He suspected that the nursery had been out of use much longer than other parts of the house—the crib and bassinet were rotting antiques, and the walls so severely water-damaged that great areas of plaster had melted away, revealing the wooden lath which itself was rotting and falling. Much of the ceiling had come down, exposing beams just below the roofline and blackened, crumbling electrical cable. Here and there charred areas of the exposed wood revealed intermittent fire damage. At first Rudy was angry, but then decided that that kind of deception didn’t fit the realtor’s character; Lorcaster must not have known about the damage.
He and Marsha had been about to build a nursery when he’d lost them both. And now, with a sick feeling, he realized he was liking the idea of having a nursery here in this house, whatever its shape. Solitary people didn’t have nurseries in their houses, nor did lonely young bachelors, nor did people with no more hope left for the future. Whatever changes he would make to this house, he knew that in some form this nursery would stay. There was something not quite right about that, he knew, but he didn’t care. After his first family had died, the thought of having children had terrified him, although he’d still had the desire. He’d never told Marsha about any of these feelings; he’d acted as excited and happy as she was.
More life meant more death—that’s what it finally came down to. The awful fecundity of the world, the terrifyingly long reach of life and its death accompaniment seemed to him a perversion. Every birth seemed to take place within a flowering of rot. What had nearly driven his father insane in the camps was having to live in ultimate exposure to so many people, their naked bodies, their bad habits, their stares, their breakdowns, their piss and shit violating his own flesh. And yet with such an overwhelming sense of massed living, breathing, sweating humanity, they still lived in a cemetery. There was no escaping it. More life meant more death, and what did it matter that your child died as long as you yourself survived? Rudy’s father used to say that his own papa would have pushed him into the ovens before him if he’d had the chance and if it would have helped him save himself. But Rudy’s father had lived and his grandfather perished. Who could figure it? Friends, families meant nothing. So much death in life, so much terror of both—the mathematics were unacceptable, yet inescapable.
What little wallpaper remained in the ancient nursery had yellowed to the point of brownness, so murky that its pattern was indecipherable. Rudy came as close to the wall as he dared, for the very walls stank of ancient damp and sewer smell. After a while he determined that the figures painted beneath the brown were cartoonish images of cute tiger cubs and lamb babies playing together, but the browning and other damage had so distorted their features they looked almost depraved, soiled and chewed upon. Just the thing for a nursery in a mausoleum, he mused, and felt disgust with himself for this errant thought.
He went to the side of the bassinet and rested his hand there. A miniature baby’s pillow of pink silk lay on a greying, dusty blanket. The pillow was creased in such a way that Rudy could almost see the wrinkles where new eyes squeezed shut, where a new nose had just shown itself, where thin lips pursed into an upside-down W. The surface of the face began to crinkle and collapse, rotted cloth giving way, dark insect heads flooding out of pores and blisters and cavities to swarm across the blanket, eating and laying and multiplying even as they filled the bottom of the bassinet with a thick, writhing soup. Rudy stepped back as the tide lapped over the edge of the bassinet, long chains of the insects hanging out like the waving, reaching fingers of a dark hand.
But then he knew that wasn’t what he was seeing at all. A few insects, no more, stains and shadows imitating the rest. With the little self-control Rudy had remaining, he left the room slowly, pulling the door tightly shut behind him.
Downstairs by the stairwell was the one door in the house he hadn’t yet tried. It was cold to the touch, despite the severe heat in the other rooms—so cold his fingertips adhered painfully to the metal knob. He hadn’t gone through this door his first visit—Lorcaster had said it led to the ice house. He’d planned to leave any examination of the ice house until he actually moved in. He hadn’t been sure if it was usable, if he even wanted to use it, or if he’d have it torn down.
