Against the Ruins Read online

  Your father is standing in the living-room doorway—completely still, eyes unnaturally wide. He looks through us as I hold you tight and whisper, “It’s okay, Lyra. Lightning must have hit the chimney. Everything’s all right.”

  William remains in the doorway—frozen. I call to him, “Are you all right, William? Are you hurt?”

  He stares at me blankly. He yells, “Where is my brother?”

  By that night, as we survey the damage, he seems himself again. The walls are black, the furniture, curtains, rugs, even clothes in bureau drawers. The next day—dark and cloudy, still cooler than normal—a massive clean-up begins. Firemen arrive and climb up ladders to inspect the chimney; they say the creosote needs to be burned off before the oil stoves can be reinstalled. They build a fire in the living-room fireplace. See that room flooding with light? We’re terribly hot, but the contradiction of winter heat on a summer day sloughs off a chrysalis, and for a moment your father and I sit talking companionably, as we haven’t in quite a while, remembering when most homes were heated with open fires. I recall how my father got up early and lit all the fires in our house—when I awoke, my bedroom always glowed with dancing flames.

  I ask William, “Couldn’t we leave this fireplace open, have real fires here this winter? It’s so cozy.”

  He says no. His eyes narrow. Fire is nothing to play around with, he adds. Wood houses can burn down in an hour. There was a reason Sherman won the war by burning a sixty-mile-wide path through South Carolina. “William R. Huntt borrowed private wagons and took all the government records to railroad cars sent from Charleston. He hired more wagons at Chester. His wife hid the state seal in her clothes. Eight days of occupation. Wind, whiskey, and cotton. Soldiers, rifles, bayonets.”

  I’m still wondering what the Civil War has to do with our fireplace when William flings a bucket of water onto the dying embers.

  Maybe I didn’t pay enough attention to changes in your father because I was so in love with your sweet and sensual early childhood, in that lost era before child-theft when children played freely in open space, when the point of an afternoon was to roll around in the dirt and take the smell of the earth inside your small body, when you were safe lying in damp evening grass and watching stars twinkle on like rows of lighted paper dolls, when every flower on earth blew thick aromas through our open windows and bees buzzed around the blooms before first light. Often I stood at the kitchen window watching you, bearing witness to the beginning of your senses. As I watched you stare into skies so bright they hurt the cornea, I’d forget how fussy you’d been that morning, how tired I was, what a job it was taking care of you and the house while William was studying or at the seminary. I’d forget all the talk about “the Bomb” that some said might be dropped on us at any moment. All that would float away as I watched you and washed dishes, singing “For the beauty of the earth, for the beauty of the skies.” My voice would float out into the yard and curl around you in embrace. Sometimes I’d stop singing and come out and sit beside you in the grass. I wanted to share with you all the marvels I’d never shared with my own mother.

  One afternoon I asked, “Do you remember Mrs. Moazen telling us there used to be a fairground with a merry-go-round here?” Your electric-blue eyes took my breath away, glittering with eagerness for life, burning with a child’s effervescent faith.

  I said, “We’re on that carousel right now. You’re riding a purple pony.”

  We were, you know. Our world then was magic. Sunshine dappling through leafy old trees, the air stunned-lazy and droop-heavy with the aroma of the gardenia bushes blooming beside the porch. Always a thrum-thrumming in the air, insects buzzing at screens and cooking grease sizzling through kitchen windows, automobile tires throp-thropping onto hot steamy pavement. So many colors and patterns to see, so much rain and sun and sky and green grass to taste and smell that some nights neither of us could sleep for the weight of all that experience. Often we both lay awake—in different rooms but umbilical—and listened to the circle of night becoming day again.

  I’ve spent a lot of years thinking about, and trying not to think about, what happened to us. In many ways, besides war, our undoing was religion. Before that, before we moved to Columbia, William was a forestry agent for a timber company in Charleston, where he helped make decisions about when and where forests were harvested and replanted. He’d majored in biology in college and cared deeply about South Carolina’s woodlands, about how the longleaf pine, which took a century to mature, had been destroyed by overcutting. Do you know that your father wrote a history for every single tree on his family’s farm? How old it was, its condition, I don’t know what all. Imagine the time that took for 462 acres.

