The Old Man

He built the house on the hill overlooking the town’s oldest cemetery. Red oak and what he didn’t know was the last of the American chestnuts from below the ridge line. Local limestone filled with fossils of the things that came long before us- the same stones that marked the graves of the poor in the cemetery below. He built the house hoping to begin something new, something clean, so he could start over- rebuild everything he had lost in the war. But he built the house next to a field of death so that he would never forget how he became a shadow.

The graveyard was segregated into three sections. Three levels of loss; three beliefs of the worth of a life. In the main yard, close to the wrought iron gates, the headstones sat upright and upkept. Marble, granite and quartzy sandstone: tablets that contained the names and the stories of those who slept in the ground. The yard here was perfectly manicured, and flowers placed near graves were replaced weekly by families mourning soldiers they had lost and women and children who had paid the price of becoming collateral devastation. Behind the graves from the war were the graves of the founders of this town. Plain field-stone headstones and foot stones that bore the family names of those who struggled to settle a place that was once steep, forested hills in a secluded area in Northern Appalachia. The graves themselves, the sunken land, told the stories of fevers and blights, motherhood mortality and the fragility of infant life.

It was weeks into construction that he ventured to the third section of the cemetery; he may never have found it if his neighbor down the hill hadn’t pointed him to the lower field at the back of the graveyard, down a short trail and hidden by unkempt trees. A small clearing filled with rows of unmarked, sunken, person-shaped swales. No headstones. No flowers. No landscaping. These were the people who had no choice in the matter of giving their lives- these were the slaves drafted to help the cause of the war. No one looked for their families or learned their names. No one remembered their stories because they were less than.

It seemed to him that life had always been hard, and for a reason he didn’t fully understand, that brought him some comfort. He was alone in life, but the death surrounding him knew who he was and what he had made it through. 

When he had finished the house and settled into living alone in this new space that somehow still felt haunted by the ghosts of the woman he so loved and the children he didn’t return from the war in time to see, to even know their names, he sunk down, back against the side of the fireplace and cried into his hands almost daily. Was he a ghost as well?

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She needed a new home for her family. The man she married had escaped a poisonous woman and with him he brought two children who you could tell just from looking at them they were rattled, brought up in instability and emotional violence. She had come from her own horror story, and together, they searched for a new home they could bring back to life, the way they were all trying to breathe life back into each other.

There was a charming historic home on the hill overlooking the town’s oldest graveyard. She had always been comforted by the quiet energy that surrounds a field of the sleeping dead. They were finished with this life and its pain, and sometimes she wished she were, too. The house was falling down around itself. The once beautiful red oak floors and grand staircase with its hand-made spindles was dull. The fireplace was broken. The kitchen was in disrepair and the bathroom was so water damaged and rotted that it seemed the floor may fall through at any moment. But she could see the house’s memory; it had been beautiful once. The skeleton keys still sat in the crystal-handled doors throughout the house, as if the home had just stood still once the old man had died. She looked at her husband and he looked back at her. This was the house. This was the place they would all heal themselves as they healed the building.

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It had been 50 years since he returned from the war to nothing- not even the ghost of his wife and children. It had been 45 years since he completed the home. It had been half a century, but there was never going to be enough time that would pass for him to move past the image of the life he should have had. He never took anyone else into his bed. He never allowed another woman to cook a meal in his kitchen. To him, his wife was the only woman that existed; she was lost to death and he was lost to time. The house he built, once solid and new, now sagged around him the way his body was also slowly pulling itself towards the ground. The floorboards creaked like his joints, and the roof leaked when it rained hard, the way his eyes still leaked when he thought of his children he never knew. And her. Her love. Her hands on his face. He kept a glass negative of her on the mantle. It was from after she lost the children, and you could see the harshness of loss that clouded her face, but she still looked like the gentle and kind young girl he had once picked wildflowers for and asked for her hand in marriage.

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The first room they tackled was the sinking bathroom. She wanted to save what they could, but time had taken so much of it there was little to save. As her husband worked on the plumbing, she wandered upstairs, looking through each small bedroom, trying to decide which to restore first. The elegant oak doors, trim, floors still glowed even surrounded by the cracked and falling plaster walls. The drafty leaded windows were original; she could tell from how the glass refracted images irregularly, and for some reason it was the windows that filled her with a sense of abject loneliness that she knew was not her own. This was the room to start with. On her hands and knees, she stripped the floors by hand, removing the decades of sun and age from the solid, sturdy boards. She began to do this in every room until the entire second floor was returned to its original state. She could feel The Old Man in every scrape and bruise and in all the dust she breathed in.

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Eventually, it became too difficult for him to walk up and down the stairs, so he moved his bedroom to the first floor. The second floor became a ghost. Death was encroaching all around him- in his home, in the ever expanding graveyard, in his cloudy eyes and his decaying body. It was as if the house was an extension of him, and as it began to sag, so did he, and so did what was left of his spirit. He slept in the bedroom off the back hall, closest to the kitchen. He kept only a chair in the corner of the living room. Away from the windows, away from the fireplace. He read each day, or thought, or stared. He was a spectre before he was a ghost. And when he finally breathed his last breath, he was clutching the negative of his wife. He had lived his life inside the memories of all the things he had lost, and that was also how he died. He was never there to begin with, and he never left.

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She found the old negative of a severe looking woman leaned against the mantle of the fireplace behind an array of old items she was planning to discard. But when she picked it up and held it to the light, she knew she couldn’t get rid of it. If The Old Man had kept it this long, she owed it to him to keep as much of the spirit of the house as she could. She saved the oak floors, even where water and sun had tried to destroy them. They kept the trim, repaired the doors, polished the mantle and the staircase, and patched the plaster in every room. He was still there; she could tell. He was in every beam, every window and every stone in the foundation. Sometimes at night, she heard a ragged breathing and heaving that sounded like quiet sobbing. Sometimes in the kitchen she felt an unwelcoming sadness, as if she had taken something from him that he never had in the first place. She told her husband these feelings, but he and the children didn’t understand what she was talking about.

Once, the woman on the mantle moved, as if someone had picked it up to admire it and then set it back in its place. Once, on a warm, sunny day, the french doors to the back porch were set open, though no one in the house had done it. Sometimes, the chair in the corner of the living room would rock gently for no reason, and once she thought she saw an old man standing in the doorway of the newly renovated bathroom, smiling to himself. She always wondered where The Old Man was buried, what was his story, if he had a family, what was his name. But these were things she could never know because these things were lost to time. And when the renovations were finished and the house now contained a new family’s story, she noticed at night that you could hear someone walk down the stairs, check the locks on the front and back doors, and walk back up the stairs and into one of the upstairs bedrooms. It was when that routine began that she finally understood why The Old Man still lived here- he wanted a family to fill the space he had built. He had waited over half a century for it. And they weren’t his, but he was a part of them.

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As more and more decades passed, the children had grown up and gone, and her husband had succumbed to a vicious cancer. She was left alone. Sometimes she felt like a ghost herself, and she wondered how long The Old Man had felt this way: like a walking shadow in his own home. She waited for time and pain to take her. There was nothing left of the man she loved; there was nothing left for her. But she wasn’t alone; she had never been alone in this house on the hill that overlooked the town’s oldest graveyard. Sometimes, she felt as if The Old Man was sitting next to her, reading her books or trying to show her his own story. She never understood him. But once it was only her in the house, after she’d gone to bed he would move the bedroom door just enough that it seemed he was peeking in to check on her. And he never did stop checking the locks each night.