MARTHA COULD NOT STAY. She had clients. What can I say, she said. I’m good at what I do. They kissed and he felt the baby in her. This time it delighted him. She looked up at him and fixed her hair in a buckle behind her head. She phoned someone and said she was on her way and they kissed again and she pushed him towards the hallway and then did a violent gesture and said no I have to go and she was angry with herself for having given in to this roughhousing but was also possessed with the notion that she deserved this type of passion.
It was the height of summer now and it was pleasant to be outdoors in just a shirt. The sun ripped the mood out of you. Martha shut her car door too hard and jerked the car out of the drive and up onto the road. She was a fast, erratic driver who did not look in all directions but she managed to not have accidents and he listened to her car accelerate down to the main highway and then slow up fast to the stop sign. He could not believe it. Almost as soon as the sound of her car had gone, so too was the truth of what had occurred. Had anything occurred? He smelled the air and she had been there. He walked back upstairs and studied the bed and yes something had happened. There was a green elastic hairband by the flashlight and in the double bed were a few strands of hair. Her hair. She had on a pretty bra. She took care to wear good underthings. Or had that been an expectation, that something might happen when she came out here. Yes. He knew now that she had thought of something before it had even occurred to him.
It is complicated to love someone, he said to the house. As he loved Martha he also felt he was losing his love, for the person he loved was staining her own dignity by loving him. What did Gandhi do in the face of British acts which stripped Indian dignity? He did not belittle them, he marched for salt.
He set about beating apart a Canadian-made solid wood coffee table but he couldn’t stop thinking about her. Of the little white pearl buttons on her shirt, it was a turquoise prairie shirt with pockets that buttoned down. Of how she felt against him as she was tying up her hair. He thought less of them in bed than in the moment when she realized she had to leave. The force of leaving him made more of an impression than her giving in to him, or was it she that took him. Martha had been on top of him. She had really enjoyed herself, but it was almost as if it had nothing to do with him. She had been selfish but he had committed. He was glad he could allow her that enjoyment. Perhaps it was the house that had allowed it.
The arrangement was it was all up to her. He was here for her. But he realized this was not fair to himself. Also, to her. No matter how much he implored her to be in control, she would take his feelings into account. Or the possibility that he might realize he’s a fraud and run.
He carried the top of the table to the burn barrel. He shoved it in and stepped away from the flames. This was what they did in Afghanistan. The truth about war is there is a lot of garbage. Since his return to civilian life he was moved at the efforts of recyclers. The care that went into separating plastics from metals, and the idea of a compost heap. I wonder if it’s possible for an army to manage a compost heap. They burned plastic by the ton, we dump waste by the tandem load. They’d once cooked a meal pouring gasoline over a mound of sand and lighting it. More damage has been done with waste than with bullets. The open burning of everything, the raw exhaust of modern components buffeting into the air. Hardly any effort to even position these heaps downwind. What did we inhale.
A truck honked—John was here! And ten minutes later he came over. He had a piece of the lawn mower pullstart with him. He needed duct tape.
You weren’t in there with the widow were you?
She’s not married, John. They weren’t married. She doesn’t like that term.
John was winding the coil tightly in his fingers. I mean it’s impressive, he said. Henry handed him the strip of duct tape.
We’re thinking of going public.
Trust me buddy, you’re public.
5
An old place should have drawers filled with precious ampoules in balsa tubes plugged with cotton, but Henry had been shitting in a big yellow plastic bucket lined with white garbage bags. That’s how crude it was here. The extension smelled of wild roses and there were plenty of large, overgrown rosebushes with stems as thick as bamboo. The smell of roses found its way into the room. There was a rotting sill and a gap between the wall and that was how the scent got in. It made the decrepit nature of the room and the squalid situation of having to shit in a bucket pleasurable. He laughed at the luxury of a good bath, and he knew how Nellie Morris must have felt when she’d left the house and moved into a seniors home that had running water.
