The Angel on the Roof

Firewood

Nelson Painter is a man who is old, but doesn’t know it yet. The dates and names of events he remembers and — though they’re private and not that reliable on their own — his memories themselves all tell him that he’s not an old man, not yet, not this early in the game. Everything but his body tells him it’s impossible to come up only sixty-one and old, and even his body is ambiguous about it, because it’s impossible, for instance, for a truly old man to be out of bed as he is every morning of the year at six, even on a Sunday in midwinter, when it’s still dark as night and snow is lightly falling and the temperature’s stuck at fifteen below as he slides his slippers and bathrobe on in the dark so as not to wake the wife and moves to the bathroom to pee in a hurry and then, hands stuck in the pockets of the robe because the house is so cold, he gets quickly downstairs, with the lights on now, follows his breath down the stairs that creak a familiar tune under his feet as he descends to the living room, crosses to the door of the kitchen, unlatches the low gate, and greets with a nod the dog, stiff between her dysplastic hips, a seven-year-old Great Dane with one yellow and one brown eye.

The dog clatters its nails on the linoleum floor and waits at the door for the man to switch on the overhead light, latch back the gate to the living room, where the thick furniture and carpeting sit sanctified and permanently new, as in a department store window display, and finally open the outside door and the aluminum storm door and release the huge, lumbering dog to the yard. Nelson stands a moment behind the silvery frosted glass and tries to remember his dream of a moment ago. It was years ago, in the dream. It was like most of his dreams that way, a phenomenon that goes on disturbing him, irritating him, actually, infuriating him sometimes, because you ought to be able to move on in your dreams, just as you move on in your life. Your kids grow up, you marry another woman, you move away, come back, change, and change again. You’d think your dreams would know that and would somehow deal with that. He knows he’s not thinking the same thoughts he thought ten and twenty years ago. Why the hell, then, is he dreaming the same dreams? Not exactly, of course, but almost — and in tone and atmosphere and most of the settings and many of the people, too, his dreams now are the same as his dreams when he was a young man of thirty and forty and his kids were kids and he was married to their mother.

His life then was loud and boisterous and quarrelsome most of the time, “a goddamned pressure cooker,” he called it, but not all bad, surely not as bad as his first wife said and as he thought then, though he was not wrong to leave her and the kids and move on to another life, another woman, who doesn’t fight him so hard all the time, who seems to like him better than his first wife liked him, or rather, seems to like the aspects of his character that he himself likes, or believes he likes. Or wants to like. His humor, for instance. He is funny, quick, and sarcastic in an intelligently cruel way that surprises people and makes most of them laugh. And his being so principled, which you might call an unwillingness to compromise, or intolerance, if, like his first wife, who did not understand a lot of things about him, you didn’t understand his belief in his own beliefs. And then there is his independence, his insistence that he needs no one’s love, though he claims to be pleased by what he’s given and says he has plenty of love of his own to give back. Still, at bottom, when push comes to shove, as he says, he does not respect love, which fact pleases him.

He can’t see the snow falling, but he knows it’s coming down — perhaps he can hear it, flecks of white ticking the frozen ground. When you’ve lived a lifetime or nearly so within fifty miles of where you were born, your body responds to shifts in weather well ahead of your mind, so that to predict the weather you consult your body and not the weather itself. As the pressure drops, one’s skin tightens, one smells moisture in the air, hears snow flurries falling in the dark, and one knows what’s coming. The body of Nelson Painter this early morning in mid-January in central New Hampshire knows the barometer is falling, the humidity and temperature are rising, and there is a snowstorm coming from the southwest, a blizzard maybe, and as a result Nelson knows that the cord of firewood, two-foot-long chunks of maple and birch dumped in a heap in his yard beside the driveway a month ago, will be covered in a foot or two of snow by noon, which disgusts him, because the boy should have come over and picked up the wood two or more weeks ago, or even before Christmas, the day Nelson called him and told him about the wood, his Christmas present to his son. There wasn’t any snow then, and the ground, frozen solid since November, was as hard as steel plate, and the wood, dumped unceremoniously from an old stake-bodied truck by the same local man who sold Nelson his winter’s wood every year, ten cords of it, had bounced and rolled over the ground, a sprawl of a pile that instantly looked ugly to Nelson. But he thought his son would drive right over from Concord in his Japanese pickup and haul it home, so he left it there on the frozen lawn by the driveway. Then, after Christmas there was a thaw, the annual January Thaw, and the yard turned to muck, the wood sank under its own weight, and it rained, and then there came a freeze again, a hard freeze, and now the wood is glued to the yard, as if molecules of maple and birch have been welded to molecules of frozen, dead grass and dirt.

