The Night Strangers - Chris Bohjalian [74]
“Come in, come in,” he says, his voice resigned. “No sense in standing outside in the doorway.”
He takes your coat and tosses it on a coatrack behind the front door as you untie your boots, and then he limps into the kitchen, sitting you down in a heavy wooden armchair before a mahogany table that is perfectly round and rather substantial. The chair is one of four. The appliances are old but spotless, the white on the refrigerator showing a little dark wear only around the handle. The floor has linoleum diamonds, and the cabinets look to be made of cherry.
“To what do I owe the pleasure of this visit?” he says, sitting across from you and folding his hands on the tabletop. In another room there is a radio playing classical music.
“Well, your parents’ house is proving to be a bit of a mystery to me,” you respond, smiling as you speak. You hadn’t planned on getting to the matter at hand quite so quickly, but he hasn’t offered you coffee or tea and has come right to the point: Why are you here?
“How so?” he says evenly.
“Well, let’s see. There are the items you left behind.”
“That old sewing machine? I told your wife to keep it. Same with the sap buckets and all them bobbins. Or you can cart ’em off to the dump. Makes no difference to me.”
“There’s a very nice brass door knocker. You could use a door knocker.”
“I heard you rapping just fine, thank you very much.”
You nod. For the first time you have gotten a real taste of his accent. When he said fine, you heard more than a hint of an o and a second syllable: fo-ine. “There were three other items that were real, well, UFOs.”
“Pardon?”
“Unidentified flying objects.”
“That’s right. You’re a pilot.”
“Used to be.”
“You ever see any UFOs?”
“I did not.”
“Believe in them?”
“No.”
“You should. This universe is a very strange place.”
“You know this from personal experience?”
He raises the caterpillars that pass for eyebrows. “So, your new home,” he says, ignoring your question. “I would not be surprised by anything at all my mother or my father left behind in that house. As you must know by now, my mother was nothing if not eccentric. And she was mighty ill toward the end.”
“No, I didn’t know that.”
“Huh. I woulda thought she was still a source of gossip up in Bethel.”
“Rest assured, she isn’t.”
Outside Hewitt’s door, a town sand truck rumbles by, and the two of you sit and listen. The storm windows rattle.
“She was once,” he says. “That’s for sure.”
“Why?”
He shrugs. “People are just built the way they’re built.”
You point at a dusty photo on a wall of dusty photos at the edge of the kitchen. It’s a teenage boy holding a fishing pole and a brown trout that must be a foot and a half long. “Is that you or your brother?” you ask.
“That would be Sawyer.”
“Did your mom become more eccentric after he died?”
“Ayup. I suppose she did.”
“How?”
“Losing a son cannot be easy on any mother.”
“Do you have children?”
“Nope.”
This is starting to feel to you like an interrogation, and you don’t like that. But you don’t seem to be getting anywhere with your questions. And so you change your tactics. “I like this little city—St. Johnsbury.” You are careful not to add a question to the statement, hoping he will offer something back without a prompt. But he just sits back in his chair, pulling his folded hands off the table and into his lap, and stares at you with a face that is absolutely unreadable. You have the sense that, if this becomes a contest to see who can remain silent the longest, you won’t have a chance in hell. Suddenly you are aware of how hot he keeps this house, and you look back into the living room and notice for the first time a cast-iron woodstove the size of a dryer. Atop is a black kettle steamer shaped like a sleeping cat. The place seems to be filled with these unexpected, oddly domestic touches. You are pretty sure he is not married now; you wonder if he was once.
“There are a few things in your parents’ house that I’m hoping you can explain to me,” you