“Folks ’round the Bay love to talk, Mr. Green. That’s about all there is to do around here—don’t matter if it’s true or not. But I take it you haven’t decided not to open her up then, have you?”
“No, I can’t say that I’ve ruled it out completely. But I don’t think it’s likely either. I don’t know a thing about the ice business. That’s not the reason I bought this place. So you’re in the market for ice, are you?”
Netherwood shook his head. “Got all I need. Just figured you might be needing some help around here. I work cheap.”
“Well, I’ll keep that in mind …”
“Real cheap. I love this old place.” Netherwood looked almost ridiculous in his sudden enthusiasm. “And I love the ice business. You won’t do better than calling on me.
Rudy stared at this man who seemed to have grown healthier even as they talked. He tried to gauge his age, but between the years in his face and the strength in his hands Rudy found he could not. “I’ll seriously consider that, Mr. Netherwood,” he said. “I certainly will.”
That night Rudy spent a few hours hauling debris out of the rooms and piling it on to a snowbank on the north side of the front yard. He figured he could live with the mess in his yard until spring, when he could hire a truck to take it away. He knew he’d be sleeping in the living-room temporarily and so swept its floor clean and attacked the windows with ammonia, then caulk and heavy curtains to keep out the cold. This would be the last night he could stand it without a real bed, however. One of the next day’s projects was going to consist of moving a bed down from upstairs and fixing it up with some sort of mattress substitute. He couldn’t imagine lying down on any of the mattresses that had been left behind.
Rudy was putting the broom back into a narrow closet by the stairwell when one of his stocking feet slipped into a pool of cold water. He looked down. He didn’t know why he’d thought it water—it was viscous, like syrup or oil, and when he lifted his foot thin strands of it tugged at his sock.
He jerked his foot and the strands let go. They curled back into the clear pool and then the center of the pool turned milky, then appeared to solidify, looking something like a clump of torn whitefish meat or waterlogged tissue.
Rudy turned on the light hanging by the stairwell. A yellow glow seeped from the bulb. In slow motion, he thought, as if the air were impossibly thick here, or full of dust, but he could neither see nor feel anything unusual in the air.
At least the yellow light allowed him to see the extent of the leak—he was already thinking of it as a leak even though he had no idea what it might be leaking from. It had gathered into a spot approximately two feet across in the center of this section of grey flooring, with a narrow tail that wriggled its way underneath the door to the ice house.
Rudy had a sudden terror of the entire ice house turning to slush and pushing its way through the walls of his home, mashing the place into soggy kindling. He suddenly felt in touch with the terrible potential of all that ice.
A thawing was impossible. It was just too damn cold.
He grabbed a mop out of the closet and pushed it gingerly into the area of the leak. The mop rapidly filled with the damp and became so heavy Rudy could barely lift it from the floor. After a few seconds the mop head appeared to bleach. Rudy bent closer and discovered the bleached effect was in fact ice. The leak had frozen again, and the mop had frozen to the floor.
Rudy went back into the living-room for his boots, picked up his tire bar off the floor, and worked it back and forth between the door and the metal jamb where thin layers of melting and refreezing ice had glued the two pieces together.
His breath made tortured clouds of white mist in the air. Now and then he shoved so hard against the bar he wasn’t sure if the resulting cracking noise was the ice or his own bones giving way.
Finally he felt the door beginning to ease open. Tiny fragments of ice showered the floor. A sudden explosion of cold air tightened the skin of his face and forced his eyes closed. As he heard more ice cracking the weight of the door took it out of his hands. His eyes still closed, he heard the door bang against the wall as if from a great distance. He imagined a delicate balance of atmospheres between the space of his house and the space of the ice house. He imagined the ice house melting all at once: boards and timbers melting down to the foundation stones. And as an alternative vision he imagined his house frosting through from the inside, all the walls and floors rimed to a slick, glasslike finish.
