The Summer I Found Home: George and Louise, #1

The Summer I Found Home

Eva Seyler

For my human children

Part One

1

SOMETIMES THE PEOPLE closest to you are the ones you know the least about.

When I was a boy, I knew my father had fought in the last war, in France—but he’d never once talked to me about it.

I knew because, propped on an old chest in our sitting room, in a battered wooden frame, was a photograph of my father and his brother in uniform, with France 1915 inked in the lower right corner—the year after I was born.

In the photograph the two men stood in front of a clapboard building. Dad hadn’t changed much in the intervening years—cheery, a little goofy—but his brother, taller and darker-haired, wore a stern, worried expression.

I wished I knew what had been worrying him.

I wished I could know anything about him at all, really.

That snapshot was one of the only reasons I knew Dad had a brother. I wondered if he died in the war, and Dad wanted to honor his memory without having to speak of him. I didn’t even know his name.

The other reason I knew Dad had a brother was because of our horse.

I’ve never been much for naming things, as Louise has always been quick to point out to anyone who will listen. I named my dog Peach, and my hens had names like Triscuit, Wheatena, and Cornflake. The roosters received ominously prophetic names like Soup or Potpie. My mother laughed each time I named the latest additions to the flock and said it must be because I was always hungry, and she had a point.

But my father did not fetch names for his animals out of the depths of a perpetually starving boy’s brain.

He named his animals after stars.

We had one horse, a bay thoroughbred, and Dad called him Sirius. At first I thought he was saying serious, as in not funny, so one evening, after we’d been to town for the day and Dad supervised me as I put Sirius to bed, I asked what kind of name that was for a horse.

Dad’s eyes went soft and he said, My father gave me a white Arabian colt for my sixteenth birthday. I named him Alshain.

Why Alshain? I asked, more confused than ever. It didn’t explain about Sirius.

Alshain is one of the stars in the constellation Antinous, Dad continued. My brother got a colt at the same time, a black Arabian, and he named him Altair, after another star in the same constellation. Sirius is the name of another star, in the constellation called Canis Major.

And he shook his head and walked away, leaving me to close the stall and barn door on my own.

So I understood the conversation was over, but I had learned one new thing: stars had names. My father applied those names to his horses, and apparently his brother had done the same.

We three lived in a tiny house in Turner, a town nine miles southeast of Salem, the capital of Oregon: my mother Alice, my father George, and me, also called George.

In those days Turner was a small but thriving little town, with everything we  needed easily available, from hardware to groceries to automobile service. You could get a haircut and buy sweets on your way out; there was even a weekly newspaper. It’s been at least forty years since I last set foot there, but I’m told it’s very different now. Everyone drives to Salem for the things they need, because most of the business has moved there instead. I can’t blame them; it was Salem we eventually migrated to ourselves.

But that is getting ahead of myself. The Turner house we lived in had been built in 1902 and sat abandoned for many years before we moved into it in 1920—empty and neglected and allowed to decline into an appalling state of disrepair. Its only source of heat was the wood cookstove in the kitchen, and damp seeped in through cracks during the interminable wetness of Oregon winters, leading my mother to wage war against mold with quantities of Clorox, and my father to constantly stuff rags into the cracks and nail up new boards over them each time a new puddle oozed in.

It was such a tiny house, we only fit comfortably because Dad made me a bedroom out of the attic space.

(Well, he hired someone else to do it.)

I loved my attic—roomy and wonderful, as big as the whole house below, even if the slope of the roof did render much of the space rather useless. Dad had windows put in each gable so I could have light and fresh air anytime I wanted. Having a space all my own made up for the other deficiencies of the house, such as having no electricity or telephone and having to use an outdoor cludgie. Of course there were leaky spots in the roof as annoying as the ones downstairs, which called for pots to catch the water, and more boards and tar paper.

The house faced the town cemetery on the opposite side of the road. (The dead make ideal neighbors, really—quiet and unobtrusive.) The owners might have kept the house looking nicer if people driving by could have seen it. As it was, set back a bit from the road, the snaggly oak trees and predatory blackberry vines were what passersby saw. Not the peeling greyish paint, nor the broken shutters, nor the pathetic patchy yard that was cracked earth and crisp weeds in summer, and slick mud and lush weeds in winter.

I made a sign when I was seven out of scrap wood and old red paint to nail over the front door: WELCOME TO THE DUMP. Dad nearly died laughing when he saw it and said I couldn’t be more American, calling this midden heap a dump.

The sign embarrassed my mother terribly, and she begged Dad to make me take it down.

But Dad’s amusement overruled. So it stayed.

