from when they lived in Berea. More than fourteen years ago now, just as her work was beginning to get serious attention. Liza sneezed whenever the cat nosed her, called it “that damn cat,” which in time became its name. Now, Damn Cat was grinding his decaying teeth against kibble in the next room and Liza was nowhere at all.
He knew he should shut down all the house lights and go up to bed while he could, find the rarity of untroubled sleep, but there was a warmth in the downstairs silence that kept him there. It was in the timbers of the house, the life still locked up inside. This had been their realized hope, finding this place in the woods, with all the folded land around them, the Smoky Mountains at their backs. How was it possible for a forty-seven-year-old man to feel this old? And yet here he was—geologic—covered up like something to be excavated at a later point in time, some remnant to unlock the problem of a future history.
Upstairs, he took the pistol out. Studied it as if it belonged to a symbolism he couldn’t quite solve. The ritual: the loading and unloading, the snug clasp of the magazine into the receiver, the snap of chambering, the cool kiss of the muzzle against his temple. Then he placed it on the pillow beside him, the pillow where she’d lain her head, available if he decided he had no other choice but to follow her.
HE DROVE in early the following morning to gather what he would need to dress up the house. The roads were emptied of commuting traffic and it was easy to slip into the Lowe’s, where he wandered around for a few minutes in its sheer warehouse enormity before he began piling paint buckets and brushes into his cart. His hand fell to whatever brightly advertised itself as a bargain. He considered it a virtue to trust in the marketing that had gotten the product this far, considering he had no expertise to rely on.
On his way back, he stepped into the Hardee’s just off the I-40 exit and ordered a coffee and sausage biscuit. Inside, there was a clutch of retired men wearing caps with stiff brims and glasses held in place with nylon cords or rubber bands. They were tacit and workmanlike about their meals, hands smoothing wax paper on tables, eyes sidling even as they spoke to one another. They discussed upcoming planting schedules, the chances of a furniture factory moving into Jefferson County, the Braves’ likelihood for a wild card berth. He caught himself thinking absently about Liza, was confused by it for a moment before he realized it was because she would have loved to have come out here and talk to them, follow them back to their homes, their lives, and photograph what she found there, either good or bad. Odd that he had never told her about them, about this quiet routine he played out when he was on his way up to the college to teach. He wondered why he left certain things a secret between them, covetous of something that could never belong to any single person.
By the time he got back to the house it was already hot and the cicadas were screaming. He carried all the supplies to the front porch and went inside to pull the furniture away from the living room walls. There was no air-conditioning in the old farmhouse and within minutes he was slick with sweat from the work. He went back to the bedroom to change into a faded pair of swim shorts and sandals, threw all the doors open, swept what he could.
By noon he had cut in the corners and rolled a clean coat over two walls, careful that Damn Cat didn’t scamper through the paint tray and leave his signature on the tongue-in-groove floors. Stratton acknowledged his progress with a tallboy of Budweiser and a half hour sitting on the shady side of the house while he watched songbirds at the feeder. Finches mostly. The infrequent Carolina wren. He crushed his can and cracked another one open as he kept working through the long green heat of the afternoon.
Later, he got around to bracing himself for what he meant to do. In the carport he turned up a couple of broken-down cardboard boxes that he shaped and duct-taped into solid cubes. From the recycling he gained a short stack of old newspaper to use for wadding. He worked through the living room first, taking down the pieces that were some of her most famous works. Teenage Girls Skinny Dipping on Troublesome Creek. Dulcimer Burning. Old Preacher at His Pulpit. Unsolved Arson. King Coal. As he took each one down and wrapped it in the paper, he tried to keep his eyes on the next picture, wary of being drawn into contemplation, but he found that nearly impossible. It was like taking down parts of Liza’s mind, this purging, this deletion by his own hand.
It took both boxes to finish the den and he hunted around for a while for a place to put the rest, but he would have to buy some more boxes. There was just too much to store and he didn’t want to risk the framing by trying to fit too much into a tight space. He took down all of what remained, spread them out on the sofa and kitchen table, any surface at all until he had succeeded in bringing down the walls to the bare paint which he would need to repaint. The whole house would need a new skin, and it would be so much easier now with the pictures gone.
Knowing that he was too tired to face it but unable to resist the pull, he went into her study, stood in the darkened doorway for a while before he gathered himself and crossed to switch on the desk lamp. The desk was all in a jumble, just as she always left it when she worked—pieces of correspondence, travel receipts, promotional material for photography equipment, all turned over by the circumstances of the moment. Her hands always busy as a sewing machine, selecting the next project by a need for perpetual motion. It had been her way of retreating from obligation, and, he suspected, the routine of him.
He sat at her desk and studied the twinned specter of himself in the window pane beyond the burning cone of light. This was the version of his appearance he liked best, this hologram compressed into two dimensions. Perhaps this inclination was a vanity, though he doubted himself capable of something so material. It was this second self in a middle space of canted light that suited what he had become, an image outside of form, incapable of the many small concerns of being fully realized within its frame.
In the top drawer he found the picture he had first seen there last winter but not looked at since. It was in black and white, heavily shaded by what appeared to be evening sun coming through a background balcony window. Liza rarely shot interiors, preferring the bold and vivid play of outdoor lighting on her subjects. A realistic way to lift the varnish of habit, she’d explained in one of her guest university lectures. The harshness of nature held up to itself as proof of what time costs the human heart.
The trick of the photo was the way in which it held the viewer’s gaze into this rich background light, obscuring for several seconds the concealed subject, the shadowed figure that stood blocking the left third of the composition, golem-like, shoulders dipped from holding something in front of its waist, suggesting an appendage of wings. Only by close scrutiny could one begin to make out the musculature of a bare chest and legs, and the towel hanging from the midsection of a young man. His face was smeared, of course, a simple monster in its anonymity. In the bottom right corner she had penciled in its title: Adultery.
He returned the photograph to its place and slid the drawer shut, committed this part of her to a place he would not touch.
3
THEY FOUND the abandoned homeplace the day of the solstice. It had been a hard day’s walk through open meadows and burning sun. With their high-slung rucksacks, they looked like wayfarers fresh from the Appalachian Trail, a disguise that they relied on to avoid the curiosity of those who might view their trespass.
The house was far back from a barbed wire fence just beyond a huge pin oak and an encircling camouflage of scrub. Built on mortared bricks, much of its original clapboard siding remained in place, though one panel had been pried open long ago, exposing a now dormant bee colony that appeared to run the length of the entire back wall. Wolf marveled at the sight, said that what the hive would do with the elements of the earth owned a greater symmetry than anything men might realize by hand and iron.
Within, the floor joists remained in place though the tile had rotted to the point that they could not support the weight of anything heavier than a child. Nail points bristled everywhere. The window’s
