I came downstairs from setting up the bed in the back bedroom, taking my headphones off to hear the knocking on the door for the first time. I don't know how long the knocking had been going on. The window in the front door of the old house I was renting in Weston, Vermont, to give myself some time to settle in to the village before buying, was frosted, so all I could see was the hazy form of a fairly bulky figure out on the covered front porch. It had snowed heavily the night before and all I could see other than the bulky shadow of a figure was a world of swirling white. The knock had been strong when I first heard it, but it grew weaker, almost plaintive, as I got to the foyer. I think it was the note of defeat that evoked that made me reach for the door latch.
I opened the door. "Nick?" I said, recognizing the older man with the white hair and beard, a thick red knitted scarf swathing his neck and shoulders. I knew Nick casually from the homeless soup kitchen I'd begun volunteering at down at the parish house next to the Weston Community Church on Lawrence Hill Road. I'd started helping out there once a week shortly after I'd moved from Savannah, Georgia, before Thanksgiving. It was a small town and there weren't that many homeless here, so it hadn't taken me long to recognize them all.
I looked beyond Nick to take in the sea of whiteness behind him on Markham Lane. This had been a really bad time of year to move to New England from the South. The snow-on-snow world had put me in a malaise where I hadn't been able to move beyond getting the art gallery over on the square between the playhouse and the Vermont Country store stocked and open. Boxes and furniture still to be assembled were scattered all over the living room. Wanting something more steady and less isolating in my life during this moving-in period was a primary reason for signing up to help at the soup kitchen. Interacting with the homeless there thus far provided most of my interaction with other human beings in this snow-covered landscape.
"Good morning, Mr. Crawford," Nick said, producing a cloud of frozen breath. "I was thinking that you had been so kind to me at the soup kitchen that you might have some odd jobs or yardwork you might like to have done for a bit of money."
I stifled a laugh, looking beyond him at the world of snow where a yard should have been. But then I saw the shovel in his hand—the shovel I'd put on the front porch with the best of intentions—and the path that had cleared from the street to the porch. He'd done this while I was upstairs, at the back of the house, listening to
The New World Symphony
on my headphones, purposely closing the winter wonderland of New England out of my mind.
I took another look at Nick. I remembered him mainly because of the name and his looks and because we were moving into the Christmas holidays. He was an older man, and his white hair and beard and his perpetual rosy-cheeked smile had readily connected the name Nick with Santa Claus, although he wasn't quite as fat as I thought of Santa Claus as being. His tattered clothes included a red scarf and sweatshirt under a tired-looking black raincoat, though, which served the image.
He wasn't dressed for the weather by any means, his clothes being too thin and worn and his sneakers having a slit in the side that exposed a hint of red socks. He wore a tattered old raincoat when something much more protective was needed in the Vermont winter weather, although it looked like he had several layers of sweatshirts on underneath the coat. His hat was more a beret than anything you would wear in cold weather. He was trembling and his skin had a bluish tint to it. He wasn't wearing gloves.
"You come in here right now, Nick, and get warmed up. I was just about to make some coffee. Come into the kitchen and have a cup."
"I don't mean to intrude," Nick said, hovering near, but inside the front door. He wasn't resisting being inside. His eyes went to the living room on one side and the dining room on the other and he clearly could see that I wasn't anywhere close to being moved in.
"Here, give me that coat," I said, taking it from him as he managed to pull it off his back. I opened the foyer closet door to hang it up, and there was Warren's red ski coat and his fur-lined boots. The warm hat with the ear flaps he liked to wear on the ski slopes was perched on the shelf above. I'd purposely put them there to have Warren with me in this move. The whole move to Vermont had been to keep in touch with Warren. He'd been my professor and mentor—and my lover—at the Savannah College of Art and Design. We were together for three years—a year beyond my graduation. Warren had an art gallery in Savannah, where he trained me in buying and selling art. I think he knew what might be happening when he sent me on a buying trip to Europe. He hadn't told me he was having a heart operation while I was traveling. He was gone before I returned, having died on the surgeon's table.
He loved to ski, and we'd come to Vermont in the winter each year we'd been together. He'd ski and I'd read by the fireplace. Afterward he'd lure me out of the ski resort and down into the town to walk its few streets in the snow. That's probably when I saw that the gallery near the square in Weston was for sale. Now I'd bought it and moved to Weston. I had inherited a gallery full of art—a lot of European period art—from Warren. I could have left it where it was in his gallery in Savannah, but the memories there were too much for me. The gallery I had required here in Weston had mainly sold Thomas Kincaid fantasy village "painter of light" oils and lithographs. I had no idea if broader interest art would do well here—but this move had been for Warren. He'd always said he wanted to live in New England. I never had said that. But this was for Warren.
So, I had his winter clothing hanging in the closets around the house even before I'd assembled the bookshelves from IKEA. And I hadn't assembled much of the furniture from IKEA yet. I just now put together the bedframe in my bedroom and raised the box spring and mattress off the floor.
Nick followed me into the kitchen and settled down at the table there. The kitchen, at least, had been made habitable. I made the coffee.
"Coffee will be ready in a few minutes," I said. "I was about ready to fix some lunch, though. Will you join me? It's good to have company on a snowy day."
"I don't want to be any trouble," he said. But he looked pretty settled in at the kitchen table and added, "I reckon it's good to have someone to chat with most any day."
I was surprised that other than his clothes being in tatters and not showing any signs of fatigue from shoveling my walk, Nick seemed to be clean and odorless. That was one thing I'd notice the couple of times I'd worked the soup kitchen at the Community Church—shower facilities must be hard to come by for these folks. Weston was a small town—a really small town regardless of its two mainliner businesses, the major catalog business, the Vermont Country Store, and the semiprofessional theater. I'd been told there were under six hundred residents in the town. And it had just a few permanent homeless, all men, not more than a dozen of them. The town did what it could to support them, but winter here was rough for even the hardiest, well-off residents. I'd already found that out, and I hadn't been here more than four weeks.
I fixed two melted cheese sandwiches and warmed some tomato soup out of a can. Nick didn't complain about the basic fare and polished off all I put on his plate.
"You'll have to let me know what you want for shoveling the walk, Nick."
"Oh, it was no bother," he responded, not naming a price.
"I'm glad someone did it," I said. "Snow's not my thing."
"And yet you came to Vermont," he said, with a smile. "Escaping something?"
"Aren't we all?" I asked. I'd talked with enough of the homeless guys at the church parish hall to know that's what most of us were doing—those serving as well as those being served. He didn't press on that.
"It was nothing," he said, returning, I guess, to the shoveling of the walk. It wasn't "nothing" for me, though. I could get to the mailbox now. There wasn't anyone I was expecting any mail from, but it was nice that I could pretend there might be. For the three years Warren and I had been together, it was just the two of us. That's why I inherited everything from him. He'd made it easy. He'd formally adopted me. "You could pay me back by letting me do some work around here for you—a couple of mornings a week. Minimum wage, of course." Nick said, breaking into my thoughts.
