A Stranger's House

by Bret Lott

  “You’ll have to give it a little more spunk than that,” Grady whispered, then laughed.

  Tom pushed hard at the wood, the sky blue giving in a little before the shaft punctured the wood, sinking into the clapboard.

  “Now twist it,” Grady said. I looked at him. He wasn’t smiling anymore, his forehead wrinkled with worry, as if he were not quite sure himself the wood would be rotten.

  Tom twisted the screwdriver, turned it to one side and the other, and then the shaft broke out of the wood, the clapboard nearly bursting, sending a small shower of dead, gray splinters to the ground at Tom’s feet.

  Grady’s face broke out in a smile. “What did I tell you?” he said. “What did I tell you?”

  “Shh,” Martin said from above us. I looked up at him. He hadn’t moved, his head still against the clapboard.

  Tom was poking at the hole in the wood, and I watched as rotten timber flaked away at the touch of his fingers.

  “Now try the one above it, the one he didn’t mark,” Grady whispered.

  Tom poked at it with the screwdriver, trying to break through the wood. Nothing happened. He pushed harder, and harder.

  “Hard as granite,” Grady whispered, and looked back up at Martin. He squinted into the light, held his hand above his eyes. “Old Martin here is, as you can see, marking up ones you might want to replace, either for dry rot, like what you’ve got down there with that piece you poked at, or for cracks or warped wood or what-have-you.” He paused, let his eyes fall to Tom. “And he’s a lot cheaper than any of your experts. We’re a lot cheaper.”

  Tom stood, and the three of us watched Martin, who was still feeling the wood, his eyes half-closed, his mouth slack.

  He looked as if he were in some sort of trance, his concentration so intense, and there, blinking at the autumn light and a man perched on a ladder, I thought again of Sandra, of the day before, Friday, and how she, too, had been in a trance all day, her hair only clipped back again, her bike nowhere, her face pallid.

  Yesterday, the day after our time in the computer room, she had not spoken to me at all, had not even looked at me. She had come in late, spent her lunch hidden away in the building somewhere, the rest of the workday spent down in the basement running her own batch of rabbits. She had left early.

  And still I had not called Mr. Gadsen. Maybe she knew I’d backed off at the thought of confronting that old man, of seeing him, of breathing him in, having the thought of that rabbit’s dead, pregnant body hanging from my hand, and the stitches and the scar, and the dreams that had begun that night.

  I wanted to talk to him, knew I needed to. But now was the weekend. I could call him on Monday. I could do that, and I could let Sandra know, and then we could talk even more.

  Suddenly Martin was down the ladder, stood back from it with both hands on his hips. He looked up at the side of the house, and we three did the same, as if Martin’s lead would bring us to the same sort of wisdom of wood he had.

  He said, “What I will need is a bigger ladder. I will need that to get up to the roof, because the roof is the next part of the house that we need to check.”

  Grady turned to Tom. “What say we get one? We can rent one in town.”

  “I’ll think about that,” Tom said, looking up at the house. “Maybe tomorrow. I don’t really feel like driving all the way back in right now. We just got here.”

  Grady shrugged, rubbed his nose. He turned to Martin. “Martin,” he said, “what say we go check on the rest of the house, give the Templetons here a taste of your expertise?”

  “Okay,” Martin said loudly, giving a hard nod of his head. But he was still looking up at the house, at, I imagined, the roofline. Then he pointed at the roof, his arm stiff and straight, cutting right through the air. It was a quick move, and startled me. He said, “But one thing is for sure. For sure the fascia is going to need to have to be replaced. The fascia.”

  Fascia, I thought, and immediately my hands were together in front of me, holding, gripping one another. I looked down at them, saw how pale they were, the skin around the knuckles the yellow-white of no blood. There, too, was the scar, two ugly, bolt-red streaks.

  I looked at Martin. His arm was still out in front of him, his finger still pointed. “What?” I managed to say, thinking of that word from his mouth, fascia, his taut throat forming the sound, and I thought of the thin membrane surrounding the skull, the membrane I scraped back to expose rabbit skull after rabbit skull all day the past two days.

