THE TURRET HOUSE by Charles Wyatt
A place. Let’s start with sound. There are lawn mowers spaced like mockingbirds, about one and a half to a block. The mowers come and go – that is, the sound grows louder because someone is walking, that mower-pacing, mind deeply relaxed, eyes following a line of cut grass, the sound I hear muted behind the walls of this house, alive out there in the vibrating handle of the machine. The smell of mown grass is rising – currents flow invisibly, intricately. I can take a moment away from these sentences to walk in that world and then return, refreshed.
I have been in this place before and now I return to it. Ohio, Oklahoma, Indiana, Tennessee, Ohio again, cowering in the middle of the alphabet. A village built on a handful of hills in the midst of corn and bean fields. And a house, this one, large enough to contain me and my digressions with its two stories and attic, its wide front porch, slate steps and cracked cement sidewalks. Inside the house, rising above the wide floor planking, the stairs creak constantly. It isn’t even necessary to tread on them.
The village is small enough to walk to the post office, to the IGA, the hardware store, but no one walks, of course. Most of the houses are tricked up with Victorian frills, towers, stained glass windows, historical plaques and three-color paint jobs. There are wrought iron fences and picket fences and the smell of fresh paint. Interesting that wrought iron can be painted white but black picket fences are rare.
Now the near mowers are silent, and I can hear the distant mowers. Like sheep on a mountainside, their bleating, their bells. I must begin the story: A child and his father fishing together. Let’s say a long time ago. Fifty years is a round number. They wear hip boots and follow a small creek. The bed of the creek is sometimes dry, sometimes yields to pools, sunken bends, meanders. In the deeper pools bluegill, smallmouth bass, catfish, turtles, crayfish, bullfrogs, giant water bugs, hellgrammites, and over those same pools dragonflies, damselflies, mosquitoes, gnats, red-winged blackbirds, the overhanging branches of trees the boy can’t identify, but there are willows, birch, and cottonwood.
The boy’s eyes are on the water’s surface, looking for the slight bulge that might identify a turtle, when the snake’s striking startles him. A blow against his booted leg and the violence of that writhing escape. Startled, his heart beating like a bell, he still wonders at its thickness, the heft of its strong body amid that snakeness, that exhibitionistic undulation in which it seems to be going several directions at once, the furious slashing toward the water and then swimming, overwater, underwater, water moccasin. Snake, snake, snake he chants to calm himself as he feels the rubber boot for snake fang punctures. He has fallen on the dry creekbed stones, but his leg has no feeling – his body has no feeling. Everything is quiet save the distant chirr of a red-winged blackbird. Where is his father? Dead these ten years. And the snake? There is always a snake.
The sky is dark today. Everyone’s mowing to race the weather. The giant elm in the backyard is palming its leaves toward the cut grass below, anticipating rain. A real train whistle identifies the distance. Boundaries. Most distant, clouds moving this way from the west, less distant, that train, a half dozen blocks. Least distant, the past. Yesterday. Anything on the other side of sleep. Elsa in Tennessee, our son Nate with her. I made my living playing music once. Once I was that fishing boy. Now father to another. There is always a fishing boy. Always a father. Another story: Nate is sitting on the front porch, playing his guitar. He’s wearing what he calls hobo gloves; the fingers are cut off at the second knuckle. (That tree behind this house is more than two hundred years old. He has climbed it, found the carved inscription “Derwin.” A joke. Welsh for oak tree.) The house, too, has a Welsh inscription. But there’s not enough of it to decipher, painted over so many times.
Nate then, playing, his left hand flying up and down the neck as if it were free of his wrist. I can’t hear the music from here. His story? It’s about the old lady across the street – the one who lives in the turret house that’s got “Rhaeder” painted over the top row of windows. I’ve sketched it, and I’ve got it here somewhere, in a box behind the rocking chair, but one has only to count the windows from this place (this desk, from which I can see the elm he climbed) imagining a labyrinth, moving always to the right – at the seventh window it appears, a white house close to the road, built into the hillside, and the old woman, Mrs. Price, Nate will learn, has brought her trash down to the sidewalk because tomorrow is the day the trucks come to pick it up, the Big O trucks.
