KATE LOVED FEEDING THE BIRDS IN THE ENON RIVER SANCTUARY. The first time we went was because my grandfather, George Crosby, had taken me there once, when I was thirteen or fourteen. I had walked to his house from school, probably restless, probably bored, and he’d said that there was a wildlife sanctuary a couple miles away where we might walk around for an hour. We found Enon River, chose a random path, and followed it through a meadow to a boardwalk that crossed a marsh. It was early October, and the sun was low and behind the trees to the west. The cold that had collected itself up in the pines during the day had begun to flow back out into the footpaths. As soon as we stepped on the boardwalk, a small troupe of chickadees began blipping about in the bushes and lower tree branches around us.
“I’ll be damned,” my grandfather said. “Hey,” he whispered. “I think that if you put your hand out, you can get them to come to you here.” We didn’t have any seeds with us, but we stood next to each other, still, hands held out, palms up. The birds circled in tighter and tighter radii, until they nodded and curtsied toward us off the tips of the bushes, no more than an inch from our outstretched hands. When the first chickadee hopped onto the ends of my fingers, I startled at the grip of its scratchy, weightless little claws, and it wheeled off back into the bushes.
My grandfather whispered, “Heh! You’ve got to stay vary steel, so the leedy birdees dond get scared,” in one of his weird, vaguely Slavic, vaguely vaudevillian-sounding accents. We must have been a sight—a short, potbellied old man and his thirteen-year-old grandson, already several inches taller than him, but still a kid, still skinny and thin-voiced and still interested in toy soldiers and plastic tanks and blowing up his model trains with firecrackers, standing side by side on the boardwalk, facing the bushes, each holding a hand out just past the tips of the branches, standing still, squinting into the shadows and light, occasionally whispering back and forth, the old man urging the boy to keep still, but in a funny voice that kept making the boy laugh and say, “Stop it, Gramp.”
Another bird flew onto my fingers. It was above my head, on a branch perhaps twenty feet up. It tipped headfirst off the branch, wings tucked at its sides, and dropped like a bobbin straight toward my palm. It flicked its wings out six inches above my hand, spun itself upright, and dropped onto the tips of my fingers. This time I did not startle. The bird looked at my empty hand, gave me a couple bemused, sideways looks, and sprang off.
I never returned to the sanctuary with my grandfather, and the experience sifted away in my mind for years, until it emerged again one afternoon when Kate was seven years old.
“Hey, Kate. I just thought of something really cool. It’s kind of a mystery, something I remember from way, way back when I was a kid.”
“What is it, Dad?”
“Well, let me just show you, okay?”
We drove to the sanctuary and I walked her down the wide grass track that ran downhill alongside the meadow, high with milkweed, and the grid of swallows’ houses until we reached the edge of the woods and entered them through a leafy archway. The path turned to packed dirt and stone, with steps made out of the trunks of trees spaced every fifteen feet or so. The hill leveled out at the edge of several miles of marsh and interconnected ponds. We crossed a boardwalk hedged by spicebush and willow. Birds began to chirp and call and zipped back and forth in front of us. We stepped off the boardwalk and onto a sandy path exposed to the fumy heat and bright, open buzz of the marsh, swarming with insects. The path led past a low section of stone wall at the edge of the marsh. Clumps of speckled alder grew on either side of the wall.
“So,” I said. “The cool thing is that if you put some seeds in your palm and hold it out, the birds might fly to you and eat right out of your hand.”
“Yeah?” she said. She wore jeans and pink sneakers and a green T-shirt with a cartoon monkey on it. Her hair hadn’t darkened to brown yet and was still bright blond, and long, and not, as I remember, especially well combed. It was snarled and looked a little wild, like vines.
I opened a plastic sandwich bag that I’d filled with black sunflower seeds.
“Take a handful and stand with your hand out, right near those bushes, and be very still, and very quiet.” She scooped some seeds from the bag.
Kate whispered, “Dad!” A trio of chickadees had come to the alder near where she stood. They hopscotched around in the branches at the back of the tree and made their way to the front in a series of formations that looked choreographed.
“Stay still!” I whispered.
“Dad!”
“Don’t worry,” I whispered. “It’s okay; they’re more nervous than you.” That wasn’t true. The birds were tame and used to being fed by people. Kate turned sideways toward the branches. She hunched up and covered the side of her head nearest the birds with her shoulder, as if to protect her cheek and ear. Her fingers started to curl shut over the seeds.
“Open your hand, Kates. It’s okay; I promise.” The lead chickadee perched on the tip of the nearest branch and leaned out. It feinted toward her and she yelped and snatched her hand away. The bird wheeled back up into the branches and chirped twice, indignant.
“It’s okay, my love. It’s a little startlish. You don’t have to do it if you don’t like.”
Kate kept her eyes on the springing birds. There were now five of them in the tree. She held her hand up. The lead bird made its way to the end of the near branch again, and this time when it launched toward Kate, she didn’t move and it dropped down, clinging to the tips of her fingers, beaked around at the seeds until it found one it liked, and whirred off into the tree.
“Dad, Dad! Did you see?”
“I saw, I saw. Keep still and you’ll get a ton of them.” And so Kate stood there, almost like statuary, as a flock of chickadees took turns going back and forth between the alders and Kate’s hand. A screechy, manic quartet of titmice arrived. They managed one or two seeds each from Kate—which she didn’t like; she said they were scratchy and hurt a little—but they mostly just fluttered around in a tizzy behind the chickadees. Two nuthatches scrambled up and down the trunk of a nearby dead pine tree, nyucking and waiting patiently for the chickadees, who were bossy and would not allow any other birds near while they were still feeding. Wilder birds that would not be hand-fed were attracted by the activity and orbited around us—cardinals and blue jays in the trees, sparrows and wrens in the underbrush. When the chickadees finally had eaten all they wanted, the nuthatches dropped down and took some seeds.
Just before Kate’s arm gave out, a tiny yellow bird emerged from the reeds in the marsh. It perched on top of a cattail that ticked back and forth like the pendulum of a metronome. Kate looked back at me and whispered, “Is it okay if I’m done, Dad?” Just as she spoke, the little yellow bird looped up onto the tip of Kate’s forefinger.
I pointed and jabbed. “Tsssst, tssst.”
