Free Fever by Sharon Butala Page A

his abrupt swings of mood, and his way of narrowing his little eyes at me as if assessing the depth of my depravity.
    There was running water in the house, but no bathroom. Nick had used an outhouse during the summer and a chamber pot in winter, so before I left the town that day, I made arrangements with a carpenter recommended to me by the café-owner, in whose café I had eaten my meals, to begin converting an upstairs bedroom into a bathroom. As I drove back to the city I was filled with an elation that I hadn’t felt since I’d received the phone call about the prize, a deep satisfaction that things were going as they should, that puzzled me and disturbed me a little, at the same time as I enjoyed it.
    “Don’t bother to visit,” I warned all my acquaintances. “It’s too far away, and anyway, I’m going there to write. I
vant to be alone.”
    “No danger,” Will, my closest and oldest friend said. “You’ll be back by fall, if you last that long. Anyway, Cheryl and I will be in the East till late June or July.” His manner was joking, but Idetected an undertone that bordered on cheerful contempt. I didn’t reply, a little surprised, faintly hurt.
    I went back to packing my books and clothes and dishes, to sending out change of address notices, arranging to have my few pieces of furniture moved, and to paying a few farewell visits. I debated, then decided not to call my ex-fiancée, Louise. My frequent, prolonged absences during the past year, and what I swore to her was only her overactive imagination had broken our relationship. Anyway, I knew she was involved with a recently-divorced English professor. No doubt she’d hear about my move through the grapevine, the same way I’d heard about her new relationship.
    At the end of the month I drove through a greening countryside back to the village, climbing slowly over many miles to that high plateau, and at last descending into the deep valley with the town spread out below me where my house waited for me. It was a soft spring twilight as I descended that long hill, the few lights in the town winking orange, and I had the sensation of sinking into some warm, dusky dreamworld. At the bottom of the hill passing the newly sprouting hayfields on the outskirts, I was seized by a wave of loneliness, so powerful that for a minute I thought I would have to pull over. I slowed, and as the outlines of the first houses grew sharper under the streetlights, the sensation diminished, grew less keen, till only a faint memory of it lingered.
    Nick was gone, leaving me, for some unaccountable reason, with the beautiful old chair I had sat on during my first visit, a few other broken remnants of furniture, and a twenty-year accumulation of dirt. I hoped that the other old man, the writer, was still present somewhere in those dusty vacant rooms with their fading, stained wallpaper and their worn, linoleum-coveredfloors. Although what I meant when I thought that, I didn’t try to articulate.
    While I scrubbed the floors and carted out and burned old rags and ancient, mouldy Eaton’s catalogues I found lying in the back of closets and in the crumbling cellar, I thought of the writer, that serious, book-ridden child, a misfit in a community of work-obsessed, silent people. I found myself looking for his ghost in the bedrooms with their slanted ceilings, and in the decaying front porch where he had sat with his mother on summer evenings, and listening in the night for a hint of his child’s voice echoing through the long years.
    I began to convert the other back room opposite the kitchen into my study. I set my desk squarely in front of the big, old-fashioned window where I could lift my head and see the hills across the little river and the opening into the more distant coulee where I would one day find the relics of a dinosaur. I took paint remover and scrubbed away the white paint that marred the Golden Oak chair Nick had left me. Perhaps it had been there since the house