Some think it is the O in Ohio, but I know it is the pickup, the O Baby, the upbeat, the invocation of a lively song, a song about a lovely lass (O she looked so fair in the midnight air), about coffee grounds, cast-off snakeskins and mismatched socks. There she is. (Mrs. Price, not the lovely lass.) She has closed the lid of her blue dumpster and she’s looking across the street at the porch where Nate is playing (I can hear it now) Villa Lobos. She’s coming across the street. There’s not much traffic this time of day. Just after a rain, a washed and sparkling light dimming and fanning out again as clouds ride above the wind, stretching and yawning.
“Good day, young man.” Nate has stopped playing. For some reason I can’t hear what he’s saying.
“No, it’s not your father that I wish to see. I’ve seen you playing here these past few weeks, and visiting with your friends. My name is Mrs. Price, and I live across the way. Perhaps you could help me with some boxes I need to move.”
Nate is thinking about his friend Carrie, who agreed to come over, and who has taken longer than she promised, this while he says something about the music he’s practicing – he’s not paying much attention to what he’s saying because he’s begun to notice this old woman whose name is Clara Price, a widow of twenty-three years, her husband killed at a railroad crossing when his car stalled and he could not resist trying one last time to restart it. The old woman has something between her eyes – what do they call it? A wen. A flappy kind of thing like a remora clinging to a shark. Nate likes the nature shows on TV. Afternoons he watched them with me after his mother first left us.
“Of course, I’ll pay you. I just realized today . . .”
The remora clinging to Mrs. Price gives her a kind of jaunty look. Her white hair seems disorganized in a hedgehoggy kind of way. She’s wearing a long black skirt and a dark sweater above it, with a white silk scarf around her neck, knotted handsomely. Leather shoes with laces peeking out. Nate thinks she’s some kind of cross between a pirate and a nun. He can’t wait to tell Carrie. And he can’t help staring at that flappy thing. There are others, but in less interesting places. Perhaps they move about at night. He looks down the block toward Carrie’s house. Nobody.
At the seventh window, see him now, following Mrs. Price across the street, after they both pause for the passing of a large green John Deere combine, a very noisy thing. It’s certain they’re not talking as it grinds unpleasantly by, both lost in their thoughts.
Five dollar bills in the blue teapot.
Calico cat on the stairway, slinking up. I’ve seen him before, mouse in his mouth. Waiting for her. There must be a sound when they bite through the bones.
Now from the eighth window – I have washed them all, admiring the old glass, its waves and bubbles, like the surface of a spring – see them climbing the stairs to Rhaeder house, flagstone steps. The ninth window is memory. Nate remembers this, will remember me. I’ll tell the story first and he’ll tell it again.
Nate has thrust his gloves in his pocket, wonders if he should have put the guitar inside the front door instead of laying it on the porch swing. It’s a cheap guitar belonging to his father. There’s always a father.
“You mustn’t mind the house, young man.”
She’s got loose keys in a pocket. Locks her door to take out the trash. Where’s the cat?
Here’s the last thing you can see from the eighth window: Clara Price poking that key the way you’d stoke a coal fire, rattling the door – or was that the combine, now turning at the light, two blocks away?
There’s no color, little light, blinds drawn, dust like flour or blown sand. Mouse smell. Not a creature was stirring. Only a mouse stirred. Old mouse. Mouse on rye.
“They’re in the tower room. I want to bring them down here to the kitchen. Scat, Millicent.” Millicent is the cat, her calico bled out, colorless.
