Like so many first timers in 1976, Dick agreed to buy The House with little more than a nod and a handshake. He walked in and handed Mrs. Updike the check for $50 and said, “Please don't cash that check until Friday. I don't get paid until then.” After handing over the check, his wife looked at him and said, “Would you like to see the rest of the house now?”
Dick, not usually the impetuous type, knew he needed a home for his kids and wife. Having grown up only a few blocks away, Dick had scouted the neighborhood many times over the years and knew it was an up and coming neighborhood - making it a much easier decision. He also knew this house wouldn’t last long at the price she was asking.
He wrote the check on the cigarette stained dashboard of the Pontiac while parked on the street in front of The House.
They moved in a few weeks after the mortgage closed and Dick was a homeowner for the first time in his life.
He dreamed of family dinners in the dining room and cookouts on a large patio he would build out back. A master bedroom for the wife and himself and a family room for the kids would come first though. The house was a tiny two bedroom built just before the first World War when the neighborhood was still just farms.
The first owner, Elizabeth Smith built the house with her husband who died shortly after it was finished. A devout Congregationalist, she opened the house for church functions and without any prior explanation, left The House to the church upon her death.
During the depression, the church sold the house to a young couple who lived there for just a decade - the Crawfords.
Mrs. Crawford moved out almost immediately after her husband was found dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound at work in the machine shop in the next town over. She couldn’t live in The House any longer, but Mrs. Crawford didn’t move far - just across the street to a new ranch-style house that popped up when the farm was sold off for development.
That was when Mr and Mrs Updike bought the property and made it their own.
They sided the house with aluminum siding and tore of the wrap around porch that was infested with carpenter ants. Mrs.Updike planted peonies around the old stone pad where the outhouse used to be and added well- trimmed yews in the front yard where the porch once stood.
The improvements and landscaping gave The House a feeling of home. They lived there for 30 years until Mr. Updike passed away from a heart attack. It was three week later when Mrs. Updike listed the house for sale and just 23 days before Dick walked in and handed her the check.
Now that the house was his, he found it difficult to sleep. The mortgage payments were almost one whole check and he knew his job as a technical illustrator was tentative at best.
The boss hated him because he could never get the drawings done quite quickly enough. To make matters worse, it was an hour commute there and back every day and his car wasn’t going to last much longer.
If only he could make a living with painting, he might find the freedom to quit this job, Dick dreamed. So far, he only had a nice sideline gig selling his artwork at area church fairs and community art shows.
When the kids were fed and dinner was cleaned up each night - before his wife could lay into him about money - Dick would grab a drink and his pack of cigarettes and head out to the garage where he assembled a thrown- together art studio where he could paint in silence. Silence except for his Mozart which he loved listening to in the quiet hours of the evening.
Invariably, by the time he was done painting each night, he would be drunk on vodka and Mozart. When he returned from the garage, his wife would be up waiting to tell him about the latest shortfalls in the family budget.
“The boy needs glasses.
The girl wants dance lesson.
The grocery store called... the account is past due.
The check to liquor store bounced again.”
Had he been sober, he might have let the subject drop, but he could not stay silent and the arguments would ensue.
She would say, “Why do you drink so much?” and he would reply through clenched teeth, “Because you make me”.
Then an ashtray would smash against the wall and the kids would be up crying all night.
Just once he wanted to come in, have dinner, a nice conversation, listen to a little music, maybe enjoy a drink or two and go to sleep. But every night since they moved in, the arguments got worse and the pressure got greater.
Dick’s hopes for a quiet night weren’t his alone. The son was the first one to mention anything unusual about The House.
It started when the boy was just a toddler. He would eat his breakfast while talking about the man who came to see him at night.
“ Who came to see you?” the boy's mother would ask.
All the boy would say was that the man came from the closet and sat on the edge of his bed and talked to him.
“What does he say”, the boy's mother would ask. “ He tells me to look both ways before crossing the street and to eat my vegetables”, the boy would answer. His lack of fear about a stranger sitting on his bed at night made the mother worry, but the stories he told about the man seemed to be safe and benevolent.
