Gravedigger's Cottage (11 page)

He was always doing something, really
always
doing something, rarely finishing anything, before a new and more important crisis caught his eye and he attacked it. All of his concerns seemed pointless to me and totally unnecessary until I finally saw the thread of what he was pursuing and that he was truly striving to make the house 100 percent airtight, secure, hermetically sealable inside from outside.

Moving away from old life and death was not enough. He had to lock it out in case it tried to follow us.

“Ah, Dad,” I said when I found him checking my own window sashes for rattles, spaces, breathability, “isn’t
some
air
supposed
to get in?”

“You’ll thank me, soon enough, when that ocean wind is banging on your window at night.”

“That’ll be me, banging on the window, because I am smothering to death.”

He left my window alone. But I knew that wouldn’t be the end of it.

Walter was still not as concerned about all this as I was, not as concerned as he should have been. Then one night the three of us unwound in front of a National Geographic special about the spread of urban and suburban wildlife. We all watched with what I thought was the usual fascination, until I noticed on passing the popcorn that Dad’s expression was more what you would call horror. He skipped the popcorn, got himself up out of his old favorite chair, and went straight to the kitchen. He removed the famous cat flap with a hammer and his trusty putty knife in a frenzy of banging and pulling and grim speech making about how many different varieties of intruder could fit through that flap, if they hadn’t already done so and were now taking up residence in the walls and basement.

He didn’t even have a proper alternative to the cat flap worked out, and he gasped in terror at the new and improved
giant
gateway between the outside world and ours before quickly hammering Walter’s regulation dartboard up as a stopgap.

I looked Walter. He looked at me. Right.

It took cat-flap fever to do it, but Walter appeared ready to help with the worrying.

“Come on down, Sylvia.”

He looked so sad and helpless there, I had to go.

“Yah, you know what, Walter?” I said, taking the ball out of his hands. “You only react to things when it costs you something.”

“Not true.” He grabbed the ball back and headed for the goal we had in the corner of the yard.

“It is so. You only started worrying about Dad going nuts when he nailed your dartboard to the kitchen door.”

“It’s
still
there,” he said, incredulous at the unavailability of his toy more than at any of the possibly more substantial issues of our father’s behavior. “He could have replaced it by now with something permanent.”

“Right,” I said. He rolled the ball toward me, and I stopped it by putting my foot on top of it. “There’s that, and now you’re only coming to me because you don’t have him to play soccer with you.”

“Not true,” he said.

I kicked the ball at him ferociously.

He didn’t even move. He waited for the ball to come rolling in and bump into him.

“He isn’t finishing these things because he doesn’t
do
these things, Walter. Don’t you know that? Don’t you know Dad? He isn’t one of those hardware-store guys. He doesn’t
do
things. He isn’t a
doer.
He doesn’t even like doers. He likes to sit in his chair. He likes to go to flea markets and maybe walk on the beach with us once in a while and go to stupid movies and play Parcheesi and backgammon. He likes soft socks, and he does not like overalls.”

Walter kicked the ball back to me. I kicked it back to him. Then we did it again, never gaining any speed or force. It was like we were playing under water.

“Maybe he’s just spreading out a little. Maybe he’s trying out new hobbies.”

“Spreading out? He spreads out from his bedroom to the kitchen to the basement, and that’s about it. Hobbies? His fingernails are dirty, Walter. Have you seen those fingernails? When did he ever have dirty nails before? He doesn’t like dirt. He likes baths, remember? He likes showers and baths, lots of them, and he likes his bathrobe. He doesn’t like dirt and overalls and hammers. He doesn’t like
hobbies.”

I decided enough was enough with this nonsense. I opted not to kick the ball from afar, and instead charged him with the ball, which I was always better at anyway. I ran in, shifted left, shifted right, went straight in at him.

And banged right into him, without ever getting a shot off. I bounced right off Walter’s chest, went back in the direction I came from, then landed right on my backside.

I sat there looking up at him.

Walter’s healthy, round, happy face, sometimes mean face, always
there
face, puckered and pulled in, collapsed on him as he stood looking down on me.