The stairway, as Nate had imagined, is steep and turns to the right, making a clock’s moves, Nate thinks, then decides he’s wrong – it depends on whether you’re going up or down. The treads creak like the stairs at home. Another closed door and pocket of keys rattling, bare bulb lit.
“Would you like me to help you with that key?” Nate wonders if she’s got the right one. She seems to have a palsy and she’s been mumbling little bird-like imprecations, roosting noises, unconscious effort.
Prying the lid off a coffin. Odd thought.
“A snake bit me,” he said, the boy I was, and his father, from the other side of the creek, standing on an elevated clay bank, the sun behind him, and of consequence made to have shining outline but darkness in place of body and face, asked him if he was sure, so many things in the world susceptible to confusion with snakes.
“A snake. A snake. Black. No, brown with patterns. See him swimming. From up there you should be able to see him swimming.”
“What kind of patterns? Are you sure you saw a snake?”
“He bit my leg.” The boy sits down, suddenly dazed. His father must, he knows, backtrack through shrubs and rosebushes down to the riffle where he can cross on the white stones.
A final rattle and the door jerks open, the knob fallen off and bouncing down the stairs past Nate, sounding, in the hollow stairwell with its one worn wobbling banister, like a host of doorknobs, a Biblical doorknob plague. All the doors in this house must be springing open, Nate thinks.
At first old Mrs. Price blocks the doorway.
“Oh damn.” In a fluty voice.
Nate is grinning. He can do this voice and Carrie’s going to hear this story. He’ll give her a few more lines, too.
Oh my paws and whiskers. Oh merde. Oh man, doo-doo. Something that starts with O. O no. Oldsmobile. Okie dokie.
Now there’s light; Mrs. Price has flounced, how else to say, through the door. A wall of windows – no shades here. This is the tower top, Nate thinks, noticing at a glance the ceiling, oddly domed and braced, something for the old-house shows on TV, but first – windows all around four walls, a square room not especially small, and turned against two, no, three walls – pianos. Keyboards like bad teeth. Uprights and those round piano stools – spin it until it falls off like a doorknob. Some are smaller with organ foot pumps – harmonium. Harmonia? Against the fourth wall, nearly to the windows’ tops, the boxes stacked like books – they may be filled with books. Under all that dust, it’s hard to tell. Nate can see down to the street, and across, his own house. Small now, like a Monopoly house, only the elm behind still huge. He’s in a tower on a mountainside.
“What are the pianos for?” Nate asks. Mrs. Price has settled on a bench and has removed a shoe which seems to have a broken heel. Nate’s not looking too closely.
“Oh, Mr. Price collected them.”
Oh Susanna, Nate thinks. Nose voice. I’ve got dog’s ears for snooty tunes.
“ . . . and Friday evenings he would . . . ”
Pull on his wings and best cuff links and flap down to the feed store.
“ . . . the Chancellor and Mrs. Wafflenose . . . ”
Too many windows for a boy whose mind is set on wandering – the steep hillside rising behind the stacked-box windows – you can see the switchbacks of a lonely trail of winding steps.
“ . . . and on this one he wrote “The Dance of the Blessed Happy Wanderers.” That was just a week before his tragic death.”
You can see the whole two blocks of Pearl Street and the inn at the corner of Broadway with its row of fountains, dribbling cannon tinkling in leaf-choked chaldera.
Now she’s playing something on a piano in a key somewhere between A and B-flat (Nate has perfect pitch). It must be the Jolly Blessed Hobo . . . Nate feels in his pockets for the gloves. He’s got one but the other has fallen out, probably on the stairs. Mrs. Price has quite forgotten him as she pounds out something very like the real Happy Wanderer that Mr. Price must have ripped off, the one with the valderi-valderas, her tongue, in concentration, protruding from her mouth as if it were contemplating immediate escape.
He’ll need both his gloves if he’s going to move any of those boxes – and that land-mine roller-skate doorknob, too. Dark stairwell. The old lady’s going for six stanzas for sure. Her ha ha ha has are hilarious.
