[“Still Time” returns to Vermont, where winter rages.
January
“Henry, Henry.” Grace, in a flannel bathrobe, is sitting on the bed, gently and patiently shaking her husband’s shoulder. His eyes flutter open, and he answers with a murmur that morphs into a “good morning.”
“What’s the worst news I could possibly give you?”
“You’re pregnant.”
“Worse than that.”
“We’ve invaded Greenland.”
“Much worse than that.”
He opens his eyes fully. “Give it to me straight, Doctor.”
“The pipes in the downstairs bathroom are frozen.” He mutters and slumps. “Have you tried the hair dryer?”
“I’ve tried everything. That’s what I’ve been doing for the last hour. And I called Emil, but his wife says he is out dealing with a bunch of no-heat situations, so he can’t come out.”
“Okay,” says Henry, resigned and suddenly grim. “Is there coffee?”
“Waiting for you.” Grace stands, turns, and heads back to the kitchen. She is 74, with straight gray hair that falls to her shoulders. Even in her floppy flannel bathrobe, however, she is trim and erect.
Henry, 73, throws off the covers. He is naked and sits on the edge of the bed, eyeing the bedside clock. 6:05 a.m. No hint of the morning sun yet. His tangled hair, more white than gray, is askew. He won’t bother to brush it until he comes back. He stands and points himself toward the bathroom. “A man’s gotta do what a man’s got to do,” he thinks.
In the bathroom, he looks out at the bottomless western sky, which is the purple-black of the Blue Norther. A frozen quarter moon hangs at ten o’clock, with a point of light just below it that he guesses is Venus. “Sunovabitch,” Henry says to no one.
By the time he comes downstairs, the kitchen is bright and bustling, a yellow-lit sanctuary against the postdawn frost. Grace provides what comfort she can as her man goes off to do battle with a silent but lethal foe. She tops off his coffee, steam rising.
“Think it’s time to revisit the southern strategy?” she says. This is a longstanding joke between them about the eventual reality of not being able to cope with the maintenance needs of The ’Stead or the challenges of a Vermont winter. Florida, they joke, is where old pipes go to stay liquid.
“Talk to me when I come back,” he says grimly. He now puts on his game face. “It’s not my first rodeo, you know.”
That is true, but it has been several years since he has had to go into the crawl space to thaw pipes. A decade earlier, they reinsulated the floor beneath that part of the house. That, combined with generally milder winters, has mostly eliminated the problem. At the moment, however, they are in the grip of an old-fashioned Arctic Dome. Polar air envelops the entire Northeast like an igloo.
Henry swaddles himself in wool. This isn’t a job for a quilted puffer. Nylon melts, and down is useless when you are dragging your chest through frozen grit. This is a job for layers: a thermal undershirt, a heavy wool shirt, the red-plaid jacket from Johnson Woolen Mill that smells of thirty years of woodsmoke, and the wool pants he saves for deer-hunting season. He waddles down the cellar stairs for the propane torch and flint. He lights the torch, a blue cone of focused heat hissing in the dark. Once, he made the mistake of going down with a dead torch. It is a mistake you make only once. He puts on his wool toque, then adds a headlamp.
In the shed he grabs a garden shovel. This is not a snow shovel job. He’ll be digging through frozen crud, specifically the massive, jagged fallen icicles that he and Grace have been dutifully knocking off the roof since just after deer season.
He pauses momentarily in the kitchen. Grace steps forward to give him the ritual kiss, her lips warm against his cold cheek—a seal of protection. “Wish me luck,” he says, “and if I don’t make it back, just leave me down there until the spring thaw. Then, wheel me up to the compost.”
The Descent
The digging is brutal. The “hatch” is a wooden square set low into the stone foundation of the ell, buried under two feet of wind-driven powder and a crust of ice. Every thrust of the shovel vibrates up Henry’s arms, stinging his elbows. His breath comes in ragged, white plumes. He knows it is well below zero. After fifteen minutes of frantic digging, he exposes the wood.
“I was a young man the last time I did this,” he says aloud to the indifferent hemlocks. “Now, I’m an old fuck.”
He kneels in the snow, knees cracking like pistol shots. He shoves a flashlight, the sparker, and the unlit torch into the dark maw of the crawl space first, turns on his headlamp, then exhales and follows.
The transition is jarring. Outside is the blinding white of the sunlit snow; inside is a lightless, airless tomb. The space is barely eighteen inches high in some spots. He crawls on his belly, his wool jacket bunching at his armpits. The ground is a mixture of frozen dirt and ancient sawdust.
Does anything live down here? he wonders. He imagines a family of rats, or perhaps a slumbering woodchuck, waking up to find a gasping, wool-clad giant invading their sanctuary. Do they hibernate, or are they watching me right now with black, beady eyes, wondering if my boots are edible?
He drags himself forward another five feet. Within minutes, he realizes the sensation in his toes is fading. Great. Henry the One-Toed sloth. He pushes on, imagining himself as a grunt in World War I, tunneling beneath the German lines. He tries to think of the name of a wintertime battle. “The Ardennes,” he finally comes up with. “Close e-fucking-nuff. Vermont is a helluva lot colder than France.”
Finally, he reaches the elbow—the Achilles heel of The ’Stead’s plumbing. He finds the scraps of wood he left there years ago. They are dry, thank God. He stacks them into a makeshift cradle, positions the torch nozzle three inches from the copper pipe, opens the valve, and strikes the flint.
