Staying Home

        “We’re done here, Mr. Goodrich!”

        It was the guy in charge of the movers, Joey V, standing in the driveway. Goodrich knew this was coming: a yell or a voice from downstairs, saying it was all over. He took slow steps over to the bedroom window and struggled to lift it. The weather had been damp and these old wooden windows stuck. He banged the upper rail with the palm of his hand and it stubbornly moved. He banged some more, allowing for an opening, and leaned towards it.

        “Thanks, Joey! We’ll see you in two days.”

        “Two days, yeah,” said Joey V. “Oh, yeah, and Mr. Goodrich? Wicked house you have! I love these old places!” With that, he turned to squeeze himself into the moving van and then drove off with the remains that hadn't been sold or given away.

        Goodrich knocked down on either side of the window’s sash, left then right, and so was able to shimmy it back down. He thought back to the time he’d removed the whole window with the notion of sanding down the edges to make it easier to open and close. Home repair was not his forte; he had to call in a carpenter to get the thing back in place.

        He walked through the bedroom, sweeping dust bunnies into a bin, and pulled the crumpled punch list from his back pocket to see if anything in this room was left to do. He looked fondly at a small crack in one windowpane that he convinced the buyers shouldn’t be fixed. “SPNEA came in and said it’s authentic, maybe as old as the house itself. It’s really a treasure and you don’t want to do anything to challenge the historic commission,” he’d said. The response was a dubious “humpf.” Goodrich watched the buyer trace the crack on the wavy pane with his finger.  Looking at the tip of that finger, he asked, “What’s Spinya?”

        “S-P-N-E-A, the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities,” said Goodrich. “We wanted to keep the house as authentic as possible, you know, and brought them in when we first moved in to give us a sense of what we had. Here, let me show you something.”        

        Goodrich led the man up to the door that led into the attic. “See this? Goodrich said. “It’s the original stenciling on horsehair plaster! They were testing it. And look…” He went up the stairs and held his hand up against the main beam. “This is hand-hewn chestnut. You can see the adze marks, and it’s as solid as the day they put it up. Look, the original pegs.”

        The buyer yawned out a “whatever,” before turning to go back down the steps and walked himself into the bathroom where he set about to turn on and off the faucets and flush the toilet. “And you get good pressure if more than one person’s got water running?”

        “Yes,” said Goodrich. “The pressure’s fine. We upgraded the plumbing in ’97.”   

        “18 or 19?” the buyer asked he continued his poking and prodding. “Is it haunted? You have to disclose that you know, drops the price, too. Ghosts, murders, that sort of thing.”

        “No, no murders or ghosts that I’m aware of,” said Goodrich.

        Goodrich leaned over to pick up a thick flake of paint the buyer had flicked off the wainscoting in the hall outside the bathroom door. “Needs painting,” that man wending his way down that hall. Goodrich turned the flake over in his fingers counting five maybe six layers of paint going back to long before he’d lived in the house

        Goodrich continued to sweep even though the floor was clean. He went into the closet for what must have been the 10^th time that day, turning the light on, looking into the built-in drawers, and brushing the inside with his hands as if trying to find something. He went as far as pulling the drawers out, looking into the dark recess. For what? For something he couldn’t leave behind?

        He walked into the small bedroom on the left of the hall, the one that had been Joshua’s, and started sweeping once again. He pulled the broom along the wide pine floorboards tracing the scratch marks his son had made with his toy cars. He opened the low cabinets to sweep inside those, noticing for the first time in years the chew marks their Labrador, Rafter, had made when he was a puppy and had long since been painted over many times. With one sweep of the broom, he heard something snap against the edge of the shelf. He put his hand inside to feel for what made the sound. It was a little green plastic soldier. “Army man,” his son would say, in the pose of throwing a hand grenade. His son had dozens of those at one time, lost in backyard battles or tossed as soldiers gave way to model planes and planes to guitars, guitars to books, and the books to Goodwill and the local put-and-take.

        Goodrich’s fingers trembled a bit as he held the figure in both hands and smiled at the image of his son playing with them on the floor, and flicking marbles in the guise of cannonballs bowling through their ranks. His son would wear all manners of headgear, from an old army helmet to a Cub Scout cap to a broad-brimmed cowboy hat depending on the battles being fought. He put the soldier in his pocket. Leaving, he turned to look once more, closing the door, and then reopening it wide, recalling the days when his son wanted the door open to the hall light.

