Chapter One #2
The acre of land just west of town and the yellow, two-story house that stood on it hardly resembled the place where Cal had grown up.
His brother, Robert, had died of influenza when Cal was six; his sister, Grace, of tuberculosis when he was nine.
Also that year his mother, Dora, of several ailments but mostly pneumonia.
That had left just Cal and his father, and Cal had moved out as soon as he turned eighteen.
It was hard to know what shape the house and the old man might have been in if it weren’t for the war—not the current war, the one before it—and all the unrelated death in the family that had come after, and all the drinking that fueled his father’s hardship.
There was a willful out-of-reachness to Everett now that seemed to deepen with his pitted cheeks, an appetite for suspicion and a compulsion for stockpiling that became more ravenous with each passing year—all of which made it a good thing the house wasn’t in town.
On a regular basis, Everett was seen pedaling his cart through the streets of Bonhomie and stopping to pull items out of dumpsters and trash cans.
Now and then, someone hollered at him or complained to the town.
More than a few times, a .22 was fired at a passing car from one of his attic windows and a deputy had to be sent out, the old crackpot on Compton Road was at it again.
The trouble was the way his father’s brain worked, Cal thought.
The trouble was also all the stuff. Everett had just barely managed to scrape his family’s way through the Depression and couldn’t abide by waste.
He kept clothes from decades past—his own and what he found.
He kept food he was never going to eat, food that had gone bad.
He kept magazines, newspapers, calendars, can labels.
Buttons, matchbooks, pencil stubs. The skulls of rabbits and squirrels he’d shot and eaten.
Spools of thread and coils of rope and wire.
Cast-iron skillets and rejected bells and clappers from the defunct bell factory.
He kept every make and manner of kitchen utensil he’d found by rummaging through the town dump or through other people’s garbage cans.
He kept envelopes, catalogues, birthday cards sent to strangers.
He maintained no liquor cabinet, but stationed (and hidden) around the house were bottles of all kinds of booze he’d bought or found or been given as payment for some odd job.
In the backyard were five Model Ts, none of them drivable.
They’d become receptacles for empty cans and mason jars, for scrap wood and car parts.
One car—rolled off the assembly line the year Cal was born—had been turned into a chicken coop.
The old man was sixty-one, had lived under fourteen presidents (six from Ohio), and, though his vision was teeming with floaters and cataracts, he’d been writing letters to all of them since Woodrow Wilson.
He had no interest in barbers, cut his own hair, let his graying beard grow wide and wiry.
He was thin; if you were to encounter him naked, you would see his bones poking to get out, not because of any ailment but because food was an afterthought to him now that he lived alone.
He was in the backyard when he heard Cal’s tires roll onto the gravel driveway.
He heard the engine shut off and, a few moments later, he heard Cal’s knock on the front door.
Then footsteps rounding the side of the house, soft-shattering the thin layer of new snow that had frozen to a crust during the night.
“Pop?”
A cardinal drew a crimson line across the snow. There was Cal: standing between the pint-size Coca-Cola chest and the wardrobe. A sack of groceries under his arm.
“Ears working today, Pop?”
“Fine.” Not fine since Saint-Mihiel, actually, but functional.
“If I didn’t know better,” Cal said, “I’d think you were getting fat. How many layers have you got on?”
Everett, who had on four jackets, two scarves, a mackinaw, and, under it all, a pair of pajamas, was dragging a wheel with a tire sagging around it toward the garage behind the house.
In the few days since Cal had last stopped by, his father had somehow managed to raise each of the five Model Ts and remove all twenty of their wheels.
The cars sat on jacks and stump cuts. The wheels and their flattened tires lay in a heap beside the garage, except for the one he was dragging through the snow.
All of which suggested to Cal that at least his father hadn’t been on a bender. “What are you doing?”
As if tired of having to answer that question (though he hadn’t spoken to anyone since Cal’s last visit), Everett, dragging the tire another few feet, said testily, “Keeping my rubber and metal out of certain clutches.”
There were trails through the snow connecting each of the cars to where the wheels and tires now lay. “What clutches, Pop?”
