"The Cottage" by Ron Rash

Ron Rash is the author of the PEN/Faulkner finalist and New York Times bestselling novel Serena, in addition to the critically acclaimed novels The Caretaker, The Risen, Above the Waterfall, The Cove, One Foot in Eden, Saints at the River, and The World Made Straight; five collections of poems; and seven collections of stories, among them Burning Bright, which won the 2010 Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, Nothing Gold Can Stay, a New York Times bestseller, Chemistry and Other Stories, which was a finalist for the 2007 PEN/Faulkner Award, and In the Valley. Three times the recipient of the O. Henry Prize, his books have been translated into seventeen languages. He teaches at Western Carolina University. “The Cottage” is from a new, unpublished short story collection titled The Far and the Near.

The Cottage

An open window with a shattered windowpane. That is what I notice first when I arrive. Break-ins have happened before, which is unsurprising since I come to the cottage so seldom. Though no vehicle is around, a boat could be shoaled nearby. Slipping up on people has its risks so, just in case someone’s inside, I do not cut the truck’s engine. Instead, I back out and drive down to the dock. The gray deck slats creak as I walk to where they end, check the shoreline. Empty. I gaze out at the deeper water that was once a valley.

When the power company took land for the reservoir, the family who adopted me was allowed to keep what wasn’t submerged. Six lakeside acres were better than thirty-five of farmland, my father always said and Uncle Boyd, who owned the mercantile across the cove, also agreed. Their mother did not. She’d grown up in the two-story house that was now underwater. But what upset her most was the “relocation,” as the power company called it, of seventeen graves in the family cemetery. Such souls would sense their displacement, she believed, thus never rest easy.

Only streams pure enough to support trout flow into this lake, so on a windless day you can peer down from a boat and see the family farmhouse with such clarity you expect someone to step out the front door, look up at your boat as if a passing cloud. When I was fifteen, a curious scuba diver drifted through the farmhouse’s front door to discover what was within. Once inside something happened and he was unable to find his way out. I remember the ambulance lights bleeding across the surface.

By the time I return to the cottage, any intruder, if there earlier, has surely left, but I open the front door cautiously. Nothing in the front room or kitchen appears missing. Which is not surprising. Like others who’d broken in, this person found nothing of real value—no computer or VCR—the television and microwave old and unwieldy. Little has changed since my childhood and adolescence, when my schoolteacher parents used this cottage as a summer retreat from students and administrators.  During those free months I spent my days swimming, fishing, and canoeing, usually alone.

Although I didn’t have to be alone. As I was first told at age eight, sometimes a young woman had a baby she could not raise herself, so these special babies, and I was one, were chosen to be in a family. Not adopted, chosen, my parents explained, and family meant extended family also. Uncle Boyd had children about my age, and they, like their parents, never made me feel otherwise.  If I wished for a free snack and soft drink or someone to play with, all I had to do was paddle across the lake. 

It’s a warm day for late September, so I sweep up the glass shards but leave the window open. The room has the damp-newspaper smell of places long shut. I check the two bedrooms and bathroom, last the screened-in porch where my parents spent their summer evenings. All is as it was four months ago—the same two deck chairs facing the dock, rusty wind chimes tangled like fishing line. After bringing in my suitcase and weekend provisions, I still need milk, caulk, and a glass pane. If I hadn’t sold the canoe, I could risk a few sore muscles and paddle the quarter mile to the mercantile, but instead I get in the truck and follow the lake’s slow curve to the opposite shore. Though the morning is warm, it is after Labor Day, so most of the rentals and summer homes are vacant. The road straightens. The gravel parking lot is paved, but the porch and requisite rocking chairs are the same as in my childhood. Boyd’s Mercantile is painted on a graying plank above the door. 

A bell tinkles overhead as I enter. Much here is also how it was. Rubber-bladed ceiling fan, bare bulbed lights, puncheon flooring showing saw marks. As with the porch and signage, the folksiness appeals to tourists and second-home owners. Though there are changes. The metal drink box has been replaced by a wall-wide cooler. Beside the National Cash register are a scanner and credit card processor.

“Be with you in a second,” a familiar voice says from the storage room.

I get the milk and bring it to the counter as Charlene comes out, dusting her hands on an apron.

“Hello, cousin,” she says, smiling. “I’ve been thinking you’d come for a visit eventually. What’s the occasion?”

For the moment, caulk and a 6 x 8 glass pane,” I answer, “that and the milk.”

 “Break-in?”