He found himself wrapping his fingers around the cold metal of the knob again and again as if trying to warm it. But the knob would not warm, and each time he came dangerously close to losing some skin. And yet still his hand seemed to need to caress the painfully cold knob. Finally he brought his hand away bleeding, the fingers extended and spread, unable to touch each other. Rudy waved the hand around in the air to help ease the pain. It fluttered like a wounded, bleeding bird. It fluttered as if seeking something to hold, another hand, or maybe something sharp that would take the skin off.
An exploration of the ice house itself would wait until tomorrow. Rudy went back into the empty living-room, skinned out of his clothes, and put his bare body down on the clean white sheet he’d used to cover the floor. A slight trickle of blood from his hand painted the sheet as he tossed and turned, searching for sleep in the worn patterns of the floorboards.
This was all he had left, but it didn’t matter. He had plenty of money—death money, pain money, blood money—to buy himself an entire new world of possessions.
II
Rudy woke up cold again. Sometime during the night the furnace had shut off.
His belly, arms, thighs were smeared with cold dried blood. The cold gobbets of blood around the wounds on his hand looked like cherry Jell-O. Jesus, what have I done to myself? He thought about the previous night and knew he had had some trouble with a door, but couldn’t remember anything more than that. Jesus … He wadded up the bloodied sheet and tossed it into the corner. The shock of changing heat and cold must have got to me … hallucinations … He staggered into the kitchen and pushed hard on the tap with his good hand. He was pleased to see that the pipes weren’t frozen, but he would always wonder why not. He shoved his bloody hand under the tap and grimaced. The water wasn’t exactly freezing, but cold enough. After a few minutes it began to warm; thin threads of blood and bits of torn skin swirled dizzily down the drain. Jesus …
He looked out the kitchen window. The sun was high and bright, probably close to ten o’clock. Ice-melt flowing over the window distorted the view, but the bright snow and sun against yellow-and-orange trees actually made the outside world look halfway inviting. He tied his hand up in a towel and padded off to his pile of gear in one corner of the living-room to find some warm clothes.
In the morning glare the house appeared even less friendly than it had the afternoon before. The rooms seemed concentrated with dust—transfusing the air, dusting the walls, powdering the rough wooden floorboards—as if the intense cold had sealed the atmosphere inside, permitting nothing to escape. The house needed a good airing out, but Rudy was more than reluctant to open up the windows. As a compromise he cracked one window in the living-room and one upstairs. After a few minutes a ribbon of icy cold wound its way past him and up the stairs, dust motes crystallized and shining as they rode along its back.
The walls looked even worse than they had the day before. He began to wonder if any of them were salvageable. He imagined stripping the house down to its skeleton and rebuilding its walls with blocks of ice—thin, hard sheets of it for windows, curtained with lacy frost. His fantasies made him colder; he pulled on long underwear, two pairs of socks, the warmest pants and shirt he could find, shiny virgin boots thick as elephant hide. He felt swollen and uneasy in his new down-filled jacket, but he knew activity would lessen that discomfort.
The front door stuck when he tried to open it. A few hard pushes and it broke free with a snap. Tiny bits of ice stung his scalp, forehead, cheekbones.
Outside, the sun was like a huge white eye with a burning stare. If he looked into it long enough, Rudy knew he’d be able to see the deadly dark pupil hiding within. He pulled on his hood to protect himself—not from moisture, but from that fearsome s
un.
During the night, light snow had pushed up on both sides of the door and was frozen in place. Now small holes were melting through the delicate membranes of ice—a woman’s dazzling white lingerie dripping on the line. He almost expected her to come walking out of the snowbank that filled half of the yard, naked, pale, and cold. Rudy walked around the side of the house and could see the pond and the distant trees beyond. Snow still capped the branches, but enough had melted so he could now see the distant darkness inside the trees.
From here he could see how badly the exterior of his house had weathered the years. Below one of the upstairs windows the wood had cracked and a brown stain spread from there down to a window on the first floor. Always a bad sign—there was a good possibility of structural damage underneath. But the rest of the structure was promising: a lot of scraping, a little puttying, replacement of a few shingles, and a good paint job would probably take care of it all.