“Institutional,” Everett said without looking up at him. “Governmental. If you want it typed up, you’ll have to wait till I have time.” He let the tire fall over as he clapped snow off his gloves, powdering it onto his beard.
Cal nodded. “Guess I’ll put these away.”
He carried the groceries up the sagging back steps and into the mudroom, where he’d once sat on a bench to take off his shoes when he got home from school.
The bench was buried under newspapers and catalogues now, tools and coats and blankets piled opposite it, so that the path through the mudroom was almost too narrow to walk.
Then into the kitchen, where his mother, blond like him and his sister, had once cooked their meals and helped them with their homework and recited the capitals of the forty-eight states by heart.
All but one of the chairs were piled with flats and boxes, the table so heaped with junk it was barely discernable as a table.
The floor drooped in places and creaked wherever a foot could get to it.
The ceiling was a stormfront of water stains.
Everett had claimed to be glad when Cal, at the age of eighteen, told him he was moving out.
He’d said he was sick and tired of Cal nagging him about the way they lived, about the condition of the house, and his drinking.
Nagging, since Cal was eleven. Everett was right on the math; that was the year after Cal’s mother had died, the year everything had somehow gotten worse.
Cal couldn’t shake the feeling that, out of the family, he was the last one his father would have wanted to be left with, and here the two of them were.
He stacked the groceries on the only free section of counter he could find, then filled the bag with things he’d brought in weeks past that had gone bad.
Collapsed fruit. Rock-hard bread. A soft, slippery onion.
He carried the stinking bag through the front door and out to the trunk of his car so his father wouldn’t be able to dig through it after he was gone.
In the yard, Everett unwound the brass wire from the joined handles of the double garage doors and pulled the doors open, making wings in the snow.
There wasn’t enough room for twenty tires in there, he deduced, even flat ones; he’d have to pull a few things out, decide what could be sacrificed to thieves, should any come around while he was asleep or away.
More than a few things, now that he thought of it, because he also had to make room for the soda chest, all the car parts, the cans, the flashing and lengths of stovepipe.
Yes, every bit of metal and rubber visible to the naked eye had to be hidden away.
He was dragging a sideboard out of the garage when Cal reappeared.
“Let me help you.”
His father wagged his bearded head no.
“This wasn’t even ours,” Cal said, touching the wood.
Everett got the sideboard far enough out so the garage doors would clear it, then leaned his elbows on it and peered at Cal. His eyes bloodshot—maybe just with annoyance. “You came to bring me food?”
Cal nodded.
“And now you’ve brought it?”
“Yes.”
Everett shifted his mouth around as if trying to separate a bit of fish from a bone. “I’m busy.”
Cal took in the yard: a disorganized cemetery of crap, all of it covered with snow. From the driver’s seat of one of the Model Ts, a chicken raised its head and cast a sideways eye. “There are a lot of guys signing up at the recruitment center,” he said. “Volunteering. It’s something to see.”
“Mmm.”
“They’re lined up down Union Street.”
Everett tugged on one of the sideboard drawers. He banged it with his fist and tugged again. Empty.
“I wanted you to know—I tried to enlist this afternoon.”
For years, Everett had been bowing to gravity the way old men sometimes do. Now, right before Cal’s eyes, he appeared to straighten, grow taller, till his gray-blue eyes were level with Cal’s. “Why?”
“Why? Because I want to be a part of this thing, that’s why. Fight the Axis. You know what it’s like. You enlisted.”
Everett winced. “Listen to you. ‘Fight the Axis.’ And you didn’t ask me first?”
“I don’t need to ask, Pop. I’m twenty-one. I’ve been registered for three years.”
“Well, it was a waste of time. They didn’t take you, did they? Because of your leg?”
“No.”
Everett’s posture deflated again. He worked open the second drawer of the sideboard, looked in, shoved it closed. “Meanwhile, they’ve bumped the registration age up to sixty-four. They’d probably take me tomorrow, but they turned you down. Isn’t that a kick in the teeth?”
Cal slipped his hands into his pockets. “Anyway, I tried.”