The Followed Man by Thomas Williams Page A

La
Guardia, so his drink was in celebration of survival. Luke had
mentioned that eventually he would want to sell his house, but had
been no more specific than that. But now Ham told him that he had a
buyer who would pay a little mOre than twice what the house had cost
to build ten years ago.
    "This is firm, Luke. These
people have A-l credit and they're nuts about your house just from
looking in the windows. What do you say? Are you ready to sell? I
think they'll buy the furniture and lawn stuff and just about
anything else. Buddy, they are hot to trot! The guy's in electronics
on Route 128, pretty good outfit, I've checked it out. Are you there?
I didn't mean to push you or anything, but the minute I saw these
folks I knew exactly what they'd want, and what they want is your
house. What do you say?"
    He
could see Ham Jones in his plaid pants and maroon jacket with the
Rockwell calculator making a slight bulge in the inside breast pocket
along with the worn mortgage tables. Not that Ham was worn—he
was a twenty-year air force officer who had retired on pension at
forty and was so invigorated by his new career he seemed in his
twenties.
    "Can I think about it?"
Luke said. He felt the sudden vacuum of not having his house, his
home place that was full of all those years.
    "Well, they've just been
transferred from L.A. and they're in a hurry to settle in. I don't
know. Do you really want to sell it, Luke?"
    "Can I call you tomorrow
night? Right now I don't know what I want to do. I know I'm not going
to live there but I've got to sort things out for a while yet."
    "Twenty-four hours? Will a
day do it?"
    "It might," Luke said.
Already he was going up the front walk, at the step in the middle
where the Japanese yews formed a sort of gateway. The landscaping
would be difficult to return to because Helen had done all of it, and
now the weeds had grown up through the sedum and thyme, through the
low mugho pine and ground juniper borders. There would be no moss
roses this year because they were annuals and she hadn't been there
to plant them. Everywhere the weeds knew how to prove that absence.
    He promised to call at the same
time tomorrow night, and again Ham said he hoped he hadn't pushed him
into something he didn't want to do.
    Then he was alone with this
conception, one he had often fooled with in the past when it was just
fooling: which of his possessions did he actually need? The question
came from a de­sire for efficiency, not, he thought, from any
ascetic urge.
    Also, how did the glass of
bourbon and water materialize in his fist? Were the two questions
related?? There were those who would settle for the bottle and a warm
place to drink.
    Now he was still on the front
walk of his house in Wellesley, ap­proaching the front door. He
didn't want to be there, because this time he would be in the
possession of the idea of farewell. Beside the front door was a
plant, a soft round silvery mound called artimesia , or
something near that; he had never seen it spelled. Once when they
were driving back from New Hampshire Helen wanted to stop at a
nursery they happened to be passing. They turned in and went past
Lombardy poplars and arborvitae to greenhouses and moist acres where
they met the old man who owned the place. At his feet were peat boxes
from which the silvery plant, which Helen had never seen before,
almost glittered in the late after­noon light. They bought one of
the boxes and the old man looked up at them and said, hefting the
box, "The trouble with a nursery is you don't just sell your
plants, you sell your soil."
    Now he was at the dark, heavy
door itself, the silver-mound glowing in the periphery of vision.
Strange to be about to enter his own front door; a formal occasion.
The door was unlocked, and swung inward on its three brass hinges
with a groan.
    "Sell the house. You can't
handle it," he said out loud, and took a drink. How much of
loss, or any strange, new or dramatic situa­tion, was an excuse
for reward?