Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage by Bette Howland

Author:Bette Howland
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: A Public Space
Published: 2019-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

POWER FAILURE

I was sleeping on the couch under a pile of blankets and coats and the fire scratched in the grate.

The power was out; one of those freak spring storms that bump off trees and knock down lines. The world was a snow-swamp, the Everglades turned white. Knee-deep drifts, floating branches, limbs bent low, broken and bearded with snow. Everything bowed with age and silence.

The only other soul I’d seen all day was the caretaker who looks after that place across the way—the one that used to belong to Colonel Somebody-or-Other. The heirs are in court, squabbling about who gets what and which was promised when; and in the meantime the house just sits there—a big pink elephant, gingerbread, jigsaws, doodads and all—getting picked clean by vandals. They would have walked off with the cannon that squats on the front lawn by now, only it’s up to its cast iron neck in concrete.

The old man seems to have all this on his mind.

He comes by just about every day. I hear a car door slam, I look up, there he is, larger than life—green plaid lumber jacket and waxy yellow work boots—squeezing out of a low-slung hatchback. A Japanese make, which I mention because there seem to be so many in this neck of the woods. The local dealer must be one helluva salesman. The little cars go clattering up and down the patriotic landscape, almost a part of it; like the red brick and bow windows, the bumpy blue pyramids of the mountains, the white birches. (You think other trees are white, too, until you see birches again.)

So here he comes. Collar up, earflaps down, hands shoving into pockets over his stomach; pipe extending the angle, the purpose, of his stubborn Yankee jaw. His eyes have a nippy glitter inside his glasses; his breath in the iced air stiffens and staggers before him.

“How’s the typewriter?” That’s what he always asks, only he says “haaoww” and “typewrituh.” It’s his joke; he means me and my machine both. He’s the one who delivered it, got down on all fours under my desk to plug it in. “Well, yuh’ve gawt noh excuse naoww,” he said, scraping and grating his sandpaper hands together. “Gawt tuh get daowwn tuh wuhk naoww.”

From his baggy pants dangle wires, pliers, clippers, black electrical tape. He’s been busy rigging up traps and alarms, meaning to give the vandals a surprise: “Next time they get the shawk of their life.”

I think he’ll be sorry if there is no next time.

Today the house was safe; buried under a ton or two of savage bright stuff. You couldn’t look at the snow for the pressure of sun on it. A blue jay flashed in branches, the colors of the wintry day. Black white blue. Trees snow sky.

Spreading its wings it became a miniature landscape, something painted on a fan.

I read by the fire in earmuffs and mittens. (Have you noticed? How hard it is to turn pages with mittens on?) When it got dark—whenever that was, the clock had stopped—I cooked supper over the flames.

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