by Melanie Finn
“Then how will I —”
“I’m ya neighbah. That shithole with tha hounds.”
Yes, Rosie recalled it, a jumble of a place almost eclipsed by brambles. She made a little goodbye wave. The man tipped his hat. His pick-up crabbed away down the road, the entire backend of the vehicle moving at a 45-degree angle to the cab.
Back inside the house, she regarded the wrought-iron stove, sitting sturdy and spinster-like in the corner of the living room. There were two latches — one on top, and one on the front. These accessed the inside of the stove, which was scrupulously clean, just a trace of ash on her fingertip. A lever on the outside worked to open or close a small hatch near the stove’s chimney pipe. At the bottom was a drawer to collect ash that fell through the grate. It was as mysterious as an Egyptian tomb.
The boathouse had had radiators along the walls. Despite a thorough search, Rosie couldn’t find any here. There were no thermostats, either. Bracing Miranda onto her hip, she made her way down into the basement. The low-watt light bulb illuminated a grubby dirt floor, a metal box she suspected might be something called a “fuse box” and a large cylindrical tank covered in rust. She put her hand on the tank — it was warm and burped softly at her; she was fairly sure this was the hot water heater — though hot was an exaggeration as her shower had made evident. The warmish water warmer, then. What might “heating” look like? Was it connected to the warmish water warmer? But nothing connected, no machine or device suggested the potential for heat.
“Heating? Of course there’s heating.” Bennett put his hand confidently on the wood stove when he came home. “This’ll have the place warm as a sauna.” He gave her twenty bucks for firewood.
The next day, Rosie walked with Miranda in the backpack to beetle man’s house. The drive was rutted and brutal, terminating in a muddy opening among the brambles. Within this bristly thicket, she could see uneven stacks of logs, piles of scrap wood, rusted machines with arms and jaws, at least six dogs on chains, snowmobiles of dubious functionality, a count of four cars that, clearly, were not going anywhere. A seventh dog lived in one. The house was encased in part by flapping plastic. She squelched forward, charting her way through the dogs. They leaned out at her, their full weight against their chains, snarling and bouncing. One was almost suicidal with rage, leaping at her with such enthusiasm that the chain snapped it back, choking its bark. Closer to the house, she called out: “Hello?” Her voice sounded foolish, girlie, as if she was selling cookies.
The door swung open, the man stumbled down to her. From ten feet he stank of sweat and booze. The stench intensified so that by the time he stood before her, Rosie had the taste in her mouth of rancid butter.
“Ya want tha wood, then?”
“YES.” The mud was seeping into her sandals, oozing between her toes. She was shouting over the barking of the dogs.
“How many cads?”
“WHAT?”
“CADS! HOW MANYA WAN?
The man reached into his back pocket and pulled out a handgun. Rosie shrank back as he raised it skyward and fired. Miranda jolted with surprise and let out a brief wail. With a whimpering transition, the dogs silenced. “Theyah eagah ta getin tha woods, is all.” He put the gun away. “Huntin.”
“Hunting?”
“Beah.”
Beah? Bear? Do people hunt bear? Maybe he wanted to frighten her, she was soft as a kitten. “What is a cad?”
“8 foot by 4 foot by 4 foot o’ wood.”
She offered him the twenty. He squinted at it. Then, in practiced sequence, put away the gun, pulled out his tobacco, stuffed a wodge in his mouth. “Seems opta-mistic. Yav got no insulation ’n tha ol stove’ll make more creosote’n heat.”
Rosie did not know about creosote. “We’ll be all right,” she said.
Was he smirking, she wondered, or just chewing? He took the money. “I dont stack.”
She turned to face the gauntlet of dogs.
“Why dont yar husband drive ya?”
The dogs were howling now, thrusting against their chains. One weak link, she thought. But she kept her gaze steady, shouted: “I LIKE TO WALK.”