  “For sure,” Martin said, still looking up, “the fascia is going to need to have to be replaced.” He turned to me, his mouth still slack, eyes half-closed. He was still in his trance.

  “The fascia,” Tom said, “is that board up there at the edge of the roof.” He, too, pointed, but his movement was casual, his finger moving up at an angle to trace the roofline for me. “That board up there that sort of seals off the rooftop so that there’s a good place to nail down the shingles at the edge.”

  “The fascia,” I said. “That’s the word?”

  “Sure,” Tom said.

  I looked at Martin. I said, “Where did you learn that word?”

  He didn’t move, didn’t blink, but only stared at me. He gave a quick shrug, his arm still out and pointing at the roof. Wisps of his gray hair lifted and fell with the brittle morning breeze.

  He let his arm drop, slapping it to his side. “Foundation next,” he said. He turned and headed off into the woods behind him, his eyes on the ground as he walked.

  The three of us watched as he kicked through dead leaves, taking small steps, the sound of broken leaves beneath his feet like fire. Then he stopped, leaned down and pulled from the leaves a thick, sturdy-looking branch about two feet long. He headed back to us, turning the piece of wood over and over in his hands, feeling it, looking at it as if it were some expensive tool he’d just invested in, or as if the thing were alive.

  He said nothing, and went right to the foundation, where he began pushing at the mortar between the stones. He did it quickly, methodically, each touch at the gray between those stones in a pattern that started from the first visible line of mortar above ground on up each successive layer of stone, about two feet. When he reached the bottom clapboard, he moved down a few feet, did the pattern again. Occasionally the mortar would break away at the push of the stick, and Tom would stoop, run a finger along the soft patch.

  “Fieldstones,” Martin said. “A good foundation.”

  Tom, stopping, said, “You’re right, Martin.”

  They reached the corner of the house, Martin leading, Tom close behind, Grady behind Tom a few feet, his hands on his hips, the three of them just prodding, touching, looking at the foundation of the old house.

  Then they disappeared around the corner of the house, working their way along the back, and I was left standing alone, my hands still together in front of me. I watched where they had been, that corner; watched for nothing, simply looking at the wood siding, those clapboards marked with Xs, and at the fieldstones of the foundation.

  I let go my hands, and held one above my eyes to block out the sun. I looked up at the roof, at that board there, the fascia, and suddenly I realized how alone I was, though I could hear the voices of my husband and Grady just around the corner of the house. I looked away from the fascia, but would not look to the woods, would not look out there to a place that went off for who knew how far.

  I was alone, and as quickly as I could I moved around that corner to where the three still jabbed and poked and fondled the foundation, some form of rough diagnosis of the ills of a house that would soon be ours.

  There had been only three sore spots in the foundation, places where the mortar disintegrated into sand when Martin poked it, and both he and Tom seemed unconcerned at that, though on one side of the house, the west side, Tom had even managed to pull out five separate fieldstones, leaving a hole right into the crawl space.

  He had turned and looked up at me, almost proud, it seeme
d, like some little boy who’d broken a window at which he’d intentionally aimed. “Just so long as they’re not loose at the corners,” he tried to assure me.

  He knew what he was doing, and I had faith in him that, yes, so long as the corners of this foundation were secure, the house would go on standing.

  “Yep,” Martin said, as though Tom had been talking to him. “Just so long as they are not loose at the corners.” Already he had been moving forward, still tapping.

  When they had finished the foundation, we had gone from room to room downstairs, checking the lay of the floor. In the front room, Martin had pulled from his pocket a marble, a large yellow cat’s eye. None of us said anything as he crossed the room to the hearth, and squatted on the bricks. He gently placed the marble before him on the floor, then took away his hand as though he’d burned his fingers on that piece of glass. We watched as slowly it rolled away from him, and, in a smooth arc, toward the wall opposite him, where it bounced once, rolled back from the baseboard, and settled against the wall.

