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.