Nelson looks into the silver layer of frost covering the storm door before him and knows that it’s lightly snowing on the other side, and he says to himself, I’ll have to call the bastard and get him over here to haul away his own damn Christmas present, or else I’ll have to see it there in the spring, coming up out of the melting snow like a damn boneyard. He closes the inner door and steps away, and a moment later he’s on his knees in front of his woodstove, a cast-iron Ranger from Sears, low and deep enough for two-footers. He crumples last Sunday’s Union Leader into balls and twists of paper, chucks sticks of kindling split off maple logs, scratches a match against the tray in front of the stove, tosses it in and clanks the door shut, and, rolling back on his heels, listens to the stove sigh and moan as the flames inside begin to catch and feed and grow.

A moment later, Nelson stands up slowly, shambles from the stove to the sink, reaches into the overhead cabinet on the right, next to the small square window that looks into the darkness of the backyard and field and woods beyond, and he draws out the bottle of vodka. With his other hand he reaches into the overhead cabinet on the left and plucks a juice glass from a stack and places it on the drainboard. His right hand trembling only slightly, he fills the glass with vodka, recaps the bottle, and places it back inside the cabinet, and now he enjoys his first drink of the day, a deliberate, slow act as measured and radiant as a sacrament, as sweet to him as the sun rising over the winter-burnt New Hampshire hills, as clean as new frost. That first drink is the best drink of the day. It’s as if all the others he drinks from now until he falls back into his bed tonight he drinks solely to make this first drink wonderful. Without them and the need they create in his blood, this first drink would be as nothing, a mere preliminary to preliminaries. With them, it’s the culmination of Nelson’s day. He sips at the vodka steadily, as if nibbling at it, and his gratitude for it is nearly boundless, and though he appears to be studying the darkness out the window, he’s seeing only as far as the glass in his hand and is thinking only about the vodka as it fits like a tiny, pellucid pouch into his mouth, breaks into a thin stream, and rolls down his throat, warming his chest as it passes and descends into his stomach, where the alcohol enters his blood and then his heart and brain, enlarging him and bringing him to heated life, filling the stony, cold man with light and feeling and sentiment, blessing him with an exact nostalgia for the very seconds of his life as they pass, which in this man is as close to love as he has been able to come for years, maybe since childhood.

Outside, the dog scratches feebly at the door, almost apologetically, and Nelson, after first rinsing the glass and placing it back into the cabinet, finally turns and lets the cold animal in. She’s abject and seems eager to stay out of the man’s way, which is difficult, since both of them are large and the room is small, but when he crosses to check on the woodstove, the dog limps quickly away and stands by the sink until he returns, and then she moves back by the door, where she watches, waiting until he sets the coffeepot on the electric range and sits down at the Formica-topped table at the far wall. Finally, as Nelson unfolds yesterday’s paper and begins to read, the dog circles and lies down next to the woodstove, arranging herself in an ungainly heap of legs and tail, neck, muzzle and ears, a collapsed, fawn-colored tent.

The sound an hour later of Nelson dialing the telephone wakes the dog. She lifts her heavy head and watches him at the table dial the phone on the wall beside him. The room is filled with white light now and smells of coffee and toasted bread and woodsmoke. Nelson holds the receiver loosely to his ear and lets it ring, eight, nine, ten times, until his son answers.

“H’lo?”

“Good morning.”

“Oh, hi, Dad.”

“Wake you up?”

“Well — yeah. It’s what, eight? No. Jesus, it’s not even seven-thirty. What’s up?”

“You, now. Want me to call back later? You alone? You got somebody there?”

“Ha. Not very likely. Yeah, I’m alone, all right. No, no, you don’t need to call back, I can talk, I’m awake. I was just up late last night, that’s all,” he says. Then, with great heartiness, “So — what’s happening? How’re you doing?”