I felt my eyes go wide, my throat lump up when I saw. He didn’t do this, didn’t show it anyway, and certainly wouldn’t do it over just bumping me to the ground.

He reached down with both hands and pulled me up, his face still all strangled up as he asked, “What’s wrong with Dad, Vee? What’s going to happen?”

When I stood, I was just about eye to eye with him. I figured it was only a matter of months before I was going to have to start looking up at him. But he still had a long way to go to really catch up.

“I don’t know exactly,” I said. “But I know it will be all right. Dad is Dad. He is always going to be Dad, no matter what. We didn’t get all the way to here, from all the way away where we started, through all the everything we went through just to suddenly go poof. Right?”

He looked at me a little bit harder then, as if to see if it was, in fact, right. As if the answer to the rightness of all was to be found just a little deeper inside my eyes.

His face uncrunched. Not all the way, but enough to make my own stomach feel a little less filled with bowling balls and bees.

“Right,” I said.

“The fish are all dead,” he then said.

“What?”

“They’re all dead. All three of them. They’re gone. Dad says the rat got them.”

“God, not the rat again,” I said as I spun away from Walter and headed for the goldfish pond. “He blames everything on the rat. The rat broke the garage windows, the rat stole the garden hose, the rat scratched his car, the rat’s been making screeching noises outside the windows at night. Like, we don’t have just a rat anymore, that’s not enough, now we have to have a rat with a
grudge.
Have you even
seen
this rat, Walter?”

We were just approaching the pond.

“Yah, I think so,” he said, stopping me dead.

“You have?” I said, turning on him.

“Yah. Maybe. I think so. It was at night. You were in the bath. Dad saw him, outside, going into the bushes. He pointed him out. I think I saw him. Saw his tail anyway. Saw the bushes move, almost for sure. It must have been the rat. Coming right from here actually, running away from the fishpond.”

I didn’t know who or what to get most furious with—Walter for falling so blindly into the rat myth, Dad for pushing the crazy rat myth…

Or the rat. I suddenly squirmed, quick-stepped this way then that around the edges of the fishpond. If we indeed had a rat—which we didn’t—then he had been right here. Yeck. No, god, no. My skin was prickling all over my body like a zillion tiny little claws. I scooted the last few steps to the fishpond, which indeed was now the fishless fishpond. Around the edge were some fish
flakes,
twinkling in the sun. A fin here, a few scales there. Possibly a couple of eyes. Rats made me sick.

“We have no rat,” I snapped at Walter.

“So,” Carmine answered, “did you want one? Because there’s a guy in the village—”

“No, we don’t want one,” I snapped again. “And what are you doing here?”

Perhaps it was the way I said it. But I had appeared for the first time to have actually hurt Carmine’s feelings. I hadn’t thought it was possible, and now that I had seen it I wished I hadn’t.

I reached and grabbed his arm as he was turning to leave. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m just, right now, a little…”

It didn’t even matter what I was explaining. He was ignoring my words and staring at my hand on his arm.

And up they came, his hands, his arms, rising, encircling.

“Go ahead, hug yourself,” I said. “I won’t say anything this time.” At least
I
didn’t have to hug him.

With Carmine sorting himself out, I was freed to go and address our other little critter issue. I had had enough.

I marched past the two of them to the house, through the dartboard door, through the kitchen to the living room, where I stopped and listened. I heard nothing.

“Dad,” I called.

“Yes, sweetheart,” came the small voice up through the small opening made by the removed floorboard.

“There you are,” I said, my hands on my hips as I barked down into the hole. “You stay right there, Dad. I’m coming down.”

“No, don’t do that,” he said, the voice coming up a little louder, a little faster.

“I
will
do that,” I said, and started marching for the cellar door. I opened it, and even though it was pretty murky down there, and even though I had never enjoyed a particularly easy relationship with cellars generally and I kept a particularly keen distance from this musty one specifically, and even though there may or may not have been a rat with a grudge in the vicinity and if I were a rat this would be exactly where I would hang out, even though all that, I stepped down those stairs because I wanted to meet my dad in his own strange new territory and find out…

“What is going on, Dad?”

