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A rather reclusive elderly uncle had died in Vermont and left his niece a small inheritance. The windfall was totally unexpected, so the news was met by the niece and her husband and their three sons with an almost giddy fascination. But only Donnie, the youngest boy, knew what they should do about it, as now he presumed they had enough for a down payment on a house he had seen advertised in the classified section of the local newspaper. This was one of Donnie’s pastimes. He often scanned real estate ads with the zeal of a Trappist monk. For years he had yearned for a conventional home with a yard, a driveway, a basketball hoop and other regular attributes. Now the convenient (and not especially sad) death of a half-forgotten relative had put this dream within reach. He begged his parents to call the realtor and set up an appointment for them to view the property, which they finally did, simply to shut the youngster up, as he had just turned 13 and had relentless and agonizing powers of persuasion.
The place was situated a few miles from the center of town, off a dirt road which was pocked with deep ruts and frost heaves, though the house itself was set prettily among some stately pines. It was obvious upon arrival that the dwelling was really only a summer cottage, haphazardly winterized and more in need of intensive care than the TLC the ad had mentioned. Also, the space wasn’t really all that much larger than their rental apartment in town. The structure even seemed to lurch with exhaustion as they crossed its wormy, scarred floors. Yet Donnie’s enthusiasm was brimming over as he darted about the little house with breathless and somewhat irritating abandon.
Back in town, he proceeded to do research in the library about the basics of home buying; knowing that neither of his parents possessed anything resembling a business head. At dinner, when Donnie was able to get their attention, he would try to explain the virtue of ownership, using a deliberately calm voice, as if he was handling a hostage negotiation — because it actually felt like his own future was being held captive. The cheerless flat where the family had always lived was over a hardware store in a depressed town in southern New Hampshire — a place which had been, according to historical accounts, livelier and more promising before the mill closed down nearly fifty years before. The downtown district, where the apartment was located, was strewn with perpetually failing businesses and shuttered storefronts. A rather unclean river ran along the main thoroughfare in a sluggish fashion and the whole area suggested a certain grim predisposition for hard luck. In this way, Donnie felt his parents fit right in.
You reached the apartment by climbing a narrow staircase from an entrance in an alleyway. Donnie’s mother and father had the only real bedroom. The two older boys, Thomas and Nathan, ages 17 and 15, shared a small room off the kitchen that was supposed to be a pantry, but now held bunk beds and an overfull bureau stacked with piles of clothes. Donnie slept on a convertible sofa, which was comfortable enough but was positioned along a peeling wall in the shadowy and cluttered living room.
His mother and father, when they worked at all, did so at the local businesses, as long as an establishment remained viable or as long as they could muster the motivation to stay employed. They sometimes got hired together, as a package deal, and were known to up and leave jobs for better opportunities that turned out to be right across the street. Like window shoppers, they ambled to and from low paying positions all over town, from the drugstore to the mini-mart to the clutch of fast food restaurants along what passed for the town’s strip mall.
Their erratic employment had less to do with laziness than eccentricity. You could say their true ambitions were lavished elsewhere. Donnie’s mother was an unpublished poet who wrote sonnets about house pets; while his father was a Civil War buff who’d been working for years on the biography of an obscure Union general that no one had asked him to write. They shared a desk tucked in the corner of the messy kitchen. It was heaped with dictionaries, research materials and a tottering accumulation of their handwritten pages. This was way back when only the most affluent and forward-thinking people in town owned computers, and Donnie’s parents certainly did not fall into this category. The family did not even possess a typewriter. All their writing was done in longhand. Donnie might have appreciated his parents’ creative efforts more if everything else had been more normal; if for instance he didn’t have to move a coffee table and two wobbly arm chairs to make his bed at night.
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About Bill Gaythwaite
