The People in the Trees by Hanya Yanagihara Read Free Book Online Page A

screeched so gratingly we tried never to open them, furniture that choked out great vogs of dust when we sat upon them. And then there was the debris, which had been vomited throughout every room—papers, crumpled boxes and cracked bottles, various neglected gadgets. My father hadn’t, presumably, been upstairs in some time, because the ladder, when Owen and I finally discovered it under the house, was rusty and unyielding after what must have been years of neglect. (Upstairs there was a mess of such proportions that contemplating it still exhausts me. We found a family of bats nesting in the beamsabove Owen’s bed, whole dynasties of mice, balls of dust as big as human heads, replete with snarls of unidentifiable hair.) But it was the staircase, its crude, old-fashioned primary colors deadened from age and dirt and the canopies of glittering spiderwebs that covered it, that gave us both pause.
    This was a massive staircase, and its collapse meant that my father was allowed only a small space—perhaps less than two hundred square feet—in which to live. It had bisected the living room, so that in order to enter the kitchen, one would first have to go outside and around the house to the kitchen door. In the summertime this was merely inconvenient, but in the winter, with its harsh winds and buffets of snow, such a trek would be arduous for even a young person. Because there was no makeshift bed in his small living quarters, and because my father had been discovered lying facedown in the grass some yards from the house early that March, we concluded that he must have been attempting to stagger to the kitchen—which was dismayingly ill-stocked: just a few tins of tomatoes and a can of mushroom soup—when he had his heart attack. (We later discovered a sad little bed constructed from some deteriorating quilts and an old sofa cushion in the little lean- to formed by the outside wall and the screened-in sunporch attached to the back of the living room.) It would therefore not be too great an exaggeration to say that the staircase was responsible for killing my father, although ultimately he killed himself with his own laziness. Even his suicide was an act of characteristic passivity.
    I was torn between sympathy for and annoyance with my father’s pathetic end. What can you say of a man who neglects his house until his house destroys him? Really, though, I was sorrier about my staircase, although it was purely a nostalgic reaction. As I had grown older, it had only irritated with its childishness in both conception and execution, and although I always said I would, I never did find the time to paint it over. Shades, I suppose, of my father yet.

    Neither Owen nor I placed much value on funerals, but partly from a sort of guilt at the humiliating way in which our father had died, and partly out of guilt for not having attended our mother’s funeral, we found a small church and convinced the local pastor, aman whose name I no longer remember (Reverend Cunningham having long since died), to perform the services.
    Only a dozen or so people appeared at the funeral to mourn my father’s death. Lester Drew had been institutionalized by his niece after he had had a severe stroke some years before, and so the only people in attendance were curious townsfolk, most of whom we didn’t recognize, and some former employees of my father’s, farmers and sharecroppers mostly, of whom we had dim recollections. I think some people were there simply to see how a rich man dies. 10 I imagine that the whole affair must have been a great disappointment to them—the shabby church, the pastor’s vague and tentative sermon, the unenthusiastic expressions on my and Owen’s faces, the scarcity of people and the absence of friends and family. If this was how one of the richest men in town was laid to rest, they must have thought, what bleak ceremony (if any at all) awaited them? Had we not been so young and callous, we would have thrown a more