Rules to Stop the Rot
The house and the old man were well matched, both large framed and
failing fast. The house had a better excuse, MacIver thought; he was
eighty, but the house was older than the Republic, had been a
century old when Thoreau walked the Cape, though he couldn’t have
seen it tucked away in the nondescript maze of scrub oak. It had
been the willful seclusion of the place that had appealed to them
when they first saw it-that and the equally hidden pool, about two
minutes away through their woods, which must have decided the
builder to choose the site. The oaks grew more substantial as they
approached the pond, but the casual visitor would not have
registered their rising height as the ground fell away down to the
water. But when the path did its last little jink through the
thicket of spare mossy trunks and last year’s leaves, you stood on
the edge of something suddenly spacious. A stretch of almost two
hundred yards of water, more than fifty wide, a glade of water,
fringed at both ends by sedge and reeds, shaded along the sides by
the larger oaks. Bird-loud by day, redwings and warblers in and out
of the reeds and busy water-traffic of ducks, and even, for a few
seasons, the stately progressions of a pair of swans; owls with
their fluttery hoots at night, and very often at the far end beyond
a fallen log, the hunched figure of a black-crowned night heron, the
grim presiding judge executing sentence on a surprising number of
small fish and frogs.
Margaret and he had watched the pond over the years at every hour in
every season. In summer, it was their swimming pool, where they swam
naked at any time of day. Often on hot August nights, they would
have a last dip before bed. They would take one towel between them,
and no flashlight, because the night sky overhead was bright enough
to light their way down the faint, twisting path. MacIver, an
energetic but clumsy swimmer, would thrash the water into turbulence
out into the deep and then make for shore, and try to use the towel
as little as possible, to leave it dry for Margaret. She would go on
a while longer, parting the water gently in her rhythmic
breast-stroke, the moonlight playing on her wet hair with each
forward surge, a sleek and quiet otter. He would lose her in the
shadowed background at the far end, and peer with great
concentration into the dark, to catch the first ripple of her
return. When she finally waded towards the bank where he was
standing, he would stay motionless trying to register the first
moment when he could see into her silhouette, and detect the dark
roundness of her nipples and the triangle of her pubic hair. Then
she would let him dry her off, and they would go home to bed.
In other seasons, dressed for the weather, they would take their
station under one of the oaks, his back to the trunk, with Margaret
sitting between his legs, and simply let the life of the pool evolve
around them. They had seen families of deer come down to drink, they
had seen a raccoon balance on a log and try to fish with his paw,
and one evening in the last of the light, they had seen a great
horned owl sail out from the tree above them and swoop on a small
rabbit on the other side of the pond. They had heard the short
squeal, and seen the inert furry bundle dangling from the bird’s
talons as he passed over them on his return. Many foxes, and once he
would have sworn a bobcat, though it can’t have been, padding along
the far bank and back into the trees. You never knew what you would
see. MacIver named the pond the Blind Pool, from a favorite boyhood
story, though it was called Frog Pond on his geodetic map, and
Margaret had called the house Night Heron House in honor of the
constant sentinel standing by his fallen branch; she did a fine
woodcut of him, too, which still hung inside the front door.
It was a traditional Cape house, but on a larger scale than was
usual, a bold architect’s airy enlargement. The front rooms were
high ceilinged and framed with more massive beams, and instead of
the usual chicken-run stairs inside the front door, there was a
handsome Y-shaped staircase down a wide hall, breaking at a little
landing halfway up and then splitting to left and right for the
upper rooms. A Victorian owner had widened the two front windows and
bowed them, letting in more light, and then had built a porch
between the two bows, with central steps up to the front door and a
simple railing on either side. The house stood by itself in a
clearing, which you had to maintain vigilantly: half a summer, and
the locust, oak, and birch sprigs would be crowding onto the grass.
Original glass in many panes; the shapes of things outside
alternately clouded and cleared as your eyes moved across the
windows. Original two-foot-wide floorboards and paneling on the
walls, flouting an ancient Massachusetts statute reserving such
width for the absent king. A cool, self-possessed house of mellow
resonance, as if you were living inside a spacious cello. Nothing
too decorative.
They had three and a half decades to set their rhythms, coming and
going to their secret fastness, the Night Heron House with its woods
and pond. When Margaret fell ill and the doctors said they could do
no more for her, they had moved to the Cape, as they had always
planned in such a case, “year-round”; in fact, she had three seasons
left, fall to spring, 1986-1987. At first the house had seemed to
banish sickness. They had moved their bed into the living room, so
she would not have to manage the stairs, but in the large, airy
space she bustled light-footed as ever; she set up her easel, and
started a series of tree-scapes framed by the windows at different
times of the day. The trees on the canvas got barer, MacIver
noticed, as the season turned, but the paintings got lighter, at
first because the angle of focus was raised to allow more cloud and
sky, and at the end, in the unfinished ones, because the marks on
the prepared white canvas, while precisely made, were fainter, less
assertive: the effect left on her only viewer was of being pulled in
her art past the blank of whiteness to the vanishing point of thin
air.