  Then one day in Summerville he came home and announced he wanted to become a minister. He wanted to go to divinity school and he wanted to go now. He told me his mother had been very religious and had wanted him to become a pastor. First I’d heard of that. Why, then, hadn’t he been baptized? He showed me her Bible and said, “It was her most prized possession, and I’d like you to have it. She read it every day of her life. From when she was a little girl to the day she died.”

  Moved, I embraced the tattered Bible and admired the hand-colored illustrations, so like a Bible my father gave me when I was twelve. I flipped to the copyright page to see if this was the same edition. It wasn’t—nor did it seem likely that William’s mother’s read “every day of her life” a Bible published six years before her death.

  I seem to have lost my train of thought—hospitals are so noisy—

  Oh—I was telling you about the lightning strike—it took forever to clean up afterward. While I was busy with this, though I didn’t know it, you were often on the front porch watching live theater across the street. Our neighbor Rosa Truesdale had the lead: she lived in a house where love (or a loose facsimile) was working hard that summer. You watched love walk up onto the porch of her house and go inside, and then in an hour, or maybe two, come out again. Love went back to its car and drove away. When I found you at this, we watched love chug down the street and disappear.

  As I would learn later, Rosa had lived on Lincoln Street for a decade, since the day she’d scooped up her son, Johnny—a skinny kid with a mop of brown hair and a cleft-palate scar, you uncharitably said he looked like a mole—and fled her violent husband. Since “nice” women didn’t leave a husband then, no matter what, Rosa’s family never spoke to her again. Later Rosa did the unthinkable—she sued for divorce, which had just been legalized. She told a judge she’d committed adultery, which she later said wasn’t true but she knew she’d get her freedom if she claimed to be a “fallen woman.” She was the only divorcée I knew then, but she didn’t seem a bit disturbed about diminished social status. She looked quite happy when she appeared on her second-floor balcony and leaned over the wooden railing in her tight pants and gold hoop earrings and bright scarves to wave at a man getting out of his car below. Rosa had the voice of canyons and caverns, a loud hearty invitation: “What took you so long, Frank?” (Or Tom or Lester or Bill.) I know you remember how she’d toss her head back and laugh and throw a kiss to the man rushing up the steps. Rosa had flaming red hair, huge green eyes, big breasts, big shoulders, and she always wore dark red polish on her fingernails and toenails. Sometimes when a “caller” arrived, she’d hold out her hand for a kiss on those red fingernails. She was the kind of woman South Carolina pretended it didn’t have, even when she defiantly brought her “men friends” to the elementary-school PTA meetings.

  About a week after the lightning strike, Rosa showed up on our porch one morning. As I shook her hand, staring at the six silver charm bracelets, she said, “Our young’uns are pals, so I thought I should come over to say hello. I know it’s late for housewarming gifts, but I brought you some cookies. It’s terrible about lightning hittin’ your place.”

  Her bracelets jangled as she handed over a plastic bowl.
I stared at the pale blue plastic and tried to imagine Rosa at a Tupperware party.

  I thanked her awkwardly. “Will you come in for some iced tea?”

  Rosa studied me for a long moment. “Not just now, but thank you for askin’.” She paused, added, “I take note your husband won’t let Lyra play in the street with Johnny no more—this isn’t a highway. M’self, I try not to listen all that much to what a man has to say.”

  She raised her eyebrows slyly and then said, “By the way, I give dancing lessons up to Arsenal Hill Park. For little kids. If Lyra wants to come, I can fix it without you having to pay.”

  “I don’t—I think Lyra’s a bit young yet.” She teaches children?

  “Oh we got ’em tiny.” Rosa smiled her huge smile, revealing a gold tooth. “Never too early to learn ’em to swish and sway.” She turned to leave. “Suit yourself.”