He’s not happy the father, slightly winded from clambering down the steep clay bank, and stepping in a muskrat hole. There is the boy, mooning on a rock, head in his hands.
“Well let’s have a look. Take off that boot.”
It’s not a snakebite, but who could tell? I’ve managed to scrape my leg on a sharp rock, either when I saw the snake, or just now when I felt dizzy. There’s a gash from my ankle to my knee.
“You’ve done it this time, Thomas. How long did it take? Have we been here a half hour?”
Father and son confer. Son does not feel like walking at the moment, would rather sit. (Would rather be left alone so as not to be seen crying.) Father observes that the gash is not bleeding, but should be washed and bandaged. That will hurt. No, it will not hurt. There’s a bottle of hydrogen peroxide in the trunk of the car. Hydrochloric acid. Thomas rocks holding his aching leg. Sulfuric acid. He’s sitting on a rock. A rock chair. And the father (just for a moment, until the kid pulls himself together) is fishing at the far end of the pool where something heaved, shouldered its way to have a closer look at his floating lure, then paused, unconvinced. They both wait now: the father, the something. Waiting, the father thinks about his own father, a man of few words, and those less eloquent than the back of his hand. Dead, he won’t go away, always lurks in dreams, powerful again – and he had a father, too. A man with a fine singing voice and a violin. And him the son of . . . that fish is backing off, but don’t twitch the lure yet. Patience. Every one of us a mooning boy.
“Nathanial.” (Fluty tones.) “Where have you gone?”
“I’m looking for my glove. I dropped it on the stairs.”
“Do bring the doorknob if you see it.” Sound of sliding cardboard box.
Nate has piano lag. An out-of-tune tune stuck in his ear. He’s found a door ajar at the first landing. “Maybe it rolled in here,” he doesn’t think – he says, preparing his defense. Table lamps like a school of fish. With those shades like inverted bowls made of colored glass. And little walnut tables. Fringed cloths. Hutches. Armoires. Knickknacks. Porcelain figurines. Glass objects. Objects. Objection, Your Honor. Overruled. (Another O.) At least a dozen lamps (and lit) by the count. And on the tasseled rug, by a seaweed skirl of cat fur, one doorknob. Looks like a door passed this way, Kemo Sabe. A central aisle which Nate (Hansel) can’t help following, magic doorknob in hand. Many shelves but no books. Nate’s father has too many books. They’re like music, he says. You want to read them again. Yes, it’s true. Some music you wish you never heard once. But it doesn’t take weeks to listen to . . . a small round table with a candle in front of the window (muffled in heavy curtains). And Nate’s glove. The one he must have dropped on the stairs. A candle lit within the past ten minutes or so. And what else? Reading glasses? A drinking glass containing a set of false teeth. Rather important looking on the white doily. This is a long room, Nate thinks as he takes his glove and begins to walk backwards, rather like treading water. Even with all the lamps, or perhaps because of them, it seems especially dark with girderworks of shadow. Plenty of places to hide holding a hatchet or perhaps a machete. And past the table with his glove, there is an archway to the right, introducing an area which seems to Nate completely dark – dogleg right. Room probably for a lurking string quartet of zombies at the very least. Nate has made his way back to the door where he can hear the sound of sliding boxes from above. Perhaps he should have pinched the false teeth.
“I found the doorknob.”
“Good. Good. Put it in the piano, then.”
“In the piano?”
“Yes, dear. With the others.” Still pushing the boxes (like a Rubik’s cube, Nate thinks), she gestures toward one of the uprights. It has no lid. Nate sees inside, to within six inches of the top, doorknobs. An ossuary of doorknobs. Some glass, some painted, some brass. They are most of them complete, the inside and the outside knob – joined by the knob axle, the door femur, the whatsits. The inside knob is still in the tower room door, Nate notices – wonders if he should bring it to the attention of Mrs. Price . . .
