The Whole Town Underwater, Part 2

What I remember of my mother is a trail of white, a person speeding down the road on a red bicycle, a smell of chamomile, two brown eyes blinking in surprise, and a body lying in the kitchen, with my father leaning over and saying absolutely nothing. He just nodded his head over and over, like a person bobbing in the water, like a doll nodding in idiotic agreement.

 

When people stopped coming to church my father stopped cleaning it, stopped replacing the candles, just closed it up for a while. He kept the chapel padlocked. But the back, the Sunday School building, he used for his new personal project.

At first his intentions were mysterious. He took some of his books from the library and transferred them to the back of the church in two big boxes, piled full. I thought he was just doing it to make room for his new law and business books, and putting the old ones in storage. The books were all hardbacks, a couple of those mail-order Library Series volumes: the European Reader, American History Through Novels. They had handsome, leatherbound covers. I saw him carry them out in the after-dinner twilight. A stiff breeze was blowing, making the chapel lock clatter. The boxes made strange, hard noises, like there were irregular objects shifting inside.

He started going out to the church in the evenings. He had a lamp he used, that I could see through the side window.

My father became famous for asking after pens. Ballpoints were in short supply, so he would go door to door, asking for pens. He hated asking for things, so I knew that whatever he was doing in the back room involved a lot of writing. He must have been desperate.

People began to notice and talk.

“What’re all the pens for, the pens your Pop’s asking about?” Burt Gibbon asked me during a trip to the library. He wasn’t much of a librarian, but he kept the shelves in decent order because not many people took anything out. He sat at the desk and got slowly drunk off of the beer that Frank Edwards bartered, in exchange for occasional home repairs. By four o’clock most afternoons Burt had nodded off, though he would perk up when the bell jingled and someone opened up the door to let in some fresh air. Some of the books just sat around in boxes in the summer heat, because no one had ever bothered to re-shelve them.

“I don’t know,” I told him. “It’s a mystery. You could ask Micah about it, that’s his territory.”

“Well, if you don’t know, no one knows,” he said. “Family secrets.”

He winked at me, and I blushed, although I didn’t really know what he was getting at. I often worried that the rest of the town thought of my father and me as weird people, now that my father had taken off the mantle of holiness.

I’m sure Burt Gibbon asked everyone questions about my father. Everyone probably whispered about us, since there wasn’t much else for anyone to talk about. But nobody ever treated me with disrespect. As I biked home from my canoe trips with Micah, I sometimes saw people sitting in front of the Marshall Store – the distribution center – and they would wave at me and inquire after my health and well-being.

I’m not sure if this was because they were worried about me, living in a house with my father, or if they didn’t even connect me with him anymore, and they just felt like waving to someone they saw on the street.

I would stop sometimes at the Store, go through the screen door and into the main room, which was cluttered with boxes of produce. Downstairs was the cellar with the dry goods. Mrs. Marshall was always behind the counter, writing letters that she gave to Artie Woodruff for his weekly two-day bicycle run to the nearest working post office.

“Go ahead and take some milk,” she told me, looking up from her letter. “We’ve got plenty for this week.”

This was obviously not true. Most of us weren’t getting anything close to a balanced diet, and I knew that Mrs. Marshall wasn’t giving me easy charity. My father never came into town on any sort of business other than borrowing pens, and so I was the obvious face of this strange, shut-in family living by the old church. People were worried about me, living with such a father. What if he had really gone crazy? What would happen to me, out in that house with him, if he were to drift further into his strange world?

 

When I came home from the boat that afternoon, my father had the old man sitting at our kitchen table. All of my books were stacked on the floor, and at first that was all I could look at. We had an unspoken rule in our house that no one touched anybody else’s books.

“This is Mr. Aptowicz,” my father told me. “He’s a visitor.”

“It is nice to meet you,” Mr. Aptowicz said to me. “You are a very nice boy. Your father says.”

“You’re very polite,” my father said, pouring some water. “Something to drink?”

“Please, thank you,” said Mr. Aptowicz.

There was a big white jar on the table. Usually I don’t say much around people unless I’m asked a direct question, but it was so strange, so thick and white in the middle of the kitchen. Mr. Aptowicz was tan and wrinkled; his face looked like weathered bark. He seemed to bend toward the clean white of the jar, as if it were a pure and holy object.

“What’s the jar about?” I asked, feeling stupid and poorly-spoken.

“That is my wife,” the old man, Mr. Aptowicz, said.

At first I thought he had said something different. His accent was extremely thick.

My father leaned against the sink and looked up at the ceiling. He started whistling. He wasn’t going to help. He was going to let me figure it out.

“That is the purpose of this visit,” the man said. “This visit is about my wife.”