As the boy got older, the stories seemed to stop and different things started to happen. A plate would go missing and the lights would flicker on and off without reason. The family got used to the ghost that lived in the house with them. They all joked that Mr. Updike was visiting again when something would go missing and show up in an entirely different spot.
The ghost was the only levity The House provided, as the marriage devolved into violence.
When the police started showing up on a regular basis, Dick knew it was time to leave but had nowhere else to go. He hid in his studio more and more and turned his Mozart up louder and louder - always while drinking.
He would put down his drink when he got into the garage, turn the radio up and slip into the music as he painted the night away. His inebriated emotions poured from his paintbrush onto the paper, the way his feelings could not from his lips. One night, he would paint a storm-whipped sea with a lonely lighthouse in the distance while the next night he would paint a flock of ducks flying away over a cold wintery marsh.
The skies were tinged with purples and greens and greys and looked as if God himself was having a nightmare when he created them. Whenever anyone questioned where he got the inspiration of such tumultuous skies, Dick would say through clenched teeth, “Well, they look that way to me”.
The pattern of angry painting punctuated by late night battles continued for a couple years. Time passes quickly and before they knew it, the boy was in school full- time and the girl was getting ready for middle school.
He could have kept this pattern up for many more years, had his wife not decided to make her stand one evening. She went to see him drinking with a friend one night at the local bar. She walked in with the two kids in tow and glared at his back as he hunched over the bar.
The gentleman he was drinking with laughed saying, “Hey Dick, I think you have company?” He turned to see his wife’s face red with anger. He puffed his chest up and put his drink down saying, “Oh Tom, would you like to meet my wife?”
She growled, “Soon to be EX” and turned, dragging the two kids out the door into the night air.
When he arrived home, he found his clothing in the front yard and a note on the door saying, “Get the hell out”.
He picked up his belongings and drove up the road to his mothers where he would stay until he could find a new place to live. The divorce was finalized two days after their anniversary in November and Dick felt good to be free of the burden of the house and the children.
He left his job as an illustrator, bought a van and started painting full time. With his new found freedom, he could spend his nights at the bar and his days painting in his apartment. When he found a girlfriend, he moved in with her and made a new studio for himself in her basement.
The years passed and when he turned 55, he offered to sign his share of the house over to his ex-wife in lieu of back child support. He thought this would free him of the House, but The House never gave up its men.
Another decade passed and the children went off to college and got married. He enjoyed walking his daughter down the aisle at her wedding and voiced his regret about how drunk he had gotten at her reception. He gave her a painting of an old rose-covered beach side cottage that he had seen in a magazine a dozen years back. He decided to paint it beneath one of his angry skies.
The cottage was one of his most popular paintings and he had painted it at least once a year for a dozen more years. The white sand beaches edged with lapping water laid in front of a sweet New England clapboard cottage gave the painting a feeling of tranquility that was cast in stark contrast to the angry skies. He might have sold a hundred of these paintings but for the skies.
His daughter unwrapped the painting when they got back to The House after the reception. She said, “ Oh Daddy, thank you! This is the best one yet.” He slammed his glass down and staggered out to his truck. He tried to drive home but flooded the motor and asked his son to take him back to his house instead.
It was just a matter of time until the cancer diagnosis caught him. As he sat by himself in his truck eating a hot dog, he felt his legs go numb and worried he was having a stroke. Instead, it was terminal lung cancer that had metastasized to his brain.
The news brought his son to his bedside, but Dick wasn’t the type to allow anyone to take care of him. When they checked him out of the hospital, he asked his son to drive him to his girlfriends house. Once again he found his clothes in the front yard and a note saying, “Get the hell out”.
Having no place left to go, he allowed his son to take him back to The House where he once lived with his wife and kids. His ex- wife welcomed him home and put him in the bedroom he built, where he would spend the rest of his living days.
On his last day in The House, he had trouble breathing and his face felt warm. He began to panic as his speech left him and all he could do was whisper, “I need to go to the hospital”.
At the hospital, they drew two liters of blood from his lungs and he knew the time to die had come. He asked to go to hospice.