“Here is the box I’ve been looking for.”
The two make their way along the creek bed, retracing their original path, finding, in fact, a fishing lure which must have dropped out of the son’s tackle box. Thomas refuses his father’s assistance, feels now this persistent gnawing sensation in his hurt leg, resists the urge to moan, realizes he’s doing it anyway.
“It can’t be that bad. It’s just a scrape.”
“Sorry.”
(The father is a meat cutter, a butcher – but he never uses that word. Comes home often with stitches, gashes, portions of fingers sliced, and stories of worse. This is all a cheerful business, this carnage, more interesting than the work of other fathers.)
“Why do you keep saying ‘sorry’?”
“I don’t know. I’m sorry.”
They have come to the road, or rather, to the bridge, which has a very steep slope up to the road. There’s a dark and broad pool which extends under the old one-lane bridge and for some ways on the other side.
“Look.” Thomas has forgotten his leg. A mallard hen and a kite tail of six tiny ducklings swim serenely away from them under the bridge. For Thomas it’s a miraculous vision. His father has already climbed to the level of the road and is coaching him to grab the end of a stick he has thrust down toward him. Halfway up the bank, Thomas lets go, slides back down and into the water where he sits, defeated. The ducks have disappeared. The father is quietly swearing.
This box is larger than the rest although not by much.
“What’s in it?” Nate asks. There is someone else in the house, he has decided. Someone in that room downstairs. Just around that corner, in an armchair, in the dark.
“Mr. Price’s hobby was carving decoys.” The box is sealed with paper tape which comes off as Nate takes over the task of sliding the box away from its fellows.
Inside the box are some old books, and, notably, a single carved and painted duck. It seems realistic to Nate. And there are baby ducks, ducklings palm-of-the-hand size. And each painted like the large one. All of them have black glass eyes. The big one is mottled, mostly gray with black. The little ones have black horizontal lines extending from their eyes. Egyptian, perhaps. Some have black patches on the tops of their heads. One is almost completely black. And from each of the ducklings hang treble hooks. They are tricked up like fishing lures. There might be a dozen of them.
“Please, young man, don’t touch.”
Nate returns the duckling he was holding to the box. The hooks were sharp.
“Where do you want this moved – the kitchen?” She nods affirmatively.
The box is awkward to hold but it isn’t especially heavy. Nate sets it down in the doorway.
“Is there someone else in the house?” he asks her. “Someone in the room with all those lamps?”
“What do you mean – all those lamps?”
It’s another day. It’s the same day. Sound comes first. The lawn mowers circling and pacing. The trees are a deeper green and the light is hot, falling only upon the just. The birds are in noon stupor. I’m in the house across the street from Nate and his story, the house where Nate and Thomas lived one time in their lives, the house where I imagined them. Like all things, this house is imaginary. Moving to the right (as is proper with all labyrinths) to the eighth window, you’ll see the white turret house. Rhaeder means waterfall. It isn’t taking any time for me to tell you this. It’s still the same day in the story. And the same time of day. The story is still in Ohio. And in a state of mind. In the limbic system and temporal lobe circling like a child’s electric train.
“The lamps with glass shades,” Nate says, “ . . . in the room downstairs, where I found the doorknob.”
“Young man, there’s no room with lamps. There were lamps in Mr. Price’s study, of course, but that room’s been closed off since he passed away. Now, if you’ll take this box down to the kitchen, I’ll give you five dollars for your trouble.” Right. No room with lamps.
