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Authors: Patrick Flanery
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untouched.
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
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
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