Fallen Land (6 page)

Sliding through darkness now, to the kitchen door at the back of the house, cottonwoods groaning in a low push of west wind, I take the key from my neck, put it in the lock, feel the bolt slip when it turns, push down on the latch and shove. It scrapes across a worn spot where the kitchen floorboards have risen, drawling a fine-milled daysong. I have chosen to remain in this house inherited by my grandparents, passed down to my mother, then to me, the steward of its last days. I live here now as an outlaw, without power or water or heat except that which I can create from matches and candles and the pump out by the barn, drawing clear waters from deep in the earth.

The rooms are dark and dust-quiet but as in the woods I don’t have to see to know where to place my hands. Six years after his death, everything still smells of my husband: Donald in the floorboards and drapes, rising up from the coal chute and resting in the accumulations of lint and debris in the corners of every room. I breathe him in, smell arms and feet and sex in those accretions of skin cells and hair. I feel his touch, the rough fingerskin on my back and buttocks, his hands encircling me, drawing me in.

I put the key on its red-gold chain back round my neck and look through the kitchen window at Krovik’s house: the cotton-puff seed that shot the root that grew the tree that bears the fruit of my dispossession. Its empty windows flash dark, one watcher watching another.
All shall be afraid, and the Watchers be terrified.

Before the new neighbors began to arrive I never locked the house. They were neighbors in name alone, looking at me standing on their porches as if I were a homeless woman begging door-to-door. When I explained who I was, the woman on whose land they now lived, I could see how they thought they were better than me in numberless ways. They looked with suspicion at the plates of cookies and loaves of zucchini bread I gave to each new family that moved in. None of them ever returned the kindness, turning their fat backs when I finally came asking for help, as if they suspected all along that my old-fashioned niceties were bribes for some future favor. They don’t understand neighborliness. Let them have their rickety new houses made of cardboard and plastic parts. They will never stand as long as this one has. Time and terror will see them all come down.

Locks have little use, even now. There is nothing here worth robbing except the jewelry: wedding rings, my own and my mother’s—Grandmother Freeman’s ring has gone elsewhere, lost, on the hand of some cousin’s daughter. There are the photographs, too, but no one would take those, pictures of grandma in her ankle-length skirt, frock coat, straw hat, and ones of my mother in gingham dresses, holding me up to the camera. Somewhere I have a photo of the benefactor, Mr. Wright, the old bachelor with a soft spot for his tenants, and other photos of the grandparents, John and Lottie, the inheritors, higher branches on the Freeman tree. Surely those old albums are worthless to any but the survivors, and who but me can now call herself a survivor? My cousins never cared for this place, and they went elsewhere years ago, leaving me, the youngest, the only true inheritor, to look after the land that raised up so many. I am the last remaining. We were lucky, unusual, inheriting land where others could only acquire through hard labor and tight saving. The photos of my ancestors are better than gold, but even I do not have names for all the black-and-white faces. I asked mama too late to help fill in the blanks in my knowledge, scribbles of pencil on the creamy backs of heavy-matte paper rectangles with rippling edges. I make up stories about people I cannot identify, imagining the barrel-bosomed woman with marcelled hair is long-lost Great-aunt Claudette, who started a cosmetics business and became a millionaire in New York, died, left everything to her housekeeper, caused scandal, was never mentioned in the hearing of children.

“Whose house is this, and who’s that next to grandpa?” I might have asked my mother as she leaned back in her chair, in the days not long before her death. The old woman would tilt her head and look through the bottoms of her bifocals, make a murmuring noise, water-thoughts rising, say she couldn’t be sure.

“Might have been a creditor. I can’t say I recognize him.”

“Whose house is that?”

“That’s this house, LouLou. It was younger then. Didn’t have so many years on it. Same way you don’t recognize me in some of these pictures. No different with houses. You think it might be the same place because there’s a kind of family resemblance, but the yard’s all wrong, and the windows look different, and the siding is brand-new. See,” she would say, pointing to an edge of the house in a photograph, “that’s the northeast corner, where the burning bush is now. Used to be a lilac there but it died before you were born.”

