Holdfast: At Home in the Natural World

Pale Morning Dun (Ephemerella infrequens)

m 85 Pale Morning Dun (Ephemerella infrequens) I usually try to avoid estate sales, the whole of a person’s life reduced to things the next of kin don’t want, and then priced and spread out on planks. But at eight in the morning, when the line of women with pocketbooks stretches out to the street, I duck through the hedge and come in the back door of my neighbor’s house as if I lived here, as if I were bringing soup to someone who is sick. Inside the house, hazy light drifts from all the windows into the emptied corners, lighting every suspended particle of dust. Exposed to the sun for the first time in twenty years, the walls shine yellow as if they are coated with shellac, but this is tar from the cigarettes Walter and Marnie smoked, shut up in the house with the windows closed to keep out the moisture. The last of Walter’s duck paintings are propped against the wall, faded behind dusty glass. In the hall, twenty years’ worth of National Geographics make two piles as tall as my waist, but every last Louis L’Amour novel has been spirited away. The bathroom is crowded with shoppers edging around, not touching anything, evidently not finding what they want, whatever that is. All the bottles are open and half empty, and who is going to want bottles that smell of Walter—the sharp smell of sea and cigarettes? Or a tube of toothpaste most recently squeezed on the last day of a man’s life? In the open cabinet, a stack of blue towels. A bathroom scale. Woven with gray hair, Walter’s hairbrush, like the tortoiseshell reliquary of a saint. 86 m Holdfast “I know he had a piano,” a woman says in an accusatory tone that suggests Walter has somehow taken the piano with him, in utter disregard for her interests. It’s true they’d had a piano. The neighbors say that Marnie played it, but we haven’t heard music coming from that house since we moved in, which was fifteen years ago. He’d had guns too, a lot of them. One night Susan, next door, thought she heard footsteps and called Walter. He loaded up a shotgun and crept through her house, threatening the dark space behind each door. Susan, who has dogs and cats and children, followed him around, snapping on lights, saying, “Never mind. Put down the gun. It doesn’t matter about burglars.” The stuff of neighborhood legend. I wonder who has the guns now. I push my way through the people who crowd into the kitchen, everybody hurrying to be the first to pick over the good stuff, all complaining because there isn’t much left, as if you ever could make anything out of the pieces, as if there is ever anything left after a person dies: a man replacing a washer on the faucet in his backyard, and then pain and darkness (or maybe a wash of light), and then nothing but leftover stuff. There used to be a maple table at the south-facing window where Walter sat after breakfast and smoked a cigarette, watching the street, letting ashes fall into the remains of the fried egg on his plate. The table is gone, but the plates are there on the counter, for twenty-five cents apiece. The big old console TV is still in the living room. How many times had I wanted to throw a brick through that screen when I came to visit Walter and he never turned off the TV, never even turned down the volume. I would take a stab at conversation: “Your roses are beautiful this week.” History for three hundred please. “Do you like the yellow rose in the new catalog?” The rationalist philosopher who died of a cold after stuffing a chicken with snow. “I think Marnie would have liked the—Rene Descartes? No, I’m sorry, it was Francis Pale Morning Dun (Ephemerella infrequens) m 87 Bacon—yellow one with pink on the edges,” I said, but Walter said no, Marnie’s rule always was, one color to a rose. Out in the garage, a plank table is piled high with herbicides and pesticides of great variety and potency. Walter raised roses, glorious roses, the most beautiful roses in the neighborhood, roses that towered ten feet in the...