Short fiction
I moved downriver and built my own little house on the banks of the bend, near where the water eddies into a deep pool. It is a modest river — its average width is about four times my height. Usually it moves at the pace of a quick walk, maybe an easy jog during a rainstorm or a thaw. But it’s been picking up speed over the years.
First I dug a box-shaped hole in the ground with a big backhoe, just deep enough so I could stand flat-footed down inside and reach up to the edge with my hands. My fingers folded over the edge right at the middle knuckle, just enough to pull myself up should the need arise. It was no surprise that the ground that came out of that hole was clay. It was good, moist, red clay so I sold it to an old, drunken artist who had moved in up the river a few years before. She said she was making an army of golems in her basement, which she said she was going to animate and unleash on the most powerful climate-change deniers. I didn’t want to ask too many questions, so I just trucked the clay up to her and looked up ‘golem’ in the dictionary later that night.
I built some wooden molds in the hole and poured a concrete foundation on a grey, balmy summer day. Massiah Smallwood was still alive back then, and he stopped his canoe on my little beach and said, “The ancient Romans used concrete, you know. It’s still in the dome of the Pantheon.” He paused and looked downstream. “Then the secret of concrete was lost for 13 centuries.”
I asked him what was the secret of concrete.
“Water,” he said, and with his oar he pushed off my beach and drifted away.
A hurricane came through and tore up a big oak tree, so I took it to the sawmill and had them cut it into thick beams. Seems we can practically count on a hurricane every year now, when before there were hardly any in this part of the world. I telephoned my ex-lover and she came down the river to help me lay the beams across the foundation. She still loved me then, and after each beam we laid she’d look across the hole at me with sorry eyes. She was a good woman, stronger than any oak tree, and stronger than me.
For the frame, I made a box the same dimensions as the hole I’d dug in the ground, so my fingers folded at the middle knuckle when I reached up to the top of a wall. From there the roof frame sloped in at a 45° angle, meeting the ridgepole at a height twice that of the walls. I used 2x4’s I’d bought several years earlier with the intention of building a boathouse. The boathouse would have been big enough for my canoe and my ex-lover’s, with room still for the survival raft that I intended to build later, just in case. My ex-lover was a cat-lover too, and I couldn’t bear to think of all those cats trying to teach themselves to swim the hard way. Some people say that’s the best way — one minute you’re high and dry, the next you’re in over your head. Sink or swim and all that. But I don’t like that idea, it seems cruel to me. I don’t know if cats could swim even if they tried. Seems like their paws wouldn’t be big enough and they’d have no buoyancy. And sometimes, even being able to swim isn’t enough. When I was a kid, one day I came home from school and my dog wasn’t anywhere to be found. I called her name so many times. Finally, I saw a hole she’d dug under the wooden fence that separated our yard from the neighbor’s yard. I had to use a lawn chair to stand on to look over the fence. My dog was floating face-down in the neighbor’s swimming pool. She was dead, drowned. There were no steps in the pool, only ladders. She’d fallen in and couldn’t get out, and no one had been home to save her. I can hardly bear to imagine it, her paddling frantically up against the walls for hours, hoping for me to come home. It’s awful, really. It’s the most awful thing I know. There’s just no acceptable place for hopelessness like that.
The doors and windows for my little house were salvaged from a partially burned-down maple sugar shack. There were two doors and six windows. I was out on a mushroom hunt one day and just saw them lying at the end of the driveway that led down to where the shack had been. Leaning against a nearby tree was a sign made from a large piece of charred tin that must’ve been from the roof of the shack. In white spray-paint there was what I took to be a short poem: “Fuck God and fuck the Devil / Both of them can sit on it and swivel.” Next to the words was a crude but recognizable rendering of a fist, thumb-up. Massiah Smallwood had told me that the fire had been started by a worshipping ritual performed by the family’s teenaged son, who was said to be a Satanist, but I’d guessed it was just a rumor. The sign seemed more anarchist to me. I picked up one door and carried it over my head the half-mile back to my little house on the river, and then I returned for the second door, and then three more times for the windows, carrying two at a time, one in each hand. I didn’t bother to refinish them, just left them as they were, and even used the original hinges which were still attached and in fine condition. Even now the wood of the doors holds the grayish smoky color from the fire, as well as a faint scent of burnt syrup when I push my nose up against it. If they lived through fire I like to think they might live through flood.
The last time I saw my ex-lover she was floating down the river in her canoe and she had all her cats in the canoe with her. I stood on the bank, the little beach in front of my house, and watched them slowly drift by. She paddled only very gently, one stroke every few seconds, resting the oar across her thighs in between strokes. Shadows from the trees moved over her — her robust body, her bare arms, her graying hair. Her deep mahogany eyes were sorry no longer, and they hadn’t been for awhile. We gazed at each other, and when the cats sensed where her attention was they too turned their heads to look at me. I had grown a thick beard. was shirtless and holding an axe down at my side. I’d been chopping up an old fallen pine, for burning in my stove come winter. My chest was heaving. The eyes of the cats studied me with what I thought to be vague recognition. The eyes of my ex-lover held me for the last time. For a moment, I thought I saw her hesitate with her oar before a stroke, as if to consider paddling backward, to delay her disappearance around the bend.