  I wondered if I had ever in my life swished. I thought probably not.

  “Thank you again for the cookies, Mrs. Truesdale.” Or was it Miss?

  “Rosa, honey. I’m just Rosa.”

  She waved and headed down the steps. I watched as she—what was the right word—sashayed across the street. Rosa was a feast of alliteration. Later, when I popped open the Tupperware bowl, I found very round chocolate-chip cookies, a single Hershey’s kiss sitting atop each generous mound, pouty brown tips pointing toward heaven.

  As I lie here thinking about those days, feeling nurses come and go, especially the one who smells of eucalyptus and massages my feet, I find myself wondering what you did when your father called about my stroke. You keep whispering that you wish you’d come home more often. I know you had your own life, but I missed you terribly. You left me here with your father.

  It’s the next day, after the praying. I wake up and think maybe it never happened. Maybe I’m dead. The blood. Maybe it’s two days later, after the hand in the air for twenty-four hours. He’s backing the car out of the garage, it’s heading down the driveway, and I’m running toward him—

  I will not think about this anymore—

  The noises of a hospital, the squeak of rubber soles upon polished floors. That day I was in a hospital, maybe a year later—1958? 1959? What I’m about to do is madness. So I won’t hope anymore? The doctor is murmuring, the mask is coming down over my nose. I begin to breathe the sweet oily ether—

  Lyra? Are you there?

  I think I’ve been asleep. Did you say something else about Lincoln Street?

  I know how obsessed you are with that house, even though I’ve pretended for years not to know. You keep going there because that’s what an expatriate become prodigal does. Remember how often I returned to Brantley? The city of one’s birth, the small town, the family farm, the old home place. These are the beams we use to build a suspension bridge across the accumulating waters of change and inconsequence. The place of youth rises as a beacon of hope across that water—there my existence began, might be remembered. Home illuminates the darkness of our lives and harkens us back to a dim unremembered consciousness—why were we born there and not in some distant hamlet, why did we blithely sail away or remain rooted in place, what is it about that earth that both attracts and repels, and why can we never escape its persistent yet elusive ghosts?

  Your father’s psychological mooring was the farm he’d inherited, and during our first summer on Lincoln Street he showed it to you for the first time. It seems such a symbol to me now, the farm does.

  That day we all piled into the taxi and as William started the engine, his shimmering blue eyes above his lit pipe regarded you warily. Disconcertingly, he sometimes looked like he’d forgotten who you were.

  He drives us down Assembly Street toward the Blossom Street Bridge. “The night Columbia was burned,” he says suddenly, “there was so much cotton stacked along Assembly Street and so much wind blowing it around that it looked like snow. Wind, whiskey, and cotton. And fire.”

  You pipe up from the backseat. “Will it ever, ever snow?”

  “Before that night was over,” William says, “some people fled to the seminary buildings for safety, others to the lunatic asylum.”

  Thirty miles south of Columbia he turns onto a narrow dirt road, and we meander past vacant fields and falling-down wood cabins with snaky vines growing out of their chimneys. More fields, more acres of pine trees. A caved-in barn, another old shack with a pine tree pushing through the roof. Finally he stops the car, opens the trunk, and lifts out a lawn mower, and we three walk into the woods. All around us, and in the distance, stand orderly rows of loblolly pines. You breathe in pinesap and say you’d like to live in a tree. Soon we reach a grassy hill where a rusted wrought-iron fence encloses a small family cemetery. Ravaged rounded tombstones, some so weathered the names are worn away, others that look damaged by vandals, lean right and left haphazardly. You tell me they look like old people too tired to stand up straight.

  You were an amazing child, if I do say so myself.