But nothing so dramatic occurred when he opened his eyes. The passage into the ice house was dark, and smelled of old, cold air, but the switch just inside the door still made a bank of bulbs recessed into frosted cages overhead burn orange-under-white. Overhead the light disappeared into the dark recesses of the quarter-pitch roof. He could hear the faint whirring of the ventilator up there removing any collected vapor. Ahead of him a series of boards had been slid behind two upright timbers to hide the passage to the ice beyond. Bundles of long straw had been packed tightly around these as insulation. Intense cold had blackened the boards and straw and, as in his fantasy, had turned portions of these to black ice that bled darkly from the heat pushing in from the warm house. Here on the other side of these black boards was the oldest ice, the ice he hadn’t been able to see from the cooling chamber below.
Rudy went back for his tire bar and used it to loosen the ice that cemented the boards together. Then, by wiggling each board back and forth, he was able to free them from the hidden ice blocks. It took him two hours to remove the top five boards, exposing a window of antique ice three feet square.
The array of ice blocks was grey, like frozen fog, with occasional shiny specks buried deep inside which vaguely reflected the light from the caged overheads.
Rudy stepped closer, shielding his eyes for the best views, careful not to actually touch the ice for fear his skin would adhere to it.
Faint shadows moved across the ice. He twisted around, feeling as if someone had stepped behind his shoulder and momentarily blocked the light. But nothing was there.
He came back around, and stared into shadowed sockets, and beneath those a dark gaping mouth frozen in the act of swallowing ice.
Rudy shouted, and the face in the ice before him fogged over. And all his wiping and scraping on the dim ice would not bring it back.
When he finally shut the door behind him he discovered that the mop had become unstuck, fallen over, and the leak was drying. Only a small, pulpy, white residue was left, and that turned to frost, then pale fog even as he watched.
III
The second visitor to Rudy’s new home was Mrs. Lorcaster, the realtor’s wife.
He’d awakened late. The furnace definitely seemed to have a mind of its own, and his sleep had been disturbed several times during the night because of alternating intense heat and intense cold. He was bound to come down with something serious if he didn’t get it taken care of quickly. He’d been dressed only a short time when he heard the knocking at his door.
From what he could see, the woman standing on the other side of the icy door-panes seemed to be warmly but elegantly dressed: a dark suit and white blouse draped with a tailored, muted red cape of brushed wool. She tapped lightly, directly on the ice-covered frame. Ice broke and fell beneath the steady rap of her dark-gloved knuckles.
She was obviously nonplussed to be suddenly viewing his early-morning face distorted on the other side of the icy glass. But she recovered with a practiced smile. Rudy made a feeble attempt to smile back. He pulled as hard as he could on the door. It stuck, then let go all at once, showering her with a blizzard in miniature. Embarrassed, Rudy reached out to dust off her cape, but reconsidered when she reacted with a step backwards into the snow. “I’m sorry,” he said quickly. “Can I help you?”
“Quite all right.” She stepped past his arm and into the house. “I’m Emily Lorcaster. I believe you know my husband?”
Apparently not as well as I thought. He couldn’t match up this elegant
creature with Lorcaster. He stared at a silver lock of her hair trapped within a fold in her hood. A snowflake hung within the curl like a jewel, refusing to melt. “Yes. He sold me …” Rudy made a nervous, sweeping gesture. “All this.” He stopped, not knowing what else to say. “I feel very lucky,” he added awkwardly.
“Yes. Of course.” She tried to look past him into the rooms beyond. He found himself shifting his stance, purposely blocking her view. He didn’t know why—having just moved in he obviously wasn’t responsible—but he was embarrassed by the condition of the place. She gave up and looked at him directly. “I used to live here. In fact, I grew up in this house.” She looked at him in anticipation, but he had no idea what she expected from him.
“That’s very interesting,” he said, feeling increasingly inferior to this creature. He wondered if Lorcaster felt the same way. Perhaps that was why the man dressed the way he did.
“I’ve heard you may start up the ice operation again. My grandfather designed and built the ice house, as well as the living quarters here. My maiden name was Finney, you see.