“We have to make a decision, Will,” my father told me. “But first we need to have dinner.”

We sat down. Venison, kale, some potatoes. It was our typical meal. Mr. Aptowicz seemed more than satisfied, shoveling everything down his throat and turning shy eyes to me and my father in turn, as if he felt guilty for receiving our hospitality. All through dinner he snuck glances at the urn. My father offered him more food, but he refused.

“Your kindness is too much,” he said.

My father leaned back in his chair. He looked at the man in a way that suggested he was looking deeper than I did, past his stained khaki jacket, his brown skin, bulbous nose, the way he stooped in his chair. My father always gave the impression of looking at someone more than just bodily.

“It’s really a small kindness,” he said. His tone was measured, the way he used to give sermons, considering the weight of every word. “The kind of kindness anyone should give.”

 

* * * * * * *

I can still remember the way my father read the Gospel of John. I will probably always remember it.

“Here it is,” he would tell me, as he read it to me, in bed before going to sleep, or even in the middle of the day, at the kitchen table, looking out over the seemingly blank expanse of fields beyond the graveyard. In church, that message was in his face: this is the whole of it, the best it can be written.

“In the Beginning was the Word, and Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

Even to the dwindling congregation, the message still lingered in the words he spoke. It rang out among the recycled candles, in the steadily darkening, dusky chapel, its benches soiled and torn, the sound of his voice echoing in the mostly empty space, over the bowed heads of the few people who still had a fragile trust in the Lord.

* * * * * * * * *

He walked around at night, in the days after my mother died. Insomnia hit me hard. I barely slept for what seemed like weeks. I knew the sickness had been in my mother’s chest and had hit her all of a sudden, and when I breathed I imagined it catching in my throat – choking was how I imagined it – as my life was taken away from me.

The sound of the creaking back door sent me to the window, where I saw him do strange things. He went from grave to grave and poked each one with a stick he plucked from under the old sycamore near my window. He called the dead by name.

“Travis, you’re sleeping,” he told one. “Mr. Morrison, you won’t wake up for a long, long time. I’m sorry to tell you this. Keep on sleeping, keep on waiting.”

He sat down in the space between gravestones and put his head in his hands.

“Mr. Morrison keeps on waiting,” he said, coming up for air. “Waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting.”

Another time he ransacked the church for candles and stalked around, sticking them in the dirt of the graves. One by one he got them lit, tiny lights all over the cemetery. It was a night of almost no moon, and I can tell you I have never been more afraid in my life than I was to see all those flames blooming up over buried bodies. I can’t begin to think what people thought, driving by, seeing little flames licking up out of the ground. They must have thought we were sliding down into crazy behavior. And they didn’t have to listen to my father, reading aloud to the dearly departed, in a low voice that kept on cracking:

“And now my soul is poured out within me; days of affliction have taken hold of me. In the night season my bones are pierced in me, and the pains that gnaw me take no rest.”

There was no wind to speak of that night, but in one or another way the candles went out, eventually. I found my father asleep on the grass in the morning, facing a tombstone, as if trying to read the name in his sleep.

* * * * * * *

After we had dinner and did the dishes, my father led Mr. Aptowicz up into our spare room. The bed wasn’t made, but my dad did a hurried job getting it ready while Mr. Aptowicz looked around the bare room. He seemed confused.

“You’ll sleep here,” my father said.

“My car,” said Mr. Aptowicz, pointing past the wall and out into the street.

“We’ll watch your car,” my father said.

“I am used to it,” the man said, shaking his head.

He made the sleeping motion with his hands, making them like a pillow. It occurred to me that he must have gotten in the habit of sleeping while parked.

“Do what you like,” my father said. “My son and I are going to go for a walk. Please make yourself at home. Eat what you want, drink what you want. We’ll be back late.”

Mr. Aptowicz seemed to understand. He sat down on the bed and tested the springs, nodding. He kept looking around the room, and then staring at his hands. He was small and wizened, tanned and skinny. His skin looked stretched around his cheekbones. My father turned to me.

“Are you ready?”

And though I didn’t quite know what he meant, I nodded. We went down the stairs together.

We set out down Main Street at a fast clip, so that I had to rush a little to keep up. He slowed down at the bend of Bacon Street, as if making up his mind about the route, and he only picked up speed a little as we moved beyond a row of abandoned houses. I didn’t like to walk this way at night, especially when there wasn’t much of a moon. There were people who lived on Bacon Street who were nasty, who used their guns freely, out of season. My father didn’t look like the issue of fear was heavy on his mind as he walked, eyes trained on the road ahead, looking up once or twice at the cloudless sky.