The Dump belonged to the people my parents worked for, Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Ward, who lived in a fine modern house about a quarter mile away and never came to visit us. Possibly they didn’t want reminders that their charity toward us in extending us The Dump to live in was hardly charitable.

The Wards also owned the allegedly haunted woods which lay between The Dump and their house, and another large tract of land on which they grew plums and peaches and hay. A man named Mr. Samuel Pearson managed that for them.

Mr. Pearson was tall and blond and built like he could hoist a poached stag over his shoulders with no trouble at all. He had a perpetual cigarette hanging out of his mouth. Sometimes it was even lit. He was well-respected in town, but I didn’t like him. He had a gruff, terse way of speaking, and a hardness in his pale eyes that made me feel cold and uneasy.

But, like him or not, Mr. Pearson managed the Wards’ orchards and fields, and three long days a week (Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Fridays), my mother managed the Wards’ house. From seven in the morning until seven at night she cleaned and cooked and sewed for them, or organized and supervised social events they hosted.

Even Dad was chattel to the Wards, as Mr. Ward’s secretary at a law firm in Salem.

Mamma had a second job as well. On days when she didn’t work for Mrs. Ward, she cooked for Mrs. Baker at the Baker Hotel. At night she came home too tired to do anything but collapse into her chair until bedtime, if she didn’t go straight to bed instead.

Both my parents worked so hard, it didn’t make sense why we were so poor. But I never asked questions, because I knew what the answers would be.

Mamma would have said, Georgie, it’s none of your business, so shush.

Dad would have said, Son, you’ve enough on your plate without worrying your head over money.

It was true that I had a lot on my plate. Out of the three of us, I was at home the most, and therefore the task of keeping The Dump from disaster fell primarily to me. Someone needed to sweep and mop, keep the lamps trimmed and filled, start the fires in the morning and bank them at night, skim the milk, churn the butter, stack wood, chop kindling, muck out stalls, milk Moo, and tend my chickens.

And I was generally on my own for meals too; Mamma rarely cooked for us, except on days she didn’t work. Fortunately I’d gotten pretty good at making porridge and eggs, and it was easy to roast potatoes in the oven. We didn’t usually have a lot of meat, because it was expensive. If Dad was able to get a deer or elk in season, Mamma would pressure-can what she could and turn the rest into jerky or sausage or smoke it. My attic and the pantry would be full of hanging dried meat for a good part of the year. Aside from that, it was mostly chicken that we ate, whenever one of my roosters nipped Mamma’s heels one time too many.

That sort of workload was all right in the summer, but during the school year, I too was gone, from nine in the morning until nearly four in the afternoon. There was never enough time for all the work; I skipped attending as often as I could get away with it—once or twice a month.

So I usually spent my recesses at school doing homework, catching up in the only way I could think of. I was forever falling asleep at my desk during class, which did nothing to endear me to the principal. I could have walked to his office in my sleep.

The other students laughed at me; my teacher put given to somnolence on my report cards, which I brought home and filed away and was seldom held to account for not sharing with my parents.

It all made me hate school, made me pull away from trying to befriend kids who clearly couldn’t understand me or my family. Not ever. I had to be a man, and I was only ten. So I continued to exist in my family’s isolated bubble, among the townspeople of Turner but not of them, misunderstood, whispered about, alone.

Something deep in my brain remembered a different time, a time before I’d started to school, a time when Mamma was home more. Certain things in the house made pinpricks of light in the lurking shadows of memory: elusive glimpses of contentment, lost and of other people being present in our lives.

The silver-plated candlesticks on the corner shelf in the sitting room, for instance. A perfectly matched pair, never used now, but sometimes when I was alone, I took them in my hands, their cold weight warming at my touch. They gave me no distinct memories, only feelings: snippets of song and flickers of soft light, the tastes of good food and the joyous company of friends. Where had those friends gone, I wondered, and why did the candlesticks sit here now, empty and purposeless?

And lonely, like us.

With no guests.

Ever.

We never have agreed in the years since what specifically started the domino run of events that summer of 1925 that turned our entire world on its head.

Mamma thought it was Louise Pearson’s letter.

Dad thought, rather fatalistically, that it was just Time for Everything to Come Out.

I’ve never believed it was the letter or the time. In my mind, it started with Louise herself, on a late April afternoon.

I lay on the damp grass of the cemetery, keeping company with Felicia H., who had died in 1885. Not a soul ever bothered me in the cemetery, and I liked the peace and quiet. I laced my hands together under my head, watching starlings clouding overhead in their massive, dizzying dance, black against the white April sky.

I always marveled at them. How did they manage it? How did they talk to one another to choreograph their formations? Dad had once told me the collective noun for starlings was murmuration. A fine word, and I liked it.

