Removing from his pocket the note that he had written while sitting at his great-grandfather’s desk, Woolly tucked it neatly between the salt and pepper shakers. Then he left the kitchen by means of the only door in the house that swung back and forth.
—And here is the dining room, he said, gesturing to the long table around which his cousins and aunts and uncles would gather. Once you were old enough to eat in here, he explained, you could sit in any seat you wanted as long as it wasn’t the seat at the end of the table, because that’s where Great-grandpa would sit. And there is the head of the moose.
Exiting the other dining-room door, Woolly reentered the great room, where, after admiring it from corner to corner, he picked up Emmett’s book bag and began climbing the stairs, counting as he went.
—Two, four, six, eight, who do we appreciate.
At the top of the stairs, the hallway shot off in both directions, east and west, with bedroom doors on either side.
While there was nothing hanging on the wall to the south, on the wall to the north were photographs everywhere you looked. According to family legend, Woolly’s grandmother had been the first person to hang a photograph in the upstairs hallway—a picture of her four young children, which she put right above the side table opposite the stairs. Soon after, a second and third photograph were hung to the left and right of the first photograph. Then a fourth and fifth were hung above and below. Over the years, photographs had been added leftward and rightward, upward and downward, until they radiated in every direction.
Setting down the book bag, Woolly approached the first photograph, then began looking at all the others in the order that they had been hung. There was the picture of Uncle Wallace as a little boy in his little sailor suit. And there the picture of his grandfather out on the dock with the tattoo of the schooner on his arm, getting ready to take his twelve o’clock swim. And there the picture of his father holding up his blue ribbon after winning the riflery contest on the Fourth of July in 1941.
—He always won the riflery contest, said Woolly, while brushing a tear from his cheek with the flat of his hand.
And there, one step farther from the side table, was the one of Woolly with his mother and father in the canoe.
This picture was taken—oh, Woolly didn’t know for sure—but around the time that he was seven. Certainly before Pearl Harbor and the aircraft carrier. Before Richard and “Dennis.” Before St. Paul’s and St. Mark’s and St. George’s.
Before, before, before.
The funny thing about a picture, thought Woolly, the funny thing about a picture is that while it knows everything that’s happened up until the moment it’s been taken, it knows absotively nothing about what will happen next. And yet, once the picture has been framed and hung on a wall, what you see when you look at it closely are all the things that were about to happen. All the un-things. The things that were unanticipated. And unintended. And unreversible.
Wiping another tear from his cheek, Woolly removed the photograph from the wall and picked up the book bag.
As with the chairs around the dining-room table, there was one bedroom on the hallway that you weren’t allowed to sleep in because it was Great-grandpa’s. Everyone other than Great-grandpa would sleep in different bedrooms at different times depending on how old they were, or whether they were married, or how early or late in the summer they happened to arrive. Over the years, Woolly had slept in a number of these rooms. But for the longest time, or what seemed like the longest time, he and his cousin Freddy had slept in the second to last room on the left. So that’s where Woolly went.
Stepping inside, Woolly set down the book bag and leaned the photograph of him and his parents on the bureau behind the pitcher and glasses. After looking at the pitcher for a moment, he carried it down the hall to the bathroom, filled it with water, and brought it back. Pouring water into one of the glasses, he picked it up and moved it to the bedside table. Then after opening a window, so that the breeze could find its way into the room after five, he began to unpack.
First, he took out the radio and placed it on the bureau beside the pitcher. Then he took out his dictionary and placed it beside the radio. Then he took out the cigar box, in which he kept his collection of the same version of different things, and placed it beside the dictionary. Then he took out his extra bottle of medicine and the little brown bottle that he’d found waiting for him in the spice rack and placed them on the bedside table beside the glass of water.
As he was taking off his shoes, Woolly heard the sound of a car pulling into the driveway—Duchess returning from the general store. Moving to the doorway, Woolly listened to the screen door in the mudroom open and close. Then footsteps passing through the great room. Then furniture being moved in the study. And finally, the sound of clanging.