The cold came without warning, the cold came at noon, a storm bending down from Canada in the first days of October. The morning had been warm, almost balmy, and Rosie had the windows open, letting in the yeasty smell of dry leaves, the moist life-smell of the cows from miles away; for, at last, she was banishing the sour musk of mouse piss from the house. She had cleaned each room over weeks while Bennett was at work. At first with squeamish trepidation; but now, with the cunning and indifference of a seasoned hunter, she had set traps. SNAP SNAP SNAP the traps went in the night, like gnashing teeth, and she’d find the soft tawny bodies in the morning, heads clamped, small eyes slightly popped, whiskers stiff. Death had been quick. Twice, though, mice had been caught by their back legs. The first one Rosie had thrown outside in the long grass, alive and still in the trap. She’d been repelled by her cruelty, and then amazed at how quickly she forgot the suffering she could not see. The second mouse had peered up at her, bereft of self-pity, neither fearful nor pleading. Tiny leg bones poked through the grey fur. Rosie’d taken the fire poker and smashed in its head.
The cold came on a silver sledge of cloud. Within an hour the sun had vanished, and the wind began, mean and prying so that Rosie soon knew how thin were the walls of the house — Yav got no insulation. And how the doors were not flush in their frames and windows loose on their sashes. The roof lacked sufficient nails as did the siding on the north side. Something clanged but she could not find it. The wind laughed and howled and danced and drummed, a band of gypsies surrounding the house, trying to get inside not for profit but for jest. The wind came through the cracks like knives. Then the rain lashed, the kind of hard rain that in summer lasted only minutes; but here, now, lasted for hours. The house leaked, and Rosie ran from room to room with pans and buckets as Miranda clapped her hands and gurgled to see such fun.
Outside, Rosie saw, through the great woolen blankets of rain: the pile of wood, where it had been left, in the middle of the driveway. She and Miranda only had summer clothes — what she’d grabbed in their flight from the boathouse. Now they were wearing these in layers: tee-shirts, dresses, multiple thin cotton socks.
As the temperature dropped, ice slicked the inside of the windows upstairs, ice on the buckets catching the water, her breath exploding into the air with each compression of the lungs. Then the lights flickered and the power went out. Rosie stumbled through the dim house, thinking of the matches that lit the propane cooking stove, thinking of candles she did not have and how useful a flashlight would be. Grappling with the cooker, she got the burners alight, the blue flame threw off a marvelous heat. Why hadn’t she thought of this? She turned on the oven, opened the door, and pulled one of the armchairs close.
When the door burst open, she thought it was the wind or a fairytale bear; but it was Bennett and the beetle man, arm-in-arm, stumbling like drunks in, somehow the small dark man supporting Bennett’s weight.
“He’d gone off tha road, those tayahs are shit,” Beetle said sighting Rosie in the blue propane glow. “Haf froze in tha fancy car.”
The man and Rosie guided Bennett to the sofa. Their breath huffed the air. Then Beetle glanced at her, he strode to the cooker, turned off the burners. “Ya got no sense! Yull blow tha house roight up!”
“I just needed to get us warm.”
“Warm in a coffin, more loik.”
Shaking his head, he made for the door. For a moment, he paused — Rosie sensed his disapprobation; then he merely raised his hand, a gesture of limited effort, and walked out into the storm.
Rosie stripped Bennett of his wet clothes. Shivering, eyes half-closed, he stood child-like at her command as she wrapped him in blankets and sheets. Then she made an igloo of covers on the bed. We don’t even have warm socks, we don’t even have boots, she thought. She made him coffee, held the cup to his lips, and he began to si
p. Gradually, his shivering subsided and he was able to grasp the cup himself. “I can’t remember,” he mumbled. “I must have passed out.”
He reached for her. “Rosie?”
“I’m here.”
Bennett mumbled: “What if we’ve made a terrible mistake?”
“No, no,” she stroked him. “We’ll be happy here.”
“I’m the dark wood, Rosie, in the middle of my life.”
She kissed him, kissed him, caressed him, she had the strength for him, she knew. The storm raged through the night, snow and freezing rain, a wild tempest filled with hungry wolves and evil queens. In the morning, the kitchen tap did not work, and Bennett slept on.
