Ann Beattie - Burning House

“I couldn’t sleep. I came out to look around.”

“What did you find?”

“Pumpkins still growing in his garden.”

At the back of the lawn, past a tangle of leafless berry bushes, was a fallen-down chicken coop. The roof barely cleared their heads. There was a cement floor, and most of the walls were still standing, but they were caving in, or missing boards.

“Long time since this was in operation,” Benton said.

“Imagine Wesley out in the country,” Nick said.

Most of the back wall was missing from the coop. When they came to the end, Nick jumped down, about five feet, to the ground, and Benton jumped behind him. The woods were covered with damp leaves, thickly layered.

“Although the shape that coop was in, I guess he was hardly the gentleman farmer,” Benton said. “What do you think about the way Ena’s acting?”

“Ena’s edgy.”

“She is,” Benton said. He pushed a branch out of his face; it was so brittle that it snapped. He used the piece of broken branch to poke at other branches. “I went into Jason’s bedroom and thought about kidnapping him. I didn’t even have the heart to wake him up to say hello.”

“What time was it when you came out?”

“Seven. Seven-thirty.”

They saw a white house to their left, just outside the woods, and turned back for Wesley’s house. Wind chimes were clinking from a tree beside the chicken coop — long green tubes hitting together.

Nick hadn’t seen the chimes when he walked back to the chicken coop earlier. They reminded him of the strange graveyard he and Wesley and Benton had gone through when they were in college and Wesley was a senior in high school, on a trip they took to see a friend who had moved to Charlemont, Massachusetts. It was Christmastime, after a snow, and Benton and Nick had been wearing high rubber boots. Wesley, as usual, had on his sneakers. They had sighted the snowy graveyard, and it had been somebody’s idea to walk through it. Wesley had been the first one out of the car, and he had also been the first to sight the broomstick slanted into the ground like a flagpole, with wind chimes hanging from the top of it. It was next to one of the tombstones. There was a deep path leading to it — someone had put it there earlier in the day. It looked crazy — a touch from Mardi Gras, nothing you would expect to see standing in a graveyard. The ground was frozen beneath the snow — the person had dug hard to put the broomstick in, and the chimes tinkled and clanked together in the wind. Wesley had photographed that, and also a tombstone with a larger-than-life dog stretched on top — a Borzoi, perhaps, or some odd cross — and the dog appeared to be looking toward a tree that cast a shadow. There was snow mounded on the dog’s head and back, and the tree branches it looked toward were weighted with snow.

“You know that picture Wesley took in the graveyard?” Nick said.

“The dog? The one you told him would make a fine Christmas card?”

Nick nodded yes. “You know what fascinates me about photographs? Did you ever notice the captions? Photographer gets a shot of a dwarf running out of a burning hotel and it’s labeled ‘New York: 1968.’ Or there’s a picture of two humpbacked girls on the back of a pony, and it says ‘Central Park: 1966.’ ”

“I remember those, too,” Benton said. “I wonder why he never showed them? Nobody else in this family is modest. Even Elizabeth tacks her drawings up alongside Jason’s.” Benton kicked some moss off his shoe. “It irritated the hell out of him that I’d put my camera on a tripod and wait for the right shot. Remember how he used to carry on about how phony that was?” Benton had stopped to look at some mint, sticking out between the rubble. “He idolized you,” Benton said.

“He’s dead and I work at Boulevard Records and handle complaints about chicken that doesn’t show up,” Nick said. “He didn’t idolize me.”

They were coming closer to the house, and the tinkling of the chimes was faint. They were walking by the pumpkin vines that wove across the ground in front of the tall black-green trees.

Nick was thinking of another one of Wesley’s photographs — one he had taken when he and Benton were still in college. The three of them had been in a booth in a restaurant in New Haven, on a Sunday, and Wesley had said, “Don’t move.” They were waiting for their order, and Nick’s hands were resting on the New York Times . The picture was pale gray and Nick had been absolutely astonished to see what Wesley had made his hands look like. One hand seemed to be clasping the other as though it was a strange hand. Both hands had been eerily beautiful, the newspaper out of focus beneath them — hands, suspended, with one cradling, or sheltering, the other. When Wesley showed him the photograph he had been so surprised that he couldn’t speak. Finally, having had time to think, he said something close to what he meant, but not exactly what he wanted to ask. “How did you get that softness?” he had asked Wesley, and Wesley had hesitated. Then he had said: “I developed it in Acufine.”

They went quietly into the house and stood by the heat grate in the kitchen. Nick took down a pan hanging from a nail in the beam over the stove and filled it with water for coffee. Then he sat on the kitchen table. The only real detail they knew of Wesley’s death was that the life vests had been floating near the boat. Ena had told them about it the night before. The life vests had stopped in time for Nick. She did not say anything about the color, but Nick knew as she talked that they were bright orange, and the water was gray and deep. One floated beside the boat, one farther off. He had to catch his breath when the image formed. He was as shocked as if he had been there when they recovered the body.

Benton was finding cups, putting the filter in the coffee pot. Benton turned off the burner. The bubbles grew smaller. Steam rose from the pan.

“We’re both thinking the same thing, aren’t we?” Benton said. “Capsized boat, life vests floating free, middle of winter.”

“ ‘Lake Champlain: 1978,’ ” Nick said.

Ena was knitting. The afghan covered her lap and legs and spilled onto the floor, a wide flame pattern of brown and tan and green.

“You look like a cowboy, Nickie,” she said. “Why do young men want to look like cowboys now?”

“Leave him alone,” Elizabeth said.

“I didn’t mean to criticize. I just wanted to know.”

“What am I supposed to dress like?” Nick said.

“My husband wore three-piece suits, and ties even on Saturday, and after thirty-five years of marriage he left me to marry his mistress, by whom he had a five-year-old son.”

“Forget it,” Uncle Cal said. He was leaning against the fireplace, tapping his empty pipe against the wood, looking at Ena through yellow-tinted aviator glasses. “Spilled milk,” he said. “My brother’s a fool, and pretty soon he’s going to be an old fool. Then see how she likes him when he dribbles his martini.”

“You never got along with him before he left me,” Ena said. “You can’t feign objectivity.”

“Don’t talk about it in front of Jason,” Elizabeth said.

Jason and Benton had just come inside. Benton had been holding a flashlight while Jason picked the mint Benton and Nick had discovered earlier.

“Pick off the leaves that the frost got, and then we’ll tie the stalks with rubber bands and hang them upside down to dry,” Benton said.

It had gotten colder outside. The cold had come in with them and spread like a cloud to the living room, where it stayed for a minute until the heat began to absorb it.

“Why do they have to be upside down?”

“So the leaves can’t speak and criticize us for picking them.”