He was tying off a garbage bag and replacing it with a new one when he realized he was wrong about where the scent was coming from. It was in the bags. The bags were scented. It was the scent of garbage bags he was smelling, a cheap scent of flowers. He was crouching over a bucket that had been there when he bought the house. He hadn’t even bought a new bucket and now all he had was the knowledge of how much his shit weighed. This was worse than how he’d taken a shit in Afghanistan.
He went to Wilson Noel’s and bought a sheet of plywood and two pounds of wood screws, a quart of white interior paint and a nylon paintbrush. He drew a plan and cut the board with a hand saw and screwed the boards together and recessed the front panel so that it angled in as it fell to the floor. That way, he explained to Baxter Penney, you can tuck your heels in.
Baxter looked at his sawdust toilet without taking his hands from his pockets. He sort of dipped one knee to get an angle on it. Fancy, he said. But you got the electrical in here. Code one means a bathroom into her. You could hook into next door’s septic system (he meant John and Silvia’s). What you should be concentrating on is a roof.
Henry painted the box white and drove into the Goulds to find a toilet seat.
He found one with cartoon tropical fish swimming in a clear gel layer. It was a toilet seat for kids, and he thought about Clem and Sadie visiting and what they’d think of this seat. But he needed a seat for everyday use. He had to think, too, of adults. He settled for a lid that slowed on a hydraulic piston. It seemed to be arguing with itself, and trying to calm down gracefully.
He bought four identical buckets at a marine supply store. He was making a composting toilet, he said with enthusiasm.
John and Silvia were unsure about the sawdust toilet.
What do you do when it’s full, John asked.
You carry it to the compost and dump it and then use two buckets of water from the rain barrel to rinse it out with a teaspoon of pine-sol.
That’s the compost nearest us.
You’re upwind.
We have a dog.
They walked over to John and Silvia’s and it was a relief to sit in one of their wide chairs. I don’t think, John Hynes said, you even have a chair over there. Does he have a chair?
He was sitting on an overturned kerosene bucket when I saw him yesterday, Silvia said.
That’s the thing he used to shit in.
The wetsuits hanging on the clothesline. The wind had blown all the clothes pegs together. John and Silvia had taken the kids down to a stretch of good beach. Henry had planned to do this when he bought the house, sort of live in the house as it fell down around him, sleep in the old bed upstairs until the floor gave way then sleep downstairs in the parlour and keep up a relationship with the beach until he was forced to buy a tent and live outside. That’s what Colleen Grandy had suggested. A spiritual life. But the house possessed him and, unwittingly, the thought that Martha Groves owned half of it and was keeping an eye on him made him appreciate the good timbers it was constructed from and the private history of a family that was contained in letters and photographs in that ammunition box and it made him fall in love with the idea of preserving something of Tender Morris’s house and his family. We are living in a time where it is easier to know more about a stranger’s family by researching online than it is to know one’s own. History is the constant upheaval of peregrination. Henry’s fami
ly hadn’t stayed put for more than a generation. The truth is neither did these families, but the houses stayed in the families and the families were so large that there was always one member who kept up the house and passed it on down to a ninth son who did not see the need to move. It had more to do with the size of families than their predilection for staying in one place. Tender Morris, look where he died.
6
Baxter was right. He had to concentrate on the roof. The sunlight drove him to climb a ladder Melvin Careen had built out of scrap lumber. He measured the roof and wrote the dimensions on an envelope. He could borrow a wand and he had propane, he just needed the material. Down the road Keith Noyce was spraying garden seed on Colleen Grandy’s new front yard. He hadn’t seen much of Keith or Colleen. The spray was like the green paint Henry had seen some richer Afghans use to paint their rocks to look like grass. Perhaps the boy was embarrassed to have seen him cry. He picked him up when he was hitchhiking with his gas can, but they didn’t talk much. Keith listened to music with earphones. He had that stoned way of being surprised. His finger full of nicotine.
Nice to see him getting work, though.
But what of Colleen? Had she been walking?
A dumptruck pulled into the side of the house. It was Leonard King. I was searching for rock for your well and I come upon this.