Clack. Clack. Whoosh. The blue flame roars into life, reflecting off the copper and the frost-covered stones. The heat is immediate and intense, but localized. Henry settles onto his side, his head resting on his bicep, and prepares for the long wait. The torch hisses—a steady, hypnotic drone that begins to peel back the layers of his consciousness.
His mind drifts, as it eventually does in the dark, to Grace. He remembers the first time he saw her, not here in Vermont, but decades ago, in the office of his boss, Pierce Holmgren. She was the wife of a college president then—an elegant woman with laughing eyes. Henry was married, too, with teenage children and a problematic marriage, with a wife dealing with mental illness.
His mind shifts to his daughter, Haley, now 49, a marine biologist living in the island nation of Vanuatu in the South Pacific, where she studies giant clams. That’s as much as Henry knows. “Should I call you Doctor Trottier?” he asked on their last phone call, forgetting that she had taken her husband’s name, Mallory. Next to Grace, she’s the woman he admires most on the planet. “Excuse me, Doctor Mallory.” He just wishes she didn’t live so damn far away.
Haley took her mother Bobbi’s death almost in stride, not unfeelingly, but almost as if she understood her mother’s illness and could see suicide as a viable, even logical, solution. Everyone predicted a delayed reaction that never came. He couldn’t say the same for his son, Burton, two years Haley’s senior. Burton disintegrated and entered a tunnel he still hasn’t fully emerged from.
Henry’s right calf suddenly cramps, causing a yelp of pain. Instinctively, he straightens his leg. All he can do is try to relax it and ride out the pain. He’s making progress when his cell phone rings. It’s Grace. He fumbles to answer. “Yeah?” “You all right?” “Yup. Leg cramp.” “You want to come out?” “Can’t … I’m on top of it.”
Yeah, Burton. Burton, Burton, Burton. Bobbi named him after the actor Richard Burton, probably because he was married to Elizabeth Taylor, then reputedly the most beautiful woman in the world. Bobbi wanted to be Liz.
It was Grace, as much as anyone, who pried Burton out of his tunnel. Henry brought him up to The ’Stead for summer visits and let him horse around on the tractor, showing off for her own daughters, Harlow and Loren. Somehow, it worked.
He remembers the first time he made love to Grace. They hadn’t seen each other for two years after Bobbi’s death, when she showed up unannounced at the Court Street Bobbin Mill, which he was renovating. He was escorting her out when she asked to use the ladies’ room before leaving. The only ladies’ room in this 90,000-square-foot monstrosity was in the Trottier residence, he told her, changing course toward the modest apartment where he lived with his teenagers, who were at school. Once inside, she pulled him to her and kissed him … hard. After they made love … wildly … she looked at him and said, “It was a trap all along,” and he responded, “How could I have been such a fool?”
The memory always made him laugh aloud.
His phone buzzes again. He struggles to peel off a heavy glove using his teeth.
“You okay?” It is Grace. “I thought I heard laughing.”
“I’m just peachy! Thought of something funny. I’ll tell you later. Nothing happening yet. My foot’s a block of ice, and I’m pretty sure I’m being watched by a hibernating skunk, but otherwise, I’m living the Vermont dream.”
“Can I do anything?”
“Use your X-ray vision to thaw this pipe. You got the tap open?”
“Yeah. I’m standing right over it. I can hear the torch through the floorboards. It sounds like a heartbeat.”
“Then that’s all you can do. Think spring, Grace. Think lilacs.”
“I will.”
He drops the phone and sighs. The torch is doing its work. He looks at the copper pipe. It is sweating now, the frost melting into beads of water that sizzle when they hit the hot metal.
He thinks of Burton again. His son is a man now, well … more of a man-child … running an indoor golf business and divorced from Jody. Why? Jody is young, vibrant, and looked up to Burton with the same intense adoration Grace’s teenage daughters had shown all those summers ago. Fuck.
He feels a sudden, sharp pinch in his calf. The cramp is back. He flinches but stifles the yell. He doesn’t want another phone call. Sonuvabitch! Is that movement? He swivels the headlamp but sees only dust and dark. Spider? Rat? Or just his own nerves playing tricks in the subzero tomb?
He closes his eyes for a second, feeling the house vibrate. He can hear Grace’s footsteps. She is pacing, waiting.
And then, it happens, starting as a low whistle, deep inside the plumbing. Then a gurgle, like a giant clearing its throat. Finally, a violent, rattling thunk vibrates through the elbow.
Above him, he hears a muffled shriek of triumph.
“It’s running! Henry, it’s running!”
“Praise the goddamn lord!” Henry shouts.
He doesn’t move immediately, savoring his moment, lying on his side in the dirt, watching the blue flame hiss. The water is flowing. Life is returning to the downstairs bathroom. The ’Stead has withstood the onslaught of nature.
He extinguishes the torch. The darkness rushes back in, but it doesn’t feel heavy anymore. He begins the long, awkward reverse-crawl back toward the hatch and the light, a wounded soldier dragging his numb foot.
When his head finally breaks the plane of the hatch, and the sub-zero air hits his sweaty face, he sees Grace. She is standing on the top step to the porch, still in her flannel bathrobe, her hair whipped by the Blue Norther, holding a fresh cup of coffee like a trophy.
“You made it,” she says, her eyes crinkling.
“I told you,” Henry grunts, hauling himself out of the hole and into the blinding morning light. “It’s not my first rodeo.”
He stands, his legs shaking, and leans against the side of the house. The sun is just barely peeking above the tops of the pines, about as high as it gets in January. He takes the cup, his fingers still smelling of propane and old earth, and they walk back toward the warmth of the woodstove.