        He next went into the big room that had been Wes’s, the one with the fireplace. It’s where they’d all slept during the first big renovation. The boys loved sleeping near the blazing fire, especially when they lost electricity in a storm, which happened frequently before the generator was installed. Goodrich started to sweep again, diligently and deliberately, although sure he wasn’t getting any dust. The cleaners had been quite thorough.

        He went along the wide wainscoting that, like so much, was original to the house. “Chestnut,” the historian from SPNEA had said. “My goodness, imagine the tree this came from. Early 1800s if not older.” Wes had carved his name and birth date into it, near the floor, when he was seven. At first, Goodrich had been angry, but his wife had admonished him. ”He’s added some of our history and I think that’s wonderful.” Afterward, Goodrich carved all their names and birthdays low on the wainscoting, imagining kids 50, 100, years from finding it and wondering who these people were. Goodrich found ash in the fireplace and rubbed it between his fingers; he couldn’t remember the last time there’d been a fire in it, yet he could detect the smell of old wood smoke. He put his hand on the mantle and bent over, getting on his knees to feel around, recalling the night they’d thrown some pennies into the blaze to see if they would melt. Indian head pennies they’d found in the attic. “Treasure!” Josh had exclaimed. “It’s all a treasure, Josh. We live in a treasure chest!”

        Goodrich continued from room to room, moving slowly, touching the walls, the guard rails, breathing in the woody mustiness, and sensing it as if for the first time. “Why didn’t I appreciate that before?” he asked himself. “I should have bottled it.”

        Easing down the front stairs on his aged legs, Goodrich turned to look back from the lower landing, imagining the boys barreling down early on Christmas mornings to open gifts. His eyes started to swell from the memories. He swirled his hand in the air, “I wish I could wave a wand…”

        He walked slowly down the main hall into the living room, the formal living room, which was never to be formal with its four large windows that faced southeast and southwest and took in the morning and evening sun. It, too, had a fireplace, a deep one with a crane that held a pot he once tried to boil maple sap in after Josh—or was it Wes—had read about maple syrup in a book. The sap had boiled but filled with ashes and covered the bricks in a sticky coating he’d spent hours cleaning. The boys loved it, however, and poured the syrup on snow to eat like pudding.

        Goodrich swept this room, as well, trying to take up the old needles nestled in the wide spaces between the floorboards. He took up a pinch, about all he could get, and held them to his nose, detecting the faint hint of balsam as he crunched the dried needles in his fingers. Didn’t they once make balsam tea, a scout project for Josh? It was awful.

        The needles were still awful, bitter. He spit them out, sweeping the remnants into the fireplace. He looked around, thinking how empty it was. He heard scratching and thought about when they discovered a squirrel’s nest behind the fireplace, but it was only the holly bush by the window holding a cardinal on a branch.

        The bird flew off in a red flash when he approached the window, as though it had never been there. “Off to your own nest, your eminence!” he said with a smile. “Home you go!”

        He went back around, one more time, and then to the kitchen, which too had a fireplace, a massive one you could walk into. It had a bread oven on the side. He opened the cabinets and doors, which were clean as a whistle. There wasn’t anything left for him to do.

        Looking at his watch, inevitably running too quickly, he looked out the window at the growing shadows. Time to move, the moment he once had looked forward to but now dreaded. One final walk around? Had he shut the lights off?

        Goodrich eyed the built-in bench by the fireplace where they had kept Rafter’s food and bowls and then Barney’s after and Aretoo’s later on. He lifted the seat looking for something, forgot what he had in mind, and sat on down, leaning his arm on the counter. He closed his eyes and thought back.

        “Dad, dad!” yelled the little boy crawling on his lap. “C’mon! We gonna open the presents.” His little brother in a onesie getting a bit competed with the young yell lab to climb onto Goodrich’s lap.

“Dada, pleasants!” The dog just licked the residual crumbs off the boy’s face.

        Goodrich rose as his wife came into the kitchen. “A wee bit much last night?” she asked with raised eyebrows. “Dad’s already in the living room demanding another cup of coffee. I’ll get you one, too. Let’s go.”

        He grabbed the boys to him and let the dog lick his face as much as he liked. “Let’s go?” he said to them. “Let’s go? Not a chance. No. Never.”