As he continued down the slope to the ice house portion of the structure, he couldn’t help watching the pond, looking for some of the shadows he’d seen the day before. An oval near the center had melted—he could see rough waters rise here and there above the ice as if attempting escape. That water’s too rough for a landlocked pond, he thought. He could sense the sun’s heat battling the cold trapped over the pond.
He found this perceived invisible activity unsettling, and looked away, gazing at his feet as they stalled and slipped their way down the slope by the ice house.
The ice house looked to be as sturdy a wooden building as Rudy had ever seen. It had two whitewashed levels: the ice house itself—level with the main house and with its own wraparound porch—and directly below it, a stone-walled cellar of some sort, or maybe it was an old-fashioned cooling chamber. Dead vines clung to the outside of the stone—he wondered if he would see it green up come spring. A rotting top hat had been nailed directly to the stone, a hole cut into the top. He stepped closer; an ancient bird’s nest rested inside. The outside door to this lower level was only a few yards from the pond. Several shade trees planted close together made a protective shield for the southern exposure. A little canal three feet across led from the pond to a small hatch to the right of the door—for transporting the cut ice blocks, apparently. The roof of the ice house had a sharper pitch than that of the house, and its eaves were unusually wide, wide enough to shade the walls of the ice house even when the sun was low in the sky. The wraparound porch was similarly wide, so that thick posts had had to be used to support it. This would leave the outer stone walls of that lower level in shadow virtually all the time.
Of course there were no windows in the ice house, and Rudy could detect no doors off that upstairs porch, just a connecting walkway to the side of the main house and an outside staircase leading down to the pond. Other than the untouchable door inside the house he’d tried the night before, the only other entrance into the structure appeared to be the outside door to the lower level. If he was to find any more he’d have to go through that door.
This wasn’t to be easily accomplished. Although the door had no lock, Rudy couldn’t budge it. It was a thick door, heavy wood, and swollen from all the moisture. Rudy didn’t think the damage had been caused by snow—the overhanging porch kept the area in front of the door relatively clear, and a small stone wall served as a windbreak for snow blowing off the frozen pond. Rather, it looked to have been underwater for a long period, as if at some time the pond had overflowed its banks. Something else Lorcaster had failed to mention, or perhaps hadn’t known about. In any case, if Rudy used the ice house the door would have to be replaced.
Rudy retrieved the heavy-duty crossbar and a large flashlight from the new truck. He rammed the sharp end of the bar into the doorjamb and started prying. Dark wood splintered with a dull, damp sound. He had to pry away chunks all up and down the edge of the door before it finally creaked part way open; the edge looked gnawed by giant teeth. He wedged his heavy boot into the opening and used hands and knees to open it the rest of the way.
Bright, ice-reflected light flooded the stone chamber. The stark shadows of the support posts and Rudy’s own upright form alternated with the bright gleamings of ice and metal. He fumbled for the light switch, and was pleased to see that the bulb was still good. The room became evenly brown. He breathed a heavy earth smell. The thick stone walls had troughs on each side, probably for keeping milk, meat, cheeses, vegetables cool during the summer. And, he suddenly recalled from some forgotten novel, for keeping the dead until the undertaker could get there. Tar had been used to seal the joints where walls met ceiling and floor. Antique ice pikes, picks, knives, and saws hung from pegs in the support beams overhead. The floor was sloped for drainage, as was the ceiling overhead, giving it a dangerous, caved-in look. From the lowest point of the ceiling a small pipe protruded above the drain in the floor, several foot-long icicles hanging from its open end. Above him were the press and cold of several tons of ice.
As he walked towards the back, his boot crunched through something brittle. He glanced down. The toe of his boot was wrapped in a tiny rib cage of greying bone threaded with dried flesh. He shook his leg and the bones separated and fell. The skull of the thing peered out at him from the side of one of the support beams.