“Look up at those stars,” my father said, soft and murmuring. Usually he would lecture me about them, giving a story from his past. Now he just let them hang, as if they explained themselves.

We passed the Wood House, the abandoned shell of Pat’s Corner Store, and then around another bend, past Micah’s house, where there were a few lights on. Micah’s father was probably still out at the Walkers’, cleaning up after the milking, but Micah must have been at his desk, reading, with the outside just the reflection of the lamp on the glass.

Suddenly the flood plain spread out before us, wide and seemingly unending. We stopped and considered it. My eyes were adjusting to the darkness, and I could suddenly see how the water was broken, here and there, by black shapes I knew were those old houses still half-standing, like remnants of a lost civilization. My father sat down on the side of the road.

“Let me tell you what that old man, Mr. Aptowicz, said to me.”

I nodded. The weather was still cold enough to make me shiver. I crossed my arms in front of my chest in a defensive gesture.

“That urn is his wife’s ashes. He’s been carrying them for some time. I can’t quite get how long, but it’s been a long time. Maybe years.”

Years didn’t seem so long, looking out at the flood plain. You could tell years were buried out there, underwater.

“He wants a place to bury her.” My father shook his head. “More than that. He wants a place to bury here where he can look after her grave. He wants the grave, and he wants a place along with it.”

He put his head on his knees.

“What do you think about leaving town?” he asked me.

I started a little.

“What?”

My father shook his hand, dismissing the question.

“Hold on, let me tell you the whole thing. The point is, this man is offering us a substantial sum of money, for the house. And the church, I think, although I can’t quite get that out of him. But he definitely wants the house.” He paused and put both his hands out, as if feeling for something in front of him.

“He has cash,” he said. “Lots of it. More than anyone’s seen in a long time. And he’ll give it to us, if we leave, if we leave the place to him.”

“Can’t he just stay with us?” I asked. “He could stay in that room. We could help him, with whatever he needs.”

My father knitted his hands together.

“Finn,” he said, softly. “I want to go. I want to leave this town for good.”

He looked straight ahead at the flood plain. He was addressing it, as much as me.

“But what about your shrine?” I asked him.

My father turned to me, fast, and looked me sharply in the eye.

“What are you talking about?” he asked me.

“What about what you keep in the back room of the church?

We sat for a while, considering each other. It was the first time I had ever said a word about it, though he must have known I would have found out. It made us both incapable of speaking for a long while.

 

I don’t know how long we sat there, watching the subtle motion of the water, but eventually my father turned to me.

“What do you want to do?” he asked me.

It was the first time he had asked that kind of question, and I considered it for a minute.

“I want to keep walking,” I said.

“Fair enough,” he said, getting to his feet.

So we walked, with me leading, past the strange bulk of the Copeland House, further on down the road. Houses dropped away, replaced by stands of black trees. We dipped in and out of different levels of shadow, in and out of overhanging branches. It was so black in patches that we could only follow the white line of the road, faded in places, broken by sprouting weeds and dirt. I went first, with my father behind. The fields were almost more frightening than the trees, spreading out for miles with patches of scrub like gangs of people meeting in the dark.

Once we reached the far end of Bacon Street, I led him down a small path that curved off of the main road and through the woods, towards the new dugout where Micah and I always set off in our canoe. We stepped into the boat, and I took my father out onto the water in the darkness. I did my best at navigating between the houses. The water cut wounds into the land, and I ferried us along the breaches.

“People used to live under there,” my father told me. “But I guess you know that.”

“I do,” I said. “We go around here a lot, Micah and I.”

“Your friend,” my father said, recognizing.

I nodded. The little sliver of moon was easy to see over the black curtain of water.

“I knew them, I guess,” my father said. “I didn’t know them as well as I should have. I didn’t do the job I was supposed to.”

His voice trembled a little, as my paddle pulled us across the surface of the water.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t think anyone could have done it. I think we were doomed from the start.”

He didn’t say anything in response, just looked out over the bay. The wind came up and died down, breathing.

My paddle struck the top of the old Marina, and I tied us off. We stared a while, out at the submerged world. On still nights, and the nights were almost always close to silent in those days, it was hard to look out on the water and not be struck by the possibility of other worlds. People could always rise out of the sea, or the waters could recede. Or else the people could be swimming under the surface of the water, from house to house, speaking to each other in the lowest of tones, so as to avoid waking the dreamers who wandered on the surface. It was the same as when I caught a glimpse of the cemetery in the moonlight, when I imagined a whole country spreading underground, deaf to the sounds of our everyday, puttering lives. There were more of them than us, in the end.

We shivered in the little boat, with the cool wind blowing off of the bay, bringing the smell of salt.

“Take us back,” my father said, quietly. “Let’s go home.”