“But where’s the porch?” I asked her. “It can’t be this house. The porch would be there.”

“My mama and daddy didn’t extend the porch to the east side until I got married, sweetheart. A house changes with the people in it. If it doesn’t, it dies, and we die along with it. This house is yours now, Louise, yours and Donald’s. You should be making your own changes. Look after it in the way you got to, in the way that your life, and that the house itself, dictates to you. It’ll tell you what it needs and what it wants. It’ll show you how it wants to live, and how it wants to help you live.”

I fear I laughed at her, laughed and then failed to do the house justice while it was still mine, and now, in place of these rooms there will be a new turning lane and a boulevard into the development that was once my family’s farm and is now just another neighborhood for people pretending to be rich. A surety on this house and the farm I sold sent me to college, gave me a career, my parents risking home and livelihood to see me educated. “We don’t want you trapped here,” they said. Everything I have I owe to this land.

The key
kathunk
s against the smooth taut skin of my sternum, metal matching the heat of its host, thawing as I cool in the dark empty house whose destruction, I have little doubt, Krovik planned from the beginning. There’s a word for him but I’m not going to say it. Say a prayer instead. The family Bible is with that same cousin’s daughter, the self-appointed matriarch, who likes to think she calls the shots, says who is and is not a Freeman: maiden name, my father’s family, they made a stand with that name, a proclamation, self-naming. Call us what we are, what we will be.

So I sold the land in the year Donald died, a few months after he went into the ground and the fire of the Fourth of July. Crazy time, dark time, replacing that short, quiet-too-good-to-last time. A horrible year of noise: loss of Donald, sale of the land, world still going bonkers, a time of sirens and alarms and the gut-wincing thunder of aircraft. I hate that the rest of my life will be spent alone in a world of terror, where terror is all that people talk about, and the language of the Crusades comes thrusting up into the talk of newsmen and politicians, soil-borne disease like
Macrophomina phaseolina
and its charcoal rot, turning language gray, spreading fungus in the drought of our time, through the dryness of speech, conditions inhospitable to growth, to the flourishing of debate: a time in which only the parasite, the fungus, or the weed survives to take over, conquering everything reasonable and rational and good.

Sell the land that nurtures and watch as the world is rent asunder, two halves, unequal in position and condition, dividing my people and me from that which would sustain us. After the sale was final, and the money clanged into my account on a white-hot Tuesday in September, I paid off the bank and the storms of autumn followed, rain and unseasonal hail, thunder and lightning out of time, a late tornado warning and the greening of the humid air, nomadic emerald city of terror and judgment that hovered for an hour, lashed the land, and moved on. I was without debt and, apart from the half-acre patch of ground on which this house still stands, without any land. I should have felt liberated, but instead I felt shackled to a future whose contours I could no longer predict by following the demands of the season.

The year Donald died there were no children at Halloween, and not for the first time. I knew what they called the place, the kids from the surrounding neighborhoods built on other farms plowed under, some recently, some as long ago as when Rebekah was a child. For years I had heard them riding past on their bicycles in high hot summer, jeering as I kneeled in my vegetable garden, screaming to each other: “Faster, faster! It’s the witch’s house! The witch is gonna get you!” Sometimes I was a witch, sometimes a goblin, always a monster, never a human.
Call me Stheno,
I once shouted, laughing,
I’ll show you how terrifying I can be,
and though the name no doubt meant nothing to them, how the children screamed.

When Rebekah was a child I took her all the way round to the city’s old northern neighborhoods packed with big frame houses long run-down but full of welcome and friendliness, always cleaner inside than out. Over there Rebekah could go house to house with her cousins in streets where they were not harassed for being themselves. Donald stayed home, said it was no kind of holiday to celebrate: devil’s night, hell night, the memory of unholy fires crackling in sacred forms, the way the neighboring farmers in the bad old days did all they could to smoke us out, did nothing to help in the lean years, made sure that if we stood we did so on our own.