A staircase rose in the center of the back wall. Rudy began climbing the dark well of it, intent on viewing the ice. With much effort, he was able to push aside the cellar-style doors in the ceiling. Old, dark sawdust rained heavily onto his head and shoulders. He was suddenly afraid of insects in his hair and down his collar, but he didn’t really think any could live in such cold. Finally the air overhead was still. With no breeze to distribute it, the cold had the presence and intensity of stone. He turned on the flashlight and directed it overhead.
Tall columns of sawdust-caked ice rose up into the darkness of the roofline where Rudy’s flashlight beam could not reach. An ice cathedral. An ice tomb. Rudy moved the beam around. He could see little detail under the grimy sawdust: a collage of shadows, light-absorbing grit, and isolated, jeweled ice reflections.
His back was damp with sweat inside the multiple layers of clothing. He could feel it turning to sleet as the chamber air drifted over him, as he thought about this dark, cold interior, this temporary storage place for the dead.
As a child he’d seen an old black-and-white movie late one night on television, a night like so many others in which he’d tried fruitlessly to sleep. He couldn’t remember the name, but it was a science-fiction thing in which a scientist had frozen the bodies of Nazis in order to bring them back later, into a world less cautious, perhaps less aware of the evil. The interior of Rudy’s ice house reminded him somewhat of the stark blacks and whites of the mad scientist’s freezing chamber.
At the time he’d become obsessed with the image of that freezing place, where sleeping Nazis waited. Strangely enough, he found himself thinking of that freezing place as a kind of analogue for the gas chambers and ovens his father had survived. He felt compelled to re-imagine his father’s time in the camps as if they had been places of freezing, where the naked bodies had been stacked into great freezers instead of gas chambers, ovens, and mass graves, their postures of agony preserved for all time, until some future scientist devised a way of safely thawing them, and they were able to wander naked among their descendants, minds perhaps damaged by the intense cold so that they shuffled and stared, but still able to bear witness to their terrible ordeal.
Rudy’s father had signed himself into a nursing home before the cancer finally took him.
“This is the worst place you could have chosen!” Rudy had screamed at him.
His father had smiled sadly. “I know.”
“I don’t understand. You have the money for a good place.” The halls bore the constant stench of shit and piss. Half-naked residents shambled through the halls.
His father had looked around dreamily, calling to the residents he had never met before, using the old Jewish names from the distant
past. Then Rudy had known: this was his father’s own way of re-imagining the camps.
Rudy closed the doors to the ice chamber and backed down the steps. He sat on the edge of a stone trough waiting for his eyes to adjust, then he went back out into blinding light and ice, closing the broken door behind him as best he could.
“So, you plannin’ to sell some of that ice?”
Rudy spun around so fast his feet slid out from under him. He recovered by throwing his knees together, but not without considerable embarrassment. He felt ridiculous; he was sure he looked even worse. The man staring at him from the other side of an ancient green snowmobile was tall but sickly looking—lids and eyes so dark it was like looking into two holes. He wore a dirty green-checkered jacket and flop-eared cap—standard New England farmer issue. “Can I help you?” Rudy managed, trying not to betray the aching pain in his ankles.
“Didn’t mean … to startle you,” the man said. Rudy took the comment more as an assertion of position than as an apology.
“No problem,” Rudy said. “And you wanted …?” These New Englanders could beat around the bush all they wanted to, but Rudy wasn’t about to play that game.
“I asked if you were puttin’ the place back into business again. Sellin’ the ice. Talk has it you’re gonna harvest this year. First time in twenty, I reckon.”
“Well, sir … I guess I didn’t catch your name. Mine’s Rudy. Rudy Green.”
“Netherwood.” He stuck out his hand and Rudy latched onto it with an odd sense of desperation. For such a sickly-looking fellow, Netherwood’s hand was enormous, and strong. “B.B. is what folks call me.”
“Well, Mr. Netherwood, I don’t know where that talk came from, but I’ve made no such plans. I haven’t made any decisions in that area at all, as a matter of fact.”
Absent Company Page 28
