The ground seemed to shift beneath his feet. Owen lifted one shoe and it came away muddy. As he stared into the early morning fog he imagined his father there, laboring furiously over first one area of the yard and then another. Only to repeat these small repairs a few days later.
It took a special person to take good care of a house. A talented and dedicated person. His father had said that many times. Owen wondered if he had it in him. There was so much work to be done here.
After Owen’s mother left his father began insisting that they “do more father-son things”. And so he had instituted the ritual of the late afternoon swim. His father expected him to be dressed in his swimming trunks by the time he got home from work each day.
It was cold in his bedroom, as it was always cold in his bedroom, which made Owen change quickly into his trunks. But he let his father believe it was an example of the eagerness he insisted on.
“Hurry up, boy! The creek don’t like a reluctant swimmer, you know.” His father said it each time, and Owen always wondered at his meaning. Maybe it was a joke, but it always made him even colder.
In any case Owen knew it was a mistake to keep his father waiting. As they walked towards the creek bank, his father led the way with a brisk, long-legged stride. When they reached the bank, Owen was to drop his towel immediately and jump into the shiny water. He learned to make the leap into the creek without thinking, resigned to it as one might become resigned to a repetitive bad dream.
Owen leapt, eyes closed, struggling to force his thoughts into a stillness, into the bad dream.
The water was cold. He got some in his mouth. Bitter, and thick. It made him spit and choke.
“That’s just from the plants living on the bank … give it a bad taste.” His father said that every time. And not once had Owen believed him.
It was hard to swim here—however calm the water appeared, it roughened when Owen tried to swim in any particular direction, the small waves pushing against him. The water was heavy on his back. As if someone were sitting on him, trying to push him into the scummy bottom. The surface was oily and burned his eyes. It had taken him a long time to find the right word it and then he couldn’t get it out of his mind: it was an unfriendly place to be.
A hundred times Owen thought of refusing the swim.
“It’s important for us to do these things together, son.”
“You never spend time with Wes. You should be doing things together!” That was Owen’s wife. He agreed with her, and the desperation he heard in her voice pained him. It wasn’t that he didn’t like Wes. He loved him deeply. And he made attempts to plan activities they could do together—movies and ball games and museums and such. But it always felt so forced. So dangerous.
And now it was all his. The house. The grounds. The bank. The creek. Owen turned and stared at it. Now, the creek was making noise, splashing and sucking, as if it had awakened from a very long sleep. He tried in vain to remember its name, and wondered if it even had a name.
On the morning of the third day back, Owen quickly put away his own gear, then set about on the first repairs. He would wonder for some time why he felt compelled to do this—he wondered even at the time. There was no reason for him to follow in his father’s footsteps. He could live a completely different life. And when he woke up that morning he had pretty much decided that was the way it was going to be—he was going to keep the repairs down to a necessary minimum. Shabbiness was one thing that could not get to him. It wouldn’t define his life.
Wes, of course, wasn’t happy about Owen’s decision. “You promised we’d only be here a little while!” was all he would say. His son’s petulance angered him.
“Just for a little while, Wes. If I do just a few small repairs then we can get a better price for this place. And I can afford to buy you some of the things you’ve always wanted. Now doesn’t that make sense?”
“I don’t want you to buy me anything. I just want to get out of this place. It’s cold and wet … I hate it!”
It hurt.
But then there were things to do. Several of the fake marble tiles popped off the wall when he went into the bathroom. He examined the exposed surfaces, and discovered the old plaster beaded with water. No doubt the caulking had eroded, letting the water from the shower seep in. Then he noticed the small rust stain in the sink, a stain he could swear had not been there the day before. Then a section of wallpaper peeled loose in the living-room. And a piece of brick fell down from the fireplace. He picked it up and it crumbled nearly to dust in his hand. He examined the rest of the brickwork and found it full of tiny holes, soft and brittle. As if alternating damp and dry had made it deteriorate.
The house was falling apart around him, and he couldn’t bear the thought of that happening so soon after his father’s death, while he was in charge. If nothing else he had to save the house for his own son’s future. Maybe eventually he would put it on the market and sell the problem to someone else, but he couldn’t let it all disintegrate while he was staying there.
On the living-room shelves were countless books on home repair. Owen spread one across his lap. The pages smelled musty, and felt a bit like dough beneath his fingertips. He stared at a rusty splotch lying on the contents page. When it started to move he recognized it: a silverfish. He sucked in his revulsion and brushed the insect away.
The plastic wall tile in the bathroom was easy. He spent about an hour scraping the old adhesive off the backs of the tiles and the exposed wall. The wall had dried during the morning and seemed pretty solid. He found new plastic-tile adhesive in a storage room in the basement, as well as virtually every other home repair compound, chemical, tool, and material imaginable. He stood there, adhesive in hand, and tried to calculate the value of such a stock. Probably in the thousands. He spread the backs of the tiles with the adhesive and pressed them firmly into place. Then the joints had to be smoothed.