Leonard patted the side of the dumptruck as if it was obvious what he had inside. Henry, from the roof, saw the yard of soil.
It’s an old potato garden, Leonard explained.
Henry asked him to elaborate.
There was a garden by a cellar so I thought I’d lay it down in behind your house.
Leonard was an enthusiastic person, but he also appreciated someone listening to him as he told these stories. He enjoyed finding out what struck someone as interesting. Leonard wasn’t quite sure what part of himself, or the way of being himself, was the bit that engaged the curiosity of an open mind like Henry’s. He spread his hand out and then waved his arm slowly about. You got no soil here, Leonard said. The garden that goes with this house is across the road. In fact, this house belongs across the road. They used to have their vegetables right up by Baxter’s. My father told me that. That’s the Morris garden in behind those alders. By rights you should be over on that.
But no one owns it and the house is here.
Someone owns it. I think this land you’re on is someone else’s.
Now that’s only what I heard. I don’t know who would make a claim on you, but if they ever do, you got land over there that must be yours. Anyway I can put this potato field right in back where the sun shines.
Nothing, in Leonard’s mind, could be solved if it couldn’t be solved with a backhoe and a dumptruck. He raised the truck bed and out slid the yard of topsoil. Then he sized up the work Henry had done. He caught the eyesore. Let’s haul that garbage Henry, take it right now while the dump is open. I’m on my way to Aquaforte, Leonard said. Leonard hated carrying an empty tandem. How much. Leonard said don’t bother with that— twenty dollars would be too much. How about forty, Henry said. No I couldn’t do it for forty. He handed Leonard a fifty and Leonard hated taking it. Henry found a pair of cotton gloves and Leonard said he preferred to work bare-handed. They spent an hour loading the truck. Henry told him the house had no well. I can dig you a well. And by the time Leonard was pulled out, they’d arranged a time to excavate. Amazing to think an afternoon could break a hundred years of no water. He watched Leonard drive off and then saw Keith Noyce pushing the lawn mower up the road, intensely listening to music, looking for more work.
Go no further, Henry said. What’s your rate.
7
Henry went inside and collapsed on the bed and listened to Keith Noyce mow his lawn. His father was coming, Keith had said. It’ll be nice to meet him.
It was a comforting, uniform sound, the lawn mower. The drizzle of a motor exercising and I don’t have to lift a finger. He thought the boy must be liking it here now. Keith had told him he’d always felt a little lonely on these visits to Newfoundland. In New York they’d had a dog, he said, and the dog was run over. She was badly wounded, his father explained to him. They couldn’t save her, his mother said. It would be wrong to save her, or to prolong the life for the son to see her. There was too much pain and so they put the dog down. Keith had cried in bed and in the morning panicked. He was twelve years old. He went to the vet’s to see the dog. Henry understood this is what compulsion is and compulsion is what makes a person fall in love and generate hate. A woman in a green environment apron hesitated while feeding a rabbit with a beaker, she was sorting in her mouth the proper words and then came up with it. I’m sorry, she said, but your dog has passed away. I know that, Keith said. I’m here to see her one last time. They walked down a yelping corridor. The sounds of animals dampened as the woman opened a door on a spring and lifted up a sheet of heavy freezer plastic. In a cooler vault in the rear, she unfastened a hatch on a grey fridge. Your dog is in there. It shocked him. The dog was fine. She looked completely unhurt except her fur was shirred in places where it looked like she’d been pushed along surfaces. She looks good, he said aloud.