Nate takes the decoy box and begins his descent. He can just reach the corners of the box to hold it with his arms completely extended. Leaning backwards, he can’t really see where he’s stepping. Roller skate? Maybe better to back down the stairs and rest the box on successive stairs. Turning around in the stairwell isn’t easy, but the box seems somehow smaller, easier to hold, but heavier. He sets it on the stair above him, waist level, halfway down to the landing where there isn’t a room with lamps. Looking down. The door is shut now. Did he shut it? Now the box feels like it’s completely filled with books. She must have added to the duckies. (When the storyteller said he wasn’t taking any time.) Below the landing he’s holding it in a bear hug – it’s definitely smaller, and by the time he’s down in the kitchen, it’s down to the size of a case of wine. He’s carried them in from his father’s car. Wine by the case, his father says, will have to do until the tanker trucks can be persuaded to make deliveries. Mrs. Price must still be in the tower room. More piano music. This time Chopin. That E-minor prelude straining to make E-flat. Old pitch. For that, you’d need an old pitch fork. Look in the box which once was another box, sleight of his own hand? Of course.
Now back up the stairs to find the old lady and collect the five-spot. She’ll meet him halfway, at the landing. But first Scarbo from Ravel’s Gaspard de la Nuit, devilish dwarf, always vanishing. In fact, a month of moonlit nights shaken from a jar. Ghostly fingers in the turret, tapping keyboards. Some of the pianos produce pitches, hammers striking strings. Others slap and moan. Doorknobs settle. Ask for your favorites, dear reader (gentle reader). There’s time.
“This is the room I meant.” Nate points to the door, “Where I found the doorknob and my glove. And the door was open.”
The old lady is ashen. Her wen might sprout wings and fly away.
“This is the closed room. It can’t be entered.” Nate realizes she’s always been ashen. She flutters her hand at him, at the door, deprecating or dusting, Nate can’t tell.
“It’s not closed off,” he says, feeling a second wind of stubbornness buoying him. He turns the knob and the door opens, not easily – he has to push it a bit, but it’s an old house, and doors in old houses . . .
The old lady might as well be singing, la la la – he’s tuned her out – she’s nattering about his five dollars. About heating old houses and doors nailed shut. It’s the same room, Nate’s happy to see, but not in the same mood. The lamps aren’t lit and the window at the far end is giving the only light. It’s not curtained anymore. There’s still something hanging there, but the light’s leaked in. All the lamps on the tables aren’t lit, and the knickknacks and china gargoyles and all solid objects are pretending to be covered by, are hiding under layers of . . . it’s the bottom of the sea and there’s a rain almost invisible of . . . calcium carbonate, volcanic ash, eiderdown, cottonwood fluff . . . No, it’s just dust. Just dust. Unjust dust. That old woman and her la la la. Nate’s not going to stop until he gets to the window and the table with a candle – no candle, but the string quartet alcove is more like a hallway and at the end of it, too far to make out, he saw this in the box, after he took out the books, the decoys, all tangled together, the eggs, round stones, an old scythe, his guitar transported here from the front porch across the street, more fishing lures, the little photo album, pictures of a dog, a dog which can sort out objects by their names (perhaps the photographs were taken by a child), and another picture, one of a bridge, odd angle, looking up . . .
The hallway ends in a dirt road and Nate’s not in that house, nor is he exactly standing in the road but it’s not the less clear to him. Dust-slicked, he thinks. The father’s pulling up the son who’s all dripping, miserable, having hurt his leg and fallen into the creek. Nate’s father showed him the scar. After all those years, smooth and hairless, approximately the shape of Lake Michigan. He’s going to put them together in the car and send them home. But first, tend to that moment when the father is fishing and something heaved and shouldered: it’s a really big fish now, a Sasquatch of a fish, and there’s a snake, too – a snake that flares up like a flushed grouse. There’s always a snake in a story like this. Then put them together in the car and send them home. It’s a long way home. And this might be the time they run out of gas. The time they run out of gas and see the fireflies. Ten thousand fireflies. They come in jars. Filled by the fathers and their fathers. Why not?
I’ve given him this story and it’s his to tell.
Charles Wyatt’s collection of short stories, Listening to Mozart (University of Iowa Press), won the 1995 John Simmons Award. This is his second appearance in Alaska Quarterly Review.