Gravedigger's Cottage

by Chris Lynch

  Walter made his move. He pulled a freshly sharpened pencil out of his side pocket.

  “Hey,” Dad said, almost a whisper. “What are you doing? That’s a pencil. Walter, you know writing implements are not supposed to be within three feet of my chair. Remember, I described the worn-leather condition of that chair? Remember? How the chair’s strength and weakness come from the same place…like Kryptonite and Superman.”

  This always made Walter nervous, even at the best of times. “Don’t compare your chair to Superman, Dad.”

  “Let him compare the chair to Superman if he wants,” I snapped.

  “Get in the chair, Dad,” Walter said.

  “Put down the pencil, Walter,” Dad said.

  “You getting in the chair?”

  “You putting down the pencil?”

  They stared at each other, trembling with the tension of the situation, for like a year. This was what happened when you let the guys handle things.

  I grabbed my father’s hand, yanked him along to the chair. I whipped the pencil out of Walter’s hand and threw it against the wall. I hauled the little one up out of the seat, and I slung the big one down into it.

  Peace. Instantly, things were different.

  The method may have been madness, but the result was quite what we wanted. Once Dad was reunited with his beloved chair, his expression immediately reverted to a version of him we recognized. A version we could talk to. A version we could deal with.

  “We love you, Dad,” I said.

  He smiled. He sank down lower and ever lower into his chair world. He looked at one lovely blackened red-tufted-leather arm and the other, and rubbed them and squeezed them as if to reassure himself that they were actually still there like before.

  “Now go back to work.”

  “What?” He almost got out of his chair, but didn’t. He leaned forward, then retreated into the upholstery like a turtle into his shelldom. “You just said you loved me.”

  “We do. Don’t we, Walter?”

  This kind of talk wasn’t as easy for Walter as for me. He nodded bravely but very honestly.

  “That’s part of why we want you back at work. The chair isn’t the only thing that’s in danger of popping its old springs.”

  He stared from deep within his turtle hideaway. His eyes, just his eyes, swung from me to Walter and back again.

  “Are you saying you think I’m going crazy?” he asked in a voice that couldn’t have sounded more unsettling if he sang all the words backward. Walter released a sigh that had a little squeal of voice in it.

  “No, Dad, no,” I said, because I am devoted to my father more than to any hyperliteral notion of truth. “It’s just that I think among the three of us, and with school not started yet, and after the move and all, and now with all the work on the house…I just think we might just start to get in each other’s hair a little bit. That’s all. And that maybe doing things more gradually, with the house, might be the way to go…”

  “And going to work…” added Walter.

  “Might be the way to go,” I concluded.

  He sat there. Started looking a little more relaxed, started emerging in tiny degrees from his shell. Even had a little turtlesque smile growing there straight and flat across his weary features.

  “You’re throwing me out of the house.”

  “Dad…” I said scoldingly.

  “You are. You’re throwing your father out of the house.” He seemed amused, almost. Tentatively amused.

  “We still want you to live here,” Walter said, apparently trying to allay fears. “We want you to come back, after you go out.”

  “Ah, you guys,” Dad said, shaking his head and laughing. Tentatively laughing.

  “Ah, us guys,” Walter said, visibly relieved at the lessening tension.

  I was reserving judgment just yet on whether the tension was actually leaving or just hiding. Dad wasn’t all the way back with us yet, uh-uh.

  “I couldn’t leave you now,” Dad said as his smile started getting too heavy to hold up, “not with the jobs left, and especially not with that rat…”

  The options for response flicked through my mind. Top of the list was to scream my guts out in frustration. Even though I was no screamer. But I decided that wouldn’t help things, so I tried quiet, but firm, reason.

  “There is no rat, Dad.”

  “Of course there’s a rat, sweetheart.” He was actually kind and upbeat about it. “He ate the fish, remember?”

  “No, I don’t remember. I can’t remember what I never knew. I never saw any rat. And neither did Walter.”

  “I did.”

  “You did not.”

  “I might have.”

  “Dad said you saw it, so you thought that was what you saw, because Dad said so.”

  “If Dad said so, then I must have.”

  “That’s my boy,” Dad said.

  Walter was supposed to be working with me. God love him, he did have such trouble straying from Dad’s path.

  “Walter!” I shouted.

  “Dad?” Walter said.

  “Listen,” Dad said, rising like a judge, “we won’t dwell on this now.”

  “Yes, we will,” I said. “We will dwell on this. Now. I am tired of not dwelling. I think we have to dwell on something, Dad. I think we have to dwell.”

  He was not ready for that. He stood, staring, his benevolent smile sliding right off his face, down to the floorboards, across the room, and down through the hole into the crummy cellar. He was ready for not dwelling. He was not ready for being told by me that we would not now be not dwelling.

  “Maybe we don’t have to dwell on this right now,” Walter said when he saw Dad’s expression.

  “Yes, we do,” I said.

  “Right, then,” Dad said, clapping his hands and rubbing them together as if we had come to some agreement. He manufactured the lamest and most unnatural imitation of his own relaxed manner, very deliberately laid it on me, then Walter.

