The House
The house sits close to the road, square as
a die, its empty windows watching time pass. It was built when the road was little more
than a dirt track leading from the lake and fairgrounds out into a monotony of
small farms that cut the Pennsylvania
countryside into 100 acre parcels. Now, cut
and cut again, the pieces are measured in halves and quarters. And instead of homesteads, there are trailers and white painted tires ringing petunias, feigning a kind of permanence where once there was a sea of greening corn.
The house was built to stay though,
and it has. Now it is falling into its own cellar and becoming one with the land:
the ultimate commitment to place. My
uncle has tried to save it, hoisting it up like a drugged cow, propping it
with timbers and metal posts, but still it sags and shrinks. Entropy is a powerful force, things falling
back on themselves.
My grandfather, the son of a traveling
Methodist minister, tried in middle age to capture the past and make
up for his childhood of always leaving everything, of never having, anything: he bought the farm with all its sad and faded ghosts. It is the place inside of me where summer
lives. For every summer memory, small
and terrible, or golden and tentative, is hinged to that white clapboard house
purpling in the twilight.
It was always only a summer place,
holding the musty secrets of its eight unoccupied months. Each May we’d drive out in my grandparents’
long Buick to open the house. We’d sit
on the hot red seats, shiny with automotive upholstery wax, testing the power
windows, raising and lowering the plush armrests, clicking the ashtrays open
and shut. We let the hot wind rushing
past the windows dry our tongues until they clung to the roofs of our mouths.
We splayed our hands against its weight, while it pushed our fingers back and
back, pointing the way from which we’d come.
Then the car would slow, gently turn into the dip that marked the drive,
wind past the crippled apple tress and stop at the back door, pinging and
clicking as it cooled. We never got out
right away. We always sat there,
together, looking at the house. Then the
crooked back step peeling paint, the jangling keys, the rusty lock unlocking,
and the door swinging wide from its jamb letting in the summer light.
Each year we cousins moved through
the closed rooms of the house reestablishing our dominion -- raising window shades, banishing shadows, brushing
aside the curled and desiccated bodies of flies trapped in those rooms, born
too early. We turned the glass knobs on
every door, met the closet’s hangers ringing empty against each other. We found the robes we’d worn last summer,
dusty, too small. Our grandmother’s faded apron; our grandfather’s brown canvas
work shoes. We opened drawers in old
bureaus that stuck like grief, and emptied the cracked pitcher in the front
bedroom into its basin finding nothing but air.
A memory: 3 am. A
train lows its warning into the night, moving freight from Erie to Cincinnati,
steel to plants and presses. It roars,
steadily eating the miles, a one-eyed dragon breathing steam and smoke,
shitting clinkers along the rails. I lie in my grandfather’s Lincoln bed, the
cherry-wood curve of its upper lip rising far above my head, the lower licking
my feet. I lie in the maw of the Lincoln bed, sweating,
the only one awake in the pith of the night.
I lie stick-straight beneath the heavy sheets, pulled out of a heat-stunted
half-sleep by the train’s cry, now unwinding itself down the long valley. The house itself is leaden with silence, only
the out-of-doors contains sound: the soft pat of a moth bumping at the screen;
the crickets’ endless drone; and, rising and falling like the sweet-sour breath
of my cousins sleeping beside me young with dreams, is the peepers’ thrum,
against which I unravel and fear takes hold.