I should have been at school, but as usual, nobody was at home to make me go, and I felt rebellious and petty about playing Cinderella to my constantly absent parents.

I noticed their absence that day more than usual, because I’d come down with ’flu the week before. Any time I got really sick, Mamma would become so terrified she wouldn’t go to work. I milked illnesses for all they were worth on the rare occasions when I actually caught something bad enough to keep me in bed. I liked having her around to fuss over me.

But the day before, she had gone back to work, despite my begging her to stay home just one more day. Bills don’t pay themselves, Georgie, and it’s high time you went back to school anyway.

I’m still so tired, I’d said.

But she left all the same, and I spent the day in Dad’s chair, re-reading The Prisoner of Zenda and feeling grouchy, until the Watkins man knocked at the door. Besides the daily stop-in of the iceman, he was the only visitor I ever remembered calling on us, so I let him in, as he was always highly diverting. I sniffed all his extracts (Mamma called them essences) and listened to him declaim the wonders of his products, and in the end he went away with several dollars from the emergency jar, leaving me with twelve glistering bottles in a cruet carousel.

I arranged and rearranged the bottles, held it up to the window, reading the names on the labels like a poem. Almond, banana, vanilla; black walnut, mapelex, vanilla; mixed fruit, orange, vanilla; peppermint, pineapple, vanilla.

It would have made a beautiful chandelier.

Also we wouldn’t be running out of vanilla any time soon.

So I lay in the cemetery, watching the starlings, hearing the distant hoot of a train leaving the Turner station, feeling the damp nippiness of spring breeze on my face. The conflict in my conscience over having skipped school when I could and should have gone battled with the knowledge that, as far as anyone knew, I was still sick, and they wouldn’t be expecting me back yet.

It also helped that I had a certain degree of immunity, thanks to our family’s dubious reputation, and the fact that on my second day of school, my father had marched into my classroom and given my teacher what-for about not allowing me to write with my left hand, and it shocked everyone so much that I was left to my own devices as long as I kept up with my work.

And I did do that.

If barely.

Hey. I heard a voice near at hand, and I turned my head. It was Louise Pearson, one of four girls from my grade at school, who sat at the desk next to mine. Her hands gripped the handlebars of her bicycle, one foot in its sensible brown oxford firmly planted on the ground. I thought you were sick, she said.

I was.

So why didn’t you come to school today?

Didn’t want to.

Why don’t your parents make you? This is the sixth day you’ve missed.

I sighed. "Someone’s got to take care of our place, and they’re always gone. Working." I couldn’t mask the bitterness in my tone.

Louise lay her bike on the ground and sat near me, cross-legged. This is how you take care of your place, by lounging on graves?

I decided not to answer that. Why aren’t you at school?

Because it’s the middle of the afternoon and school’s over?

Is it? I asked, surprised. The white sky gave no indication of the sun’s position, even if I’d known in those days how to estimate time of day by the sun.

She didn’t answer, only leaned closer to inspect the marker by which I lay, and tried to decipher the poem on it. Shed—not—something?

I interrupted her. Without moving from my place, I recited the words easily, taking care to let them flow distinctly one by one, rhythmically as clicking beads, smooth as butter.

Shed not for her the bitter tear,

Nor give the heart to vain regret;

’Tis but the casket that lies here.

The gem that filled it sparkles yet.

I liked the way casket and sparkles tasted in my mouth, like holding a cold marble on my tongue, but I didn’t say it. I knew people would laugh at me if I told them words had flavors and textures. Not even my parents knew this secret. I felt Louise staring at me, hard.

You don’t read like that in school when your turn comes.

Why would I? If they think I’m stupid, they won’t expect as much out of me. And it’s only an epitaph. Anyone can read an epitaph.

I’ve never heard anyone read one like that, she said. You sit here a lot. Who’s Felicia H., anyway? Relative of yours?

No, I said. I have no idea. I just like how white the stone is. And the carved hands. And the words. How do you know I sit here?

I live two houses up the road from you, so I pass your place going home every day. I like Mary S. over there. She pointed, but I already knew the headstone she meant, the one carved like an unfurling scroll.

"I didn’t know you came here," I said.

She tossed her head. Not much else to do, is there?

I looked at her then, really noticing her for the first time: her thin, pale face framed by untidy white-blonde hair, eyes the same pale blue as her father’s—the frightening, farm-managing Mr. Pearson. Even though we’d sat beside each other every weekday for seven months, I’d never really seen her, let alone spoken to her. Don’t you have any friends? I asked.

As many as you.

And how do you know how many friends I have?