Gravedigger's Cottage Read online

  Except then when you went into Dad’s bedroom, across the hall, the floor all over was a brilliant blond wood—except for four or five randomly placed molasses boards, matching the living room floor.

  “It’s like a puzzle,” Carmine said with delight.

  Dad, I noticed, was looking at it all anew. And with something less than delight. His brow crunched down low over his eyes as he concentrated on what he was seeing, and he started acting like some kind of hired surveyor of his own place. He drew his famous little notebook out of his right hip pocket. And his trusty little pen from the left front.

  Walter looked at me, and I at him. Dad was taking notes.

  “Can I go to the bathroom?” Carmine asked, the excitement proving too much for his system.

  “Sure,” Walter said, failing to read Dad’s face.

  Dad’s face, if you cared to read it, clearly stated that it was time for Carmine to go home and use his own bathroom.

  He is not impolite, my dad. Far from it. It was just that, even before now we had become aware of what was probably the house’s least charming eccentricity.

  The toilet was not the most robust mechanism. You could all but hear it sigh with fatigue and depression when you flushed it.

  Up till now it was an annoyance, but at least it hadn’t been a public nuisance. This was the world getting inside our soft underbelly, and Dad would have problems with that.

  Now…

  We mulled, almost huddled around the bathroom door, as we waited for Carmine to return to the tour. The bathroom was situated at the far tip of the L by the back door just off the kitchen. It was not an out-of-the-way place. It was not a through way. It was not a place we could cut the tour and leave somebody who—despite claiming to have friends who used to live here—did not know his way around.

  So we waited. Nearby.

  Dad made busy, turning on the loud kettle to make tea whether we wanted it or not. Walter went shopping in the fridge, staring, closing it, opening it, staring. I turned on the kitchen radio for the camouflage of music, but timed it just right for Story Time, which they might as well call nap time.

  It was all a kind of hoax anyway. We were not trying not to listen. We were trying not to seem to be listening.

  Meanwhile we were listening our heads off.

  And rooting for the toilet.

  Come on, toilet.

  Walter slid up next to me, whispering. “What is he doing all this time?”

  “I don’t know. He’s your little friend.”

  “He’s your boyfriend.”

  “I am going to kill the next person who—”

  We were interrupted, fortunately, by the sounds of some telltale rustling in the bathroom. A shuffling of feet, a big slam of the seat…

  Come on, toilet.

  Dad, try though he might to be cool about it, was leaning his whole self in the direction of that bathroom door, like a silent movie guy leaning into the wind.

  We were perhaps putting a lot of pressure on the poor toilet to uphold the family honor.

  The toilet let us down.

  Oh my. Oh, that wasn’t very good at all. The toilet…it wasn’t even all the toilet’s fault in all fairness. That little Carmine must have just waved at the handle, because the thing didn’t even manage its usual sad swish of a flush. It was like it had quit and died right there, with all its steam running out. If you could punch a toilet unexpectedly in the stomach, this is the sound it’d make.

  You’d have to understand about Dad, and his privacy, and his ways with people and the world and all. He didn’t go out into the world more than he had to, and he didn’t let the world come inside much either. So something like this, like Carmine coming in and getting toured, well, that was big effort for Dad. And the thought that the whole process was kind of jammed up here, with Carmine and whatever suspended in the innermost, private-most part of Dad’s private world…that would be a lot for him.

  Dad stood there, anxiously awaiting an outcome. In the bathroom, Carmine took forever, waiting for the tank to refill, then flushing again. You know the way TV kidnappers clamp a hand over the victim’s mouth to shut them up? Dad was doing that to himself. For as long as he could manage.

  “Is everything all right in there?” Dad finally called when he could bear the wait no longer. He was also knocking at the bathroom door, as if Carmine could have simply forgotten to come out and just needed a reminder.

  Finally, a heartier push on the handle, and I think the job was properly done.

  It was like a surprise party, a parade for a returning war hero. When Carmine came out that door and saw us huddled around him, I thought he was going to run right back in. But before he had the chance, Dad took him literally under his wing. With a little excess of enthusiasm, he wrapped an arm around Carmine’s slim shoulders and charged him through the remainder of the microtour.

  “Here’s the kitchen,” he said, pulling him out of the kitchen. “These are the stairs. They used to have these stairs over there, but apparently a few years ago they moved them over here. I think that was a good move, don’t you?”

  Dad was gibbering; Carmine was spluttering out answers, half words, and grunts. And Walter and I were following, trying not to giggle.

  Because we loved this bit of Dad. We loved all the bits, truly, but the bits of mad Dad were the best bits of all.

  When he was good, he was good. But when he was not so good, he could be great. If some people thought he was a little nuts, we never minded, too much. We were happy, mostly. We were odd maybe, but we knew it, we dealt with it, and, at some level, we embraced it.