Nelson says fine and comes right to the point of his call: “You got a cord of firewood sitting out here in my yard, Earl, and the snow’s starting to fly already, so if you want to burn any of that stuff this winter, you better drive over here and get it out this morning.”

Earl says damn, but quickly assures his father that he’ll be over in a few hours. “Be good to see you, anyhow,” he adds. “I haven’t seen you since what, Christmas?”

“Before.”

“Right, before. Well — we got to catch up.”

Nelson agrees, and the men say good-bye and hang up. Then Nelson gets stiffly up from the table and tosses a log from the woodbox into the stove, goes to the cabinet over the sink, and brings down the vodka bottle and juice glass and pours his second drink of the day. The dog watches, her yellow and brown eyes drooping from the heat. Then she closes her eyes and sleeps.

The woman in Nelson Painter’s dream is sometimes his first wife, Adele, who lives out in San Diego now, alone, and sometimes she’s Allie, his second wife, who lives with him in this house, where as town clerk she runs her office from the room he made out of the shed that connects the house to the barn. In the dream, it doesn’t seem to matter, Adele or Allie; they behave the same way — they scream at him, a roar, high and windy, a frightening mix of rage and revulsion that blames him for everything in general and nothing in particular. The dream always takes place in New Hampshire, though sometimes it’s set in the tenements and trailers he shared with Adele when they were young and raising their three kids, when Nelson was an apprentice and then a journeyman carpenter, working out of the Catamount local; and sometimes the dream is set in this house, a renovated nineteenth-century farmhouse that he bought when he married Allie and started making good money running work for the state and large, out-of-state contractors building New Hampshire dams, hospitals, and now the Seabrook nuclear power plant. Nelson is no longer running work, of course, no longer a foreman, for it has gotten too complicated for someone without an engineer’s degree, and he can’t concentrate like he used to, but even so, he is making good money, thirty-six grand last year, more than Earl with his schoolteaching in Catamount, more than that bastard Georgie down in Rhode Island, working for the state as a fancy-pants counselor but never writing his own father, never returning calls. He acts like the old man is dead, for God’s sake. What’s wrong with a kid like that, a man in his thirties who won’t speak to his own father? At least Earl deals with him, more or less, though you’d have thought, if one of the boys was going to hate the father, it would be Earl, the elder, who was so much closer to his mom and was twelve when Nelson left them and thus probably was her confidant during those years when she was mad at Nelson for leaving them and not sending more money. But Georgie, he was always the easy one, the friendly one. It didn’t make sense. Any more than his dream made sense, the dream in which Nelson strolls into the room — a kitchen, a bedroom, it’s one or the other — and the woman, Adele or Allie, looks up from her work, ironing, putting away dishes, unpacking clothes from a trunk, and recognizing him, she points and starts screaming at him, as if to say, “He’s the one! He’s the one who killed me, murdered my baby, slew my mother, father, sister, brother! Him! Him!”

Despite its insane fury, the dream doesn’t weigh on Nelson so much as it angers him. He knows it’s about guilt, not redemption, and he’s said to himself at least a hundred times that of course he feels guilty for the way he’s treated people over the years, his wives, his children, others, too, old friends who won’t talk to him anymore, sisters, brothers-in-law, bosses, even strangers, guys he meets in bars after work and drinks late with and then somehow gets to arguing with, and before he knows how it happens, it has happened again, and there he is, being pulled off some guy and hustled out the door or picked up off the floor and aimed by strangers toward his car. Then he weaves across the lot to his car, gets it started, and drives slowly home, where for years Adele and now Allie wait for him, wait to shout at him, or if not to shout, then to glare and snub him and show him her back, until he gets mad all over again and wrecks the careful affection he’s built up between them since the last time. Oh, sure, he knows that once every few years he loses control and hits his wife across the face or pushes her away too hard. But he isn’t a wife beater, one of those guys who takes out his frustrations on someone who can’t defend herself. No, he just loses control once in a while, once in a great while, dammit, when he’s been hounded, nagged, criticized, picked at, until he just can’t stand it anymore, so he lashes back, pushes her away, gets himself left alone, for God’s sake, so he can think.