The paramedics loaded him onto the stretcher and wheeled him down the hall to the waiting ambulance. The driver asked him if he liked any particular music and he mouthed the word beneath the oxygen mask, "Mozart”
The female paramedic must have been a music lover and reached into her purse and pulled out a CD. She handed it to the driver and the sound of “Requiem” filled the ambulance.
He closed his eyes and felt the cool flow of oxygen fill his dying lungs and a peaceful wave came over him.
The ambulance drove slow and obeyed all the traffic signals. He had half hoped hoped they would sound the siren and felt like a little boy again when the thought occurred to him. The pragmatic old man who that boy became, however, would not let him say a word. He smiled and enjoyed the moment.
In his peaceful state, he slipped in and out of consciousness, but he was quite certain that he was conscious when she spoke to him. The voice called to him and no one in the ambulance seemed to notice. Perhaps it was the music he thought to himself, but he was sure he heard it.
“George it’s time” he heard her say again. No one had called him “George” since his grandmother died 30 years earlier. “It’s time to go” she said and his peace left him.
When they got to the hospice, the ambulance pulled into the car port and they unloaded him through a big set of glass automatic doors. The warm April morning felt good for just a moment before he was plunged into the chilly sanitized air conditioning that remind him of death.
He was having trouble staying awake, but did his best to take in all his senses as he knew this would be his last chance. The white roses on the credenza, the quiet violin strumming, “Fount of Every Blessing”, the hiss of the nurses uniform pants as they rushed here and there trying to make him comfortable.
When they had slid him over into his hospital bed, he could smell the fragrance of the young nurse’s perfume and became a little aroused. He always loved the smell of a woman and he thought if this was his end, it was a gift to have her smell in his nose.
She came back to him with a white blanket and said “Mr. Dick, are you comfortable?” He nodded in agreement and closed his eyes.
The next thing he felt was a needle being shoved into the back of his hand and he turned to see his son looking over the shoulder of a nurse who was installing an IV into the thin veins of his hand and having trouble.. She said “Your veins are so thin and fragile. I am sorry if I am hurting you.”
The nurse turned to his son and explained, “ We need to give him some medicine and this is the best way.” She finished as quickly as she could manage and injected a vial of morphine into his hand. The burn made Dick wince for a moment but he soon fell into a deep sleep.
He could feel himself beside the bed, looking down at his dying body. The room was empty and the whispers in the hall were quiet and muffled. The woman was the only voice he could understand and she didn’t look like anyone else.
Her skin glowed and her hair was as fine as silk. She looked remarkably like someone he had seen before but he could not place her name with the face. She looked at him with understanding and patience and he felt a warm light radiating from her presence.
She spoke,” George, it is time.” He said, “yes I know but when?” ‘ “Soon” she said, “but first I must explain something”.
“The House where you raised your children and spent your final days is your home. It is part of you and you of it. You are one of a line of men who have called The House a home and it is your turn now to watch.”
He cried. “What do you mean? I am ready to go?”
“You are not ready to leave yet. You will go to The House to watch and learn until you are called.”
The nurse ripped him from this dream as she flushed his IV and he felt a cold burn of saline enter his veins. “ You clogged up the IV”, she said, “ We need to get this medicine in”.
His son was sitting in the chair beside him and it had gotten dark outside. The boy read a book with a small light over his shoulder and looked up when his father touched his knee. “It’s gonna be alright kid” the old man whispered and faded back to sleep.
“George, I need you to understand that when you leave here you will not come with me. You are not ready to leave yet, so you must go to The House first.”
“But why”, he asked.
“The House needs a watcher and you are next in line. You will watch The House and learn. The families who live there will be yours to watch until the next man takes your place”.
“But how do I know how long that will be?” he pleaded.
“You will spend that time learning about love and happiness. You will learn the lessons that you did not learn in life”
His last memory was the sound of machines being shut off and the silencing of an alarm. He thought he heard crying and felt warm hands remove the ring from his finger and the cross from his neck.
The rest went dark and he felt himself rise above his body and into the blackness.