  Upstairs, Carmine was treated to a lightning view of what Dad called “Dad’s study” but we called more accurately the computer room since nobody studied anything in there and Dad was lucky to get any time in the room at all. In fact, he was far more likely to see the inside of his study because he was invited by me or Walter into a computer game than he was to be working on his own work. He really didn’t enjoy doing his own work anyway, so really we were doing him a favor.

  The tour wound up with a quick peek into Walter’s neat, comfortable bedroom, all carpeted and gabled and warm, and an even quicker peek into mine.

  “Oh god,” Dad said, closing the door as quickly as he could, like there was a leaping lion on the other side.

  He was exaggerating. The thing is, I find it personally offensive that girls are just naturally expected to be neater than boys. My bedroom is my statement.

  “You’re a pig, Sylvia,” Walter said.

  “No, I’m not, I’m a social commentator.”

  “Then you make filthy comments,” he said.

  By the time we got back to the door, Dad had excused himself, clearly bent on a mission involving the house, his notebook, and some mumbling. I myself thought we had come through our first house tour pretty well, for people who didn’t do this sort of thing.

  I loved the house more than ever. I loved its kinks and quirks and its us-ness.

  And I was confident my bedroom had helped to finish off my little Carmine problem.

  “So, still want to be my boyfriend?” I said to the visibly shaken boy who was standing in my doorway staring at his feet.

  He looked up, first at Walter, then at me. He looked at me intensely, powerfully, like he was singing in a boy band.

  “No,” he said, high drama, “now I want to be your husband.” He grabbed himself in a furious, celebratory hug.

  I guess I had misunderstood the trembling.

  He stood there hugging; Walter stood to the side of me laughing.

  “Shut up, Walter,” I said.

  “I just thought of something funny, that’s all.”

  “Did I hear somebody say shut up?” Dad called from someplace far, far away. I swear, sometimes he calls home from work, sensing that we have said something from his never list.

  “How old are you, Carmine?” I asked as politely as I was ever probably going to be to him again.

  “Alm
ost eleven.”

  I shrugged. “Oh, now you see there, I’m already past fourteen, so that wouldn’t work. But later on, when we’re the same age, we’ll talk about it again. Okay?”

  He hugged himself so hard, he was unable to talk until Walter went up and forcibly released him from his own grip.

  “Pah,” he gasped. Then started backing hastily away. “Wait till I tell everyone…” he said, and bounded away like a happy, demented jackrabbit.

  When we had the door safely bolted, I turned to my brother, whose flickering, dancing smile expressed both hysterics and just a wee bit of apprehension.

  “Do you suppose they’re all like that around here?” I said. I noticed I had my hand on his arm in a very serious gesture, and we were standing close against the front door the way they do in horror films when a madman comes chopping his way in with an ax. I took a step farther into the house.

  He was about to respond like a normal person, to sort of agree and to say something helpful and reassuring. Then he remembered to be Walter.

  “What are you talking about? The only one acting weird was you. You could treat people better, Sylvia. And you better try a little harder before you get us all a reputation.”

  I stood, aghast, waiting for him to give, to laugh at his own absurdity.

  But he held his pose of rotten seriousness.

  “Hey,” Dad called from the far tip of the house, “come here. Come, let me show you what the toilet’s doing now.”

  “I have to go,” Walter said, turning into the queen of England or something. “My father would like me to see what the toilet is doing.”

  And off he marched.

  Right, I’d better be careful not to get the family a reputation.

  The Brothers Grim

  THE THING ABOUT FINCHES is, they can do an awful lot of chattering without ever telling you much about what’s bothering them, or even if anything is bothering them at all. Their little songs are so cute, coming from their round little bodies and their serious little faces, that you always think everything is going okay, just from the sound.

  They weren’t brothers, of course, since they were married, but Walter and I decided to name them the Brothers Grim when we realized after the first several hours of staring at them that they were very grim characters indeed. If we got too close to the cage, the bigger one, Mr. Grim, would open his bright orange beak as wide as possible—which was a whole quarter-inch wide—and threaten us to keep a distance from Mrs. Grim. They were very much in love, the Brothers Grim.

  So, with their habit of singing the same song come what may, tweeting and twittering away, you just might not notice if you forgot to fill the water dish for them one or two or three days straight when you were really busy with tests and life and things. You might not notice that, and they might not help things any by singing away and flapping away, much like they did any other day.

  And it sounded just as beautiful. Just as beautiful, thrilling, sweet, and comical as all the other too few days they sang and filled our house before.

  But their wee bodies couldn’t take it. They couldn’t go for very long, not the way a polar bear or an alligator could go very long between meals because they could store up great reserves of energy with their big meals and because they conserved their energy by not doing anything for anybody.

  They couldn’t go for very long without a bite or a drink, finches couldn’t. Because they kept singing. Because they kept singing and kept burning it up, and who knew, what with all the business of life.

  And so when he ran down, one Brother Grim just fell over and lay there among the tiny little seed shells all over his sandpaper floor, where I found him.

  And it did not matter how much I cried and apologized and overfed and overwatered the other brother, nothing was going to stop her from following along the next day and falling right down to that same sandy, seedy cage floor.

