Howard Axelrod - The Point of Vanishing: A Memoir of Two Years in Solitude

The house wasnt something you stumbled upon by accident. It wasnt something you passed going anywhere else. To get there you drove through Glover, Vermonta general store, no traffic light, one Busy Bee Dinerclimbed along switchbacks through maples, evergreens, and birches, then turned left onto a wide dirt road. You passed the barn and blue silo of the Mooreland dairy farm, snaked past a few scattered houses and trailers, then followed deeper into the woods, the maples tapped, tubed, and strung together like prisoners on a chain gang, as it was early March now, sugar season. A few miles in, at a mailbox nobody used, you forked off the wide dirt road onto an unmaintained narrow lane, the deeper snow tugging at your car as though part of a different gravity. You slipped through a tunnel of overhanging trees, came to an empty field bordered by tall pines, then passed an uninhabited house, its siding job left unfinished, then followed as the road dwindled into what seemed only the ghost of a roadno car tracks but your own, the twin trail in the snow behind you like a vestige of the two ruts in summer, when the weeds between them would grow taller than your hood. A small meadow opened on your left, three gnarled apple trees glimmering in the sunlight like chandeliers, and beyond the meadow was the beginning again of forest, with little promise of a house at all. From there, just inside the buried fence-posts, you walked. And at the bottom of the steep grade, with its sky-blue paint flaking, its lines badly canted, sat the two-story house, like a sunken ship.

Not much from the outside world found me there. In the year and a half since Id moved in, there had never been a knock on the door. I had no television, no computer, no cell phone. There was a land line, which rang maybe twice a month, so a wrong number was an event. As for other news, the yellowing issues of the Newport Chronicle, stacked in the corner by the woodstove, reported on beaver problems, church suppers, DWI charges, and missing dogs, but all from years past. Sometimes, kindling the fires embers at dawn, Id find myself wondering about a handsome spotted pointer or the cutest darn black mutt you ever saw. But then Id notice the newspapers date: those dogs had lighted out for their canine dreams two summers earlier, long before the snows.

The only news that didnt reach me with a kind of ghostliness came through the houses windows or from my daily walks up into the woods. Clouds wrestling on a blustery afternoon, sunlight opening through the birches as though from behind a curtain. Slow flurries descending towards dusk. And about once a week, if the roads were clear, Id make the drive down into the town of Barton for groceries at the C&C, then up the curving road to the Lake Parker General Store. West Glovers tiny post office hid at the back of the store, in an elevator-sized room with bars and a window, as though it had once been the towns tiny bank. The young woman behind the counter was no more than eighteen, lovely and bovine in her slowness. She would walk the dirt-worn floorboards very deliberately, past the cooler full of milk, past the six packs of beer, past the canned goods, then enter the post office and check the box for General Delivery. Not wanting to make her any more self-conscious, or myself any more aware of what it would mean to be alone with a woman again, Id wait up at the counter. When she returned, shed blush like something blooming in one of those time-lapse nature movies, the red rising up her neck, then her cheek, the blush all the more vivid when there was no mail for me. Maybe this was because I looked something like a wild animalshaggy beard, eyes too intense. Or maybe it was just because my voice had gone unused since my last trip to the store, and, when I thanked her, too much feeling was stored up inside it. Even to me, my words seemed to come from far away, as though they required travel time, like light from a distant star.

So on that moonless March night, when three raps came at the mudroom door, surprise wasnt the word for my response. Each rap sounded alarmingly inside the house, hardening the posts and beams into place. A current ran through my bodya rattling, physical charge. The blue candle guttered on the table. It seemed I was underwater and something was bobbing on the surface far above me. In the darkened windows to the woods, the reflection of my dinner flickered soft and shadowy, more the idea of a dinner than anything solid. And my image flickered just the same.