Mr. Pacifaker’s House
“I want to apologize to Mr. Pacifaker.”
When the knacker came, inquiring after the horse, Garnet Manon slammed the door in his face, ran up to her room, and wept.
She walked down the Mr. Pacifaker’s house that evening. She pulled two leaves of hay from the bale in the back of the pickup, shook them out for the horse, and patted its ribs as it ate. She wondered if the horse missed its daily conversations with Mr. Pacifaker. She wondered how on earth it had outlived him. It had been an old horse ten years ago.
“Don’t worry,” she told it. “I won’t let the knacker have you.”
She fingered the key in her pocket, learned its peaks and depressions, wondered if it were a token of forgiveness, an indication that Mr. Pacifaker hadn’t had time to change his will, or simply a poke in the eye to the Presbyterians.
She thought of the spiral-bound notebook she’d filled as an adolescent, investing the house with all the beauties and grace she’d wished for herself, investing Mr. Pacifaker with a power he’d never had, investing the bitten, scrawny horse with nobility and wit.
If the inside of the house were really dreadful, she didn’t want to have to see it. She didn’t want to know the fullness of the squalor he’d lived in.
She’d named his tragedy once, and it had killed him. As good as killed him. Nothing was disguised. Everything was real. Them boys would never come.
“I’m going in,” she said to the horse. “If I fall through the floor, will you let somebody know?”
She fitted the key into the lock and turned it. She pushed against the door, lightly at first, then pressing her weight against it, until it screamed open and she staggered inside. She stumbled over a bundle of molding newspapers, and caught herself on an ancient television set, which groaned and collapsed. In the dim light filtered by grimy windows, she saw fat scurrying things on the floor, the coffee table, the exploded couch. Glowing white fungus crept up the stained wallpaper. The air was thick with dust and the smell of mildew.
“Oh, Mr. Pacifaker,” she said sorrowfully.
The bathroom, the kitchen, were just as bad. All around the house lay the debris of a man who cared only for the life in his head. Had them boys ever come to see him, he couldn’t possibly have let them in.
One room remained unexplored—the bedroom, it must be, just off the kitchen, behind a closed door.
She opened the door and found the beauty in the core of the house, in the core of Mr. Pacifaker, the soaring vermilion chamber disguised by the squalor that surrounded it.
“I said, ‘I’m sorry I killed you, Mr. Pacifaker.’ And he said, ‘I’m sorry you’re so goddamned egotistical.’ ‘But didn’t I break your heart and kill you?’ ‘No, I died of tetanus, just like it said in the paper.’”
She sighed and leaned her head against Sarcastic Talking Horse’s neck.