Owen found himself using the flat end of a toothpick, as if he were sculpting a miniature. An old house like this never forgave shoddy work. Before you knew it, something adjacent would need repair—like an infection spreading. His father must have told him that a hundred times.
Wes spent a great deal of time wandering the grounds and reading. He didn’t like sitting on the ground, so he always carried a folding chair with him. Sometimes Owen would discover him behind a bush or some other object, watching Owen make the repairs. Owen thought he seemed content enough.
Rubbing paraffin on all the edges of a sticking kitchen cabinet door seemed to solve that problem immediately. Replacing a door spring with a pneumatic closer from the basement storage room stopped the back screen door from banging. The wobbly legs on the dining-room table were repaired by forcing new glue into the joints. A small hole in one of the walls was filled with gypsum-board joint compound and sanded smooth. Owen discovered a small hole in one of his mother’s favorite pewter mugs; he cleaned the metal inside the mug with steel wool, then covered the hole with epoxy mender.
When he returned the epoxy to the basement he discovered that several of the water pipes were sweating, and a puddle had formed on the concrete floor. He stared at the pipes, fascinated by the way moisture just seemed to ooze out of solid metal, then wrapped them with fiberglass tape.
Over the next few days Owen discovered he had a knack for this sort of work, something he never would have imagined. Some repair solutions came to him naturally, unbidden. And for the knottier problems he discovered, by dipping into his father’s library, that there were tricks he could use, that the mysteries had discoverable keys. By drilling holes almost through the wood slightly smaller than the nails he was going to use he could prevent the wood from splitting when he nailed two pieces together—especially useful when working with oak or yellow pine. Coarse sand was required for making good concrete. Cellulose cement made a neater joint than epoxy glue but it broke down under heat. Pyrethrin was a good spray for centipedes, but since they kill many other insects perhaps they’d best be le
ft alone.
The air seemed drier in the house. It had been unexpectedly easy to conquer the dampness. Owen breathed more easily.
Wes spent a great deal of time in Owen’s old bedroom, playing with his ship models, taking them apart, reassembling them. And some days he took long walks by himself. But never by the creek.
“Why don’t you ever go down to the creek?” Owen had been repairing the porch swing, replacing some of the slats, when Wes walked up behind him. It startled Owen at first; his son had paid a noticeable amount of non-attention to the repair work up until this time. “There’s a lot of interesting animals living by the creek, birds and reptiles and things. And it’s a lot cooler down there.” To his dismay, Owen usually found himself taking up a semi-lecturing tone when speaking to Wes. The canned sentences almost led him to propose that Wes take a swim in the creek. But the suggestion died in a sour taste that filled his mouth.
“I don’t like the creek,” Wes said. Then, when Owen thought the boy wasn’t going to say anymore, “There’s something wrong with it.”
Owen laid his tools down and turned from the job. “I don’t understand what you mean.”
“What are we doing here, Dad? You said just a couple of days!”
Owen closed his eyes. He was angry, but he also felt an unaccountable kind of grief. He reached out and touched Wes’s tennis shoe. Maybe it was silly—he wanted to hold his son, grab his hand, but the shoe was all he could reach at that moment. “I’m sorry. I know. But I’m real close to settling something, Wes. I can’t explain it, but we have to stay just a little while longer. I feel so close now.”
He must be babbling like an idiot. He expected his son to look confused or appalled or miffed, but the boy looked almost kindly. “Okay, Dad. But let me help you fix some of this stuff. Maybe then we can get out of here.”
Owen nodded.
Owen discovered it relaxed him to make the walk from the house to the creek after a long day repairing the house. He’d sit in an old chair on the bank and nearly fall asleep watching the slight, restless waves. He wanted badly for Wes to join him there, but wasn’t about to force him. He could see now why such a ritual might have appealed to his father.
Owen had noticed a peculiar coincidence. The better the repairs proceeded, the nearer some intangible ideal of “finishedness” the old house approached, the lower the level of the creek against his bank. And the dryer and firmer the ground. If repairs were going exceedingly well, he could hardly see the surface of the water.
Owen spent several more weeks making repairs. He had little time to think about why he was doing them; they just seemed to need doing. But after a while, after long stretches of labor, usually on a weekend when he thought he could rest, things seemed to go all wrong somehow. Concrete and brick he’d repaired three days before crumbled. Chair legs warped, popping their joints. Wallpaper buckled.
The damp was back, undoing Owen’s repairs one at a time.
He had grown more and more irritable—he couldn’t help himself—but Wes seemed to know enough to stay out of his way. Occasionally he allowed the boy to help out with the small things, the unskilled labor tasks like carrying supplies or bracing beams—but most of the time he refused help. Wes spent more and more time inside Owen’s old room, with the shades drawn. Some days they didn’t see each other at all. He ate his meals, sandwiches usually, wherever he was working. Wes seemed good at fending for himself.
Once his father had spent most of a week carefully laying flagstones for a patio that was to abut one of numerous flower gardens he had established on the grounds behind the house. By that time his father’s anxieties about the house and yard were obvious to Owen. The number of lines webbing his face had increased dramatically, and there was a barely perceptible tremor in his hands. More than once Owen had seen him drop a hammer or screwdriver, then rub his hands violently, as if to work the circulation back into them.