Kate looked back at her hand. The bird did not seem to notice the seeds. It was smaller than any I’d seen before, save for hummingbirds. But it was not a hummingbird. It was not a finch or a warbler or a wren. I’d never seen a bird like it, in the woods or meadows or in a book. Kate looked at the bird and smiled. The bird sang a liquid, silvery little phrase that was so clear and so limpid it seemed without source, trilling in the air for an instant and evaporating without a trace. (Afterward, whenever Kate and I talked about her first time feeding the birds, we ended our recollections by talking about the little yellow bird and the little silver phrase it sang that neither of us could have said quite for certain we had actually heard, but for the fact that the other seemed to have heard it as well.) The bird remained on the tip of Kate’s finger for another moment and whirred back into the reeds. I tried to sight it with my binoculars but could not find it again.
We crossed the boardwalk, walked up the log steps in the woods and into the milkweed field, which was full of swallows zinging around catching insects on the wing in the sunset.
Kate rubbed her arm and said, “Oh, man, I must have fed like a hundred birds. That pretty little yellow one was the best. I couldn’t even feel it on my fingers.”
WHEN I WAS A kid, we followed the Memorial Day parade from the Civil War memorial in the center of the village, down Main Street, to the cemetery. The veterans and cops and firefighters and dens and packs of Boy and Girl Scouts and the high school marching band formed a semicircle around a portable podium with a built-in microphone and speaker, which was never loud enough, set up once a year for this occasion in front of a file of uniform headstones belonging to a group of Revolutionary War veterans, each with a small United States flag poked into the ground next to it. An officer in the army or navy reserves would give a speech, which, translated through the podium speaker, sounded like a garbled distillation of every Memorial Day speech ever given in every small town in the country, the words of which were not as important as the spirit in which they were delivered. When the day was sunny and blustery, the wind would pop and roar through the speaker along with the speech. When it was overcast or rainy, the speech would sound nearly subterranean, as if it were channeled through the officer at the podium from one of the soldiers in the ground behind him. Villagers sat on the hill overlooking the podium or meandered among the headstones, searching for the oldest dates, or stood behind the crowd with toddlers in strollers. Kids ran around playing tag or hide-and-go-seek and were shushed by whatever nearby adults when they squealed too loudly. After the speech, the first trumpeter in the marching band played taps. When he was finished, the second trumpeter played it again, from behind a maple tree at the back of the cemetery. Three veterans from the National Guard fired three rounds of blanks from their rifles and the Cub Scouts scrummed at their feet for the shells. The parade re-formed, the drum line started a march, and the procession headed back to town, where it ended with another short speech in front of the town hall.
I played drums in the high school band and dreaded the Memorial Day parade because I had to spend the day among everyone I knew dressed in a shiny blue polyester suit, with a white sash, white bucks, and a blue plume sticking up from the crown of my white vinyl shako. After high school, I never thought about the parade until I moved back to Enon and had Kate.
Kate was born in November, on the Monday before Thanksgiving, but the next May, when she was six months old, I found myself taking her to the parade and following alongside the band with her in her carriage. I took her to the parade every year until she was old enough to join the Brownies, after which she marched in the parade, and I followed alongside her troop, taking pictures. She didn’t continue into Girl Scouts because by then she was preoccupied with tennis and running, but I was still able to lure her to the parade the two years before she died, although the last year, the spring before her death, she ran off with three of her friends and they all sat on a stone wall along the route, sucking on lollipops, knocking side to side off each other’s shoulders, laughing and yelling at their friends in the parade. I took their picture and they all mugged it up, making funny faces, and we kept the photo on the refrigerator until Kate died and Sue moved back to Minnesota and took it with her.
THE FIRST NIGHT I spent alone in the house after Sue left I lay on the couch in the living room, in the dark, resting my broken hand on my chest. The hand was swollen and my black-and-purple fingers stuck out of the cast. The doctor had given me a prescription of thirty what she called instant-release painkillers and I’d been following the directions on the prescription bottle to take one pill every four to six hours. I took a pill and my brain felt slightly rubbery. But my hand hurt so much that I began to resent the pain for distracting me from Kate. I found myself having a debate between thinking about Kate and concentrating on the pain. The argument became one of those tedious, seemingly never-ending dreams that irked and provoked me but from which I could not rouse myself, even though I was not, properly speaking, sleeping.
I had known lots of guys over the years who took pills and mixed them with other drugs and alcohol. I thought, A second pill won’t kill me; it’ll just sand the burrs off the pain and cool down these voices, these antagonists who haven’t the decency to leave me in peace. I need a break, some rest. I’m just so cooked, so cracked up and crooked. If I get some time out, if I can just step back a little, get my feet back under me, let this hand heal a little, stop killing me so much, I can figure out how to get hold of myself.
I sat up and took another pill from the bottle and swallowed it dry. I was thirsty. My mouth stuck together and the pill seemed to adhere to the back of my throat. Instead of getting up for some water, I lay back down and rested my hand on my chest and closed my eyes and whispered, “Just have some mercy, please just have some mercy.”
I surfaced into consciousness four hours later, sweating and parched. I rose and lurched to the bathroom and ran the cold water tap in the sink until the tepid water in the pipes cleared and the chilled water from underground poured out. I filled the red plastic cup Kate had used for rinsing her mouth when she brushed her teeth and gulped the water down and filled the cup again. I stood for a moment in the dark. What if Kate and Susan could just be upstairs, sleeping? I thought. Couldn’t I just be down here going to the bathroom and getting a drink of water, or having a couple Toll House cookies and drinking milk from the jug in the light from the refrigerator, the door propped open against my hip, and pulling back the shade on the kitchen door a couple inches to look out at the moonlit yard, to think for a second about all the animals out there, hidden, going about their business, to think that that was eerie but also taking some comfort in it and going back upstairs and peeking in on Kate to make sure she wasn’t hanging half off the bed like she often ended up and climbing back into bed next to Susan, and maybe even worrying about money or work for an hour before I fall back asleep? What a comfort that would be, worrying about money while my daughter slept.
Going back to sleep upstairs in Sue’s and my bed, next to Kate’s empty room, appalled me, so I went back to the living room and picked up the bottle of pills and shook it. I tapped a dozen pills into the palm of my hand. I pinched up two painkillers and put them in my mouth and washed them down with the rest of the cold water in the red cup.
I WOKE AT TWO the next afternoon and struggled to make a pot of coffee with my good hand. My broken hand hurt dangling at my side, so I held it up near my cheek. Out of habit I looked for birds in the backyard. We’d bought a couple of feeders and Kate kept them filled. She tried to get the chickadees to eat from her hand, but they never would. The feeders were empty by the time Kate was buried. I couldn’t bring myself to refill them, so I fetched the bag of seeds we kept in the bottom drawer of an old bureau in the garage. After cranking open one of the windows in the nook, I removed the screen and scooped up a bunch of seeds in an old plastic juice pitcher that had faint traces of a family of cartoon bears painted on it, and tossed them out into the yard.