As winter approached, they would still visit the pond on good days,
though they didn’t stay long to absorb its more furtive movement;
they would come out at the end of the path and stand a few moments
looking, an old couple supporting each other in a lover’s stance,
heads inclined towards each other, his rangy arm around her frail
shoulders, her mittened hand around his waist. Then they would work
their way back; she only needed a sighting, it seemed. Things were
moving faster for them now, forcing changes they could not plan. In
no time the number of hours she could be up each day, the number of
feet she could walk, were shortening on them. By the end of
February, she was confined to bed, daily falling further away from
him deeper into sickness. He was ill himself, he knew, but nothing
to this. First weekly, then twice a week, he would make grim sallies
to the drugstore for the morphine prescribed from New York, and come
back as fast as he dared, fearful of finding another visible
weakening. There was no talk of going somewhere else for final care.
It would end here, in this room. He would read to her, coax her to
eat a little, play Mozart to her, spin new tales she would like
about his boyhood on Loch Affric, and games and battles farther
afield. When she drowsed, he would stay sitting on in the bentwood
rocker through the fading afternoon. She would wake up and read his
unguarded face; she could see her fierce old Scot being gentled out
of character by his own secret illness, never to be mentioned, and
by grief.
It was all grotesquely new to him; he was not a man who had ever
willingly let things be taken out of his hands. Sometimes she would
send him on small missions, to shake him out of his spellbound
broodings. She would ask him to go down to the pond, “and report
back on your findings.” At first in the winter, he would have to
work hard for interesting gleanings to take back to her-animal
tracks on the frozen pond, an air bubble caught in the creamy ice
inshore around the heron’s branch, the number of trees deep he could
count in the leafless screen of woods across the pond, viewed from
the oak where they hung the towel. When the grudging days of early
spring arrived, and the trees were fretted more with undergrowth,
the views foreshortened, but there was more to report. One day in
late April, he had taken her back a box turtle, patterned in a smart
brown and yellow plaid, but built a little too high off the ground,
like the old Volkswagen Beetle, to be aerodynamically sound. MacIver
had put him on the quilt, and the little fellow had finally stuck
his head out of his shell and taken a couple of steps, before
pooping quite impressively right there on the bed. Margaret had
given him the Scottish name of Archibald, and insisted that MacIver
take him back to exactly the same leaves in which he had found him,
with the added gift of a lettuce leaf for his pains. She died three
days after that, on the first soft day that promised full-blooded
spring.
As Margaret had feared would be the case, MacIver did not do well
after she had gone. He let himself go, and he let the house go. He
knew it was happening and he felt bad about it as far as the house
was concerned, but he didn’t seem able to do much about it, except
fitfully. His concentration was gone, along with the object of his
attention. There was a backlog of work due on the house; they had
loved it and cared for it year after year, as it needed and
deserved, but in the fall MacIver had persuaded Margaret against all
previous habits to delay some of the chores to the spring; they
should hunker down and enjoy each other quietly, without ladders
looming and workers banging. She had been sick enough to agree, but
the house was showing its frailty now quite markedly; it was no
longer a matter of cleaning gutters, checking storm windows, and
calling the exterminator to keep the termites at bay. The fabric of
the house was sagging visibly on the eastern side, and he was sure
it needed a new roof. And what else? He mentally checked off the
items he knew about-siding on the windward face of the house,
boiler, always feeble, cheating him of more and more degrees against
the thermostat (unless it was the cold, or the windows?), two
sagging, buckled gutters. In the end, he did not call the
contractors, because he did not want them to open up the house and
tell him how bad it was. And he did not call them because he still
did not want their banging, their company, or even their secret
sympathy. Bereavement seemed to work on him as a kind of blanket
allergy, making him edgy and irritable to all the outside world.
And of course it was reciprocal: the world receded on him. Even his
own Blind Pool seemed to shun him as an interloper. The lens of the
water, which had taken in a full orbit of creatures and their
activities, their presence and their shadows, and held them for key
moments for the two of them to share and admire, now stared blankly
upwards, blind indeed. He could tell that his ability to focus, to
fix on a detail and hold it, had deserted him, and the loss of it
had weakened his grasp on the place. He did not really seem able to
see what was happening anymore.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from Rules for Old Men Waiting
by Peter Pouncey
Copyright © 2005 by Peter Pouncey.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Random House
Copyright © 2005
Peter Pouncey
All right reserved.
ISBN: 1-4000-6370-1
