the fall MacIver had persuaded Margaret against all previous habits to delay some of the chores to the spring; they should hunker down and enjoy each other quietly, without ladders looming and workers banging. She had been sick enough to agree, but the house was showing its frailty now quite markedly; it was no longer a matter of cleaning gutters, checking storm windows, and calling the exterminator to keep the termites at bay. The fabric of the house was sagging visibly on the eastern side, and he was sure it needed a new roof. And what else? He mentally checked off the items he knew about—siding on the windward face of the house, boiler, always feeble, cheating him of more and more degrees against the thermostat (unless it was the cold, or the windows?), two sagging, buckled gutters. In the end, he did not call the contractors, because he did not want them to open up the house and tell him how bad it was. And he did not call them because he still did not want their banging, their company, or even their secret sympathy. Bereavement seemed to work on him as a kind of blanket allergy, making him edgy and irritable to all the outside world.
And of course it was reciprocal: the world receded on him. Even his own Blind Pool seemed to shun him as an interloper. The lens of the water, which had taken in a full orbit of creatures and their activities, their presence and their shadows, and held them for key moments for the two of them to share and admire, now stared blankly upwards, blind indeed. He could tell that his ability to focus, to fix on a detail and hold it, had deserted him, and the loss of it had weakened his grasp on the place. He did not really seem able to see what was happening anymore.
Once he made an effort to put this right by willpower alone: he would make himself a botanist along the lines of Margaret herself, who could identify every wildflower she encountered, including the tiny creepers you were about to step on, barely showing more than two petals above the clutter of leaves around them. She had assembled a beautiful library of Victorian botanical books, gorgeously illustrated with her own kind of painterly eye. With these in hand, he would beat himself into an amateur botanist. He went for walks and collected samples of wild-flowers and grasses he did not know; he intended to study such things as root systems, the deepening shades of color at the base of petals, the precise veining and edge of every blade of grass. “Focus!” he enjoined himself. He sat at the dining room table with the fine old Victorian guides, his glasses on the end of his nose and his samples lined up in front of him, and announced to the empty room, “We will now name names.” Then he picked up an unoffending but anonymous plant, with small white flowers and long skinny leaves, and asked like an inquisitor: “What is your bloody name?” He riffled through the books, occasionally coming up with a winner: “Your name,” he declared in patiently didactic tones, “is Seneca Snakeroot,” and made a note of it on the pad beside him. He held himself to the work as long as he could, matching specimens to the elega
nt paintings in the guides, and putting doubtful ones aside for reexamination when he drew a blank, but the whole exercise was painful and pointless: he wasn’t meant to be a taxonomist—his interest in the work had no root. Why labor to put names on things, when there was no one there to say them to? He persevered for a few days with diminishing returns, and then the line of samples was left to wilt on the table, exuding a hot acidic scent, like weeds cut and left lying after the scythe. When they had fully dried and started to break up, he picked up the paper they were on and slid them unceremoniously into the trash.
Without taxonomy, the summer went on, and he could not really have said whether it was wet or dry, hot or cold. He went swimming a couple of times, and after the second attempt emerged shivering. His own illness was now hard for him to ignore. Passing the full-length mirror in the wardrobe door on his way to the shower, he surveyed with detachment the skeleton he would soon be, seeing through the paper-thin, blue-traced skin stretched over knobs: it was true, the bodies of old men were unseemly. Spidery on the outside, it seemed the whole web of connection was also fraying within; all his old orthopedic injuries were playing themselves out again, right knee dislocating itself, right shoulder clamped in arthritis so he could not raise his arm chest-high. His walk had slowed to a shuffle, testing each footfall.
Still, there were better days, when the cloud cover broke, the step seemed resolute and the mind clear. One day after Labor Day and a big September storm, he felt well enough to survey his pond once more, and was rewarded with a startling sign: he had barely made his way down the path to full view of the water, when an osprey, straying God knows how far afield, appeared, a stark apparition with the fierce black markings on the white frame, an obvious intruder making no effort to camouflage himself. The big hawk cruised one length of the pool nonchalantly first, circled round to the right, started another run a little more purposefully, saw what he was looking for, and made his strike. The descent was remarkably steep, the whole body taut, wings raised back and feet extended like locked landing gear, then the water pierced and the talons clenched on quite a large fish, while the huge wingspan worked to restore forward motion, feet and fish now trailing behind, scattering drops of water on the shattered green glass. MacIver watched frozen with excitement at the athleticism of the catch. “You like predators, don’t you?” Margaret had said years before at his exultation over the owl. “I love big obvious birds with style,” he had said, “but I love their victims, too.” So here was another one, another sign to him, writ large, he thought, to hit home to his too blatant nature. From owl to osprey, rabbit to fish. It seemed to put a seal on all the pool had offered them both over the thirty-five years. He was not confident he could visit it again. But what he had loved it for, he now saw, was not these extravagant gestures but its reserve, showing its secrets, big or small, in its own time, never profligate, keeping him humble, never an initiate, always a patient believer waiting for the next revelation. It was the closest he came to observing one of Margaret’s insightful cautions: “Don’t go so much for the staginess. Go for the deeper, quieter rhythms, and you’ll get some peace out of them!” Now he was grateful to the pool for making itself so vivid to him again, but he could leave it to its measured life apart; he would know it was playing out its habitual patterns those few steps through the woods away from him and his beleaguered house.
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