Rosie dressed herself and Miranda in most of their clothes and wrapped them in blankets like sarongs. She tied plastic bags over her sneakers and inserted her home-made baby back-pack into a garbage bag. With Miranda on her back, she went out to the woodpile. The wind had torn every leaf from the trees, and they stood newly naked, vulnerable, against the bleak sky. The day was glum and grey and frigid. The snow was only ankle deep but after a few minutes of clearing it from the wood, Rosie’s bare hands were freezing. Back inside, she fashioned mittens from a pair of Bennett’s thick rag-wool socks by stabbing holes in the wool for her thumbs with a kitchen knife. She marveled that he had managed to pack several pairs in his haste to leave the boathouse.
Or were these brand new?
After an hour, she’d moved a quantity of wood inside and set about trying to start the stove. Through its window-eye, the stove regarded her suspiciously. A pox on you, too, she aimed her thought back at it.
How was it that she was 20 and did not know how to light a fire? In movies it involved paper and dry twigs. What dry twigs might there be after a dozen hours of rain and snow? Vaguely, she recalled a couple of broken chairs stashed in the basement. Retrieving them, she smashed some of the larger pieces on the back step until they splintered sufficiently. An elaborate sculpture of crumpled paper and broken chair rose from her hands, and she admired her work before lighting the match. Instantly, the pile ignited, the bits of chair catching quickly. Now she reached for the larger logs, selecting two that felt the least wet. These she placed on the fire and shut the stove door.
Her triumph was short-lived. Smoke seeped, then quickly billowed from the stove and she ran to open the doors of the house, the smoke so thick she could no longer see the stove. Coughing and spluttering, she grabbed Miranda, they waited outside in the cold until at last the blue haze cleared to a mild fog and she could open the stove. The paper and kindling had burned completely, the log lay, un-scorched, in a wet mush of ash.
She tried again, more paper, more chair, a different log. But the result was the same — the log was not even warm to the touch. As she made her third attempt, there was a knock at the door.
The beetle man greeted her impassively. “I seen yar smoke signals.”
“I’m trying to get the wood stove started.”
“Ya wanta keep troiyin?”
Rosie pulled open the door, Beetle stepped in and immediately took off his huge boots, which were about half of him. His red wool hat stayed on his head. He gestured to Bennett, still asleep, warmly cocooned on the sofa, “Dont reckin he’s gonna live.” Miranda had crawled to the stove, stuck her hand into the ash mush and put it in her hair. “No, no,” Rosie said, scooping her up.
“I’ll get ya some wood’n kindlin, enough fortha week.”
Boots back on, he left.
Ten minutes later, he returned on his tractor, a stack of logs in the front-loading bucket. Together, they carried the wood inside. If he noticed the plastic bags on her feet, he didn’t say a word.
“This heah’s yar dampah.” He fiddled with the knob on the side of the stove. “Ya wanta open it ta start, then ya close it once tha fiya gets goin good.” He’d brought a feed bag of newspaper, too, and this he scrunched into long, tight wands. On top of this, he layered kindling of different sizes, and like the cherry on an ice cream, a small log. “Ya want tha wood to clink loik yer grandma’s china cups. Heah that?” He knocked two pieces together. “Then ya know it’s good’n droiy.”
Within minutes the fire blazed. Rosie instinctively placed her hands open and palm down to feel the rising heat. Delicious. “Oh!”
“Yer gonna feed this beast till May,” he nodded at the stove. “Reckon six cad’ll do ya.”
“Thank you,” she mumbled again, bobbing like a demented bird. “Thank you.” She followed him to the door. “Can I pay you for the wood you brought today?”
He looked at her, perplexed or insulted, she could not discern. “No.”
“But the cads?”
“This heah’s a welcome gift.”
“How much for a cad of wood, then?”
“Fifty.”
“You’ll need that all at once?”
“Pon delivery.”
Rosie thrust out her hand. “I’m Rosie.”
“Billy Mix.”
It was only when Rosie took the hand, felt the hand, she acknowledged the fine bones within and she looked again at Billy’s face, saw the smooth cheeks and the smooth throat, and she recalled the voice. Billy was a woman.
Billy, for her part, threw one last look at Bennett, still slumbering. It was an inscrutable regard, yet, as if by a visual trick, Rosie briefly saw Bennett as Billy must. Hadn’t his hair been thick and lustrous? In reality, it ebbed back from his forehead. The skin on his face collapsed against his arm, his mouth partly open to emit a soft snore. For too long they both stood watching Bennett sleep.
