Empty Spaces

A short story

Even a small house has many stories. Ours buckled beneath the bulldozer’s blade, and upon the torn and trampled earth, she bled out ghosts. Floyd’s papa built that house to sit in the middle of their land, watching over their crops and critters, and every morning Floyd stood on the edge of their little back porch, seeing and smelling all the chores set out before him, the hogs in their wollow, the cows in the hollow, and the hens clustered to feed. Then one day, with the gray morning not yet free of its sleepy mists, he squinted his eyes at each critter and asked how it dared not be a dog.

Rotted boards snapped, and the roof--long surrendered to raccoons--collapsed inward, filling spaces that had stood empty for years. Mildred had filled those same spaces with pride. When she was eighteen, she married a man who worked at the Goodyear plant, and he moved her into the only company house that didn’t look like every other. Some said they’d reserved the original farmhouse for the company manager because of its large yard, but he’d turned up his nose and gone for something else entirely. His loss. Mildred felt like royalty, and that coming Halloween, once she opened her house for the big block party, she’d establish her prized position in the eyes of all. Everyone for a mile around would say, why that’s the Queen Bee of Brookhaven, she’s an important woman to know.

The house collapsed, and a few boys cheered like a medieval crowd applauding the executioner’s blade. It seemed fitting. The place had that kind of spirit in its latter years, suggesting a quaint but eventual doom. By the time I settled there, it had a reputation for being haunted—not the kind of talk I believed, but it still gave me second thoughts. My boy had a hard enough time fitting in, and being the weird kid who talked to ghosts wasn’t going to do him any favors. Still, it was what I could afford, and with the vegetation cut back, maybe it wouldn’t look so foreboding. That’s what I told myself, every morning with a smile; this house would be everything we needed.

They paved over the neighborhood and put up a mall. Hotdog on a Stick, an arcade, and a three-screen cinema anchored the northeast corner where a glass-walled entrance, with its view of sun-baked cars, occupied the land that once held the house that we called home. The movie-house manager parked his car in the same space, every day, in the middle of what had once been the hog wallow.

Floyd spent half a summer picking which pig he could best train. He called them to feed, threw sticks, and with wild gestures suggested a roll in the mud. The chickens looked on with curiosity, at least in the beginning, but then gave up their positions and returned to pecking the dirt, until one day midsummer when Floyd realized one chicken remained watching.

He called to the chicken, and she stood up tall. He whistled, and she came running. He motioned for her to roll over. She ignored him entirely.

He said, “Speak!” and she squawked back at him, long and firm.

Mildred’s yard had the only two trees left on the block and from them hung white cotton ghosts, lulling upon their strings, dingy and gray in the cool of the morning. Paper mache tombstones turned the garden into a graveyard. A radio played in a room stripped clean of furniture, and Mildred Darbrowski sat at the breakfast table, listening with her husband. The night before, Glenn Miller had played Ding-Dong! The Witch is Dead, and today Hitler invaded Poland.

In every house, on every street, she knew all her neighbors listened. Hitler’s speech at the Reichstag played like an undercurrent beneath the broadcaster’s English. Sometimes the broadcaster interpreted line-by-line; sometimes he summarized as the words grew fierce and fast.

“For the first time Polish regular soldiers fired on our territory, and since five this morning, we’ve returned that fire. From now on bombs will be met by bombs,” he said, naming off atrocities invented to place at Poland’s feet, horrors spun to justify aggression and call it self-defense, lies hung out for all to witness, like decorations for Halloween.

She wanted to say something but only put a hand on her husband’s arm. Our neighbors and friends will be coming soon, her touch said. Everybody knows you come from a good, Jewish family in Warsaw. They’re hearing this nonsense, and they’ll come, ready to stand beside you. They’ll fill the house, double over what it was last night. Just you wait and see.

Floyd put the chicken on a leash and took her out for a walk.

What he really wanted waited in the woods beyond the hollow, and he needed a good dog with a good sniffer, ready to tree a raccoon so big, it’d fight off any beast lacking the true nobility of a hunter. His papa had no patience for such notions and less still for foolishness. Floyd could think of nothing more foolish than trying to raise a farm animal as a hunting dog. Papa would get him what he needed, if only to save the family reputation.

My boy spent too much time inside, but the neighbor kids didn’t give him a choice. Those old ideas wouldn’t change with a hedge trimmer and a bucket of paint.

Stevie was thirteen years old, and since the age of six, he’d made clear how special he was. Even our old church had invited me not to come back. It wasn’t Stevie’s disinterest in rules and activities, so much, as his interest in whatever things occupied empty spaces, things Stevie talked to. The Sunday School teacher had hinted at demons.

I wondered if these empty-space conversations were geared toward me, some safe way of reaching out. With just the two of us in the house, I heard every word spoken in corners of other rooms. Sometimes, Stevie would say my name, and it took all my strength to keep from calling back and upsetting him into silence. Motionless, I listened as the complaints of an aging house grew louder around me. Something scratched at the walls. I winced at the thought of mice, but intermittent with the scratching came another sound, a tap both rhythmic and random.

Floyd’s papa put an end to the foolishness and took the chicken to the chopping shed.

Stevie parked his car in the same spot as always and went inside. Security unlocked the glass doors before he arrived, but otherwise he was the first one there, every day, and he never took a day off. A mall without people was a banquet of empty space, and he thrilled at the long vistas that served no peopleless purpose.

He left money on the counter of the Hotdog-on-Stick. At the regular time, at the regular spot, they’d have his lemonade waiting for him, no talking required.

He couldn’t manage a movie house without speaking to anyone, but he hired retirees instead of teenagers. Together, they ran the most well-ordered and well-cleaned cinema in the county. Everybody said so.

Mildred waited.

Friday had come and, with it, the president’s fireside chat, but still no neighbor had visited. No neighbor had called except to cancel plans. She waited alone at the house, and after dinner she sat in the family room with her husband and listened to the president.

“The nation will remain a neutral nation,” he said, “but I cannot ask that every American remain neutral in thought as well. Even a neutral has a right to take account of facts. Even a neutral cannot be asked to close his mind or his conscience.”

Floyd ate and went back for seconds. One of the pigs had shown interest in chasing a stick, maybe tomorrow they’d have bacon.

“We’ve got neither the time nor the money for an animal what don’t earn its keep,” his papa said, his good arm propped on the table, the other held to his chest by a sling.

Floyd nodded and bided his time.

Our house will die its second death when they tear down the mall, but some of the spaces are rented by businesses in need of cheap square footage. Security still opens the glass doors every morning. Stevie’s still the first inside, but the cinema’s been dark for years. There’s no arcade and no Hotdog-on-a-Stick, and every morning he’s thirsty for a lemonade he’ll never drink.

He enjoys the empty space and doesn’t ask himself what he’ll do when the space is gone.

— Thaddeus Thomas