After dinner that night Reed and his uncle went for a walk in the woods. Reed hadn’t walked that much in the city. The moon was full, giving a silvery pallor to the trees and polishing the limestone outcroppings and shallow pools to a mirrorlike finish. Ben had said he was going to show him the new house—”new” even though his uncle said he hadn’t done any work on it in about six years.
“Our dream house, mine and Martha’s.”
Ben had worked on the house in the little hollow behind his property a long time—almost ten years. It was to be their own special place, his and Martha’s, a place where they could live in the summers and after they retired. They’d both worked on it every chance they got, adding rooms, laying down tile, building bookshelves and furniture. And there was a little creek, a small branch of the Simpson, running right through the front yard.
They had loved it; it had been one of the reasons they decided to build where they did. But it had turned into their downfall. Reed stared at the house in disbelief.
“The Nole Company began stripping the mountain above here when Martha and I were almost finished with the building. I did everything I knew to try to stop them. But they wouldn’t even compromise. When I told them what stripping would do to the property, they just laughed.
“Well, at first it looked like it wasn’t going to affect us much—it was too far away. But then those Nole workers started doing what they always do in stripping operations—they bulldozed the excess soil, the overburden, over the side of the mountain, where it drifted down into the little creek here.”
Reed looked. The creek was just a trickle of water now; silt had filled in most of it.
“The creek couldn’t carry that much silt and it overflowed its banks. Again and again and again. I begged them, then I threatened them. Nothing worked.
“Our dream house sat in the damp year-round.”
Ben took Reed inside. Walls and floors and posts and old furniture were mildewed. “The mildew just crept right across these planks like a disease.” Like a plague, Reed thought. “Expensive planks, too. I hand chose ‘em. The linoleum buckled, tiles popped loose, doors and windows swole up ‘till they couldn’t be opened. New carpet rotted right on the floor.”
As his uncle described these effects, Reed confirmed them with his own observations. Twisted tile and warped wood. Doorways seemed vaguely askew when he walked through them. The floors slightly drunken. The smell of decay. The dampness seemed to have brought out all the corruption latent in the building materials. All the surfaces were dull, the shadows in the rooms like stains and somehow… soiled.
The new house sat there and, even as they watched it, creaked as moisture worked its way through the wood, the structure falling apart a little more each year. Each day, each moment, Reed thought, as he imagined he could see the walls falling around him.
This house, he imagined, must have had a much different feel to it than the house he had grown up in, the house his stern grandfather had built and his father had added on to. He could see that even beneath the distorting effects of the dampness. The living room was an open, living place. There was a swing for two on the porch. The kitchen had lots of room for storage and a table for eating right next to the cook. There were nice guest rooms. The bedroom had lots of shelves for books and for displaying memories. And the bed there was for two people who wanted to be close during their dreaming.
And suddenly, staring at warped floors and buckled woodwork, Reed saw a house full of water, human figures floating in it like rotting driftwood.
“You should have done something, Uncle. You should have sued,” Reed said quietly.
“There was no point, son. They’ve got the power. The courts say that’s their right.”
“But still… weren’t you angry?”
“Of course I was angry. Damn angry. But I was powerless… and that made me sadder than it made me angry, I guess. I was always like your father a little in that respect, Reed. It was hard to show my anger. Now your dad could rage sometimes, really go crazy. But only sometimes; there was a lot more rage where that came from. And he could never get it all out.” Ben looked off into the woods with a puzzled expression, as if distracted by something there. “Guess that must seem a funny way to look at it, from your viewpoint. Guess it must have seemed he was angry all the time.”
“Yes… it sure did.” Reed looked out toward the woods in the same direction his uncle had been looking, although he didn’t know what he should be looking for. “What was my father like… as a boy?”
“Unhappy,” his uncle said, then paused for a long time. “Your granddad was a hard man sometimes, especially where brother Alec was concerned.”
“He doesn’t look like a very warm person in his pictures.”
Ben shrugged his shoulders. “Only passion I ever saw him show was when he was angry. And you never could tell what was going to make him angry; he was a changeable man.”
Reed saw that his uncle was staring off into the woods again.
“One time your dad broke a jar of pickles; he was in a hurry climbing out of the root cellar with it.” He frowned, hesitated. “Daddy locked him in that root cellar a good twenty-four hours. Alec screamed that the rats were coming after him, that there were dark things down there that were going to get him, but our daddy paid no mind, and slapped Momma when she tried to sneak out and let Alec go.”
The wind was swaying the trees at the edge of the wood. The water-logged house creaked loudly in the cold breeze. Reed looked away from his uncle.
“Your daddy never acted much like a child again after that,” Ben said. “He hated our father then, simple as that. Then years later, after your granddad died…” He stopped, and they both listened to the wind inside Ben’s dream house, trapped in there and making sounds like a small, desperate animal. “If you remember, your dad didn’t go to the funeral. What you didn’t know… well, we all hushed it up pretty well I guess.” He sighed, “…the preacher caught Alec out in the graveyard. He’d shattered the stone into a hundred pieces with a hammer… and was digging into the grave… snapping and yowling like some animal…”
Something fell inside the dreamhouse. Dream of drowning house, Reed thought. The screen door swung open and clattered against the porch wall.
“…I tell you, Reed. Sometimes I wake up at night hearing your dad… snarling and yapping like that… like some dog that’s been abandoned out in the woods a few years.
“What if they hadn’t stopped him in time?”
Then Reed heard the low growl beneath the wind… the popping lips. He turned around as if under water. His uncle was turning in slow motion, returning to the darker shadows beyond. Turning. As if he too were drowning, dancing a death dance beneath the flood.
Chapter 18
He had to go through the operator in Four Corners to make the long distance call to Denver. He’d waited a long time to call; he probably should have called Carol the first night he was in, let her know he had arrived safely. That’s what he would have done a few years ago, and she would have expected it. The first few years they were married they both had had an almost desperate need to touch base after they’d been separated a number of hours, in order to head off fantasies of accidents and murder.
But the last few years they’d gone completely the other way—sometimes they didn’t call each other even when they knew the average person would. It was one way in which they both asserted a new independence, albeit an immature one. Reed had been the worse offender—he’d badly scared Carol a couple of times, and she had been too stubborn, too independent to show it.