The empty house held its silence like a solid volume. There was weight to it. The hosts on talk radio sounded brash and insipid and oblivious. The music on the classical station sounded like music for a dentist’s office. Rock music sounded lurid and insincere. I tried to read a newspaper but the bad news made me feel more hopeless and the good news seemed invented. I wanted to call Sue’s parents’ house and ask if she’d arrived okay and ask if it felt better to be there, but I knew that that would be the wrong thing to do. Sue had called at some point the night before. I remembered hearing the message on the answering machine, and from the tone of her voice that she’d arrived without any problems. I already felt bad, not having answered her call, not having already called back, as if I’d missed my one slim chance. I couldn’t bring myself to listen to the message and I unplugged the phone. I checked my cell phone and saw that she’d left a message on it as well. I slid the backing off the phone and removed the memory card.
By three o’clock, it was unbearable to be in the house anymore, so I went outside and started to walk. I didn’t want to walk along the road, on the sidewalk. Someone might see me and stop and offer condolences or deliberate small talk. I imagined myself walking down the sidewalk and a woman pulling over and asking if I was doing okay and other people driving by and seeing me and knowing I was that grieving father and separated husband, and the exposure and embarrassment and humiliation being too much to take. But, since the Fairfield estate had been subdivided into a development twenty years earlier, it was no longer possible to cut through the fields that had originally been called Wild Man’s Meadow, when Enon had first been colonized, at least during the day. As conspicuous as walking along the road felt, cutting through the meadow would have drawn more attention, if only for the strange and sorrowful fact that in the thirty years there had been houses set around it, I had never seen anyone, adults or kids, in the meadow, no one exploring or stalking through the high summer grass or marching through winter snows. Whenever I passed it, I recalled swiping my way through the tall, buggy grass and being half terrified that the wild man, after whom the area had originally been named and about whom I had been told by some older neighborhood kids, was scrambling toward me with unnatural speed and aim from somewhere along the line of trees bordering the meadow. My terror was greatest in broad daylight, because of a sense that the wild man was so terrible and so wild he did not even need the cover of darkness or creeping stealth to claim his victims in his realm. I told Kate about the wild man one day when we were walking by the meadow. She must have been seven or eight—old enough to be told the story and be thrilled instead of frightened. But she had not been thrilled or frightened in the least.
“That’s just people’s backyards,” she said, and just like that it was true; her understanding of the landscape unseated my own—the mythical wild man of the meadow simply disappeared or, simply, had never existed for her and would never be grafted into her impression of the place.
Scooting past the meadow, I felt so panicked that someone was going to pull over and talk with me before I reached the woods that twice I nearly stopped and turned around and ran back to the house. When I reached the West Enon playground, I hurried off the sidewalk and past the empty basketball courts to where an old path entered the woods at a break in a stone wall. I sat on the wall for a moment and half-sobbed in relief at reaching cover. My broken hand ached terribly. The blood pulsing through it hurt. I took one of the six painkillers from the breast pocket of my flannel shirt and swallowed it.
The path in the woods dated back to the Revolutionary War, and I thought that only animals and kids must have used it for many years, deer and coyotes and the dogs of the village, which were allowed to roam with complete freedom, Enon never having had a leash law, and kids, at least when I’d been young, always having been given the run of the village by the time they were nine or ten years old. My friends and I had used the path when we were kids. I realized that I’d never shown it to Kate and that I had not walked it in over twenty years. As I recalled it, a quarter mile into the woods the path crossed in front of the ruins of an old cabin engulfed under thickets of bittersweet. The cabin was harmless but eerie. I had been inside only a couple of times, when I was a boy, on dares, during the day; otherwise, I always skipped into a half run to get past it. It lent the sense of some forsaken soul lying in a bed in the back room, someone who had been ill and semiconscious for two hundred years, his limbs and body wrapped in the bittersweet, too, who sensed me passing by out on the path, and who wanted me to come into the house and snip the vines from him and take his hand and put a cloth soaked in cold water on his forehead. But his hands would have been hairy with roots and would have crumbled away like dirt when I cut the vines from them and took hold of them, and his old striped shirt would be rotted and full of spores that would have made me cough, and his old body would have been packed dirt that had half-rotted through the bedding, and the entire room would be full of a noxious suspension that had been fermenting for over a century, since the dying man had been quarantined and forgotten, exiled in an obscure dead water of time, the sort of which Enon is full, if you observe carefully enough.
There was no trace of the cabin where I remembered it being. I ranged up and down the area where it should have been, looking for a pile of logs or tangle of bittersweet that somehow might have digested the cabin, but there was nothing.
“There was an old cabin here when I was a kid, Kate,” I whispered out loud, still scratching a little at the underbrush with my foot, half-looking for a threshold. “But it’s gone, just disappeared, like it never even existed.” I turned back to the path and resumed walking.
I walked all afternoon through the woods and hidden meadows of Enon. The sun went down and dusk spread and darkness began to fall. At one point it occurred to me that I had not eaten anything, but I felt neither hungry nor very thirsty. I reached the western shore of Enon Lake as the last light left the sky. I knelt down by the water and raised my broken hand above my head so it wouldn’t get wet and cupped some in my good hand and took a couple sips. The water was cold and clean-tasting, fine, mineral. I swallowed two pills with another mouthful, then jogged across the street and into the trees on the other side of the road, at the edge of one of Enon’s two nine-hole golf courses. The cemetery was a quarter mile away, back toward the village. It lay between the two golf courses, along the flank of a large hill. The golf courses and cemetery begin on flat tracts directly off the old Post Road to Boston, which then steeply elevate in a succession of rises. I crossed the near golf course and stepped over the stone wall into the upper part of the cemetery. Kate was buried below, toward the front, in the family plot, next to my grandfather George Washington Crosby and my grandmother Norma Crosby and my mother, Betsy Crosby, and where I will be buried when I die. My great-grandmother Kathleen Crosby is also buried in the cemetery, in another section.
