This tree stands inside the bowl, a monument of roaring health and the only green for acres. A crowded monstrous thing with naked and muscled limbs, some like trunks in their own right, with seven tire swings suspended like ballast from the two lowest limbs. Some of the tires sway on their stout ropes, as though only just vacated. A dead kite peeks from the grass near the tree. A pair of vivid pink and white beach balls give the patchy yard a surreal tint—he can’t imagine children staying here, but Corddry can see no other instruments of leisure or rest around the house. The brief porch has no rocking chairs. Nothing to use for contemplation of the vague slope and its arc of watchful crone trees, of the imminent reason for one’s presence here.
“And my House in communion, washed in gone wine,” he murmurs, tasting the words and threading them out slowly, but doesn’t bother wasting space in his pocket book. “Would I wish for rain or would it soak?” Tepid as twice-steeped tea. He has always written badly when his heart is in knots. When another lover spurned him. When the lover that mattered died two hundred miles from him in a hospital bed the poet never laid eyes on. In those moments he used to imagine his eyes growing into deep holes that had seen too much of all that lay ahead again. The old routine. Yet now the horizon is readable in its nearness, its abruptness. He will not again win the National Book Award. 1979 smolders far behind in the brighter ashes. The poet only wishes for the last handful of new words. He has no time to purify them by fire, but they could be kindled on a page. Something to shelter against the single paragraph his obituary will be shoehorned into. No surviving family. No partners. Showed great promise once.
The Volvo eases down the gentle slope. Here the gravel widens into a square. There are no cars, no garage, only a tall windowless wall serving no utilitarian purpose for the house, paint flaking like an aged fresco. He gets out of the car with his overnight bag, pats the breast of his coat for his slim book.
Around the front of the house, his eyes averted from those staring tires, and the quiet is broken as he steps up onto the porch. Low voices. The owner, a Mr. Hessel, didn’t mention any guests. But the poet feels no pique. Anders, a mythology man Corddry has half-known since their teaching days at Dartmouth, told him this place is a kind of hospice in which a friend of his cousin had apparently “gathered his last thoughts.” There is a room here, and a bottle with an eyedropper full of “a good death” perched upon a table, that affords one a soft, guiltless shuffle off the coil. Hessel confirmed this in an evasive but acquiescent way. An end to the pain, and the striking through of that word—suicide—that might otherwise mar the one paragraph of eulogy in the paper. He can be interred with a kernel of pride.
But the words he feels he can write here—he has no way to know why he at once felt the assurance, the galvanization, he simply did from that single vague conversation with Anders—those are the true reason he’s come. The idea, from the first, felt like removing the bookmark from himself, where he has always fallen open to the pages of his thirties, well-thumbed, his spine lightly broken.
Cobwebs lace the quartered window in the front door. He turns the brass knob and steps into a high-ceilinged space flush with warmth. This main room seems to claim the bulk of the house, and it hasn’t been cleaned in some time. Part of him registers the low fire in the grate, the uneven row of various animal skulls along one of the oak walls, the downward slant of the ceiling. Too many sofas and stuffed chairs stand upon the vast area rug on the floor.
The rest of him takes in the group of people sitting in a waiting line on two of the sofas. The sofas each tilt a bit toward the other, suggesting an arrowhead that directs Corddry toward them, and the tone of everything changes. He feels it as a pressure in his ears, like driving into the mountains after a long time away from home, a headache, a swelling of the dust motes in the last blades of light falling through the parted curtains over the windows.
“Hello, dear,” an elderly woman says, “it’s approaching evening prayer.”
Not merely elderly but deeply old, wrinkles like crevasses and dried riverbeds, a shamanic, photojournalistic old. She and two other women and three men watch him, the deer and bird and, he thinks, wolf skulls like thought balloons above their heads. They are siblings or have simply withered into a sameness, equally old, shrunken as prunes, skin stretched thin as butcher paper.