Around eight, Nelson takes his third drink. Then, passing from the kitchen through Allie’s cluttered office, he goes into the cold, dark barn, where his ten cords of wood are stacked in neat, head-high rows along the near wall from the front to the back of the large building. When he returns, chilled, with an armload of wood, he sees his wife at the range, boiling water for tea. Her short, blue-gray hair is wet from her shower and slicked back like a boy’s, and she’s dressed in her usual western clothes, jeans too tight around her big hips and legs and a red-and-white-checked shirt with pearl buttons. Her clothing annoys him, though he never says so directly. “You dress like you want people to think you keep horses,” Nelson has told her. With most people (though no longer with him), Allie affects a manliness that Nelson finds disturbing — a hearty, jocular way of speaking. She’s a back slapper, a shoulder puncher, characteristics that, when he first took up with Allie, attracted Nelson. Long before that, he’d come to despise Adele’s whine, her insecurity and depression, so that Allie’s good-natured teasing, her tough talk, released him from guilt for a while, maybe a year, maybe two, until he began to see through the bravado to the strangely fragile woman inside, and when he hurt her with his hard, unexpected words and once in a while with his hands, too, he began to feel guilty again, just as with Adele. You think a woman’s strong, that she can take it, so you treat her as an equal, and before you know it she can’t take it, and suddenly you’re forced to tiptoe around her as if a single hard step would break her into a thousand weeping pieces. More and more, Nelson believes that being alone is the only clear route to his happiness. It’s coming to seem the only way to avoid hurting other people, which in his experience is what gives them power over you. Look at Georgie, his son. The boy has a power over Nelson that comes from his belief that he was hurt by Nelson over twenty years earlier, when the boy was only ten. Earl, now — he’s different. Earl’s made of tougher stuff. You can’t really hurt him; he’s like his dad that way. He won’t let you close enough to hurt him, and consequently he never obtains any power over you, either. That’s the kind of love Nelson both understands and respects. It’s what he had with his second wife in the first year or two of their marriage and what he misses in her now.

“You’re up, eh,” he says to Allie’s back and dumps the wood into the woodbox, startling the dog awake.

“Yep.” The dog gets to her feet and crosses to Allie, shoves her head against the woman’s hand until she strokes it between the long, floppy ears. “Ah, you big baby,” Allie says. The dog leans her weight against Allie’s thigh, and she goes on patting the tall, ungainly animal. It’s Allie’s dog, not Nelson’s — he insists that he doesn’t like animals. He’s been this way for as long as he can remember. He doesn’t know why he is this way, and he doesn’t care anymore, if he ever did. It’s too late to care. It’s how he’s survived, and thus it’s who he is. Let other people adjust to him — Allie, Earl, Georgie, everyone. If, like Georgie, they aren’t willing to adjust, then fine, go away, leave him alone. Alone to think.

“Paper come yet?” Allie asks him.

“You feel like going out to get it, it’s there.” Nelson has sat back at the table and faces the woodstove, rubbing his hands before it, to get rid of the chill. He’s a large, fleshy man, and he looks like a bear cleaning its paws after eating.

“You gonna get dressed?” she asks.

“Eventually. It’s Sunday.”

“I know. I just—”

“What?”

“Nothing.” She walks to the refrigerator, pulls a tube of frozen orange juice from the freezer, and goes to the sink to prepare it.

“Earl’s coming by,” he says. “He can bring the paper in from the mailbox.”

“Oh? He coming for the wood? It’s snowing.”

“That’s the point. He don’t get it now, it’ll be there in April.” Suddenly, he stands up, and the dog clatters away from the sink, and Allie looks over at him.

“What?” she says.

Nelson is looking intently out the window next to the stove, staring at the driveway and yard, where his son’s wood is heaped up.

“What?” she repeats. “Who is it?”

“Leave me alone. For God’s sake, leave me alone. I’m trying to think.” He moves closer to the window and peers out, as if searching for someone in the snowy distance.

Allie goes back to breaking the frozen orange juice into a green plastic pitcher, and the dog sits on rickety haunches and watches Nelson at the window. “Maybe I should get dressed,” he says in a low voice. “So I can help Earl crack that wood loose and load it. Stuff’s frozen into the ground, most of it.”

Allie says nothing.

“Maybe I’ll call him again. See if he’s left yet.”

“It takes a half hour in good weather. He’ll be an hour today,” Allie says without looking at him. “You got no hurry.” She speaks carefully, slowly, in a deliberately quiet voice.