There was no shining light and no warm voices to welcome him. He was unsure of how he was moving, but felt his body being pulled.
His eyes were bleary and he could not be sure. He thought he saw his wife and children standing by a church altar crying.
His next sensation was green grass beneath his feet and the smell of wet autumn leaves. He was at The House.
The smell of food cooking was familiar and the sound of music filled the air. This was his family and this was his House.
Time did not pass the way it did when he was alive and it seemed that months and even years would pass for the family, but without his knowledge. He saw his wife grow old in what felt like moments and his children become adults in the blink of an eye.
In what felt like a mere moment, the family grew up and moved on from the House and a new family moved in whom he did not know.
The smells were different and the music was strange. It was a woman with two children he did not recognize. He dared not be seen and his where he could see nothing. Years must have passed as he hid beneath the stairs and in the back hall closet.
He moved between the rooms only at night and cringed when he walked the stairs thinking the creek of the old wood would give him away. Night time was the time for what he was now and he knew it. It was the time of spirits.
The children grew with time and he wondered if he should speak to the youngest girl as she seemed to sense his presence most often. Her eyes seemed to sense him when she looked beneath the stairs in the basement and she rushed to get her coat from the back closet as if she knew he was there.
He did not speak though for fear that he would be detected, but instead watched as the family grew and the time passed. The energy of The House changed over time and the mother grew increasingly tense and the children grew more morose and apathetic.
Eventually he heard the sounds of boxes and footsteps and withdrew from his place beneath the stairs to see what was happening. The family was leaving and moving men were emptying the House of it’s contents.
He retreated beneath the stairs and waited until nightfall to see what would happen and when he next left his hiding place, The House was empty.
There was no family to watch and no life to cling onto. The House seemed to be dying just as he had died so many years back. And a silence took over the House.
In the quiet of The House, he thought about all the years he had been here and wondered how many more he would be forced to stay. He had come to understand that his role as watcher was just as much a blessing as it was curse. He couldn't leave, but he was invited to participate in the love and happiness of a family he would never have to be part of.
A silent observer of the children and the lives that would come and go through this House and these walls, until a replacement came to take his place. He resigned himself to watch over the House until a new caretaker came along.
Unlike the men who watched this House before him though, his House was empty and there was no family to give it life.
Mr. Crawford, Mr. Updike and Mr. Smith before him, had families to care for and children to talk to in the quiet hours of the night. Dick had only empty bedrooms and silent halls to talk to and wander about through the silent hours of the night.
In life, he enjoyed his time alone. A double vodka at the end of the bar. An afternoon painting by himself with only his music to keep him company.
In death, he found his existence quite lonely. Oh sure, the mice made for decent entertainment at first, but when the crumbs were all eaten, they left and his loneliness became complete.
Dick remembered climbing the stairs to tell his children good night, but those children were now beyond his reach. He remembered sitting at the snack bar listening the the New England rain in the mornings, drinking his coffee. Now however, all he had were the echoes of memories to fill his hours, months and years, waiting for his replacement to come.
His hope had been stirred sometime back, although he could not remember when. A realtor came to eye the damage abandonment had wrought upon the old place. He hid in the back closet for fear that he might blow past the cobwebs and startle the young woman.
She left, never knowing that he was cursed to walk these floors until the next man of the house passed on to take his place. Her presence however, gave the house some life, even if it was just for an afternoon.
Why had she come, and when would the next family come in, he wondered? Would a new man move in or was his time as the watcher unending? The questions began to pile up when it seemed the house would never be occupied again.
And that was when he noticed the sign in the front yard. He dare not step outside for fear that he may never find his way back, but he saw the sign that said, “New Development Coming in Spring 2021”
What did that mean, what was coming and what would happen to his watch? He returned to his place under the stairs to think and before he knew it, he heard the rumble of machinery shake the walls of the House.
He peered though the window where he could see buds on the branches of the trees out front and the brilliant shade of green grass. He longed to smell the grass once more, but knew he had not heard the call yet.
Through the window, he watched the giant tires of the machine dig up the wet grassy soil of the front yard, as they moved in to tear The House down.
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