  And who could blame her?

  It was awfully quiet then.

  And the earth was still wet and soft and bald from when we had buried the first one the day before, so at least it was easy to get them back together. At least there was that.

  “Sorry, Sylvia,” Walter said, patting the same ground again with his bare hands. This was mostly his job, the burying. We never quite arranged that, but it became pretty much his job, and he took pride in his job.

  “Don’t get your shirt dirty,” I said.

  “I won’t,” he said, and stood with his hands carefully extended away from his school clothes.

  Dad had gone to work already.

  “Wash up,” I said. “We have to go.”

  Bygone

  BY THE TIME HE was done refiguring, the only part of the house Dad was still satisfied with was the outside.

  We had the trees. We had the one cherry, and the two inedible apple brothers—crab and mutant. We had all manner of evergreen and leafy and baldy. We had the sea grass, the sandy soil paths, and the smell of the ocean everywhere you went, mixed all gorgeously with whatever mad plant life you happened to be standing next to. Even if the scent part did Dad less good than anyone, even if he had to work twice as hard as anyone, to grab hold of the scent part of things.

  It was one of the saddest parts of my dad. It was one of the saddest parts, and on certain days—like especially on the most aromatic-breezy-oceanside-harvesty days—I thought it may have been even the very saddest part of him, beyond even any of the old sadnesses. The fact that he couldn’t smell things the way we could. Just didn’t have it, because of, I don’t know, an infection way back or something, he was never quite sure, or quite clear, other than that it just went on him. Left him flat.

  He worked these days from the memory of scent, from before, from when he was younger, from before it left him. He was always a scent guy, he said, back before. It was his favorite sense, he said, back then.

  “But we won’t dwell on that now,” he would always say, when he caught himself dwelling on it.

  Anyway, it just didn’t matter. What mattered was that he had to work a lot harder than you do or I did or Walter did to smell the apples in his own yard or the roses, for that matter.

  I thought that was a horror. Especially for somebody who wanted so badly to smell the apples and the roses.

  Then again, it might be the other way around. The fact that he had to make so much more effort—and you should have seen him, pressing a fruit or a flower so hard into his face and closing his eyes and squeezing and pulling the whole garden almost all the way into his lungs—that maybe if he still cared that hard, to do it that hard, that he appreciated it all the more than you did or I did or Walter did.

  But, anyway, we had all that and more, all around us. We had the hedge that was our border, our moat, the spotty but more or less continuous twenty hodgepodge varieties of scrubby hedge. We had the big patches of grass, the wild wildflowers, the climbing ivies, the creeping border plants, the tough vines and thorns of our ruffian thistles and rosebushes.

  And at the center of it, we had our fishies. A neat, odd irregular-shaped man-made pond sunk right in the middle of our overgrown secret jungle. Two fat contented lazy giant goldfish and one mustachioed black catfish squigged around in that pond as if they were putting on a slimy fashion show just for us, whenever we came by, any time of day. I named them Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria after Columbus’s boats he used to find the New World because this would sort of be our New World.

  I wondered if they ever stopped for a rest, if they stopped for anything, if they did all that swimming just for us, or if they sensed us coming and snapped to it so they wouldn’t lose their jobs.

  Not that it mattered. It was enough that they were there, live and living like the rest of the garden, and the garden was ours.

  You really would be happy to live here in these grounds, even if there were no house at the center at all.

  So the outside passed inspection, even with Dad.

  On the other hand…

  Something happened. It hap
pened to Dad, although if you asked him he would say it was the house, but something happened after the visit from Carmine.

  It wasn’t Carmine himself. Weird as he may be, he didn’t actually do anything wrong. He just appeared, came into our new world. Walter and I tried to come up with the last time Dad had had anyone over.

  “Last time?” Walter said. “What last time? Doesn’t there have to be a first time before you can say a last time?”

  Right.

  While Dad was sleeping, if he was sleeping, things started creeping. Creeping up on him, getting into him.

  And that is not what he likes at all. Things creeping in. He likes the outside outside. He started taking things very seriously. He started making big things out of little things, and somethings out of nothings.

  “Did you see the color of it?” Dad asked over breakfast the next morning. He was at the table already when we came down, and his list—his dense, multipage list—was in one hand, a cup of Earl Grey was in the other. I smelled his tea before I was even down the stairs. Earl Grey is one of the finest scents, and it will pull you right up out of bed even on a Saturday.

  “The bathwater, I mean. Don’t be polite—you can’t deny that you’ve noticed it. The gray bathwater, like somebody is blowing smoke through it before it comes out of the spigot. The water that looks like it’s already been bathed in by some other family and then drained off to us. The fish bathe in nicer water than we do.”

  You couldn’t miss it. Especially since the house didn’t have a shower, and so we all took baths all the time.

  “Um…did I notice? I don’t think…Walter, did you notice any smoke water?”

  “Smoke water? I didn’t notice any smoke water. I didn’t notice any fish. We have fish? Where are they? Can we eat them?”