Nelson dials his son’s number, sits down, and lets it ring. On the fourth ring, Earl answers. “Hello?”

“Good morning,” Nelson says.

“Oh, hi, Dad.”

“I was just wondering…”

“Yeah, look, I’m sorry. I got sidetracked here, some people came by and we got talking. Listen, you gonna be there all day today? I can come by later more easily, if that’s okay?”

“Well, the snow…”

“Yeah, I know. You’re right. That is good wood. Be nice to get it home here, before it gets buried and all.”

They are silent for a few seconds, then Earl says to his father, “How about I come out there next Sunday? Or maybe an afternoon this week after school. Yeah, that’d be better all around for me. Though you won’t be there then — but we can get together some other time, right?”

“It don’t matter much to me one way or the other how you do it — it’s your wood, not mine.”

“Right.”

“All right, then,” Nelson says in a voice that’s almost a whisper.

“You okay, Dad?”

Nelson hesitates a second, ten seconds, twenty. He opens his mouth to speak.

“Dad? You okay?”

“Yeah. I’m… I’m fine.” His thoughts are burning and whirling, as if there were a fire inside his head. “I… I wanted to ask you something,” he says.

“Sure. What about?”

“I guess about your brother. About Georgie. You. Your mother. Your sister.”

“Fine,” Earl says. “Shoot.”

“No. I mean, not— Well, maybe we oughta talk about this stuff over a few beers or something, you know?”

Earl says, “Hey, fine with me. Anything you say, Dad.”

“Well, I was wondering, see, about Georgie. About why he’s so mad with me,” Nelson blurts, and the fire inside his head roars in his ears, stings his eyes, fills his nostrils and mouth with smoke and ash.

His son says, “You should be asking him that. Not me.”

“Yes. Right, of course. You,” he says, “you’re not mad at me like that, are you? For leaving your mother and all? You know … you know what I mean. All that.”

Earl inhales deeply, then slowly exhales. “This is weird. This is a weird conversation for us to be having, Dad. I mean, you— Look, I made my peace with all that years ago, and Georgie hasn’t, that’s all. From his point of view, you ruined his life or something. But that’s only how he sees it.”

“I didn’t, though. I didn’t ruin anybody’s life. You can’t ruin a person’s life. I just left, that’s all.”

“Yeah. It’s only a figure of speech.”

“I didn’t ruin anybody’s life.”

“Yeah.”

“Not your mother’s. Not Louise’s. Not yours, Earl. Not Georgie’s, either.”

“No, Dad, not mine. You can be sure of that. Listen, I got to get off, okay? There’s people here. I’ll be over to dig that wood out sometime this week, some afternoon this week, okay?”

Nelson says fine, that’s fine with him, but Earl will have to do it alone, because he is home only on weekends, now that winter’s here. “I been staying the week down at Seabrook lately,” he says.

“No kidding. Where?”

“I got a room in a motel over in Hampton. It’s nice. Color TV. You know. Kitchenette.”

“Nice,” Earl says.

Nelson says, “I… I’m sorry, about that other business, Georgie and all.”

“Hey, no sweat, Dad. Look, I gotta go,” he says. “Talk to you later, okay?”

“Fine.”

“Love to Allie,” he says, and then good-bye, and the phone is dead, buzzing in Nelson’s hand.

He looks up and sees that his wife is staring at him. He places the receiver on the hook and walks to the sink, pours himself another vodka, only a few ounces, half the glass, and drinks it down with a single swallow. This time he leaves the glass in the sink and the bottle on the drainboard.

“How many’s that?” Allie asks in a flat, matter-of-fact voice, as if asking him the date. She sips at her tea and over the rim of her cup watches him ignore her. Then she says, “Earl’s off in his own world. Don’t let him bother you.”

“He doesn’t bother me. That damn wood bothers me. That’s what bothers me.”

“Earl doesn’t really need it, you know. He lives in town, he just has that little bitty fireplace of his—”

“That’s not the point!” The point, he tells himself, is that the pile of wood looks like hell out there in the yard, and under the snow it looks somehow worse, because it’s no longer clearly firewood but may as well be merely trash or sand or brush or landfill, the dumb, shapeless residue of a job halted when winter came on. Abruptly, Nelson unlatches the gate, passes into the cool, dim living room, and walks upstairs to the bedroom. In a short while, he is dressed in heavy, green twill pants and wool shirt and snow boots and has returned to the kitchen, where he pulls his mackinaw on, then his black watch cap and thick work gloves.

