"Which one?" I asked. We'd looked at six or seven houses in the past couple of weeks.
"That big farmhouse," she answered. "The one with the privet hedge."
"Oh," I said. "Why?"
"Because I think it's charming," she answered, and she glanced quickly at me, smiled, added, "And I think we can be happy there."
"Aren't we happy here?"
Here
was a townhouse apartment just south of Syracuse, New York.
"
Happier
, there," she said.
We moved in a month and a half later. Jim Sandy came over with his backhoe to dig a trench and lay ceramic tile and PVC pipe two weeks after that.
E
rika was in the city that day, working. She owned a small record shop that kept her away from home quite a lot because she was devoted to it and felt that with enough devotion it might make a good deal of money someday.
I watched as Jim Sandy towed his backhoe up the long, steep driveway, started it, unloaded it. I expected that he'd come and announce himself, but he didn't. He chugged around to the side of the house, the treads of the backhoe chewing up the lawn and spitting out huge divots. Then, with a great thud, the shovel sank into the earth and he started to work. From a kitchen window, I watched him for a few minutes. He looked at me once; I smiled and waved at him. He nodded stiffly from the cab of the backhoe. It made me feel instantly that, even from behind the window, I was somehow in his way, so I busied myself with some unpacking and listened to the grinding
chugga-chugga
of the backhoe.
That
chugga-chugga
stopped a half hour or so after it started. I waited for it to start again, and when, after a few minutes, it didn't, I went to the kitchen window and looked out. The backhoe was a good fifty feet from where it had been a half hour earlier, and its shovel was stuck into the earth. I didn't see Jim Sandy and decided that he'd probably had to relieve himself and felt more comfortable behind a tree or the garage.
I pressed my face into the kitchen window. I looked right and left, but I didn't see him. And when I turned from the window, thinking that whatever he was doing was his business, anyway, I saw him at the screen door, his hand raised, fist clenched, ready to knock. He knocked once on the screen door, opened it, knocked again on the inside door, saw me through its window, opened the door, and came in.
"Hi," I said. "What's up?"
He nodded, again stiffly, to indicate the area he'd been working in. "I dug up somethin' out there," he said.
"Oh?" I said.
"Yeah. I dug up an arm. I dug up someone's arm."
E
rika screwed her face up and said, "That's disgusting, Jack. Did you
look
at it?"
"Sure I did," I told her. "Why not?"
"What did it look like?" she asked. "Was it a skeleton? Was it just bones?"
"Mostly," I said. "There was some skin attached to it. It looked like a rolled-up grocery bag, Erika. There was nothing
upsetting
about it."
"And was there anything else?" Now, her look of disgust was mixed with curiosity.
"Anything else?"
"Sure. You find an arm and you'll probably find other things."
"Nothing yet, Erika."
She rolled her eyes. "That's comforting."
"This bothers you, doesn't it?" I said.
"Huh?" she said, clearly incredulous.
"I asked if this bothered you." I paused very briefly. "I guess it probably does."
She reached up and patted the top of my head. "Yes, Jack," she said. "It bothers me."
I felt very foolish.
S
he had an accident once that scared the hell out of me. She was cleaning the cellar floor of our townhouse in Syracuse. It was particularly dirty because we'd been gone for a week and a half, and our cats' litter box had grown too filthy for them, so they'd started using the floor. The smell was awful.
I was upstairs, making dinner, when the accident happened. She'd been moving some aluminum screens and windows that had been leaning against the wall—the cats had utilized the area behind these screens and windows—when one of the windows shattered. A shard of glass put a nasty gash in her arm, just above the wrist, and when I got down there, after hearing her scream, I found her holding the arm tightly, eyes wide, mouth open. I realized she was going into shock.
The gash was bleeding badly; my first thought was that an artery had been severed, so I led her to the cellar steps, sat her down, ran upstairs and grabbed a dishtowel, ran back, and made a tourniquet.
"I'm taking you to the emergency room, Erika."
She shook her head.
"Erika, this is a very
bad
wound; you might have severed an artery."
She shook her head again. "No," she whispered.
"You're being stubborn."
"I'm not," she managed. "The bleeding will stop, Jack." She sounded very sure of herself. "It's not bad."
I believed her. I told myself that I was being foolish. "Yeah, and where'd you get your medical degree?"
And she said, with that same stiff self-confidence, "I know my body, Jack."
I sat beside her. I saw that much of the towel, which was white, had turned a deep shade of red. "What were you doing, Erika?" I asked, merely for something to say.
"I was moving one of those windows, Jack. The cats crapped behind it."
"This is foolish," I began, and she interrupted, "I know my body, Jack."
I was nervous, of course; I nearly said something suggestive, something to lighten the tension between us. Instead I asked, "Am I being overly protective?"
"Yes. But it's okay. The bleeding has stopped."
I shook my head. She took the towel off her arm. The bleeding had indeed stopped. I shook my head again. "Keep it wrapped up, Erika, please—"
"No," she said. "It's okay."
And it was. A narrow, almost invisible scar is all that remains.
S
everal days after Jim Sandy's discovery I told her, "Jim Sandy said that other . . . body parts have been found in the area."