  And then he left the room.

  I chased after him, just caught him at the kitchen door. Not that he was in any danger of running away, of course, since that would require actually leaving, which he didn’t do anymore.

  “Hey,” I demanded.

  “What?” He sounded exasperated and was gesturing with both hands at the door. “I have to get this stuff done, Sylvia. Look, can Walter’s dartboard really stay there forever? I don’t think so,” he said with a chuckle that made it sound as if I had been the one who ripped a hole in the door and patched it with a dartboard.

  “That’s right,” Walter said, coming in behind me.

  I turned on him. “Must I remind you every two minutes which side of this you are on?”

  “Which side of what?” Dad asked. “There is no this. We have no this to be on one side or the other of.”

  “I think we do, Dad,” I said, and as I said it I made a very deliberate grab of the wrist, of the right wrist. In his right hand was the infamous, do-it-all putty knife.

  “No,” he said, looking at the wrist, or my hand, or the putty knife. “I don’t think we do, Vee. And Walter doesn’t either.”

  And with that, when I would not back down—or let go—he did something, a move that belonged to somebody else but not to my dad. He suddenly, angrily, ripped his hand away from me.

  Somebody else. Some other place, other time, other reality, but not us or ours. My dad would have never.

  He acted like he didn’t even notice. He turned away from me and dashed across the kitchen to the counter at the far end where a small army of tools and appliances had been steadily gathering like for war around the general that was the radio. He turned on the radio, then turned it up loud.

  I was still staring at my hand. Maybe it wasn’t a big thing, maybe it shouldn’t have been a big thing, but it was a big thing.

  I looked over to Walter, who was also staring at my sad little hand.

  It wasn’t red or scratched or bruised, or anything bad.
Except empty. Violently empty.

  I sucked up my foolish girly sadness, I sucked in the wet charcoal air, I sucked in my lip that kept popping out and flubbering around, and I followed Dad across to the other side of the kitchen.

  He looked so unlike himself. His back was to us, his palm flat on the counter as he leaned with one hand and fiddled with some tool or other with the other. His head hung so low that from behind it looked like he was cut off at the shoulders.

  “Dad,” I said, as I tugged at his belt from behind. That was how I always grabbed him, when we would play, when I would be corralling him.

  He turned the radio up a bit.

  “Dad,” Walter said, bumping me as he reached in for his share of the belt.

  Dad turned on his electric drill. It sounded like a trash truck.

  “Dad,” Walter and I both called out. We tugged him hard, so he had to turn around.

  He was all apology. His face, was an apology. Words, however, did not come along with it. He stood mute, with the drill in his hand pointed like a gun at the sky. There was nothing in it—no drill bit, no screwdriver bit, no working bit of any kind—but it whirred away madly, loudly, above even the radio noise.

  “Would you turn that thing off?” I shouted. “You can’t hear yourself think with all this going on.”

  He didn’t turn the drill off, not right away, and he didn’t turn the radio off either. He reached out, drill in hand still, and wrapped Walter and me up in the tightest ever bear hug. Walter got the arm with the drill, so it was right by his ear. He didn’t complain though.

  “The last thing I want,” Dad said right in my ear, “is to hear myself think.”

  Then, quick as a cat, he released us, turned off the drill, and dropped it on the counter before stepping away again, to his room, and slamming the door.

  I was all but ready to give up, which I normally am not. I was scared, which I normally am not. I was out of answers—which I am never.

  But then the cavalry rode in.

  “No,” Walter said.

  He left me, and stomped his way toward Dad’s room. I ran after him. He reached the door, where we heard Dad’s radio playing away as it always did, day and night.

  He didn’t even knock.

  He burst into Dad’s room and went right over to the bed where Dad was lying, staring, wide-eyed at the ceiling.

  “Chaos,” said Dad.

  Which this time was fairly accurate. The idea of Walter bursting uninvited into Dad’s room, and for purposes of confrontation, was about as close to a definition of chaos as we would have gotten. Before recently.

  “No, Dad,” Walter said, plunking himself into a seat on the mattress beside Dad.

  “No?” Dad replied.

  “No.”

  Well, that did the trick. The shock of hearing Walter scolding as if he were me jolted Dad into action.

  Instead of staring at the ceiling, he closed his eyes.

  Just then, over the airwaves came the shipping forecast for all boats at sea, something that always made me feel like holding on tight to something or somebody warm and close, and hearing words from somebody who would talk to me about anything other than the vastness and emptiness of the wide world, but which Dad had always, always found to be absolutely vital and compelling listening.

  He rolled over, away from us, tucked his knees up to his chest, and lay there like a conch shell just abandoned by a hermit crab.

  “I said no,” insisted Walter, sounding more like me than I was daring to sound. He shook him with both hands, bouncing the man and the mattress up and down and up and down. “No being crazy, Dad. You are not allowed. We need you to be you, Dad. Everybody has to be themselves, and people can’t just all of a sudden start being something else. That’s no good, that messes everybody up. Not allowed. Not allowed at all.”

  He kept shaking and shaking on the mattress and on Dad until I thought Dad’s teeth would fall out and right onto the floor.