“You getting the paper?” Allie asks from the table. The dog has settled at her feet.

“Yeah,” Nelson grunts. Quickly, he walks out to the barn, where, with the door to Allie’s office closed tightly behind him, he shoves open the large, sliding door at the front, flooding the darkness with sudden white light and swirls of blowing snow. For a moment he stands, hands sunk in his pockets, staring down the driveway to the road, his back to the green rear deck of his Pontiac station wagon and the gloomy darkness of the cavernous barn beyond. He moves around the car to the front door on the driver’s side and opens it, reaches under the seat, and draws out a half-full pint of vodka. Unscrewing the cap, he tips the bottle up and drinks. It makes no difference — he feels no better or worse after having taken the drink. All he has done is avoid feeling as bad as he would have felt without it. When he has replaced the bottle under the car seat, he turns and bumps against the chopping block, a stump with a steel splitting wedge and single-edged ax driven into its corrugated top. He laughs at himself, and his voice sounds strange to him, an old man’s voice — Ho, ho, ho! — mixed with a drunkard’s voice — Har, har, har! Hesitating a second at the door, he turns back again, retrieves the bottle from under the car seat, and slides it into his mackinaw pocket. He leaves the barn and, like an Arctic explorer setting out for the North Pole, plunges into the snow.

It’s deeper than he expected, eight or ten inches already and drifting, a heavy, wet snow driven by a hard northeast wind and sticking to every surface that faces it, trees, houses, barns, chimneys, and now Nelson Painter, working his way down his driveway from the huge open door of the barn, a man turning white, so that by the time he reaches the woodpile he’s completely white, even his face, though he’s pulled his head down into his coat as far as he can and can barely see through the waves of wind-driven snow before him.

He leans over and with one gloved hand grabs at a chunk of wood, yanks at it, but it won’t come. He brushes snow away, grabs at another, but it, too, won’t give. Standing, he kicks at the first log, and it breaks free of the pile and rolls over in the snow. He picks it up, lays it against his chest, and kicks at the second log. He kicks twice, three times, but it won’t come loose, so he takes the first stick, and holding it by one end, whacks it against the second, until it breaks free. He’s out of breath, sweating inside his coat, cursing the wood. He picks up the two sticks and goes to work on a third, which he eventually kicks loose of the pile and picks up and stacks in his arms, and then, when he kicks at a fourth piece of wood, he loses his balance, slips, and falls, and the pieces roll into the snow. Slowly, on his hands and knees, puffing laboriously now, he gathers up the three logs and stands, his left hip burning in pain where he fell against it, and starts back toward the barn.

Halfway there, retracing his nearly filled tracks, he sees on his left the door to the house push slowly open against the blowing snow, and Allie steps onto the sill and waves an arm at him, indicating that she wants him to come inside, to the kitchen. He can’t make out her face, but he knows her look, he’s seen it lots of times before, a mixture of anger, hurt, and concern, and he can’t hear her because of the wind, and his cap pulled down over his ears, but he knows what she is shouting to him: “Come inside, for God’s sake, Nelson! You’re drunk! You’re going to hurt yourself!” The dog appears beside her and, not recognizing Nelson, bounds outside, barking ferociously at him, leaping eagerly through the snow toward him, barking with great force at the snow-covered stranger in the yard, and when Nelson turns to avoid the animal’s rush, he slips on the wet snow and falls again, dropping the wood and scattering it. Suddenly, the dog recognizes him and retreats swiftly to the kitchen. Nelson reaches into his coat pocket, pulls out the bottle, works the cap off, and takes a long drink. Recapping the bottle, he places it in his pocket and looks back toward the door, but it’s closed. He’s alone again. Good. Slowly, he retrieves his three sticks of wood one by one and stands and resumes his trek to the barn. It seems so far away, that dark opening in the white world, miles and years away from him, that he wonders if he will ever get there, if he will spend years, an entire lifetime, out here in the snow slogging his way toward the silent, dark, ice-cold barn, where he can set his three pieces of firewood down, lay one piece of wood on the floor snugly against the other, the start of a new row.