Rudy tried to remember what Lorcaster had said about “Old Finney”. He couldn’t remember the specifics, just that it had had a negative tone to it. The previous owner hadn’t been a Finney, though—some investor in New York by the name of Carter. So it had passed out of the family. Now Rudy could make some rough guesses concerning Lorcaster’s reluctant style of salesmanship. “Just a rumor, I’m afraid,” Rudy said. “I don’t know how it started. Actually, I hadn’t really decided. You know, just yesterday a man named Netherwood came by—”
“Netherwood,” she interrupted. “I see. Still about, is he?”
Rudy didn’t think she really wanted the question answered. “I have to admit this interest in the ice has me curious,” he said. “I might have to look into it.”
“Oh, by all means! My grandfather, and my father after him had quite a lucrative business. And you’ll still find those very interested in the ice from this particular pond.”
“Magic ice, eh? Something special?” Rudy tried to chuckle, but it caught in his throat.
She eyed him coldly. “Perhaps. I wouldn’t know. But I know there is a market.”
“I’m surprised. Surely with modern refrigerators and freezers …”
“Tradition, Mr. Green. The people of the Bay value it most seriously. And some would cherish just the novelty of that sort of ice, I’m sure. And then there’s the ice palace. We had wonderful ice palaces! Many here still remember them.”
“Ice palaces?”
“Winters, for years, the whole town would come out to the pond and help Grandfather cut and haul the ice. Blocks two feet wide and almost three in length. They’d lay the blocks out on a pattern staked out in the snow on the other side of the stone wall; the forest wall made a beautiful backdrop. There they’d build up ice walls, and ramparts, and Grandfather would chisel turrets into the huge towers. People would come from towns many miles away to see the palace and spend their money. It was a great boon to the town.”
“I take it the custom eventually stopped?”
“They used my grandfather.” She looked almost, but not quite, angry. “Or at least he thought so. He said they only cared about money, or whatever they had in hand. He said they had changed, all of them. He said they sat around in their houses doing nothing, breathing in the fog off the Bay, letting it fill up their lungs. He said there were just too many of them for comfort. Too many eyes to stare at him in their pain. Too many mouths to feed. Too many bodies old and dying. Finally, too many to bury. He said they didn’t even behave like human beings anymore.”
“That’s pretty strong, isn’t it?”
She smiled faintly. “I suppose my grandfather wasn’t very well at the time. He worked very hard, you see. Other than the construction of the palace each winter, he would permit no one to help him, except for occasional odd jobs he would offer my father when he was young. He would hire no one, and my grandmother was not allowed near the ice. He discouraged visitors; he no longer had any friends in the town. He suffered the customers for his ice simply as a necessary evil. “My own personal poison,” he would say, and laugh—the only time I ever heard him laugh. He’d cut the ice himself and guide it down the trough from the pond to the cooling room. He wore the pike handles down until they snapped from his using them, his hands moving constantly around and around their shafts in that nervous way he had when he worked the ice.
“Back when there were ice palaces he used to let me play inside. I was the princess, you see. He said the ice palace was my castle, and I could do what I wanted. Once he stopped building the palaces he had very little to say to me. He’d simply haul the ice that would have gone into the palace up into the ice house, and once the ice house was full he’d still cut the blocks and lay them out on the bank, leaving them there for spring melt. Fewer and fewer customers came, so there was always a large surplus left on the bank.”
“So why did he bother cutting up the ice? Just to have something to do?”
“My grandfather never did anything ‘just to have something to do’. Everything was done with a purpose. I used to think that at his age he believed he needed to repeat the habitual gestures of his job again and again or else his muscles would lose their edge and forget what was required of them. Eventually it became clear that he viewed it as he would view the milking of a cow: it was necessary.”
“If you don’t milk them they become swollen and in pain. Eventually they go dry,” he said. She looked at him quizzically. He smiled. “My father kept a cow in his garage in the city, until enough of his neighbors complained. He had liked that cow more than people, and trusted it far more. He had said that the cow was infinitely more reliable. Forgive me for saying so … but I imagine the town found that to be very strange behavior.”