  “Okay,” Dad said quietly.

  But he kept lying there, letting his body flop along deadly. And Walter kept shaking.

  Panama

  I HAD DREAMED ABOUT getting a parrot since I was a very little girl. Probably, it was the whole magical thing of being able to talk to a creature that was not of your kind. To make the leap all the way out of your world, whatever that world was bringing to you and doing to you at that time, and to drop down into a whole other world.

  It would almost have to be a better world, too, wouldn’t it? If you felt about animals the way I felt about animals. It would have to be a sweeter, a simpler, a brighter world than our world.

  And if I could converse with a representative of that world, she could tell me all about it. About places and creatures and habitats I knew nothing about. About what it was like to be an animal and deal with other animals. To find out how they are to each other. To find out how they smell to each other.

  To find out what they thought about humans.

  And even more. Even more, I could teach. She would say what I taught her to say. If it worked out correctly, I could be building a whole little individual, framing her way of thinking, molding her thoughts, starting from scratch in creating a totally new relationship in the world, and then relating to it.

  We could explain each other to each other. And we could understand each other. She would have the soul and heart of an animal, so she would be pure and good, and she would have the words and thoughts of myself, so she would be right and good.

  Panama my parrot learned to say one word. “No.”

  She said no all the time, even when I didn’t ask her anything.

  And the feathers on the top of her head fell out when she was only a few months old, and she never did anything at all, so she was like this nasty little old bald man with no job, sitting on a bench all day, complaining all the time, and saying no to everything and to nothing.

  I tried forever to get Panama to say something more. I was very patient with her. I begged her.

  “No,” she said.

  It was a dream, but it was a good dream. It was the best dream. I even went to the trouble of explaining it all to her over one very long, very hot, very sad summer afternoon, the two of us locked up in my room. I explained it to her, how we would understand each other, in a way that had never happened before, and so we wouldn’t have to die not understanding.

  “No,” she said, without giving it much thought.

  I opened her cage. I opened the window wide. I never told anybody what I did.

  We even had a big phony funeral in the yard for her.

  I cried my guts out. As hard as for any of them.

  Ritual

  HE WAS GOING TO stop. He told us he was going to stop. We agreed not to harass him while he tidied up this and that little nagging chore, and then he was going to stop obsessing on the house and get back to some form of recognizable Dad behavior, full of the regular level of eccentricities and oddities and comfortable rituals.

  We liked our rituals.

  We perhaps clung to our rituals, perhaps depended on our rituals a bit heavily, but so what? What if they got us along, got us through, got us from A to B and whatever letters beyond we could manage? Wasn’t that okay in the end? Wasn’t it okay to depend a little bit on something to help you along, as long as in the end you did get along?

  I liked the hollow ticking sound of my thin, tin oval clock on my wall. It helped me to get to sleep gradually at night and helped me wake up gradually in the morning, and had done so for as long as I could remember. I liked looking up, at the moments I found myself awake, and looking for the time and reading it on its numbers drawn in cows and moons and dishes and spoons; and I didn’t know if I could go to sleep the same if I did not have that clock, and I didn’t like to think about a time when I might have to consider that possibility. It was, fortunately, a very reliable and durable clock.

  I decided that it was okay to depend on such things if they were dependable. Our rituals with Dad had alwa
ys been dependable. Like having his special pan-fried boneless garlic-reek chicken on Friday nights. Like going swimming every year on my birthday because it’s summer and ice-skating on Walter’s because it’s winter. Like watching religiously together whenever the America’s Cup yacht races came on television even though we didn’t have any interest in yacht racing, but we saw it once accidentally and we liked it and so it became a thing.

  Rituals didn’t have to make complete sense to be good rituals, but that did help.

  Thus he broke two deals when the day came for the three of us to go out on our pre-school trip. He broke the unspoken deal that we would make this trip, the three of us together and alone, every year until the end of time. And he broke the very clearly stated rule that he was to start no more new home improvements.

  I found him that morning, yanking the old exhaust fan out of the bathroom wall, preparing to seal up the opening and tile over it. He stood there in the tub, the old fan unit dangling from his hand, staring at me sheepishly as if he had been caught doing something unspeakable. Which he had. He had very tired, bagged eyes, as if he had been up and at it for many an hour already.

  “Then we just won’t go school shopping, and we just won’t go to school when the time comes,” I snapped at Dad when he suggested we do our own pre-school shopping this year. The suggestion made me livid. He reached in his pocket with his free hand and waved an overlarge thicket of bills at us to get the job done.

  It was not that we needed him for his fashion sense. I could just about remember when Dad last chose our school clothes for us. I was nine, Walter was five. Even Walter knew. It couldn’t happen again.

  He was good at some of these things, Dad was. Sweaters, he was fine. Jackets, he was great. Socks, he knew socks as if he were in the sock business and descended from a long line of sock aficionados. He would actually go out sometimes, on his lunch hour, and shop for jackets and socks and sweaters and pajamas for us if he thought we just needed that one more item to keep us warm in the coldness of the days or nights, and he was almost always right on target, and we appreciated it to heaven.