  Martin had stood then, his eyes on the floor, and I could see in the unblinking severity of his gaze that he was recording the path of that marble, storing it away somewhere in his brain.

  He went to the marble, picked it up, and positioned himself on the hearth a foot or so away from where he had been before. We watched as he squatted, let the marble go.

  The marble was much slower to start its movement this time. But once it was three or four feet from Martin and heading for the wall, the marble took a strange turn, rolling almost perpendicularly to the path it had been following.

  “Bubble!” Martin shouted, and he gave a quick smile, though his eyes were still half-closed, staring as the marble regained its momentum, starting back on its inevitable trek toward the wall.

  Once the marble had stopped, Martin moved to where it had rolled out. He placed one foot on the linoleum, put his weight down, and almost imperceptibly the linoleum gave way, went flat.

  He looked up at Tom. He said, “Are you going to take out this floor?”

  “The linoleum?” Tom said.

  “Yep.”

  “Yes, we are,” Tom said.

  “No worry about this bubble, then,” Martin said, and moved back to the hearth where he positioned himself at the end of the bricks, facing the front wall.

  He’d done all the rooms downstairs—Tom’s, the pantry, the kitchen—just that way, his eyes demarking the path of the marble each time, remembering those curves and bumps and rises and valleys in the floor.

  Now Tom and Martin were in the crawl space, having gone down through a trapdoor in the pantry. I was standing in the kitchen, leaning against the cabinets, the counter with that ugly yellow Formica scarred and pitted.

  Grady was in the living room, and I could hear his footsteps as he walked back and forth, the floor creaking beneath the linoleum. I wanted the linoleum out first, I thought, and the paneling in there and in Tom’s room and in our bedroom and in my room upstairs. I could hear just beneath me their movement, the dull, muffled scrapes and taps, occasionally some comment from Tom, a one-word answer from Martin, their words veiled by the wood between us. I wondered what they saw down there, how cobwebbed and filthy and cramped it must be.

  Grady stood in the doorway into the kitchen, his arms crossed. He shook back a lock of hair from his forehead.

  He said, “I can bet I know what you’re thinking about.” He grinned, and I wondered what was behind him, inside that same, practiced grin, and it finally came to me how it would be practiced, how hard it must be for him even to give that much: his father killed, mother having committed suicide, grandfather disowning him. His only friend a dishwasher at the Friendly’s he worked at, from every indication his job waiting tables his job for life.

  So I smiled, smiled as hard and as best as I could, because it was about all I could give to him right then. I smiled, and crossed my arms. I said, “All right, you tell me what I’m thinking about.”

  He said, “What do you bet?” He was rocking back and forth on his heels now.

  “Lunch at Burger King in town. Or Wendy’s.”

  He looked down and shook his head, still grinning. “Don’t you think I get enough burgers at work already?” He looked up, hair down in his face again. He shook it back.

  “Chinese, then. Tom and I will take you and Martin to that takeout Chinese place on King.”

  “Deal,” he said. He closed his eyes and put his fingertips to his forehead as if he were some sort of medium. “I see,” he said, his voice a monotone, “I see, I see .. . a woman who is wondering how these two men who will be helping work on her house got all the way from Florence out to Chesterfield. This is what I see.”

  It was not what I was thinking, but now that he’d said it I wanted to know. I hadn’t thought of them getting here before; for some reason their being here seemed a given, something that came with the house.

  I gave him a puzzled look, tilted my head a little to one side, and said, “That’s it exactly. Really. How did you know that? And how do you get out here?”

  His fingers were still at his forehead, and he shot open his eyes. For an instant his face gave up his surprise at my answer, his eyes opened wide, his mouth drawn closed. He let his hands drop, and he smiled, this time a genuine one, the corners of his mouth much higher, his teeth there, that perfect white. He looked down again.

  “You’re patronizing me,” he said.

  “No,” I said. Then I said, “Maybe,” and I smiled, too. “But how do you get up here? Really?” I paused a moment. He was still smiling. I said, “You don’t ride your bikes, do you?”

