He held the doubtful old ladder while she climbed up into the loft. It smelled airy, and like hay or burlap and desiccated wood, a place with a history of rain and heat, long abandoned by human intention. Her older brothers and sisters had stories of playing in it, but their father had forbidden them to play there years before she was born because of the splinters in the plank floor and the nails that had been driven through the shingles in the low roof, and he had taken away the ladder in order to baffle temptation. Nevertheless, from time to time the boys contrived to hoist one another up into that secret and forbidden place to act out stealth and ambush, an impulse too primordial for even Teddy to resist. It would never have occurred to them to bring her along, the baby sister whose indiscretions were notorious in the family for years after she had outgrown them. So this was the first time she was setting foot in that fabled space.
Jack had run a length of clothesline from beam to beam and thrown a tarp over it to make a low tent in the angle of floor and roof. She knelt and looked into it. The edges were neatly nailed down. There was a floor of newspapers, a rumpled blanket and a pillow. He had set a wooden box on its side as a table and shelf. A flashlight, a few books, a mayonnaise jar with a handful of her oatmeal cookies in it. The framed photograph of a river. A glass and an uncapped pint bottle, three-quarters empty. The dark little room smelled strongly of whiskey and sweat. It seemed almost domestic, and yet there was a potency of loneliness about it like a dark spirit lurking in it, a soul that had improvised this crude tabernacle to stand in the place of other shelter, flesh. She thought, What if he had succeeded in dying, and then she had found this, so neatly and intentionally made out of nothing anyone could want, with the fierce breath of his grief still haunting it, the blanket still tangled.
Jack said, “Are you all right? I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have asked you—”
She said, “I’m fine.” He would know from her voice that she was crying, but she had to say something, and he would expect her to cry, surely. She pulled the blanket out of the tent. An empty bottle dragged along with it. She put the bottle aside and folded and smoothed the blanket and put it back. Then she pulled the crate to her and took the bottle and the glass out of it and set them aside. The books were The Condition of the Working Class, The High and the Mighty, and a worn little Bible. The flashlight had burned itself out, but she turned it off and put it beside the books and slid the crate back into its place. It felt like piety and propitiation to calm the disorder this most orderly man had left in the confusions of his sorrow.
He said, “I think there are only two bottles up there. I’m pretty sure.”
That meant he thought she was taking longer than she needed to. He would be embarrassed that she had seen and touched his secretiveness, which was so like shame, so like affliction, that they could hardly be distinguished. She said, “I’m coming,” and stayed where she was, kneeling there, amazed at what was before her, as if it were the humblest sign of great mystery, come from a terrain where loneliness and grief are time and weather.
She held the bottles against her side with one arm and the glass in her hand, and with her free arm she held to the ladder and lowered herself onto it.
“I’m right here,” Jack said, and held it steady for her. Then he stepped away and stood with his hands on his hips, looking at her with the distant and tentative expression that meant he felt she might be making a new appraisal of him. He said, “A little strange, hmm? A little squalid? Sorry.”
“No matter,” she said. “I think this is everything.”
He nodded.
“I poured out the other bottles in the orchard.”
“Fine.” He said, “I made that to keep the bats off when I read with the flashlight. Bats are attracted by light, did you know that? Useful information. And it kept the rain off. That roof is just about worthless. So it made a kind of sense. To me.”
HE WAITED FOR HER, AND WHEN SHE CAME BACK FROM the orchard and the shed he walked to the house with her, a few steps behind. He said, “I’ll pull that down tomorrow. My shanty. I’ll clean things up around here before I go. I’ve let a lot of things slide.”
“It’s still much better than it was when you came.”
He opened the screen door for her. He said, “I’m going to try to get some of these