It was just superstition, but I did not want to pass in front of Kate’s grave. I felt the way I would have had she been alive and I on as many drugs as I’d taken over the course of the day. Without having paid attention, I realized I had taken at least twice as many pills as I ought to have, and maybe more. It almost felt as if I were levitating when I stopped walking and stood still and looked down through the shadows to where Kate’s stone was. The moon was out and there was a beautiful view from the top of the cemetery. Deer browsed on the golf greens below to my right, and the tombstones made of white marble glowed. A corner of the lake was visible below, past the road, beyond the trees, sparkling.
I sat and surveyed the land, and looked down the hill, toward the Norway maple under which my grandparents and my mother and my daughter lay. A stupor fell over me and I floated without direction for some time, possibly hours, until I was roused by the voices of two young girls. They were sitting fifteen yards away from me, to my left, cross-legged, face-to-face, hidden from the road behind an enormous rectangular white headstone, on the other side of which, as I knew from my many trips to read the inscriptions on both the cemetery’s prominent memorials and its modest ones, lay a family of six, named Smith, all of whom had died during an epidemic in 1839. The girls shared a cigarette and swapped a bottle of wine. They both bent forward to examine something on the ground between them. One took a drag from the cigarette and passed it back to the other and opened a small book she had in her lap.
The girl with the book held it close to her face and fingered through the pages until she said, “Here it is.”
“What, what; what is it?” the other girl said.
“Give me a second, will you?” The girl examined the book, then dropped it into her lap and stared at her friend. She said, “Dude, this deck is whacked, it’s always so right. This card is that you lust for someone you know is evil.”
The other girl blew smoke out of her nose and clapped herself on the head, her forearmful of bracelets and trinkets clinking and twinkling in the moonlight, and groaned, “Oh man—that’s freaking Carl!”
Both girls had long, very dark, unkempt hair, which I assumed was dyed black but could not tell for sure. They both had pale skin and heavy black eyeliner on, and very dark lipstick, which might have been black or a very dark shade of purple or red, and they both wore all black clothes. I guessed they were a couple years older than Kate. I liked them immediately, and imagined Kate being their friend and going through a safe and uproarious adolescence with them. I even found myself wishing that they might do what they did in front of Kate’s stone, so that Kate could hear them and have the company, although she was too close to the road, and the girls would have been overheard by someone walking his dog, who would probably have called the police on his cell phone. I lay still where I was for half an hour, while the girls sipped wine and smoked and used their tarot cards as prompts to talk about what was important to them. Their conversation was endearing, although I was embarrassed by a good deal of it, and embarrassed that I was eavesdropping on them. But I did not want to try to sneak away or attempt to rise and act as if I’d stumbled on them by accident. I did not want to frighten or upset them. So I let them chatter and laugh and enjoyed the smell of the smoke from their cigarettes and looked up at the stars and tried to see if I could detect their movement through the sky, and thought about Kate watching the whole scene and being amused by it and teasing me about it when we both returned home.
Toward midnight, one of the girls said, “Man, it’s almost twelve. I got to go; my parents will be home soon and get all over me if I come in later than them.”
The other girl said, “Yeah, me, too.” Both girls stood up and stretched and brushed off the backs of their skirts, their bracelets jingling. I heard the cork squeaking back into the mouth of the wine bottle. The girls walked back down the hill, past my family, still talking, but more quietly. They passed under the light of a streetlamp and into shadow and were gone.
THE CARETAKER OF THE Enon cemetery was named Aloysius Shank. He talked through a voice box wrapped around his neck with a cord. There was a hole in his throat, from an operation for cancer. He smoked a pipe, though, and told me once about having smoked four packs of cigarettes a day for fifty years, since he’d been eight years old.
He bubbled away at his pipe and said, “But I quit to smoking when I got that cancer.”
Although I’d hardly ever spoken with Aloysius before Kate died, I’d known about him since I could remember. He had always simply been the man at the cemetery. I remember asking my mother once, when I was a kid and had already seen him countless times, for years, as we passed the graveyard in our car, “Mom, who’s that guy who’s always in the graveyard?”
She answered, “That’s Aloysius Shank.” She chanted, “God help Aloysius Shank! His shack is cold and dank! He pays no rent, his head got dent, and one of his legs is a plank!” That was a rhyme she had learned as a kid during recess at the Bessie Boston Elementary School, the same school I went to, was probably going to, in fact, when I asked her about Aloysius, sitting on the massive, maroon vinyl back bench of the woodpaneled station wagon my grandfather, her dad, had given us—as he would continue to do with all his station wagons until he died, and the last of which was still sitting in my driveway, and still worked, fifteen years after his death, ten after my mother’s, and two weeks after Kate’s—no seat belt on, windows open, wind roaring, sun pouring in, on our way to poke around the Woolworth’s five-and-dime store—she the clothes and knickknacks, me the records in the store’s tiny music section—and after go to the drugstore lunch counter, where she’d get coffee and a blueberry muffin and I’d get a chocolate honey-dipped doughnut and a chocolate milk in a paper carton. When I asked her who’d made the rhyme up, she said that she had no idea, that everyone just seemed to know it.
It was true that Aloysius had a prosthetic leg. The original had been wooden, but it was plastic by the time I knew him, paid for collectively by the members of the Enon Fire Department, who all chipped in for it because he had been a mascot or honorable member for as long as he’d been the caretaker at the graveyard. (All the members of the Enon Fire Department were buried in the same section of the cemetery, of which Aloysius always took special care. There was a brigade of two dozen souls in the section, reaching back to the first official members of the department when it had been established, in 1821, with the purchase, by subscription, of six ladders and three hooks, according to the local histories.) He told me that he’d lost the leg when a Japanese kamikaze plane had struck the deck of the transport ship he’d been an ensign on in the Pacific during World War II. His left leg had been torn off at the knee by a chunk of white-hot shrapnel.
“Lucky it was heated,” he said, pursing on his pipe. “Cauterized the wound before I even hit the water.” (He’d been thrown overboard by the blast.) “Would have bled out right there and been fish food otherwise.”
It was also true that Aloysius had a dent in his head. “Crease” is a more accurate description. A shard from the same exploding plane had propellered its way into his forehead, just above his left eyebrow.
“When I woke up on the hospital ship, the metal was still stuck in my head. They were afraid to pull it out, were afraid it would kill me, that it was the only thing keeping my brain from spilling out of my head,” he said. “I told them take it out, I didn’t care, because living with that saw blade of a piece of Japanese metal stuck in my crown made me feel like a traitor, or like some sort of secret weapon they could hear through and send radiation waves through or something, and it gave me a terrible headache right behind my eye. So they took it out and patched over the hole with a piece of tin or something or other and that was that. The only thing that was different after is that now I can’t smell anything and green looks red and sometime I forget who I am for a minute.”