“And now a full house,” one of the men says. “Take your coat off, stay with us! You can tell us some limericks.” The others chuckle, five toothsome grins slipping behind knotted hands.
“Yes, mister,” a second woman says, her voice reedy and accented with what his little experience insists is northern England. “We’ll have soup here shortly, after we say our prayers. I know how to make a good soup!”
“And you can make us a good sap!” says another man, and they all giggle behind their hands again.
Limericks? Sap? They are mocking the poet. But the warmth, the rosy breath of the room carries the sweet smell of wood smoke. Sweat springs from his face and brings the pain spreading back into his knees. The poet removes his coat, drapes it over the back of a wingchair, and sits facing the other guests. On the single table between them is a deep red apple, a single bite removed like a shocked mouth, its flesh white with the faintest tinge of yellow oxidation.
One of the elderly folks clears a throat and the poet looks up. Only now from this lower angle does he notice the odd positioning of the women’s hands, fingers laced over their bellies from which woolen robes suddenly fall away. Those bellies are globes, fully swollen with pregnancy. There must be inflatable balls, watermelons, some sort of prank under those elastic shirts, even with the outward nudge of navel in the center of each, like the aroused nipple of a breast.
“I should,” the poet murmurs, and stops. His eyes trail from one distended belly to the next. He should what? He realizes he doesn’t know. Leave, this is the sensible thing. But his head swims, small pieces of light fizzle around the edges of his vision, and he finds himself finishing his thought, “I should really unpack my things.”
He has no indication that they hear him. He feels he has ceased to be in the room, so he stands and follows himself out. Their heads have bowed in prayer, as though to dictate the string of unpausing words from their narrow mouths.
2. LOW VOICES, OUT LOUD
His room—or the room he has fled to—has one small lamp on the bedside table, a wax-shaded thing that produces perhaps a single tallow candle’s worth of light. For the past hour Corddry has fidgeted, cowered on the lumpy bed, gazing out the narrow uncurtained window. The beastlike oak squats beyond it, the tire swings deaf wind chimes. Up the slope is only an indistinct night.
He cannot hole up in here. Tonight this room would make a regrettable coffin. His stomach quivers and grumbles. Hunger is rarer these days, and he welcomes it when it comes, the way it feels like middle age. A bowl of their soup, a conversation with Mr. Hessel once he tracks him down, and he can either drive away or keep to his own end after a day of reflection and writing. Strange ancient siblings be damned. It is going on eight-thirty, but he hardly sleeps before midnight anymore, and never very deeply. His joints saw with discomfort through the night, underneath the more profound pain in his guts, those teeth that have in recent months begun to chew at his insides with real fervor.
But outside the room are the low voices, and he cannot face the drone of their interminable prayer. He sits a little longer, discovering his mind full of Daniel here at the end. It has been, he supposes, since the word “terminal” came into play. There is no bottle on the table, nothing in the room with skull and crossbones. The walls are old and bare. Spartan, austere, there are many words he finds but none of them fits the quiet despair he feels in this room. He hopes this despair isn’t the crystallization of an excuse, a want for a cleaner postcard ending. He hopes Daniel hasn’t filled his imagination for any lesser reasons. Or simply because of the way AIDS took him.
He last held Daniel in 1993, and Daniel last had him six years before that.
Those years stretch long enough that a simple nostalgia can manage the longing. Daniel is now akin to the memory of true appetite. His lover’s body wasted away into a protracted death, and the poet will not have that for himself. There is an honor in there, somewhere. He is counting on it.
“Daniel, a grave whose grass I never knelt upon, the way all things tend toward silence,” he says, pulling his book over and uncapping his pen. He once wrote a poem on another, more recent man’s chest with this pen. He hopes it was about something ephemeral. “Out loud, the way we would ask ourselves who dragged us from the lake,” he writes. And the words begin to come, as easy as this. A cloud of dense silence gathers as he scratches at the Moleskine pages.