We were in bed. I felt her stiffen up beside me; she said nothing for a few moments. Then: "On our property, you mean?"
"I think so. I'd have to check."
"Check what?"
"The survey map. I'd have to pace the boundary out, I think. What does it matter?"
"It matters," she said, her tone very earnest. "I don't care if they find 'body parts' somewhere else, Jack. It's no concern of mine. But when they start finding them on
my
property—" She paused. When she continued, her tone was softer. "It's spooky, Jack."
"It gives the place atmosphere," I said.
She said nothing.
"Don't you think it gives the place atmosphere, Erika?"
"No," she whispered.
"Do you think we should move?"
"Not yet," she said.
"When, then?"
"When they start finding heads and torsos and thighs and eyeballs and . . ." She paused. "Then we move!"
"It's a deal," I said.
But we never moved from the house. In retrospect, maybe we should have. It probably wouldn't have made any difference, after all, but the effort might have given me some brief comfort.
I'
m a commercial artist. In college I studied fine arts—it's what I got my master's in, in fact—and I had grand ideas of making some kind of living as a painter. I didn't care if it was a good living, or even a poor one. I was willing to suffer. I did suffer. For ten years, I went from one lousy job to another—I laid sewer pipe; I washed dishes; I was a gardener's helper, a carpenter's helper, a plumber's assistant. And all the while I told myself, and believed it, that I was doing it "for the sake of art." I did hundreds of paintings. Landscapes, mostly, and a few dozen portraits (when friends or relatives pleaded with me to do something with my painting that would get me some
money
). I sold five of the landscapes in ten years (earning a total of $825.00 from them), and all of the portraits, because they were, in a sense, commissioned. And one morning, seven years ago, I sliced my face up while shaving with a razor blade that should have been replaced weeks earlier, but I literally did not have the money to replace it. I looked at myself in the mirror and whispered, "Enough! This has gone far enough!" A week later I had a position as an apprentice commercial artist with an ad agency in Elmira, New York.
I was still working for that agency when Erika and I bought the farmhouse. The agency had moved to Syracuse, a good 125 miles from the house, but they trusted me to do much of my work at home, so it wasn't a matter of commuting that distance every day. Once or twice a week would do it.
My work is fairly well known. I've done jobs for Coca-Cola, for Pampers, for IBM, and NIKON, and
Burpee
Seeds, plus several dozen others. No one knows that the work they're looking at is mine, although I've managed to slip my initials into a few ads (check the rectangular reflection of white light on the Coca-Cola ads that feature a koala bear). I've resigned myself to anonymity.
J
im Sandy never finished his trench. He came back to the house the day after he'd begun work and told me, "Sorry, Mr. Harris, but you gotta get yourself someone else to do this work."
"Who, for instance?" I asked.
He shrugged. "Beats me." Then he loaded up his backhoe and left. I think the cellar leaks to this day.
L
ife at the farmhouse was going to be rustic, I realized. We had no trash pickup, for instance. We got a permit from the town clerk that allowed us to use a sanitary landfill three miles east of the village. This weekly job started shortly after we moved to the house. We put a half-dozen plastic bags filled with trash and garbage into my Toyota and carted the whole stinking mess to the landfill, which, we found, was down a half-dozen narrow dirt roads. It gave us a chance to scout out the area, anyway, which Erika enjoyed. There were a lot of mobile homes, most of them with makeshift the roofs—I guessed that it was a town zoning ordinance—a trailer looked less like a trailer and was indeed more stationary and therefore a more permanent part of the tax base if it had an extra roof on it. There were also several small, crudely built houses, some with tarpaper roofs and windows covered with plastic—most apparently had fallen into years of disuse. A few were inhabited. We saw several scruffy children standing around, looking bored, their equally bored-looking mothers behind them; this bothered Erika a lot. She said that children who had to be so close to the earth should learn to enjoy it. I accused her of naïveté, and the subject was dropped.
We saw a couple of joggers, too, which I didn't expect. I had assumed that jogging was an urban pastime and that rural people did enough hard work that jogging was unnecessary. "You're a snob," Erika said, and I agreed.
"These people do seem to put more into it, though," I said. And it was true. One of the joggers, a man apparently in his late thirties, legs and arms and chest well-muscled, head bobbing, dark hair flying this way and that, looked wonderfully involved in what he was doing.
"Now that man's
serious
about it, Erika," I said. "He's not just fooling around."
"Of course he's not fooling around," she said. He obviously knows the value of what he's got."
"The value of what he's got?" I asked.
She nodded. "Yes. His body. He knows how precious it is." She gave me a quick once over, reached and patted my stomach. "You could use a little
self-appreciation
yourself, Jack."
I glanced at her, grinned. "Oh? I thought you liked that . . . "—I looked down briefly at the slight protrusion of my belly—"that small proof of my imperfection."
She laughed quickly. "Jack, I love what makes you human. I wouldn't change any of it." She patted my stomach again. "Even that."
"Thanks." I said, grinning. I glanced in the rearview mirror; the jogger had fallen. I stopped, looked back; Erika looked, too.