Aloysius had the habit of running one of his forefingers up and down the crease when he was concentrating. It was impossible to tell whether the injury had done anything else to his personality. He did belch, fart, and pick his nose freely, in front of anyone who happened to be nearby, no matter what the occasion—funeral, Memorial Day speech, or smoke break. Sometimes, when I thought about the plate in his head and his old wooden leg, which I fitted in my mind with rusty metal hinges and braces, and even that piece of shrapnel, which appeared in my imagination as a table-saw blade sticking up out of his head like a steel rooster comb, it seemed that Aloysius was in fact some archaic military experiment gone awry. He was like a vacuum tube Frankenstein. When the Japanese had tried to make a double-agent robot to sabotage the enemy, they had succeeded only in creating a pipe-chomping gravedigger who saw the lush green lawns of the cemetery as blood-red and who had an abiding love for firefighters.
My mother got to know Aloysius when my grandfather died. After my grandfather’s ashes had been buried, my mother walked the two and a half miles from her house to the cemetery so that she could put her hand on top of his stone and talk with him. She wiped pollen and dirt off the top of the stone with the tissues she kept in her purse. Every spring, she planted red geraniums in front of the stone, in time for the Memorial Day parade. She overwatered the flowers, but since the grave was several feet up a slope, the water drained away and didn’t drown them. My mother had spent her whole life in the town, so she knew many people in the cemetery. Besides her father and mother, her paternal grandmother, Kathleen Crosby, was buried there, as well as both of my grandfather’s sisters, Marjorie and Darla, who had followed my grandfather down from Maine and lived within a quarter mile of him until they died (Marjorie of lung cancer, Darla of a stroke, although my grandmother always said that it was a stroke if by stroke you meant gin). Many of the people with whom my grandparents had been friends when my mother was young were buried there, too. My mother could offer a census of the old neighborhood; she knew where every person from her parents’ group of friends was buried, and once my grandfather was there, and soon after my grandmother, too, she regularly planted and tended flowers at their stones as well. Since she spent so much time in the graveyard, she and Aloysius got to know each other. When she died, Aloysius planted geraniums in front of the headstone for the first Memorial Day parade after her death. I felt embarrassed, and when I saw him at the ceremony, I thanked him for remembering my mother and for planting the flowers, and said that I’d make sure to plant them the next year.
He said, “We all end up here sooner or later. Your mother was a nice lady.”
I BEGAN TO WALK the length and breadth of Enon every day, as late summer turned into early autumn, wandering paths and the old railroad line, where deer grazed and coyotes sometimes commuted. Since I’d broken my hand so severely, I’d been able to refill the prescription for painkillers. In order to conserve the pills, I got into the habit of taking one in the morning, when I started my walk, then two or three at once later in the afternoon, and abstaining from taking any at night, drinking whiskey until I fell asleep, to get me through to the next day. After wandering all morning, at noon I would sit against the trunk of a hemlock or chestnut tree and eat an apple and a chocolate bar, or whatever I had found scavenging through the increasingly bare cabinets at home, and drink rusty-tasting water from an old tin canteen. A breeze would rise and I’d fall asleep watching the traces it made among the ferns. I would awaken curled up on my side, warm against the ground but chilled down my back. I would curl up tighter but be unable to warm myself. It would be late afternoon and the warmth gone from the sun, and the sun’s light would knife through the trees sharp and gold. As chilly as it might be, I did not want to return to the house. The idea of returning to the house, cold, too, my steps echoing through its empty rooms, the plates and glasses in the sink clanking as I lifted a dirty bowl from the pile and swabbed it with a dirty dish towel and poured stale corn flakes into it and poured water from the tap onto them because the milk was sour and looked for a spoon that didn’t have old food cemented on it and couldn’t find one and so just tossed the bowl of cereal into the sink, where it split in two and shattered a juice glass, and so on, until I had swallowed enough pills and drunk enough whiskey to get past the rightful despair at the condition of the house and myself in it, that idea—the idea of that sequence of acts—was intolerable.
Susan had been gone for more than a week. I wanted to call her, to hear her voice. The idea of hearing her became a little like being able to call Kate, wherever she was, and hear her voice and be comforted by it. But I didn’t call. Poking the numbers on the keypad and hearing the ring on the other end of the line and having Susan or Kate answer would have split something that had already begun to skin over. The idea of hearing Kate’s voice was already an instance of the kind of daydreams I’d begun to give myself over to. (What if there were to be a phone somewhere in the woods, a chthonic hotline made of dark horn, resting on a bone cradle, that patched me through to Kate in her urn?) Calling Susan seemed increasingly impossible, too, though, because after she said hello, after she had answered the phone, or her mother or father had, which, I thought, might even be worse—having to say hello to her mother, for example, and having to ask if she could get Susan to come to the phone, when maybe she wouldn’t, when maybe the phone call would even end with that, with her saying, “No, Charlie, I don’t think that would be good for Susan right now,” or something equally gentle and negative—after Susan had answered the phone, and there was that open sound coming over the handset, that white noise that old phones pick up from the ambient commotion of the planet, what would I say? What could I say? What word could I utter into that rushing silence that would change things, that would bring Susan back to Enon, that would bring Kate back to the both of us?
OUR HOUSE WAS RAMSHACKLE and had old plumbing that smelled ammoniac in hot weather and heating that clanked all night in the winter and ancient horsehair plaster on the walls that crumbled if you tried to tap a picture hanger into it. We’d bought it just after Kate’s third birthday, with help from my grandmother and my mother and some from Susan’s parents out in Minnesota as well. It consisted of two smaller structures, neither originally built on the site, joined end to end. The back part of the house had been a seamstress shop originally located a mile away, at the crossroad in West Enon, where two hundred years earlier it had stood facing a one-room schoolhouse and the long since demolished home of a man named Ebenezer Cross, who’d acted as the caretaker of the school. It had been constructed in 1798 and had low ceilings and small windows, and when we first moved in and I was poking around in the attic space above the kitchen, I pulled back some of the old lathing and found it insulated with crushed seashells and balled-up newspapers from 1807. The front part of our house had originally stood a mile away in the opposite direction, on the road north to Hillham. The man from whom we bought the house, a widower named Roberts, told us that the front part of the house had been built by a young husband for his wife and child—a young family like ours—in 1880. When they had raised a family of three boys and four girls and the husband and wife passed away, both within a month of each other, in 1950, the farmer who owned all the orchards around the property had the house moved to its present location, along with the old seamstress shop, which had belonged to one of his great-aunts. The front part of the house had high ceilings and tall, drafty windows that Susan and I both loved because they let in so much light. There were two rooms on the first floor—a dining room and a living room—and two bedrooms on the second floor. The two halves of the house were connected by a single low doorway between the kitchen in the old part and the dining room in the newer part.