 “Yes, but no damage besides the window. Nothing stolen.”

 “Likely some high school kids,” Charlene says. “Six by eight, you said?”

I nod and she disappears into the storage room, comes back and sets the caulk and glass pane beside the milk. She bags the milk and caulk but doesn’t pick up the scanner.

 “Cousin Nell died in March,” Charlene tells me, unsurprised at my perfunctory “Sorry to hear that.” There were times in my twenties and thirties when she lectured me about the importance of family ties, but we’re past that now. “And Janie’s husband,” she adds, watching me more carefully. “Did you know?”

I shake my head.

 “I didn’t either until a few months ago,” Charlene says. “You know, I always thought you two would end up together. So did your parents.”

 “Sometimes things don’t work out,” I answer.

I take out my credit card and set it on the counter. As always, Charlene protests, but knowing I’m adamant scans the items and returns my card. While I gather what I’ve bought, she asks if I’m staying for the weekend and I say yes.

“Well, come by tonight,” she says. “We’ve got a first-rate bluegrass band playing at seven. and Bo Triplett will be selling barbecue.  It’ll get cool once the sun goes down, but I’ll have a kettle of cider, with some special flavoring for the grownups, if you know my meaning. You’ll find something there to make it worth your time,” she adds, giving me a mischievous smile.

“Maybe I will,” I answer.

Heading back to the cottage, I near the boat ramp turnoff where Janie and I would kiss goodbye forever. This was late-August of 1968. To a younger generation, that might bring up images of love beads and peace signs, but that August was more like the aftermath of 9/11. The King and Kennedy assassinations made clear violence wasn’t contained an ocean away. Something in the country had gone terribly wrong, and the nation wanted some explanation as to why. Using Richard Speck, who’d killed eight student nurses in Chicago, as a harbinger, two Harvard researchers offered an explanation: Speck’s xyy chromosome. When prison research in Britain offered further alleged evidence, everyone from Walter Cronkite to the New York Times reported on the “violence gene.” In the Columbia newspaper, which my parents read, a psychologist’s op-ed went so far as to name likely “xyy carriers” in our own state.

Which is why as I drive past the boat ramp’s turn off, I am not recalling that last night I saw Janie. Instead, a memory of entering a dim-lit room whose rowed seating first evoked a chapel, the chair itself priestly with its high back and long wide arms. Until, stepping closer, noticing the drawn-back curtain, the leather straps and black cables,

What you wanting to know?

Are you present when it happens?

Haven’t missed one in twenty-three years.

You were here when Lee Gaskins was executed?

After a few moments, he grins and answers.

 I thought I seen something familiar in you.

Back at the cottage, I replace the pane and caulk the edges. Then I walk around the cottage. No visible termite damage and the roof looks to last another year, but the gutters need replacing and that cannot wait until spring. I tell myself, as I often have since inheriting this property seven years ago, that I should sell it. But my surveying business has done well so I don’t need the money. It would also feel like a refutation of two people who had never consciously made me feel anything less than their own child.  

 After I eat a sandwich, I go to the bookshelf. You need only to peruse its contents to know my parents both taught History, but there are also paperback novels. I remove one, take a lawn chair from the closet, and walk down to the dock. The trees are starting to turn and with the blue sky and calm water, a good day to be up here. I read a while, then set down the book, and close my eyes. When I awake, I read until shadows make the words hard to see. I close the book but don’t get up. 

On summer evenings in1968, I’d leave my parents on the screened-in porch and come down here. I’d place my tackle box, flashlight, and Zebco in the canoe and paddle away from the cove. All day you heard splashes and shouts, boat and jet ski engines, on the shore lawnmowers and weed eaters, but come evening the water calmed. As last light drained behind the willows, the cottages ringing the lake lost definition. I would pass them unseen. From the screened-in porches, music or a ball game, ice resettling in a glass or a cigarette lighter snapped. And voices, soft and intimate yet discernable. Unlike previous summers, however, this year my rod and reel remained in the bow.

I paddled steadily on to the next cove’s boat ramp where Janie waited. She drove up from Seneca on these weekday evenings, needing only to get back in time to pick up her mother, who worked a three to eleven shift at the hospital. As I approached the dock, I’d point the flashlight and click it on and off. If Janie was already there, her headlights blinked. But I tried to arrive first, enjoying the anticipation, teasing myself that this time she might not be able to come, which made it all the better when I saw her car lights on the access road. She’d take the quilt from the back seat and lock the car. Then I’d row us to a diving dock at the cove’s center. 