“Shhhiiit,” Billy hissed. “Titsonna bull.”
Titsonna. Bull. Rosie took a moment to process. Then nearly burst out laughing, because it was really how she felt about Bennett sometimes.
The next morning, Rosie found a pair of winter boots on the front porch, used, too large, but thickly felted.
While Bennett huddled like an old woman in layers of blankets by the stove, Rosie pulled on the boots, stuffed Miranda into the backpack, wrapped in the trash bag, and set off down the hill. Town was seven miles there, seven miles back, the day was fine and clear. The first mile had been rough-plowed by Billy, the snow banked up and grubby as it hadn’t snowed in a few weeks. Kirby Mountain to her east drew a hard line against the blue sky, and to the west she could see as far as the Green Mountains that ran like a spine up the middle of the state. As she passed Billy’s house, the dogs, curled up against the cold, awoke with wild and sudden outrage. Turning onto the paved road, she noted that trash lined the way: beer cans, cigarette cartons, Styrofoam cups, fast food containers. The jetsam of the lazy, she thought; or perhaps these litterers were marking the route like dogs, asserting possession of their territory. Halfway down the hill, she came across a bundle of junk mail and unpaid bills addressed to Williamina Mix. Most of the beer cans were probably hers. They were exposed, like an archeological dig, in layers of plowed and melted snow, the weeks of winter drinking and driving.
Along the slow, descending curves through farmland and woods Rosie walked, and onto the wide flood plain of the river that began near the Canadian border. The town ambled out to meet her: houses clustered along the roadside, three or four to a group, with enough land out back for a small holding. Walking, Rosie saw what she could not when passing in the car with Bennett: decrepitude under the decorative cloak of snow. Sway-backed barns, windows boarded up with plywood or swathed in plastic as Billy’s house. Briefly, she thought of Bennett at home, warmed by Billy’s firewood. What did he mean: I’m in the dark wood in the middle of my life?
A fabric store going out of business, a lumber yard, a gas station. Further on, the supermarket, the library, a pizza joint, a car dealer, the post office, two banks, a bar, a Dunkin’ Donuts. This, she decided, was her best bet for a quiet, working phone. In her bag, she had $4.25 in quarters, pilfered quietly from Bennett’s pockets — enough for the phone call, a coffee, and a donut. She dialed, she knew Gran would answer, the phone ringing
in that quiet house like a rare and alarmed bird.
“It’s me,” she began.
“Yes,” Gran said. She was standing in the hall, the black phone on its own table, her bag looped over the bottom bannister. “Where are you?”
The surface of the moon. Timbuctoo. “Vermont.”
“Vermont.”
“I’m a bit short of money.”
“Why are you in Vermont?”
“Could I borrow —?”
“Why Vermont?”
Rosie pressed on: “Just fifty.” Then she thought it would be good to buy herself and Miranda some clothes. “A hundred?”
“A hundred?”
“I’ll pay it back.” Though how, Rosie couldn’t imagine. Money was like lighting a fire: she didn’t know anything about it. She didn’t even know what most things cost. Except abortions and firewood. “I have a child now,” Rosie continued. “I need to buy firewood to keep us warm.”
She could hear breathing. And then, at last: “You have a child?”
“A little girl. Miranda.”
“You’re in Vermont and you have a child and you want to borrow money.”
These simple facts, laid out in a row, suddenly seemed outrageous, and Rosie felt her face flush. “I just need a hundred. That’s all. And you’ll never hear from me again.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“I won’t ask again, I promise, just this once.” Rosie went on, summoning conviction. “I’m in this house and all it has is a stove.”
“Why aren’t you at Parsons?”
“Because,” Rosie exhaled. “I met a man, and then I got pregnant.”
“And you think fifty dollars will solve this mess?”
“It isn’t a mess, Gran.”
Rosie called into the speaker, “Gran? Gran?”
Rosie heard the softest shuffling, perhaps a crumpled Kleenex being pushed back up the sleeve of a sweater.
“Gran?”
“You had a scholarship, Rosie, a full scholarship.”
“But you didn’t want me to study art!”
“I wanted you to have opportunity.”