Heaven's Coast - Mark Doty [89]
the mere word “animal” a skin
through which its old sense glimmers, of the soul.
Always exploring ahead of us on our walks—the walks Wally couldn’t take anymore—Arden was our future’s dark vessel, the part of us that would scout ahead, sniffing out what’s to come. He was, in my dream, where we were about to be struck.
Refuge (3)
We bought the first house we saw.
Not, of course, without seeing many others between that first visit and signing the offer to purchase. We looked at condos—tempting, with their new appliances and slick surfaces, after our years of living in a Victorian undergoing uncompletable renovation, but soulless. And we looked at other houses, but nothing else drew us back for a second and third look.
I think it was on that third visit to the little Cape—a very old house whose character had been obscured by Sheetrock and awful paneling and shag carpets—that the realtor gave us a key and let us visit the empty house alone. (Joe the realtor’s dead now, like so many men who’ve figured in our story.) Upstairs, in a neglected bedroom which had escaped the remodeler’s touch, we were inspecting some moldings on the wall, a chair rail thick with layers of paint, when an odd detail caught Wally’s eye. We moved a bureau and there, half papered over but plainly visible, was a fireplace. Its opening was filled with plaster, but the surround, of old wide beaded boards in eighteenth-century style, was intact. It was then that we fell in love, and the making of home again began to be a project and refuge.
Looking at other early houses—in the distinctive Cape Cod style, a version of the rural English house which would be copied and modified, eventually, all over America—we could see clearly how this one ought to look. We talked to a town historian, searched the libraries for books, traced the deed as far as we could, and threw ourselves into making a plan for how we’d work with the house. The camp had sold, so we had just enough money to buy the new place and make the changes that seemed essential before we moved in; our rental cottage was leased till Memorial Day, so we had months to demolish and strip, to haul away debris and sand and paint. We could hire people to jack up sagging floors, repair the chimney, rebuild the rotting eaves and the crumbling sill in the corner of the kitchen. Like everyone who buys a two-hundred-year-old house, we’d read stories about new homeowners who discover a hidden mural, a beehive oven, or perfect wainscoting hidden behind an unpromising wall. Though we didn’t tell the realtor, even before the papers were signed we were sneaking around with crowbars and screwdrivers, poking through the plasterboard and peering under the rugs.
What we found was not, in fact, much. Some lucky Victorian fisherman must have come into enough money to modernize the house, and so the old mantels and paneled walls had gone, to the dump or for kindling. But underneath the carpets and a layer of linoleum and newspaper were wonderful wide-board pine floors, from which we carefully sanded gummy red and green paint made of whale oil, lead, and who knew what else. Under the vinyl paneling and the gypsum were the sturdy and simple bones of a beautiful house: hemlock beams in the low ceilings, intimate little rooms with walls of a soft plaster made of sand and horsehair and oyster shells.
That fireplace which had first won our affections turned out to contain a tiny, Victorian chimney with little round openings for stovepipes. Originally, the house would have had a massive brick spine of chimney at its center, opening onto several hearths, heating the whole building and anchoring it in Atlantic storms. But neighborhood tradition held that the house had been moved, brought here from Truro by being floated across the bay. I heard this from my neighbor, whose family had owned the little Greek Revival house across the street since it was built in 1825, so I took her word for it. The great chimney would have been demolished to