Heaven's Coast - Mark Doty [33]
The other pair I knew was in Vermont, back when whatever shadows darkened our horizon were the ordinary ones—jobs, money, how to make the best of our lives—those things that are momentous, but come to seem luxurious considerations when illness fills up the stage of a life, or two lives. In those days we lived in a ramshackle thirteen-room Victorian house in Montpelier. I’d gotten a grant from the Massachusetts Artists Foundation, just before we left Boston to come north for a teaching job for me. The generous foundation gave me a check for $7,500, a princely sum for us, and we decided to use it as a down payment for a house, since property in the north was cheap then. Even at the low prices of 1985, what we looked at was far beyond our means; we were despondent and about to give up when our realtor drove us past the flat-roofed, down-at-the-heels New England version of an Italian villa, its handsome form abused by a sea of mustard paint trimmed in chocolate brown. Yellow and brown, for some reason, is a traditional combination in Vermont’s working-class neighborhoods. There was a for sale sign on the rickety picket fence, which had been forced to wear the same shade of chocolate.
“That?” the realtor said when we asked. “Oh, you don’t want to see that house. That ought to be torn down.” Which was really all we needed to hear, contrary creatures, scavengers, aficionados of barn sales and other people’s attics that we were. And it did turn out to be like a barn sale, really—except that we bought the barn, for twenty-nine thousand dollars. It had no insulation, an antique wood-fired furnace that consumed whole cords of timber in a wink, and period plumbing of unquestionable authenticity. Whether the flat roof was a concession to poverty or the Italianate fashion I never knew, but in the course of one Vermont winter the absolute madness of the idea became clear. Snowfall after snowfall meant shoveling the roof, and as soon as there was a bit of a thaw ice dams pushed at the spongy old roofing material until the melting water began to drip, and then to cascade, into our bedroom.
But that was all down the road. First the sellers, Clayton and Rita, taught us the intricacies of the furnace, the mysteries of a kerosene-burning stove. Rita worked in a clothespin factory and made all Clayton’s meals; he gathered mushrooms and cut firewood, though I never saw him do anything but sit at the kitchen table and smoke. They sized us up in five minutes, and seemed perfectly happy to accept us as a couple, especially once they’d figured out that Rita could talk to Wally about where to shop while Clayton told me about maintenance, shoveling, plumbing—men’s work. He’d even make jokes about the fussy concerns of wives, winking at me and nodding in Rita and Wally’s direction.
Once Clayton and Rita vacated for their new house, we found ourselves alone in thirteen rooms of linoleum concealing wide-plank floors, cheap lumberyard paneling covering up layer upon layer of wallpaper roses. The house had long been inhabited in the manner of poor Vermonters who made do, got by, put a patch on what broke. It had been a long time since that house had gotten any serious attention; had it ever gotten serious attention? But it didn’t matter a bit how much work confronted us, or that the renovation would turn out, eventually, to be unfinishable work—what mattered was it was ours, a great rambling dream of a house, eccentric, temperamental, rife with character, capable of being profoundly loved. And we were thrilled; the house was ours to rescue, to uncover, to inhabit, to play with, a piece of the world on which to make our mark.
For the five years we lived there—in which time my hands, or Wally’s, must have touched every surface of that house, inside and out, as we painted and plastered and stripped and cursed, built and caulked and wept—every penny we could make went into the house. Mustard and chocolate gave way to a creamy colonial yellow, white trim, and blue shutters; the