Houses retain traces of the people who have lived in them and I feel those traces immediately whenever I step into one. When Susan and Kate and I looked at the few houses within our price range in Enon, there were times when my stomach soured and my head ached before I had walked through two rooms. A given house would seem like a repository of misery, a deliberate prison in which successions of families had huddled and cowered from one another for decades. It seemed criminal for the real estate agents to talk up such miserable wrecks, as if they could ever be homes again for reasonable, peaceable souls, as if they should not have been demolished and the land on which they stood rededicated in special, purgative ceremonies. The agitation I felt in those tomblike buildings felt like contagion, as if the frequency and amplitude of the woe vibrating through the boards and pipes and wires of the house immediately began to affect the synapses in my brain and interrupt the beat of my heart. Susan experienced this, too, and the two of us passed silly, exaggerated looks behind the real estate agent’s back as we allowed her to give us the complete tour, having agreed after the first time this had happened that we were too self-conscious to stop the agent short because the house had bad vibes. Susan would squinch her nose, as if she smelled turned milk; I’d hunch my shoulders and limp like Quasimodo; she’d put her hand to her mouth and nod a couple times, miming laughter; I’d raise a fist and tilt my head, roll my eyes back and loll my tongue, mimicking the hopeless father who had hanged himself in the basement.
KATE AND I SOMETIMES took walks along the Enon Canal. We reached the canal by a dirt access road that ran between my old friend Peter Lord’s house and the estate of a widow named Hale. I had met Mrs. Hale twice. The first time was when Pete and I were boys, maybe eleven or twelve, and had been sledding down the hill on her property, which was called Hale’s Hill and was the third-highest hill in the village, and the highest down which a sled could be run. We had not asked permission to be on her property. She must have seen us from one of the third-story windows of her mansion, just visible over the east slope of the hill. When we saw her marching across the deep snow toward us, we thought she was coming to scold us. Being brought up in Enon, neither of us had the inclination to run away. We were well used to taking scoldings from elderly women. Mrs. Hale was tiny, barely five feet, and as lean as rope.
When she was within a few yards of us she said, “You sled like girls.”
She reached us and grabbed Pete’s sled from him.
“This is how you do it,” she said. She dropped the sled, knelt, and lay belly down on it, face-first.
“Push,” she said. I leaned down and took the sled by the backs of its runners and inched it toward the brink of the hill.
“A real shove,” she said. “Shove me right down the thing.” So I gave her a heave and down she went. The snow was packed and hard where we’d been making our runs, so it was like an ice chute. Mrs. Hale went down the hill as fast as if she were on a luge. There was a swamp at the bottom, full of trees and shrubs, and we always bailed off our sleds before the ends of our runs, so that we would not be dashed against a tree or shredded up in the briars. Mrs. Hale must have seen us flopping off our sleds before we hit the swamp and been galled by it because, when she hit the bottom of the hill at near-Olympic speed, she simply rocketed ahead. We lost sight of her past the tree line, but we heard the racket of the sled as it clattered among the trunks and frozen tules. We ran after her, convinced that she lay broken and dead, headfirst among the bulrushes and alders. But before we were halfway down the hill, she staggered out of the swamp, dragging the sled behind her, hat askew. She stomped up to us and handed Pete the tether.
“That is how you sled,” she said and limped away back to her big house behind the hill.
The second time I met Mrs. Hale I went to her house with my grandfather to fix one of her clocks. Her house was the sort about which I have always had dreams. Maybe hers is the house that prompted them.
When my grandfather was alive, and whenever I had a hard time during college making enough money to pay rent or bills or to buy groceries, he paid me to help him with his clock-repair business. He had been a machinist at a shoemaking factory for years when he’d been young and then taught mechanical drawing at the vocational school the next town over. He cut new gears for broken clocks in his basement workshop and used a slide rule. I had no aptitude for numbers and was useless when it came to making real mechanical repairs. But I had a pretty good feel for taking the works apart and finding out what was wrong and then putting them back together and oiling the pinions after my grandfather had done the skilled work and I had cleaned everything in an ammonia bath in the ultrasonic cleaner.
Whenever I worked for him, my grandfather made me get to his house by seven in the morning. I’d find him at his kitchen table reading The Wall Street Journal, because he had a few shares in a couple of utility companies, and my grandmother clearing his breakfast plate and coffee cup.
“Behold!” he cried when he saw me. “The flower of Enon village!” I groaned, sleepy, and tried to smile. He folded his paper and rose from his seat and said to my grandmother, “Well, never mind the wood, Mother.”
I finished, “Father’s coming home with a load,” and we all laughed and my grandfather and I went down to the basement and went to work, him at his old school desk that, in order to get it into his basement, he’d had to cut into pieces and reassemble, and me at the workbench, puzzling out the guts of a carriage clock.
One morning I found my grandfather already dressed in his windbreaker and Greek fisherman’s cap.
“Leave us go, Lucky Pierre,” he said.
“Where?”
“We are going to Mrs. Hale’s house,” he said. “She has a tall clock she wants looked at.” Whenever a customer had a grandfather’s, or tall, clock that needed repairing, my grandfather made a house call to see if he could fix the problem at the home, so the clock’s works would not have to be removed from the case and transported.
My grandfather and I drove to Mrs. Hale’s in his station wagon. We brought a stepladder and a tackle box and an old leather physician’s bag full of tools. As we came around the last turn in the driveway, the house rose and spread across the view in front of us. My grandfather whistled.
“I guess you know what she spends her time doing,” he said.
“What?”
“Counting her money.” I pulled the stepladder and tackle box out of the back of the car, and my grandfather took the physician’s bag. We walked to the main door and my grandfather lifted the brass knocker—a pheasant—and tapped the rhythm to “Shave and a Haircut.” One of the things of which my grandmother remained most proud her whole life was that my grandfather had never used the service entrance to any home where he did work. “He always used the front door,” she said many times.
