“Can we talk now?” Coverly asked.
“I guess so,” Honora said. She put her elbows on her knees and leaned forward. “You want to talk about the house on River Street?”
“Yes.”
“Well, nobody’ll rent it and nobody’ll buy it and it would break my heart to see it torn down.”
“What is the matter?”
“The Whitehalls rented it in October. They moved in and moved right out again. Then the Haverstraws took it. They lasted a week. Mrs. Haverstraw told everybody in the stores that the house was haunted. But who,” she asked, raising her face, “would there be to haunt the place? Our family has always been a very happy family. None of us have ever paid any attention to ghosts. But just the same it’s all over town.”
“What did Mrs. Haverstraw say?”
“Mrs. Haverstraw spread it around that it’s the ghost of your father.”
“Leander,” Coverly said.
“But what would Leander want to come back and trouble people for?” Honora asked. “It wasn’t that he didn’t believe in ghosts. He just never had any use for them. I’ve heard him say many times that he thought ghosts kept low company. And you know how kind he was. He used to escort flies and moth millers out the door as if they were guests. What would he come back for except to eat a bowl of crackers and milk? Of course he had his faults.”
“Were you with us,” Coverly asked, “the time he smoked a cigarette in church?”
“You must have made that up,” Honora said, fending for the past.
“No,” Coverly said. “It was Christmas Eve and we went to Holy Communion. I remember that he seemed very devout. He was up and down, crossing himself and roaring out the responses. Then before the Benediction he took a cigarette out of his pocket and lighted it. I saw then that he was terribly drunk. I told him, ‘You can’t smoke in church, Daddy,’ but we were in one of the front pews and a lot of people had seen him. What I wanted then was to be the son of Mr. Pluzinski the farmer. I don’t know why, except that the Pluzinskis were all very serious. It seemed to me that if I could only be the son of Mr. Pluzinski I would be happy.”
“You ought to be ashamed of yourself,” Honora said. Then she sighed, changed her tone and added uneasily: “There was something else.”
“What.”
“You remember how he used to give away nickels on the Fourth of July.”
“Oh, yes.” Coverly then saw the front of their house in many colors. A large flag hung from the second floor, its crimson stripes faded to the color of old blood. His father stood on the porch, after the parade and before the ball game, passing out new nickels to a line of children that reached up River Street. The trees were all leafed out and in his reverie the light was quite green.
“Well, as you may remember he kept the nickels in a cigar box. He had painted it black. When I was going through the house I found the box. There were still some nickels in it. Many of them were not real. I believe he made them himself.”
“You mean . . .”
“Shhhh,” said Honora.
“Supper’s ready,” said Maggie.
Honora seemed tired after supper so he kissed her good night in the hallway and walked to his own home on the other side of town. The place had been empty since fall. There was a key on the windowsill and the door swung open onto a strong smell of must. This was the place where he had been conceived and born, where he had awakened to the excellence of life, and there was some keen chagrin at finding the scene of so many dazzling memories smelling of decay; but this, he knew, was the instinctual foolishness that leads us to love permanence when there is none. He turned on the lights in the hall and the parlor and got some logs from the shed. He was absorbed in laying and lighting a fire but when the fire was set he began to feel, surrounded by so many uninhabited rooms, an unreasonable burden of apprehension, as if his presence there were an intrusion.
It was his and his brother’s house, by contract, inheritance and memory. Its leaks and other infirmities were his responsibility. It was he who had broken the vase on the mantelpiece and burned a hole in the sofa. He did not believe in ghosts, shades, spirits or any other forms of unquietness on the part of the dead. He was a man of twenty-eight, happily married, the father of a son. He weighed one hundred and thirty-eight pounds, enjoyed perfect health and had eaten some chicken for dinner. These were the facts. He took a copy of Tristram Shandy down from the shelf and began to read. There was a loud noise in the kitchen that so startled him the sweat stood out on his hands. He raised his head long enough to embrace this noise in the realm of hard fact. It could be a shutter, a loose piece of firewood, an animal or one of those legendary tramps who were a part of local demonology and who were supposed to inhabit the empty farms, leaving traces of fire, empty snuff cans, a dry cow and a frightened spinster. But he was strong and young and even if he should encounter a tramp in the dark hallway he could take care of himself. Why should he feel so intensely uncomfortable? He went to the telephone intending to ask the operator the time of night but the telephone was dead.
He went on reading. There was noise from the dining room. He said something loud and vigorous to express his impatience with his apprehensions but the effect of this was to convince him overwhelmingly that he had been heard. Someone was listening. There was a cure for this foolishness. He went directly to the empty room and turned on the light. There was nothing there and yet the beating of his heart was accelerated and painful and sweat ran off his palms. Then the dining room door slowly closed of itself. This was only natural since the old house sagged badly and while half the doors closed themselves the other half wouldn’t close at all. He went through the swinging door on into the pantry and the kitchen. Here again he saw nothing but felt again that there had been someone in the room when he turned on the light. There were two sets of facts—the empty room and the alarmed condition of his skin. He was determined to scotch this and he went out of the kitchen into the hallway and climbed the stairs.
All the bedroom doors stood open, and here, in the dark, he seemed to yield to the denseness of the lives that had been lived here for nearly two centuries. The burden of the past was palpable; the utterances and groans of conception, childbirth and death, the singing at the family reunion in 1893, the dust raised by a Fourth of July parade, the shock of lovers meeting by chance in the hallway, the roar of flames in the fire that gutted the west wing in 1900, the politeness at christenings, the joy of a young husband bringing his wife back after their marriage, the hardships of a cruel winter all took on some palpableness in the dark air. But why was the atmosphere in this darkness distinctly one of trouble and failure? Ebenezer had made a fortune. Lorenzo had introduced child-welfare legislation into the state laws. Alice had converted hundreds of Polynesians to Christianity. Why should none of these ghosts and shades seem contented with their work? Was it because they had been mortal, was it because for every last one of them the pain of death had been bitter?
He returned to the fire. Here was the physical world, fire-lit, stubborn and beloved, and yet his physical response was not to the parlor but to the darkness in the rooms around him. Why, sitting so close to the fire, did he feel a chill slide down his left shoulder and a moment later coarsen with cold the skin of his chest, as if a hand had been placed there? If there were ghosts, he believed with his father that they kept low company. They consorted with the poorhearted and the faint. He knew that we sometimes leave after us, in a room, a stir of love or rancor when we are gone. He believed that whatever we pay for our loves in money, venereal disease, scandal or ecstasy, we leave behind us, in the hotels, motels, guest rooms, meadows and fields where we discharge this much of ourselves, either the scent of goodness or the odor of evil, to influence those who come after us. Thus it was possible that this passionate and eccentric cast had left behind them some ambiance that made his presence seem like an intrusion. It was time to go to bed and he got some blankets out of a closet and made up a bed in the spare room, nearest the stairs.