I don’t think he thought I would actually come down. He was there, in front of me, on his knees. He had a surgical mask covering his mouth. In one hand was a bucket of some kind of white goop—putty or cement or some combination of some such goopiness—and in the other was his putty knife.

“I’m patching up the house with Spackle,” he said so apologetically I felt immediately sad and guilty for asking, for being down there, for even looking at him.

I looked around at the trail of patching. Even in the dim light it was easy to see the nearly glowing whiteness of the Spackle against the crumbling dull of the walls and the packed dirt floor. He had obviously been feeling his way around, filling in any holes he could in the surfaces, mostly where the rock of the wall met the earth of the floor.

“How’s it coming along?” I asked, though not too hopefully. I think at that point I was trying to make conversation and that was the only subject that seemed topical.

To answer, Dad first started nodding, looking around, mostly behind him, and nodding, nodding, then back at me, then not nodding, then shaking his head, no. No.

“There’s a lot, sweetie,” he said, “a lot, and always lots more behind it, it seems. It’s like there’s leakage everywhere, whether it’s moisture getting in where it’s not supposed to or air and cold getting in where they’re not supposed to, or whatever getting in where it’s not supposed to, or heat getting out where it’s not supposed to. Just leakage, and every time you block it up somewhere, it bursts open someplace else.”

He appeared—there on his knees, covered in cellar dirt, looking out from inside his mask—like some kind of shrunken, battered, moldy basement version of my dad. I hated it, and I hated the cellar.

“Do you smell it down here?” I asked. “It’s that smell, that wet, burnt-charcoal smell. It is very much down here.”

He nodded. “Yes, it is very much down here. I’ll figure it out though. It’s on my list.”

“Your
list.
Your list is too long, Dad. First, you know, I don’t think the house is so bad, especially if you don’t spend all your time crawling around the most decrepit parts of it. As a matter of fact, I really, really like the house. So does Walter.”

“And me, too,” Carmine called from the space of the missing floorboard upstairs.

“And so does Carmine,” I said to Dad. “Thank you, Carmine,” I said to Carmine. “Go away now, Carmine.”

“Yah,” Dad said, finally getting to his feet but only to wander the perimeter of the cellar, checking for more holes in the walls. “But it really needs—”

“So, can’t you just get somebody in to do some of it? There
are
people who do that sort of thing, you know, Dad. Like carpenters. It’s their job. You already
have
a job, remember?”

“I remember,” he said, finding and instantly patching a hole. “But you know, Sylvia, how I don’t like having workers in the house.”

“You also don’t like doing this stuff, Dad. Remember? Because if you don’t remember, then let me point out that you used to look at putting out the trash on Wednesday mornings as a major home-improvement project.”

He stopped feeling the walls. He turned to me and stared. Then, through his mask, he chuckled. Like we were reminiscing about an old mutual friend.

It was a treat. I became aware then how little he was laughing lately. He used to think all kinds of stuff was funny—some of it actually was funny funny, some of it was kind of nuts funny.

Nuts funny was fine by us. Nuts funny was fun. Nuts serious was a whole different monster.

“Yah, true. I hated it.”

“Good. Great. So hate it again.”

“Why?”

“’Cause I don’t like it.”

“What? What don’t you like, Sylvia? You don’t like what?”

Grr. Why did he have to do this? He knew better than this. And he knew I didn’t like having to explain myself. Everybody hates explaining themselves. Especially me. Especially us. And anyway, especially if I came down here to this creepy place, asking questions, if I came asking questions, then I certainly didn’t feel like being the one doing the explaining. Anyway, he knew. I believed he knew. You could always tell he knew what you were talking about because he asked you to overexplain yourself. So he could bunch up as many words as possible to confuse things, like piling all the psychological furniture against his side of the door while your logic was trying to get in from the other side.

“It,
Dad. I don’t like it.
The
it. This. Us. Here. The difference. Something has gone wrong, and it has gone wrong here, and it has gone wrong suddenly, and I hate it—and did you tell Walter that the
rat
ate all our fish?”