He is lost, dinner forgotten until he hears a voice say through the door, “Want your soup, mister?”
A female voice, the same English one from before, but now the accent is so clearly fake that he can’t believe he didn’t hear it the first time. These other guests, the very fact of three fully pregnant women in their nineties have impossibly dropped out of his mind. “I’m not feeling well,” he calls, “I’m sorry.”
“I’ll leave it here by the door, then, poor old man.” He hears a thick grunt, a clunk of something against the floor, and pictures the woman bending over that great fleshy globe. It is several minutes before he dares creep to the door, opens it to find a wide and yellow porcelain bowl sitting there, warm but not hot to the touch. The poet closes himself back up in the room. He doesn’t want to bless the doorknob for having a lock but does it anyway. The smell the soup gives off is a wild green miasma that clears his sinuses. The hunger sweeps back to the surface and he sips at it. Vegetable stock, and spicy as hell. His stomach is just going to have to deal with it.
He writes a little more, him and Daniel standing in the grave, worms leaking out of rich soil, trying the words aloud to frame their cadences, until a heavy, musty drowsiness takes him, swift enough to be nearly unnoted. The bar of light under the door filling up a piece at a time, the scuff of shoes crowding around it.
3. WHEN WILL HE LET YOU, WHEN WILL HE COME?
Corddry wakes and his book slips to the floor. The pen clatters after it and under the night table, upon which the lamp still sheds its tallow light. He hears voices but in the sleep fog they are pitched too low, garbled. “Want him to play with us,” a man’s voice says, and the words are repeated more slowly by others, almost in a song. “Make him play with us.” “He has to.” “It’s almost time for the root.”
He scrubs his face with his hands, stands and moves toward the door. A new voice speaks from its other side just as he bends to press his ear against the wood: “Come out now, poet.” He shrinks back, realizing the first voices might not have come from beyond the door. “We know you’re trying to die on us.”
He spins in the small space, hearing more of them, “Make him play,” a grunted “God, it’s deep”—what was in the soup he drank? His eyes fall on the window, the oak rearing outside, and below it, rocking toward and away from him in lazy motion, are four of the elderly guests perched on the tire swings. Their faces are obscured moons wisped with white hair. Corddry steps to the window and boxes his hands around his eyes, peers through and at the two women seated on tires, their own hands making slings beneath their heavy burdens. Their bellies seem to swell with each upward forward arc. They see him watching and wave.
The third old woman abruptly appears and presses her face against the window, grinning, motioning Corddry outside. Behind the woman two of her companions begin chasing each other around the tree, weaving in and out of the tire swings, setting them to spin.
“Go away, please!” Corddry shouts. The strain in his throat from the words doubles him over in a coughing fit. He lets his knees unhinge and he drops back onto the bed. Buries his face in his hands and squeezes his eyes shut.
The doorknob rattles twice. “Who is Daniel?” the voice says from the door. “When will he let you?”
“When will he come?” Corddry whispers, finishing the title of his first chapbook, published in 1971, his christening as a “Rimbaud for post-Free Love America.” And he bought into it from the start, nothing more so than the debauchery. A trail of wine bottles and dirtier things clanking from San Francisco to Montreal to the seams of Greenwich Village. But his blood stayed clean through all of it. Everything goes out of him suddenly on this bed, the fear, the disorientation, the cancer itself, for all he knows. The narrow mattress could swallow him. He only feels hollow and very tired.
“Just leave me be,” he murmurs, curling into himself, “I came here to be alone. I came here to do one thing.”
From the window, muffled, another voice, “Guess he doesn’t want to play tonight.” Fists thump against the house, fading toward the front door. Soon the silence has wadded itself back into the room like cotton balls into prescription bottles, the ones he pushed away from himself, left back in Roanoke. His pen remains under the night table. His book waits, open, somewhere on the floor.