  “You said it,” he said. He looked up, and his face was different now. He was younger, much younger, that adult demeanor now seemingly lost altogether. He was standing with his hands in his pockets, and shrugged. “We stash them back in the woods a few yards so’s nobody will get to them.” There was no trace of the grin anywhere, just the real smile, the authentic one that made his eyes softer somehow, his build seem even more slight.

  I said, “Why don’t you just put them back in the barn? That seems like a good place for bikes.”

  “No,” he said too quickly, “no. That’s not a good place. The woods are a lot better.” He tried to laugh, but couldn’t. “Not the barn.”

  He leaned against the doorjamb, brought one hand from his pocket and reached over to the other arm, held his own elbow. Hair was down in his face again, but now he made no moves to shake it back. That hair was always there, always would be. It was just a part of who he was: a scared boy, frightened, I imagined, at becoming a man. This house, I knew, was most likely his last connection to who he had been, to his childhood, to any love that had existed in his life outside of the companion-love of Martin. Now the house was disappearing before him, slowly changing over into our hands, ownership shifting from his family to ours, sealing off for good his childhood. This was what I imagined as we stood there in the kitchen, the subtle, almost inaudible scuttling of two men below us.

  Quietly he said, “But I think I know what you’re thinking about. Or at least were.”

  I said, “What?”

  “Martin and me. Probably how we met. How we know each other.”

  I said, “You’re right,” and I made no smile, no move, only stood leaning against the counter. I was not patronizing him. I wanted to know, but at the same time I wondered how much truth he might give. So far he’d told us two different stories of his parents, neither one of which was true, according to Mr. Clark’s lawyer. But what made me think that Mr. Blaisdell, that fat old man with the deep leather chair, was telling the truth himself? I did not know what to believe. I only knew that I wanted to hear whatever Grady had to say. “Tell me,” I said.

  He paused, let his shoulders fall, all the while his hand still clutching his elbow. “It has to do with this house, I guess,” he started, and then he looked up, out one of the windows to my right. He wasn’t looking at me.

  I looked to
the window, too, not so much to see what was out there, though what I saw was beautiful: a cut-glass sky, the hill behind the house rising up into it, some trees bare, some with the dull russets and coppers and cadmiums of the last few leaves yet to fall, green pines mixed through.

  A cloud passed overhead, and those trees and leaves and the room went dark, the air almost imperceptibly gone cooler, yet the sky out there above the hill still so blue I thought I might have been able to see stars if I stared at it long and hard enough.

  No, I looked out the window just as he had so that he wouldn’t feel my eyes on him, wouldn’t feel embarrassed at having a thirty-year-old woman watch him here in this kitchen, his kitchen, while he told of his retarded friend. I wanted, too, to see what he saw out that window, wanted him to know I wasn’t sorry for him, there clutching his elbow.

  The cloud passed, the room and forest and hill bathed in light again, and I ran my hands up and down my arms. I had goose-bumps now.

  “Keep going,” I said. Wind from somewhere swayed the branches of the pines. From beneath us I heard a soft tapping on wood.

  “He was a friend of my daddy’s,” he said. “They always knew each other. Martin, he was born over in Worthington, just another mile or so on down the road. You know where that sugar house is over there? Bourne’s Sugar House? The one down at the bottom of the ravine.”

  I said, “No,” and closed my eyes. Something in his voice made me want to know where he was talking about, made me want to see that sugar house, but I could not, and so I stood with my face toward that window, my eyes closed. I listened.

  “Well,” he said. He paused. “Well, there’s this house over there, just a cabin, beat out now. That’s where he was born. And my daddy was born in this house.”

  He stopped, and it was then I caught the lie, if it was that: Mr. Blaisdell had said it was Grady’s mother who was born here, the child of Mr. and Mrs. Clark. He’d said that, I remembered, but still I didn’t know whether to believe him, the lawyer, or not. I didn’t know what to think. And so, for now, it was Grady’s father who was born here. My worrying over this detail would not stop anything, and the best I could do would be to let him go on, make my judgments, if any, later.