“Do your parents ever wonder why you don’t catch any fish?” Janie asked one night.

“I tell them I let them go.”

“You don’t tell them you caught a pretty girl.”

“And let her go?”

“You’d better not,” Janie said.

“Never,” I’d vowed.

Had my parents known about these rendezvous, I doubt that it would have mattered much. Until my junior year in high school, I’d been an indifferent student, at times a discipline problem, including a fight in gym class. Then midway through the school year, Janie and I began dating. When my grades and attitude improved, enough so to get accepted at USC, my parents rightly believed Janie’s maturity and intelligence (enough to earn her a full scholarship to College of Charleston) was the cause. 

Once the canoe was secured, we’d place the quilt on the boards and lie down, find each other’s bodies as the diving dock swayed beneath us. Sometimes a faint light blossomed from distant storms. Most nights the stars were out. After we unclasped, we’d turn on our backs and gaze at them. With the sky wider and closer seeming, it was as if we lay on a cloud. Once a fisherman passed near, unnoticed until his lure plunked down inches from the dive dock, the lure wobbling back toward a boat silhouetted by a lantern’s glow.

When high-school sweethearts left for college, even the same college, most soon drifted apart. We’ll make it work, Janie had vowed, and for three years of college we had. Letters and phone calls, weekend bus trips from Columbia to Charleston, holiday breaks and summers back home. We were already planning our married life. With Janie’s nursing degree and mine in civil engineering, we could live almost anywhere, but we both loved the upstate so would look here first. Both of us knowing the problems of being an only child, we agreed on at least two children.    

“Mom mentioned yesterday that she was hoping she’d have some grandchildren,” Janie told me one night. “I’d say you’ve won her over.”

“It’s sure taken a while.”

“Well, you weren’t exactly an Eagle Scout when we started dating,” Janie chided. “She said my dad got into trouble as a teenager before seeming to straighten out. Then him up and suddenly leaving us like that. You can’t blame for not wanting that to happen to me.”

Before returning to the boat ramp, we’d go back the way I’d come, eavesdropping on the seven cottages between the two coves. It’s like turning a dial on a radio, Janie said. At the Hendersons, whose daughter was home from college, Frank Sinatra and the Beatles alternated. Mr. Hayes, who lived alone, listened to Braves games. We passed these to linger where voices filtered through porch screens. Certain topics predominated at each cottage. The Brocks, a retired couple, recited their various ailments as if in competition; the Harmons, also retired, argued local and national politics. The Lutzs spoke of their workday while the Teeters discussed their grandchildren. The Morrisons, two elderly sisters, discussed the news and linked it to Biblical prophecy.

After passing the Morrisons’ cottage, I’d turn the canoe around and paddle back to the boat ramp. I’d wait until Janie’s taillights disappeared before returning to the cottage. Nearing our cove, I clicked on the flashlight to see the dock and shore better. If my parents were on the porch, my father sometimes helped me beach the canoe.

Until the late July night when my thumb settled on the flashlight button and I hesitated. Perhaps my own thoughts of marriage and children made me more curious about their lives, though I don’t remember thinking that consciously.  For whatever reason or no real reason at all, I set the flashlight down, made several deep paddle strokes, and drifted into the cove.

The porch was dark except for the glow of a cigarette. My parents were complaining about Principal Skinner, which was not unusual, before switching to the classes they’d teach in the coming school year. For a minute they were silent. Thinking they were about to go inside, I dipped the paddle. Then my mother spoke.

“I know we’re right to never tell him, but if Daniel finds out another way. That article last month mentioned Gaskins by name.”

“Darlington’s far enough from here,” my father answered, “and the bastard’s dead and the adoption records sealed.”

“But if it is a matter of a chromosome, and the change that Janie’s made doesn’t last….”

Then the only sound was the waves’ soft slap against the dock. My parents got up and went inside. Later that night, I stared into the bathroom mirror, and as if for the first time, I saw how different I was—my dark hair and blue eyes, my sharper features, my height.

The next evening, I paddled out of the cove and to the lake’s deep water. As I drifted, Janie’s headlights flashed on and off. After a few more minutes, I picked up my flashlight, signaled back, and paddled toward her. Janie knew something was wrong right away, but it wasn’t until we were on the diving dock that I told her. She waited a few moments, thinking it out.

“It doesn’t matter who he was, Daniel. He’s dead.” Janie placed her hand on my cheek, drew our faces close. “Listen to me, parents are the two people who have been your parents, who show every day they love you.”