  William begins mowing around the graves, sweat staining his starched white shirt. After a while he rolls the mower out of the cemetery and we head deeper into the woods. Blue-black clouds appear, a sprinkle of rain falls. Through the damp mist the charred ruins of a small plantation house emerge, bit by bit, as though coming into focus through a camera lens. Deep shadows and crumbling brick walls no more than two feet high appear first, then huge shards of broken and jagged mortar and a burial mound of blackened lumber topped by a single once-white door lintel. The stone chimneys on either end of the original three-story structure have toppled sideways—one is broken in half—and a tangled jungle of weeds and vines crisscross the open space of what was once a formal parlor.

  I shiver. Even the air around the ruined house seems old and gray, as if its ashes never fully settled. You walk toward the ruins eagerly.

  Your father, staring into the distance with a gone-away look in his eyes, tells you, “This land has been in my family for two hundred years. Destroyed in 1865.” He climbs over the jagged brick wall, shovel in hand, and walks toward a mound of upturned dirt.

  “The place was called China Grove. We had the largest brick kiln in South Carolina. We never grew cotton, we grew food and made bricks for the columns of the great houses in Charleston and Savannah.” William gazes at the nearby woods. “In Civil War times it was six thousand acres. Lost most to pay taxes during Reconstruction, when it sold for a dollar an acre.”

  Your father starts digging in the bare spot. “My grandfather left here at age fifty-six to join the Confederate Army; he was too old, the war was lost, wasn’t anyone left to fight it but old men and boys of twelve or thirteen. I don’t think we’d ever had slaves, but it was personal once Sherman made it clear he had it in for South Carolina and started burning us out. He sent looting men into people’s homes to steal everything, including food, from women and children. Then they’d torch us. Around here, 1865 was a lot like being in London during the Blitz.”

  You scramble across the stone wall to join your father but he orders you out, says there are old nails everywhere. So you wander into a nearby stand of trees to play while I lounge in the grass, gazing out at the fields. The farm’s spaciousness appeals to me more than its history does. The woods, the fields. All this land. Because we’re educated, I’ve never felt poor even though, if cash is the barometer, we are. Now I realize we’re “land poor.” No money for a piano or a dining-room table, but there are 462 acres. Something valuable and important to leave to our children.

  William tosses dirt behind him as he excavates his past. Over the years he exhumed hundreds of the wedge-like handmade bricks that formed columns. The only valuable he found was a blackened sterling coffeepot hidden in the well.

  I call out to him, “You truly enjoy this, don’t you, darling?”

  He doesn’t hear me. He moves back and forth across the ruins rhythmically, stops and
unearths two more tri-cornered bricks, rough bumpy exterior, inexact sizes. He picks up something—I can’t see what—and examines it, then looks toward the nearest trees as though pleased. Here, I realize abruptly and not comfortably, he’s happier than he is at home. Why is that? I didn’t understand that day why ruins were reassuring to him, why the mystery of disintegration was comforting, why it was a relief to him that there was something no one could fully fathom, change, or control. But as evening falls, my husband is a silhouette against a darkening sky, a desperate Lear straining back and forth before his fallen house. What your father needed, as we now know, could never be found beneath that hallowed dirt. It was never Old South sentimentality, it wasn’t even about history. Your father was drawn to ruins and to cemeteries—as you’ve followed in painting after painting—because nothing is more mysterious, or more normal, than death.

  William continues digging, but the ruins feel less and less peaceful to me, so I round you up and call to him, “Shouldn’t we be heading home?”

  Despite his warnings, you clamber over the brick wall into the interior of the ruins. William yells for you to be careful. He knocks dirt off his shovel, finally brushes it off with his hand. And does the most startling thing. He walks over and drips a handful of dirt across your shoulders. I watch the grains of Carolina earth—part beige sand, part black loam, part red clay—cascade onto your denim shirt, dirt so old it looks like dried blood. You gaze up at your father, his shaggy blond head hovering over your cornsilk waves, and you smile at him like you rarely do. My breath quickens, as it does when something is happening that you know is important and you want to slow it down. Staring at your father, you kneel down and scoop up dirt and hold out your hand to give the handful to him. He takes the dirt and puts it in the pocket of his khakis, reaches out and tousles your hair, smiling as though seeing you for the first time.