The Good Neighbor by William Kowalski Read Free Book Online Page B

sleepy.”
    “But do I?”
    “Of course you do,” he said. “Why do you always feel the need to quiz me on our relationship after we have sex?”
    “I do not.”
    “Always.”
    “I’m sorry,” she said, looking up at the ceiling again. “Are we go ing to stay here for a while?”
    “I wanna take a nap.”
    He lay with his back to her. Francie grabbed the remote and flicked on the TV. A man and a woman lay in bed and nuzzled each other. The woman was wearing a silk nightgown and the man was wearing silk boxer shorts. The sheets of their bed were silky-looking, too. They lived in a silk world. Francie muted the television and watched with envy as these people talked gently to each other, imagining what they were saying, trying to read their lips, trying to figure out how it was really done.

    5 ‌

    A Historical Digression

    A dencourt was built, in its slapdash fashion, on the orders (and with the considerable family fortune, got by the slave trade)
    of Captain Victor T. Musgrove, gentleman-hero of the Mexican- American War of 1848, and of several unnamed Indian campaigns before then. Captain Musgrove knew a fair bit about one or two things, including Indian warfare and a couple of native languages, but was completely ignorant of everything else, including the principles of architecture. This didn’t matter in the slightest, as far as building the house was concerned; for the Captain consid ered himself to be a man of impeccable taste, and no one was rich enough to contradict him.
    Adencourt was one of those spectacularly solid and impenetrable homes of which it was said, even one hundred fifty years ago, that it would last at least one hundred fifty years. One could tell this just by looking at it. It was a breathing, alert thing, looking something like a submarine monster: the vast, oaken panel of the front door like a mouth agape; the windows, its many blank eyes; the roof, by turns gabled, peaked, flattened, and widow’s-walked, a ridiculous
    46 W ILLIAM K OWALSKI

    hairline; and the two large wings, northern and southern, a pair of clawless appendages. Its skeleton of hand-smoothed beams was connected by a kind of joint known as mortis-and-tenon, carved with mallet and chisel by carpenters skilled in arts hardly anyone remembers today, except Luddites and Amishmen. The carapace was motley clapboard of a half-dozen tones, all variations on the theme of dirty white. Were you to go over the whole thing with a metal detector, you’d find scarcely a nail in it. It was put together with hand-whittled pegs, like some sort of giant Chinese puzzle. The frame, that is. The drywall had to be hung with nails; there just wasn’t any other way. But that, of course, was a recent addi tion.
    The house’s bones were cherry, ash, and oak, grown from the very earth on which it stood now. Some of its beams, the ones you rarely saw unless you descended deep into its bowels, were thicker than a man—these were the spine and ribs of the house. It was a strong house, a house built like a ship, or even better than a ship; it was a house that would float if set on the sea, a house that could never be broken. It was, in fact, a fortress. In certain rooms, the walls were still the original mixture of horsehair and plaster of paris, so springy that if you tried to drive a nail in, it came flying right back out at you, like a bullet.
    Until 1945, an old-fashioned carriage house with a turnabout had stood next to the barn. The carriage house had been knocked down with the intention of replacing it with a modern garage, but at the dawn of the twenty-first century, this improvement had yet to be accomplished. The barn was still there, however. It was older than the house by three years, and would likely continue to exist a while longer in its present form as a pile of ancient lumber, unless someone took a match to it—or it was hit by merciful lightning.
    Captain Victor T. Musgrove was commonly referred to by his neighbors as a