Mrs. Hale, as slight and lean as I remembered, with her white hair pulled back, appeared in one of the sidelights. She did not acknowledge us and vanished from the window. A moment later, she appeared around a far corner of the house off to our left.
“Come through here,” she called.
She showed us into a hallway that seemed to connect two wings of the house. “Good morning, Mr. Crosby. Haven’t had that front door open in years. This one is closer to the clock anyway.”
Mrs. Hale led us into the main part of the house, past elegant, dimmed rooms and long hallways to a broad, uncarpeted wooden stairway. The clock stood on a landing halfway up the stairs. It was seven feet tall and wholly without ornament. Its hood was a simple, beautifully constructed box of wood and leaded glass. Its dial was ivory white with slender Arabic numerals painted around its circumference and nothing else, no illuminations, no decorations. Its case was narrow and plain, the wood seasoned and dull with age.
My grandfather whispered, “Well, I’ll be damned.” Mrs. Hale raised an eyebrow and looked at my grandfather for an instant and resumed her impassive demeanor.
“I guess you know this is one hell of a clock,” my grandfather said. “Simon Willard. If the works are what I think they are, this is the only one of these he ever made.”
“Mr. Willard made it for my grandfather,” Mrs. Hale said, by which she meant her great-great-great-great-great-grandfather. “There are some clockwork roasting jacks in the fireplace in one of the old kitchens, as well, that he made for Mr. Revere when they were in business together.”
The house enchanted me. I felt a mix of awe and longing and embarrassment at the awe and longing. I wondered how many kitchens there could be, whether the huge outer house contained several others, nested one inside another, like Russian dolls, each smaller and more primitive than the one immediately encapsulating it, until, arriving at the center, one would find a mud hut, and in the middle of its earth floor a charred depression in which sat ashes, dead to appearance, but from which the gentle breath from someone kneeling in the dirt and putting his face to them, close enough to whisper a confession, would arouse an orange ember, crystalline, nuclear, at the very heart of Enon’s greatest virtues and its innermost corruptions.
“And there is the orrery, of course,” Mrs. Hale said. “Mr. Willard made it for my grandfather, for Christmas 1799, the year there was so much snow.” She talked about and among the generations of her family and their acquaintances as if they were all alive and their doings recent or, if not recent, remote but personally recallable. “That is in my grandfather’s study. One of Mr. Willard’s brothers—I think it was Aaron—made several orreries, but Simon made just the one, for my grandfather, as a token of his affection.” Mrs. Hale stopped herself abruptly, as if catching herself in the sin of demonstrativeness, offering so much information. It occurred to me that she must be lonely. I looked from Mrs. Hale to my grandfather.
“What gives, Captain?” my grandfather asked.
“I don’t know what that is,” I said.
“An orrery is a mechanical model of the solar system,” Mrs. Hale said. She seemed pleased at the opportunity to instruct somebody.
“Oh. That sounds wonderful,” I said and smiled, at a loss for the correct response.
“Yes, it is quite wonderful. What do you think about the clock, Mr. Crosby?”
My grandfather said, “Well, let’s take a look and see what’s what. Set that ladder right in front there.” I opened the ladder and stood it in front of the clock. My grandfather climbed up and the two of us removed the hood together and I placed it on the floor at the bottom of the stairs. My grandfather looked at the clock’s works and whistled again. He said, “This is it, boy. Boy, is this ever it.”
“I’ll leave you two gentlemen to your work,” Mrs. Hale said. I smiled and nodded and she walked off into the reaches of the house.
“Open the case and take the weight off,” my grandfather said. He handed me an old-fashioned key he’d taken from the front ledge of the hood before we had removed it. I inserted the key into the keyhole and opened the door. The old air fell out of the clock, dry, held in the cubic shape of the case for who knows how many years until I opened the door and it collapsed out into the contemporary atmosphere, distinct and nearly colonial for a moment and then subsumed, and I wondered how old it was, if it contained any of Simon Willard’s breath. I lifted the lead weight and unhooked it from its pulley wheel. It felt like removing the heavy heart of the clock. I laid the weight on a rug at the foot of the stairs. It thudded onto the wool like an object from another, outsized planet with twice the gravity of our own. A heavy lead heart, I thought. That has to do, too, with the burning ember in the center of the house.
“Get that flashlight,” my grandfather said. “Shine it down right there and let’s see what’s what with this tricky little zon of a beetch.” I stood at the foot of the stepladder with the flashlight held above my head, pointing down at the works and the chains depending from them, while my grandfather fiddled around, pulling and poking and muttering and humming to himself. I looked at the furniture and the paintings and the rugs and the sconces. I tried to see through doorways into other rooms.
“Hey, who turn out da lights?” my grandfather said in the French-Canadian accent he used for jokes. I had aimed the flashlight beam away from the clock, looking at Mrs. Hale’s house. I pointed the beam back onto the dull, dusty mechanism, which, I noticed for the first time, was especially simple.
“I let go this bear’s ass, you find out who turn out da lights!” I said and pointed the light back at the clock.
“Now you hold that steady, Junior, right there, and leave us find out just what the hell …” My grandfather’s voice trailed off. He inserted a long, slim flathead screwdriver into the works and stuck an arm down into the case of the clock and tugged on the chains from which the weight had been hung. The works clicked for a second, but then the chains seized.
“Ooh, you tricky little bastard,” my grandfather said. He spoke to clocks like that when he fixed them—as intimates, as if they were both adversaries and patients against whom he had both pitted himself and to whose well-being he had sworn an oath. My attention wandered again. A window I could not see threw a crosshatched apron of light across the floor at the far end of the hallway through which we had come to reach the clock.
“Now you just wait one sweet, precious minute …”
“You got it, Gramp?”
“Jesus, Leviticus …”
“Is that it?”
“Julius, Augustus …” My grandfather used the screwdriver shaft as a fulcrum and bent some part of the works a little and pulled on the weight chains and they didn’t move and so he bent a little more and pulled again and the chains moved and kept moving. He stuck the screwdriver in his back pocket and pulled the chains with both hands like a deckhand hoisting a sail.
“Ha ha!” he barked. Mrs. Hale reappeared almost as if on cue.
“Have you met with success, Mr. Crosby?” she asked.
“I can’t say for sure,” my grandfather said. “But I think we are cop-a-cetic.” He patted his forehead with a folded tissue. “That clock is something else. I’d have hated like hell to take it apart.” In fact, he’d have loved nothing more than to have taken the works home and mounted them on one of the six-foot wooden frames he used for repairing tall clocks, for the sheer pleasure of having such a rare—in truth, unique—piece in his home for a month or six weeks. But he also knew that this was not an artifact with which to trifle, and the less fiddling with it, the better. “We’ll leave it for now and see how it does. If it stops, you just ring me and we’ll come back and take another look.”
