I stay. Of course I do.
Deus ex machina, and all that. The hardest part is convincing Donnie and Eric—not their real names, but good enough for now—that they need my services; they really had no greater idea than to plop a few houses down and build a road or two. But with my winsome and charming personality—and more than a little bit of virtual arm-twisting from Tom—we manage to reach a solution that works out for all parties.
—
It’s strange to watch the farm change, stranger still to know that I am responsible for everything I see around me. The first phase of it is far enough away from the house that we don’t notice it all that much; even so, I’ve made sure that we keep enough land around the house to give us a little bit of privacy as things proceed.
“Are you happy with it?” I ask Tom, one day.
“Sure.”
I can hear it in his voice. “Tom.”
He smiles. “It’s… well… ” He shrugs. “But I have to let go, I know.”
“We don’t have to stay here. I’m sure Donnie and Eric would make you a very good deal on this place.”
“And tear it down.”
I shrug. “It’s… possible.”
He shakes his head. “I don’t want that. Staying here, at least I can save this little bit.”
I understand him. Guilt and family history are hard things to shake off.
—
Of my own family history…
I make it a habit—as does Teresa—to stop by our mother’s house once or twice a week, to see how our father is doing. He’s set up camp here, living tentatively in and among what’s left of her possessions. We help as we can, when we can… groceries, or dinner out, or stuff to run a house. We never give him money, because we know where it will go.
Still, he seems to have money for that, as well. He’s making it work, managing to hold down day-laborer or construction jobs here and there… rough carpentry, masonry, roofing, things like that, things he’s picked up over the years of his nomadic life. I’ve never dared to put him forward for a job on the dairy redevelopment, because I can’t trust him to show up.
I stop by one Sunday after a trip to Kroger’s, a bag in each hand, basic stuff like milk and eggs and bread. I don’t want to put the bags down, tap at the front door with a foot.
Silently, the door swings open.
“Shit,” I mutter, to myself. His truck’s gone; he’s gone off somewhere—job, shopping, bar—and forgotten to lock it behind him. But something tickles the back of my mind.
I stand on the threshold, barely breathing, looking in, trying by divination perhaps to see if he’s truly still here. The room is gloomy and butter-colored; he’s got all the old pull shades—their white gone to a nicotine yellow years ago—yanked down over the windows.
“Dad?” My voice echoes off the bare plaster, the bare floor. “Dad!” I call out again, more loudly.
What the hell, I tell myself. I have as much right—more, I think—to be here as he does. I step across the threshold, into the front room. It’s hard to tell from this room if he’s still here; it’s little-changed from where Teresa, Duane and I left it. I go into the kitchen.
I put the groceries on the counter, open the fridge, which is empty save for the stuff that people always seem to leave behind… ketchup, mustard, some unidentifiable and mold-furred leftover—burrito? cinnamon roll? kitten?—in a styrofoam container. I rifle through drawers, cabinets, closets. They’re all empty.
Then, I see it, and I know I don’t have to go upstairs to see the rest of it. With echoes of my mother’s epistolary madness whispering around me, I weigh the thing, tapping it against the palm of my left hand. It has my name on it, and Teresa’s. I slit it open and start reading.
When I’m done, I call Teresa. “He’s gone.”
“Hi. Who’s gone?”
“Dad.”
“Are you over at the house? I was just there. Well, two days ago.”
“Yeah, I’m here.”
“Gone… as in ‘out to the store’ gone, or—” But she knows. I can hear it in her voice.
“Gone as in ‘I’ve left the two of you a letter’ gone.”
There’s a long silence, followed by a sigh. “Oh.”
“Do you want me to read it to you, or… ?”
“No,” she responds. “I need to come into town, anyway. I’ll be there in a bit.”
—
I watch Teresa as she reads, seeing her eyes tick back and forth like twinned pendulums, listening to her quiet breathing, watching as she turns the letter over to read its back. When she’s done, she folds the letter neatly and slips it back into its envelope.
“Well,” she says.
“Well,” I answer.
“We should keep this,” she remarks. “With the other papers… her will, and… ” Her voice trails off, finds itself. “Just in case he… ” and her voice wanders off again.
“He won’t.”
“I know.” She pinches the bridge of her nose. “I know.”
—
The four of us take on this project. Teresa, Duane, Tom and I throw ourselves into it; what starts as a distraction becomes something else as we make the house over from top to bottom, give it the new life it deserves.
I want to do this, need to do it, and I can see the same determination in Teresa as well. Everything, everything, everything goes, even the pieces I thought valuable. It turns out that they have less value than I would have thought, even in this traditional and antique-mad state. The younger generation wants nothing of this stuff, considers it next to worthless.
No surface remains untouched; we go under the skin of the walls, the floor, the ceiling to the very sinews of the place, rooting out all corruption, all rot. The odors of paint, of plaster, of floor finish are a tonic to us, are become the scents of renewal and redemption; we work and work and work until the house shines.
The work, too, is a tonic. There is something immediate and very real about getting your hands dirty, actually making something versus just putting lines to paper, or pushing buttons on a computer. I’ve missed this, I realize. One makes a decision, one carries out the work, and there it is, in the flesh.