“But all this time, with their never mentioning him, it’s like I never thought about having a father.”

“You have a father,” Janie said. “I’m the one who doesn’t. It’s been over a year since I’ve heard from him.”

“But shouldn’t they tell me all they know?”

“Maybe they figure it doesn’t matter,” Janie answered.

“That’s not how it sounded.”

“They love you so they must have a good reason,” Janie said. “Maybe knowing who he was could cause problems for you, or for them, possibly legal ones. It could be something they can’t disclose until a specific time.”

I had not thought of that.

“It’s in the past so let it go,” Janie said as we lay down on the quilt. “We’ve got a future to think about.”

~~~~~~~~~~~ ~~~~

The bluegrass band is already playing when I arrive, the store’s porch serving as a stage. Some people sit on the concrete curbing the gas pumps, but most crowd closer to the musicians. The song is “Wayfaring Stranger” and the singer’s voice has a high-lonesome frailty that makes the lyrics all the more haunting. The guitarist, who like the singer appears about my age, is also very good, but it is the banjo player, who looks barely old enough to shave, who is most impressive, the notes of his three-finger picking distinctive but fluid.

I’m at the back of the crowd, but Charlene spots me.

 “That boy is their grandson,” Charlene says as she comes to stand beside me. “If he sticks with it, he might be the next Earl Scruggs.”

“I don’t know about that,” I answer, “but he is very good.”

 “I’m glad you came,” Charlene says, “and I’m not the only one.”

“How’s that?’

“My surprise,” Charlene says, and points to a woman standing at the back of the crowd.

“Janie?” I say after a few moments.

“She moved back last winter after her husband died, bought a cottage up near the dam.  Janie’s asked about you a couple of times. Perhaps old flames yet flicker,” Charlene says, smiling. “She’s done well for herself, though you might already know that. Perhaps an occasional internet search?”

I don’t answer, though several evenings after drinking too much I’d pulled up her married name, Janie Davis-Greenway, and learned that she was a pediatric nurse living in Raleigh.  Married and the mother of two children, both sons.

“I told her you might be here,” Charlene said, clasping my elbow.  “Let’s go say hello.”

I tell her I’d rather not but Charlene doesn’t let go of my arm. Instead, she raises her free hand high overhead to catch Janie’s eye.  She waves back.

“Come on,” Charlene says. “Not to say hello would be rude.”

We make our way to where Janie stands alone. Her hair is gray and short now, the face creased by time, though less so than mine. The green, almond-shaped eyes though, they are the same. I wonder if she finds something similarly unchanged in me. Likely not my eyes, enlarged as they are behind glasses. Perhaps she only sees what is not there—unlined face, thicker hair, trimmer waist.   

“I got the hermit out of his cave,” Charlene says, “so see what you can do with him.”

I’m unsure of the protocol—handshake, hug, kiss on the cheek—and Janie seems unsure too.

“Time to spike the cider,” Charlene says, and leaves us.

 Over the music, we make small talk like any former classmates might, turning our attention to the makeshift stage when our pauses linger. I’m already thinking of what I’ll say to Charlene about minding her own business, thinking also of what I should have done long ago—sell the cottage and leave this place behind for good.  As another song ends, I make an excuse to leave. 

“It’s been fifty years, Daniel,” Janie says. “Can’t we talk a few minutes, and somewhere quieter?”

“Alright,” I say.

Janie clasps my upper arm and guides me to a Ford Bronco parked by the road.  She gets in first, tosses CDs and a trail map into the back. I get in and close the passenger door.

After so long, our closeness has the time and space leap of a dream.  I smell her lavender fragrance, hear her breath, feel where her hand gripped my arm.

 “I’ve done some Google searches on you but found little except for your surveying business,” Janie says, gazing out the front window as she speaks. “It seems to have suited you having your own business.”

“I like being outdoors, that and being my own boss.”

“I worked as a nurse but last year I retired,” Janie says, “but I take it you haven’t?”.

“Maybe in a year or two,” I answer then pause. “Charlene told me about your husband. I’m sure that hasn’t been easy.”

“No, not easy. After living with a husband and two boys, a three-bedroom house can feel mighty empty. When I moved back to be closer to my son and grandchildren, I got a small place.”

“I hear your children have done well.”

“Yes. Bill’s a journalist. He and his partner live in England. Though I don’t see him much he stays in touch. Lance is a GP. He and his wife live in Greenville and have four children. It’s nice to be closer to them. One of my granddaughters is at Clemson so I see her. Rob and I had some rough patches in our marriage, but whatever our failures, at least we didn’t ruin our kids.” Janie smiles wryly. “Or maybe we were just lucky. I’ve known better parents whose children have struggled.  After all, despite each other’s flaws, the union had survived. More information than you wished for, I’m sure.”