I put the tools back in the physician’s bag and folded the stepladder and rehung the weight in the clock and replaced the key on the ledge of the hood.
“Between this clock and those jacks and that orrery, I suppose you know you’ve got a regular museum here,” he said to Mrs. Hale.
“You may see the orrery, if you like,” Mrs. Hale said. She and my grandfather looked at me.
“Oh, I’d love it,” I said.
The orrery stood on an oak dais in the middle of a room that had been the study of probably eight generations of Mrs. Hale’s forefathers. Four brass legs supported two horizontal brass dials connected by vertical posts, in between which was a series of coaxial shafts, stacked with telescoping gears, and a long brass hand crank with a wooden handle. A kettle-sized brass sphere, set above the middle of the upper dial, represented the sun. Its surface was so polished and reflective it not only threw the room’s light back out, as if generating the glow itself, but also seemed to possess depth, as if one might be able to plunge into its fish-eyed fathoms, into another brassy room. The planets and their moons were made of proportionally sized ivory balls. Each was fixed at the end of a brass arm. My grandfather and I stood looking at the marvelous machine in silence.
Mrs. Hale said, “Master Crosby, you may turn the handle once or twice if you’d care to.” I looked at my grandfather.
“That means you,” he said. I stepped forward and grasped the handle.
“Clockwise,” Mrs. Hale said. I turned the crank and there was a pleasing resistance against it and as I found the right amount of pressure to use, the wheels and gears began to revolve. The machine was nearly silent. Its precision was such that the planets tilted and turned on their axes and their moons spun around them and all of the arms revolved around the diameter of the disks with a fine, low whir so apt I thought I could hear it harmonizing with the roar of the real universe. The earth and moon turned on a third disk, into which had been etched the seasons and night and day and the moon’s phases. As the arms and disks and spheres turned, I looked at my reflection in the brass sun and thought, This is a part of it, too—the ember in the pit, the clock’s lead heart, the brass sun in its corona of wires and gears and ivory moons.
“I suppose Harvard or some such place would like this someday,” Mrs. Hale sighed. She seemed about to say something else but left off. “What do I owe you for the clock?”
Every time I hiked past the house I imagined the old clock and orrery and the fantastic rooms. With Kate or by myself, I imagined sun-drenched salons with open double casement windows of leaded glass, some panes stained to pale summer tints that took up the tendrils of light twirling through the draperies of the linden trees outside; walnut libraries with first fires lit more against the idea of autumn frosts than their actual nick, in order to please and add comfort to the contemplation of books; hibernal innermost parlors at the heart of the house, with deep chairs set before small, hot fires, the heave of winter winds and piling snow telegraphing through the timbers, pointing up the good fortune of well-being; bare, clean, cold, high white rooms filled with sun and wide views of crocus beds and back lawns greening in the rain; the massive orrery, oiled and polished and potent, ready to replicate the symphonic whirlings of the pale minor bodies around our pale minor star.
That was the thing about Mrs. Hale’s house. It loomed so suggestively in my imagination and my dreams that its essence changed almost every time I thought about it. It seemed as if its nature, its architecture, had been made to accommodate those very whims, as if its very construction in fact required that, for example, the notion of the jeweled orange ember at the center of the house be transformed into the brass and ivory orrery, and that in turn converted into the next dream, all somehow having to do with the heart of my home village.
Mrs. Hale’s house prompted my deepest desires to provide for Kate, as well as my deepest resentments about wanting such material wealth. There were evenings when, returning from an afternoon walking along the canal, tired, hot, sweaty, thirsty from our hike, Kate and I would cross Mrs. Hale’s cracked and weed-shot tennis court and sit in the grass on the side of a rise overlooking the estate, a copse of darkening fir trees looming at the top of another rise to the right, and the house half sunk behind another rise on the left, beautiful in the oncoming dusk—dim, solid, so white it glowed blue in the gloom, huge, one or two windows lit and glowing the color of the wood of the floors and walls, the colors of the Persian carpets, the colors of the glass lamps that lit them. We’d sit and recline next to each other and the shadows would advance over our heads like a canopy and clouds would spread out over the sky from the west and Kate would braid stalks of grass and I’d watch the sky and point out the evening star and the crescent moon as it arced up from behind the dark firs and the bats would begin fluttering after insects and we’d each take one last sip of the last of the water in the canteen, tepid and metallic, holding some of the day’s earlier heat in it, and we’d cool off and rest a little beneath the wide pavilion of night before setting out for home. And I’d tell her about the secret clock and the secret solar system deep in the house, the solar system elegant and outrageous almost, almost indecent in its elaborations, almost, I could hear Mrs. Hale saying to my grandfather and me, ornamental, and the secret clock, elegant and simple and enduring and itself also almost ornamental, or worse, but worse because it was secret, because it was hidden away from everyone, but preserved, too, because it was hidden away from everyone (almost secret, I thought, because I know about it, and my grandfather did, and Kate knows about it now, too, but hasn’t seen it, hasn’t been into the inner rooms, the sanctum of the temple, and seen the ark, seen the actual wooden case hung with the simple mechanism and fitted with the simple, clear dial painted with the simple, clear unadorned black Arabic numbers and nothing else) and not donated to some Harvard and degraded to being another anonymous plank in its hoard of bric-a-brac, stuck in a corner of a room where faculty members and committees meet in order to resolve on more meetings and committees and faculty members and so maddeningly exclusive and precious both and incurably so. And the incurable pull inside me that Mrs. Hale’s house and the clock and the orrery exerted was impossible and yet so and sometimes even made me want to sob and I felt ashamed to be taking my daughter back to our little house, which seemed those times dingier and more poorly kept than ever, its table-tops piled with newspapers and bills and shoes and laundry and crumbs on the counter, its cheap, hand-me-down furniture, more like a den for little animals than a house for humans, and hot and stuffy instead of cool in the summer, and freezing and drafty instead of warm in the winter. And sometimes on those nights I lay awake in bed haunted by Mrs. Hale’s house, there in what felt like the dead center of the village, almost Enon’s essence itself but not quite, more its trope, its idiom, its veil, prosperous and merciful, bland and trivial, wicked and fallen, and I across the way in my little shack, alien, native, insomniac, and enthralled.