But it was not only the silence of Halloween that fall, my first autumn without Donald, it was a deeper, broader silence, an inland sea of quiet, profound and dark as the great aquifer that sleeps below the surface of this land. There were no phone calls for weeks: a month passed and I did not speak to my only child, in her home and her job on the far side of this country. I sat through years of quiet in the long autumn’s shortening days, tired through to my tissues and teeth.

Weeds grew up through charred remnants of corn, yellowed in the downshifting light. I tried to see it through, that time before winter, as I had in the past. It was always a season of “putting”: put the vegetable garden to bed, put up jars of green tomatoes and pickled pole beans, put mulch around the kale and Savoy cabbages. The first frost came late, mid-November, woodland rusting ripe at last: everything was out of kilter, the land gone mad from the people upon it. Not just then, but now:
The time is out of joint
, scrabbled, unjust, a country stalked by ghosts
.

If it hadn’t been for my job we would have starved, gone under, lost the land, would have had no health insurance or benefits if I had not taught English and History and Geography and Social Studies. As a girl I helped in the fields from May to September and as an adult I continued the schedule: driving the tractor, hand-picking corn when no one else could be convinced to work for us, picking sometimes in the dark with a headlamp and the sound of cicadas singing themselves to death. It was a life of long hours, blistered hands, calluses embedded with earth: woodskin grain of fingerprint whorls, tree circles on palms, counting the age and the labor, the dry years and wet.

Walking the blackened fields on Thanksgiving morning that year I found the firecracker debris: snatches of glossy red-white-and-blue paper burned along the edges in an undulating smoky brown line. Frost was on the ground but I could still feel the cornfields burning against my face, hot as Donald’s finger on my flank, and I’d sat in my house waiting for it to come, doing nothing, feeling in that moment it might be the best way to end:
while the earth is scorched up with fervid heat . . . you become incapable of walking.
And then the rain arrived, a torrential midnight downpour turning flame to steam. Even in November I could smell it, burning corn and the ozone of storm as I looked down, studied the white rime of crystals edging black loam. Ink in the milky sky, geese going north. Cardinals staying, fire in flight, and when the ground turned white a week later, blood on the sheets, splattering but leaving no mark.

On the night of the solstice I took out my snowshoes and walked the perimeter of land that was no longer mine. Even under snow I could still navigate it with my eyes closed, knew the feel of the land as it rose and fell, the way shadows cut from the shelter belt on the west side and the line of woods leading to the reserve on the northern and eastern sides, the cottonwoods that intruded into fields where the old streambed crossed the land in a diagonal arc, where in the wettest years a river formed, flooded the land, pooled in ponds that dried only in late summer. It was flawless land, uncommon in its compact beauty, sheltered from arctic winds and the worst of western storms.

Rebekah came from California for Christmas that year, acted like she was indulging me, favor-making, the condescending so-and-so. The turkey was wild, my own kill from the edge of the woods. I had taken aim on a foggy morning, brought it down while the other birds fled in low flight, then plucked it in the barn and kept the largest feathers, remembering legends of a Muscogee Creek ancestor in the Freeman line. I imagined fashioning a feather cape, hiding out in the woods, turning myself into a great shimmering black bird.

No sooner had the snow melted the following spring than Krovik arrived with his backhoe or grader, whatever the machine was. The day I took down the storm windows and packed them away between sheets of newsprint in the cellar he began slicing a street off from the main road, intersecting at a perfect perpendicular, making a crossroads, conjuring up the dead. For a week I watched as he drove back and forth, shifting earth still half-frozen, dumping rich dark soil in heaps that would blow away come summer. Eventually he put down gravel, and, once it was warm enough, asphalt over the top, paving the new street and his driveway. I wanted to tell him that asphalt would not hold in this climate, would crack and fracture at the first succession of hard freezes. In the thaw and refreezing, under the pressure of vehicles, potholes would grow. Concrete slabs were the only way, and even they would need annual maintenance. Thinking back on it now, the slipshod approach might have been part of his plan, works needing the intervention of the city.