The plywood for the walls and roof I got in a trade with Stony Tom. He had some extra he’d won in a raffle at the town Casino Night. It was a good prize, the plywood, because everyone in this town is always building something — or planning to build, anyway. But just then Stony Tom wasn’t in need of his unused plywood, so I traded him a cord of that old pine, two leftover beams from the big oak, and exclusive rights to any geological phenomena he might find on my property. Fossils and geodes were what he expected to find mostly, and I think he did find one or two of each before he grew tired of looking, or I grew tired of him picking around on my property — I can’t remember which.
The slate for my roof I got from Stony Tom, too — paid him good money. That’s what he’s known best for, his slate shingles. He shapes them by hand, using only a small hammer, and sometimes a chisel. He knows exactly how they’ll break, knows all the right points to tap with his little hammer. The holes for the shingling nails he bores with a hand-crank drill. The drill-bits he sharpens himself. Stony Tom and I are the only two left. From the folks of our generation I mean. There was a whole wave of us that came around the same time, when we were young and still idealistic. Back then the river was calmer, moving downstream like a waltz, sort of twirling around on itself more. That’s what I like about the new little spot I chose here on the bend, how the eddy pool out front seemed to be hanging around from the old days, while the rest of the river was hurrying to streamline its flow. Up at the old place, where I lived with my ex-lover, the water level was rising, the banks growing steeper. It became harder to get in and out of the river and we had to tie our canoes to roots to keep them from maybe being swept away, when before we’d just eased them up onto the slope of the bank and left their back ends still resting in the shallows.
The siding for my little house was standard cedar, from the lumberyard, which I treated with linseed oil. The flaxen smell of the oil mingling with the sweet whiffs of the cedar was enough to make me feel I’d done the right thing by moving down here, building my own little house on the bend by the eddy pool. The trim I painted with a thick, sticky oil-based paint, just about the color of blood. A glossy, sticky paint like that requires a patient hand, so I take some pride in the smooth finish I was able to achieve. But not many people ever see my house close-up.
I painted the interior walls the color of heavy cream, laying it on in thick coats with a rabbit hair brush the width of my hand. When I paint large surfaces I go into a trance state, in which I have no thoughts and lose all sense of my own body. There is only the brush, the paint, the wall. This is why I used to make my living as a professional painter. The most wonderful thing I ever painted was the hull of a great ship. The paint was the blue of the ocean at midnight but as I painted it became all colors — from the deepest, most unforgiving black to a blinding white that drove me to close my eyes until it would settle itself down, change back to purple, or the chalky yellow of goldenrod. On both the bow and the flat back of the stern I painted the chosen name of the vessel in an insistent red — a name which happened to be that of my own mother, except in a different language. The ship sailed for many years, mostly Atlantic trade routes, and the captain would occasionally send me pithy postcards from different ports. One day, I read in the newspaper that it had been attacked by brutal pirates. They gunned down the captain and crew with machine guns, looted the ship, then blew a hole in the hull with dynamite and let her sink to the floor of the Caribbean.
The floor of my house I laid in rectangular tile. When I place my bare foot on one of the tiles, the tile’s outline contains almost perfectly the dimensions of the foot — from heel to toe, outside knuckle to the outside curve of my big toe. In the summer they are cool, though sometimes a bit clammy, and in the winter the ceramic holds well the heat from the woodstove.
I’d planned to tell of the furniture, where it all comes from, but sometimes I just lose my will to press on. My body goes limp and my brain seems to empty itself, everything just dumped out a hatch in the back, and all I want to do is float emotionlessly in the eddy pool, face-up, watching the high leaves in the wind, the movement of the clouds.
In my bedroom there is a large throw rug that was woven by my ex-lover during her days of learning to weave. Most nights before I go to sleep I sit for a few moments on my bed, with my feet still on the rug. I close my eyes and conjure an image of her. She sits at the loom, her back to me, the bones of her shoulders moving in a gentle rhythm.
The upturned stump of that oak tree the hurricane took down is still out there in my yard. Every Sunday I spend a good long while looking at the underworld of its roots, trying to learn from it something about how things are able to stay upright, at least until something like disaster comes. The roots have dried and died but still hold tightly to large stones.
I feel sure there will come a day when the hurricanes and the water will be too much for my sturdy little house to withstand. The river will rise above its banks, soaking the clay soil on my little beach, then licking at the cedar siding, then gushing in through my windows and doors, splashing onto my tile floor, flowing down into my basement — filling, filling, filling, then lifting, and taking my house on down the river, out into the brimming sea.