“Certainly. They did. But things happened when he failed to harvest the ice. I know. I saw them.” She paused, as if waiting for him to guess. Get on with it, he thought, but said nothing. And still she waited.
“What happened?” he finally asked, angered by this petty use of power.
“At first the ice turned very grey. Greyer than any fog. If you put your tongue on it, it would taste sour. Some got very sick doing that—a few even died. And you could see all kinds of shadows trapped inside, or worse still, vaguely moving if you had the right angle on it. Sometimes you thought you saw faces there, as if someone were looking up at you through a foggy window, but you could never be sure. If you put your hand on the ice too long the ice hurt the skin. It burned, or ached for days. And a few times the ice went completely black, coal black, surely unlike any ice that ever was. Grandfather said harvesting the ice was the only way to keep the pond pure, to put things right again. He said that it was dangerous if left too long.”
“You saw this?” he asked.
“I did. And tasted it. And felt it.”
Rudy turned and looked out a side window. He could see one corner of the pond where the ice had melted and dead leaves floated, swirling in a small circle. White chunks of ice bobbed to the surface like drowned hunks of flesh. In the yard, snow and ice encrusted the old furniture he’d tossed there, making it resemble brilliant white formations of coral. “How long has it been since the ice was last harvested here?” he asked.
“Too long, Mr. Green.” She almost smiled. “Better a dazzling clean ice palace, don’t you think, than that great stretch of frozen grey fog?”
The wind picked up after lunch, keeping Rudy inside. He spent several hours staring out of an upstairs window at the pond and the distant trees. By late afternoon white snow-mist was blowing off the frozen water—a solid expanse of it, no breaks now—turning to grey fog once it got a few yards over the land. The brilliant white eye in the sky had shut its lid. Ice trees bent and broke into glistening shards as the wind picked up. The skin of the pond grew greyer still. It seemed to turn to night in the pond before it turned to night in the sky.
The visitors had
soured Rudy. He’d come here for escape, and now they wanted him to revive a business—to build ice palaces, no less. Despite his fascination with the ice house and its history, the thought of all the other visitors that that might bring, all the customers, appalled him. He just wanted to be alone. With his thoughts, his memories, his imagined relationships with dead families. He could live with the invisible presence of Old Finney, even his father—that seemed to fit, that seemed inevitable. But no one else.
That night Rudy set up one of the old beds in his living-room, tightening all the rusted wood-screws and hammering in a few large nails for additional support, and constructing a mattress out of sewn-together sheets with rags and odd bits of clothing stuffed inside. He shut the furnace off completely, thinking that he’d sleep better in his clothes, with several heavy blankets laid on top.
But after only a short time he was awake again, the sweat pouring off him, the distant sound of the furnace a hot static in his ears. He stared up at the ceiling. He thought he could see the waves of heat flowing there, gesturing to him with their long curves and heated mouths. Sweat popped up out of his flesh and immediately went cold, so that he could track the progress of every drip across his painfully warm skin.
The furnace was working overtime to protect him from the deadly cold. As if it had its own intelligence. The cold was tricky: it hid in the corners, under the bed, around the windows. It could seep through an unprotected electrical outlet or along a pipe coming through the wall. It prowled the floorboards in search of ill-protected feet.
But more than that, a mass of it hid just on the other side of the badly insulated wall. The oldest cold Rudy had ever known, heavy and full of memory.
He’d always insisted that couples who had separate beds—or, worse still, separate bedrooms—could not really call themselves married at all. It was the body heat that was important, that they needed to share, the heat that signified their living, their working and doing. And of course at no time was that plainer than on a cold night, when the skin sent out the messages of I live, I need, and I love. He wouldn’t even allow himself to buy an electric blanket. Now his memories of his wives and children were cool ones—they lacked the heat of life, the heat of love. In memory there was only numbing, deadly cold.
Absent Company Page 29