This project, somehow, becomes the most personal thing I’ve ever done. Part of the reason is obvious—I grew up here, lived almost half my life here—but it’s more than that. I become the de facto leader of our fearless little foursome, find myself consulted, deferred to, in charge of things. It reminds me again of some of the things I lost when I and my partners started the firm. Every day I seemed to drift further and further away from the essence of architecture, of what drew me into it in the first place. I ended up little more than a glorified manager, taking credit for work I didn’t really do.
As the house takes shape around me, some little thing grumbles in the back of my head, some errant thought that dances around, inchoate, looking for a name and a place to land.
When we’re done, we treat ourselves to dinner.
“Now what?” Teresa asks. “Rent? Sell?”
“Sell,” suggests Duane. “Hate to see the place get messed up by tenants.”
“Well, if you find the right tenants… ” Tom answers.
“Do you really want to be a landlord?” I counter.
“Well, between the four of us… ” Teresa looks around at the rest of us.
“Either way, if Dad shows up… ” I shrug. “He’s going to want a part of whatever we make on it, whatever we do. Or all of it. And I really don’t like being forced to fork over anything to him, not after all the work we’ve done. And just because it’s… him.”
“He won’t. We have the letter. He doesn’t want the house. He said so.” Teresa.
“Which won’t really mean anything, if there’s money involved.” I answer. “Look, I hate to be a noodge about it, but—”
“A what?” from Duane.
I have to explain it to him; he chuckles, rolls his eyes.
In the end, we agree to let it go for a bit; it isn’t costing us all that much to carry the house for a while.
But I have another idea.
—
I look down at the package on the table in front of me; such a simple thing, smallish, not all that heavy. I unzip and unfurl and unwrap until I extract it from its nest of packing material.
The town and I have worked out a deal. I can use this place as an office under certain restrictions. The neighbors didn’t seem to mind all that much; I think I’m proving to be a better neighbor than my mother ever was… cleaner, at least.
My sign—this thing before me—is restricted, as well… only so big, only so flashy. No happy, laughing cows here, not in town.
I call up Tom. “It’s here.”
“It’s—oh. That was quick. How does it look?”
“Good. Best work I ever did.”
He chuckles. “Let’s hope not.”
“Come by, later. Help me hang it.”
“I’ll bring lunch.”
I hang up on Tom, look down at the sign. Three simple words: Mark Davenport, Architect. Some kind of future before me, unknown and unknowing, but my own future. Our own future.
—
Autumn’s riches of copper and gold submit to winter’s alchemy, become the dark bronze silhouette of bare trees against a silver sky. When we can, while we can, we strike out across the fields of bluegrass—those that have not yet yielded themselves to development—then across the road and down to the waiting river. The palisade rises above us, imperious and primeval, testament to the implacable power of the river that has cicatrized this land. On more than one occasion, we have surprised fellow travelers on this path: fox and deer, for the most part, but once I thought I heard the low, snarling skirl of a bobcat hidden among the trees that cling to the rock shelves. More and more often, the mornings surprise us with the crunch of frost-tinged grass under our feet; we come down simply to talk and to watch the river, growing ever more sluggish, preparing to bed itself down to winter’s dreamless sleep.
I have slipped back into the rhythms and cadences of this country, have become again that which I was many years ago. My body reasserts itself without the constant ministrations that life lived elsewhere seemed to demand; the charade of muscles gained by artifice yields to a more natural stringy leanness. A certain drawl has crept back into my speech; had it been there when I arrived in New York? Had I made myself forget it because I thought I must? More foolishness.
Already, New York and my life there seem to belong to someone else, some more polished and more vital twin to myself. The parting was mostly amicable, if not entirely painless. A great deal of me is still bound up in that place, with those people, and always will be.
But more of me is bound up now with these people, with my sister, her husband, their children. We bind ourselves more strongly to each other day by day; there are birthdays and holidays and anniversaries and just why-don’t-we-all-go-out-tonight kinds of days. And I like it. I like the rituals; there is a different reality at work here, no less important and no less interesting than the one I had in New York. We work our way through the clockwork of the seasons.
To my father I am bound, to a lesser extent. We have no idea where he is; no letter or message reaches us and we have to assume that he’s back at it, again, in some nameless place, trying to convince himself that his sixty can keep up with men half his age—a third his age!—simply because he has no other choice. If I could say one thing to him it would be that he could have stayed in that house, could have worked himself back into the family. I would have found another place to set up an office.
I love him despite his flaws. I love him because of those flaws.
To my mother I am bound, if only in spirit. Part of her courses through me, as well. Teresa and I share what’s left of her besides what resides in our collective memory. Part of her remains with Teresa, tucked away on a shelf in their living room, mute witness to what I hope and think is a happy house.
The other part of her remains with me: her letters to me, the poison and pain and sadness in them locked away in the Pandora’s box in which they were found. And, of course, the house that she and our father bought, so many years ago, their life together only dreams and imagination at that point, poised on the threshold of their own happiness, destined never to find it.
I am what I am despite her. I am what I am because of her.
—
And Tom, and Tom, always Tom.
Posted 8 January 2025