Keith was comfortable saying that because this was his dog. You could get away with saying inappropriate things if you loved and if you possessed and made it obvious your clutch was from commitment. But I love you. The woman said the dog felt nothing. She had a tone of pride in her work in not causing pain. We inject in the hind leg, she’d said, right here. She put a fingertip on the joint. But I don’t see any damage, Keith said. Is the damage on her other side? The woman was puzzled. It’s a needle, she said. There’s nothing more to it. My dog was hit and run over by a car, he explained. You’re mistaken. The woman was delighted to be able to tell him this. Your dog arrived in perfect health, she had no injury at all, she left this world very peacefully. And as she said this something clicked in her. She had gotten through all the verbal obstacles of breaking bad news but now another level of awareness had struck, one that no teacher had ever briefed her on. Keith had the facts now though not arranged properly and for a second he thought perhaps it’s possible they have dogs that are not the dog in question, but made-up dogs that are not his dog after all, and he had exposed this truth, but he looked again at the angle of the dog’s face, how the spots were on the nose and this was his dog. The dog looked stuffed and that was what rigor mortis did to you. This dog walked in here, the woman had said. She was a fine dog and we hate having to put down fine dogs. We had a family lined up but then they changed their minds and we waited three days and, as you can see, we are above capacity.
Then he saw the truth pass out of her face. Sometimes truth is like a physical liquid that can leak out, or when it turns into liquid there is no container for it. His dog had been fine. His parents had argued. His parents were splitting up, he knew that, but what he did not know until this moment was that no one had a practical answer for the dog. The pure truth of the event leapt off the orb of her eyeball, it was a visual story that bounced off his eyes.
That was when he was twelve and that summer his mother moved to New York and shared an apartment with an old school friend. Keith continued his schooling near Lake Placid and lived with his father. His father brought home styrofoam bowls of soup from the cafeteria in the basement of the building where he had his healing practice and they ate their lunch together before both went back to school and work. They continued this even though it may have been more convenient for the boy to stay at school all day. They had not missed a meal together, and the boy would have to be a lot older, much older than his father was now, before he appreciated that, Henry thought.
Keith visited his mother and knew he was more like her than his father. He was, in fact, most like his grandfather—his mother’s father. He did not sleep as he lay on their couch. And at three in the morning he left her and her female lover a note to say goodbye. The garbage trucks hurled down Fifth Avenue. A man dropped off the back of the truck and whipped ou
t the white bag of garbage sponsored by the Doe Fund then ran across a crosswalk and jumped back aboard the rear lip of the truck. The garbage bin empty. Someone else must put in a new bin liner later in the morning.
The silver tower on the Empire State Building like a picture tube in a TV, or the filament in a lightbulb. The lightbulb broken off. Some silver in the Chrysler Building too. In Madison Square, park staff cleaned up sidewalks, green coats with a white maple leaf on the back. One was wearing homemade cardboard shoes over his personal shoes.
His mother kept grudges, but limited them, so she got over much grief by drying out the grievances on a clothesline then stacking them in a little drawer behind her ear. She lived carefree and immediately. A grievance her son kept in his own little box behind the ear was this very method, a method kept to manage the mortal life. I want to be an actor, he said to his mother’s lover, Althea. She was brushing her teeth and Keith had walked in on her and Althea had not asked him to leave. But there was no money for theatre school and his parents were preoccupied with work and transitions and hauling the infrastructure of two professional lives around the world.
His father had set up a pattern and Keith appreciated the routine. He found himself lured into his father’s work. His father’s trips to Peru. Summers in Newfoundland. How much is decided not by the intentions of a people but by how close the sun revolves around the soil layer of a particular geography. It would take Keith years to understand that it was not the content of his father’s work that interested him, but a person’s dedication to a set of limitations. Conviction and commitment. But he was only eighteen now and so he followed, with animosity, his father’s spiritual path to Peru and then to Newfoundland—a good solution to anger but one that did not provide a heavy bag in front of him to lash out at, only miles of open air that infuriated him. This hinterland or frontier—this place of the close-knit family—did his father acknowledge his neighbours in Renews? Colleen Grandy, the woman whose husband was away in Alberta, she cooked them both a boiled dinner and carried it over, two plates covered in tinfoil, and his father had her in and set her down and talked about what he was doing while revolving the chunky amber beads on his necklace. This lonely woman who someone should be cooking for, is what Keith thought, lonely and starved enough that she was engaging with the Americans. When she was gone they tore off the tinfoil and devoured the hot plates of food.
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