4. THE YOUNGEST THING HERE
And there is the poet Louise Glück, born eleven days after Corddry Smith, making them siblings of a sort. She haunts him most. Although he won a major award long before her Pulitzer and other immortalities, her poems have always sent him into bleak rages of jealousy. In the title piece of The Wild Iris, the very book that cast her impenetrably higher than he could ever throw, she wrote of being buried alive, and of a door at the end of suffering.
Corddry wakes the next morning, in weeping pain, with her words in his mouth and soil in his bed. “The stiff earth,” as she called it, lies in crumbs upon his scalp, in the creases of the sheets. It clings in the parted cleft of his lips, tasting of stale minerals. He wishes he had brought his phone, that he hadn’t doubted his resolve, but even now, who would he call? Only the proprietor, Mr. Hessel, and this would be only to enquire about the bottle with the eyedropper. Furlough House’s patented “good death.”
He wants that bottle. And he will try to write a little more. Those lines from yesterday evening—something he thinks he might call “Your Unearthed Coffin”—are the start of something good, maybe special, better than anything he’s written in fifteen years, surely.
The main room is empty, animate with the sense of dust still settling after being disturbed. Breaths left behind to break apart into atoms, vibrations of words whispered about the poet. A lump of rot sits on the table, a riot of mold, and after a moment he recognizes the indention in it as the surprised open gape of the apple that was there the night before. Weeks have passed, if one takes this apple and disregards the remainder of the universe.
A deep spiny pain flowers in his gut. He closes his eyes, opens them with a fiercer resolve to find a phone. But the main room, extending a good hundred and fifty feet from his bedroom door, has none. He walks to the other end and opens doors, peers into messy, incongruous bedrooms with dolls and plastic robots strewn among twisted clothes, every wall alive with mildew, but the house continues to yield nothing until he reaches the square kitchen at the east end of the house. This, too, is dimmed by uncleanliness, but there are no cockroaches, no smells of spoiled food. Simply the same wilting age that seems to have coated the house like a sudden film.
One of the old women is squatting on the floor there as though to piss, but what rills toward Corddry from between her legs is a creek of blood that reeks of copper. Her straining, sweaty face is close to as red. “The root’s taking strong hold this time,” she gasps at him. There is no affectation of an English accent there now.
He stands frozen and stares at her far past the reach of decorum before managing, “Can I—I’ll find a towel.”
“Don’t mind it, it’s got to run,” she says. “It’s awful close now.” And she screams, tipping her head to the ceiling so the tendons in her neck stand out like collarbones. He seems to see the tip of something reach out from her behind the sodden hem of her hiked cream skirt. Just when he can stand it no longer, she falls quiet and flops down on her rear
, the skirt blessedly concealing her to the knees.
“I saw what you wrote,” she says, panting, looking up at him between damp wings of dark hair. “Is that a poem in that book? I didn’t understand some of those words.”
“Yes,” Corddry says. It is all he can think to say.
“But I liked where you said that about the grave and all things tending toward quiet. It’s true, when you think about it. Those trees up there. A room with nobody in it. Fruit when you take a bite of it, or when you take it from its place. We die so fast. Maybe your pretty words slow it down.” She smiles, suddenly bashful, and looks down at the blood-smeared floor.
“It was ‘silence,’ not ‘quiet,’ but thank you.” He clears a blockage from his throat. “If you don’t mind, I’m trying to reach Mr. Hessel.”
“Who?” She giggles.
“Mr. Hessel, the owner of this place.”
“He doesn’t ever come.” She’s still looking at the floor, dragging a finger idly through the blood, drawing an inexplicable cat with it, Corddry is nearly sure. “He’s just the mouth that brings us food from out there. He tends to the tree. But we can get your nectar if you want it.”
“Nectar? Is that what you call it?” He is getting a fever—it creeps out of his collar and flares on his bald scalp—and cannot think of other things he should ask. “Yes, please, I came a long way for that bottle.”
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