 “It’s all right, I asked.”

 “Charlene says you never married.”

 “No.”

We are silent again. The musicians have taken a break and some people are leaving. A motorcycle engine revs, the sound diminishing as it speeds away.

]“Over the years there have been times I almost contacted you,” Janie says. “I wanted to understand what happened between us. Since I’ve moved back, I knew I’d eventually email or phone you, but then Charlene said you came up here every few months. I felt what I wanted to know would be better asked in person.”  Both of our eyes settle on the windshield, as we might at home looking out a window, as if suddenly speaking after so long, we need at least the illusion of distance.

“I’ve just had a strange thought,” Janie muses. “If back then I’d somehow glimpsed this future moment, the two of us here together, I would have believed that all these years we’d never been apart. It’s interesting, how things in life turn out.” 

I suppose,” I answer, though interesting doesn’t seem to quite cover it. 

“The way you told me, with no warning, you’d met someone else,” Janie says, still staring at the windshield. “That was hard enough, but not taking my phone calls or answering my letters, refusing to see me….Momma said your breaking up with me, doing it so sudden like, showed who you’d really been all along. She said that you were exactly like my father. In part, that’s why I married Rob. We weren’t a perfect match, I knew that from the start, but one thing I did know was that he’d never desert me.”

“And he didn’t.”

“But what Momma said about you being no different than my father, I never could believe that, even when I wanted to.  I still can’t. You once told me you wouldn’t ever let me go. I took that to heart, Daniel. It really hurt me. I kept wondering if our talking about marriage and where we would live and names for our children, you felt you were being pressured by me into something you weren’t ready for.”

“You didn’t do anything wrong,” I answer. “The problem was with me.”

“That’s not enough, Daniel.”

 There is so much I could tell her, beginning on that late-August afternoon in the USC library, straining my eyes reading microfiche about Lee Gaskins: the murders of my biological mother and my older brother, the trial and execution and his alleged DNA connection to Richard Speck, what the gray-haired guard said when I asked if he’d been present at the execution, how he’d studied me a few moments, then smiled. I thought I seen something familiar in you. I could tell Janie how in 1978 the alleged chromosome and criminality link was disproved, but by then she was married with two children. I could tell her how later that same year on Christmas eve I had stood in the dark across the street from her mother’s house, while inside the living room’s wide window Janie and her family gathered around the tree and I thought This could have been mine.

“So you have nothing more to say, even now,” Janie says, breaking the silence.

“I made a decision that I thought was best for me, and it turned out best for you.”

“What decision?”

“I didn’t want a family and you did.”

“But why didn’t you tell me then?” Janie says. “We could have talked about it. At least I would have understood.”

“It doesn’t matter now. It was the right decision for both of us,” I answer. “You have wonderful sons, wonderful grandchildren. Could you unwish that, even for a moment?”

“No,” Janie says. “Their existence is the greatest blessing in my life.”

“Alright then,” I say, but as I shift my body to open the door, Janie reaches out, not grasping my arm but softly settling her hand over mine.

“And what about you?” she asks.  “You’ve done well with your business, and it hasn’t all been solitude. Charlene says you’ve brought a few lady friends to the cottage over the years. But that’s what you wanted, right? Charlene says, as far as she knows, you never married. If that’s true you didn’t change your mind about being tied down.”

“No, I never married.”

 “Ever come close?”

“Once,” I answer, and free my hand from hers.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

             When I return to the cottage, I pick up the paperback but the words keep gliding past. I know I won’t be able to sleep for a while so take the flashlight and walk down to the dock. The music has ended at the Mercantile. A few last headlights come on, the sound of their engines soon dissipates. Though the evening is mild, an earlier cold spell has silenced the frogs and crickets until spring. Around the lake there are many more second homes now. Their lights form a necklace around the shoreline. Mostly inside lights, however. I suppose sitting on a screen porch talking softly in the dark is outdated, like radios and secrets. My eyes settle on the water. I think of the diver as he left his boat and descended. I imagine him kicking his fins and then drifting toward the farmhouse’s open door. He hesitates, suspended, trying to decide. Then he enters.