But on this particular day his father seemed worse than usual. He walked around as if on eggshells, as if a cake might fall, or a castle of playing cards topple if he did not move softly enough. He carried the flagstones out to the prepared ground carefully, looking at the ground in front of him before each step. Then he knelt slowly, positioned the stone, then tamped it gently into place with a rubber mallet.
Owen didn’t exactly see what happened next, but he heard his father fall and felt the ground shake. And saw, although from a distance, the flagstones sinking into mud. Later he examined the ground there; it had been seriously undermined by the water.
He could have gone to his father that long ago day. He could have comforted him. But could not. Just as Wes could not. They’d always been like that, the two of them. The three of them. They were past changing, past any piecemeal repair.
Owen dreamed about plans for the house—his father’s plans, his own plans. If he could only solve the dampness problem, they could have a rec room in the basement. His father had talked about that for years. It would give them more time for each other. Wes would like that. It was important for a father and son to do things together.
Each night Owen would awaken from the dream of a house that demanded no labor, to the sound of the dripping. He’d leap from the bed and roam the house, checking the faucets, the windows, the roof, examining the ground outside. No moisture. And yet when he crawled back into bed he could hear it louder than ever, impossibly loud.
He wondered how Wes could sleep through it all.
He’d remodel the house completely, he thought. He’d put in a den, a children’s room. Wes would have his own workshop, his own tools. He’d really like that. Re-shingle the roof, panel the living-room, change the ceiling fixtures, update the wiring. Once the house was unrecognizable perhaps there’d be no more problems.
Owen would walk into the bathroom in the morning and find the faucet running, a continuous silver line as if the metal were leaking into the bottomless pit of the drain. He’d tighten the handle but the leak couldn’t be stopped, and he’d stand there watching the metal dissolving, being stolen so quickly by something that lived at the bottom of the drain.
Some nights he’d awaken and wander sleeplessly from room to room. Every faucet in the house would be running in that continuous, echoing, dreamlike way. He’d go back to bed wondering when the porcelain sinks themselves would begin their silent journey into the dimension at the other end of the drain.
He’d build a children’s room. A silly thought. But what was a house without children? There was so much work to be done—who had time for a family? Drip … drip.
There were hidden leaks in the house. All the good air escaped through the poorly-insulated roof and walls. Some energy projects would be good for next fall. Maybe an insulating blanket around the water heater would help.
He’d wake up in the middle of the night because of the awful subtlety of the noise it made. Drip. He’d pull up the bedclothes and check his toes for cracks in the toenails leaking his life away. His father would be surprised to see how well he’d managed the repairs.
He’d wake up in a heavy sweat, the bedroom impossibly humid, the walls warping inward from the damp. He’d check his damp head, fearing his brain fluid was leaking away.
He had a plan for getting remarried if he ever got out of the house to meet someone. She would be enormously impressed with the improvements he had made. And once she saw his sensitivity demonstrated in his plans for the new children’s playroom, she would fall in love with him. They would be married in the living-room, if he could keep it dry long enough.
They would have children. He’d always wanted children.
His bed rotted under his thrashing body. His sheets tore to damp rags in his fists. The wallboard began to decompose, releasing gases into the room that reminded him of swamps and old spring houses. You can smell history in these rooms, he thought, and wondered if he had stumbled across an important discovery.
He woke up with the water in his ears. He stumbled into the bathroom —the liquid oozed
from the tap like clear molasses. He went to the kitchen and the water was full-force from that faucet. The “hot” and “cold” handles no longer controlled it. He wandered into the turgid air of the living-room; the walls had begun to sweat.
Where was Wes? Owen scrambled up the stairs and into his old bedroom. The bed was soaked, the sheets falling apart, the models suspended from the ceiling so damp they periodically dropped pieces onto the floor. Like rotting carrion.
But he couldn’t find Wes. He fell running back down the stairs. The steps were slick, insubstantial.
Someone was calling for help. A child was lost in the creek, drowning. The child’s voice was badly garbled by the fog, each syllable filled with cold and damp. But Owen had momentarily forgotten where the creek was. If anything, the creek surrounded him.
It was quieter outside. The creek kept peace tonight. He could not decide what had made him so anxious.
When his father beckoned from the house for their evening swim, Owen did not hesitate.
Stone Head
He woke up with a severe headache. A migraine, he thought in surprise. He thought he had finally escaped their daily torment years ago. The room was soot-black, bone-black. He wasn’t sure if it was because there was no moon or if the migraine had addled his senses. He could recall headaches so bad he could not speak, hear, or think.
Someone was speaking his name.
Had he overslept? Was it dark outside? For some reason he thought perhaps it might be early morning, just past midnight, but he could not find the window shade, did not even know where to look. It could be dawn outside his room; it could be noon. The headache seemed to be slowly creeping through the tissues of his brain, turning his brain—his thoughts—into stone.
Absent Company Page 5