When my Grandma Elsie died in 2002, at 80 years old, she had only once in her life lived in a home that she was paying to own. That was during a brief period in the early 1970s, when she and my grandfather, Robert Lee McDonald, moved from a house they were renting in a small community called Floydale to a shoebox-shaped new brick house on “the highway” nearer the county seat of Dillon, South Carolina. Farm work had dried up, and Grandma had found a job in a sewing factory. Granddaddy, the only one of the two with a driver’s license, was working in town as well, at Dixiana Mills, so I suppose it was more convenient for them to be closer to things.
It wasn’t a good move. If I have the timeline right, it was during this period that Granddaddy became bolder about the relationship with another woman, named Mildred, that he had been carrying on for at least a decade. He was scarcely home–sometimes just long enough to shower and leave his dirty clothes for Grandma to wash–and knowing him somewhat, I am willing to surmise that he probably stopped contributing to household expenses in a regular-enough way, directing whatever little money he had to support his not-so-secret other life. So Grandma Elsie packed up and moved back to Floydale, to the same rental house she had lived in before the experiment in home ownership. Dutifully, she brought Granddaddy’s belongings with her, and he visited on occasion, usually late Sundays, when he would come smiling and snaking around, just in time for supper. The house was owned by a distant relative who charged her $40 a month, never an increase, and Grandma lived there until she died.
1819 Bonsal Court, which Google has not mapped and likely never will, was the address of the small house I am talking about. It had white asbestos-panel siding and a crumbling black-shingled roof that I cannot remember ever being replaced. The corner lot was enormous and included a cinder-block smokehouse with an ancient peach tree lunging from its foundation, and a pack house deeply redolent with the scent of cured tobacco years after it had last been used for that purpose. There was a great pecan tree about three feet from the front porch, a majestic specimen that I photographed often—the image it cast so perfect that the University of Alabama Press used one of those photographs of it on the cover a book of mine they once published. Running nearly the entire length of the yard, parallel to the train tracks that were just across Friendship Road, was a vegetable garden that was rightly a matter of local legend. In season, it was worked daily and was flush with varieties of beans and peas, corn, okra, tomatoes, squash, and assorted greens, and always at least one long, abundant row of zinnias and marigolds whose seeds were sown directly into the tilled ground. Visiting grandchildren got drafted to pull weeds or pick whatever was ready, and we did it without much fuss because it was what grandchildren did. For a reward, or sometimes just because, Grandma would dole out some coins to spend on the penny-candy table at Miss Lil Benton’s store across the railroad tracks. Miss Lil had a wooden leg and a brash personality, but the candy table was worth the dread of having to encounter her.
As for the house itself, there were six rooms, not including the bathroom and a screened porch at the back, off the kitchen, which everyone used to come and go. It was rare and a bit strange whenever someone opened the front door. Usually, that was during some winter gathering when everyone was in what was called “the living room,” gathered and talking around a disproportionately small but potent fireplace, and one of the men in the family needed to go out for some air or to shoot fireworks or smoke. At Christmas, it might be to play Santa Claus, knocking on windows and making a general fuss that stirred up the children and got everyone laughing. The adjacent room held a small television with rabbit ears that I only ever remember playing Lawrence Welk, Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom, and, during one hour on weekdays, The Young and the Restless. Both of those living spaces were full of plain but serviceable furniture, the biggest piece being a brown Naugahyde couch that crunched when you sat on it. The expectation was that everyone would have a place to sit whenever the four tribes that Grandma Elsie had sent forth into the world were reassembled. You would have to be sitting in order to prop your Chinet supper plate on your lap for those occasions, which always involved fabulous amounts of food produced in a kitchen that was smaller than the display models you see at Lowe’s. It held not only a refrigerator, a pie safe, a canning cabinet, and a small dining table with chairs, but two full-size stoves: the gas model she preferred, which she and Grandaddy purchased in 1954 and “still worked good”; and an electric one that she had to concede did make baking a more predictable process.
Before I am accused of painting a picture of some sweet and golden place and time, let me round out the scene. The mounds of pink and white crinum lilies that flourished near the back of the house did so because the dark wet spot around which they were planted was evidence of a defective sewer that was never repaired in the entire time my grandmother lived there. There were also the floors, which tended to slope in places—so dramatically at one point that my father crawled on his belly under the house, in a dank dirt-floored space barely big enough for him to turn over and look up, and contrived some way to insert 4”x4” supports to prevent what seemed inevitable collapse. The roughed-in kitchen cabinets and drawers were so warped and settled by time that they wouldn’t close all the way without an effort near brute force, and there were two main bedrooms without anything but 2”x4” studs and wood planks for walls—always painted a clean flat white, but otherwise apparently unmodified from the original construction, probably sometime in first decade of the twentieth century. The euphemism for what they were, what the whole house was, structurally, is modest.
When my grandmother died, my father’s younger sister had been living in the house with her for a few years. It’s a complicated story, yet relevant to the continued habitation of a place that, by any reckoning, should have been abandoned. Despite leaving and going back, over and over, my aunt had finally not been able to stay with the man she married for a second husband, to replace the alcoholic she married not long after high school—a good man who was kind to us children and who seemed to love her, but who was, as they say, a mess, and was doomed and dead early. The new husband was not a good man; he didn’t drink but was mean to the core, demeaning and hateful and very needy. When my aunt had had enough, she packed her life into the front bedroom of Grandma’s house, a spare space used mainly to store band fruit in the winter, and for a very long time, she stayed cocooned there, alternately sleeping and crying, emerging only to keep her job at B. C. Moore’s department store or get something to eat.
Not having many options, my aunt appealed to the distant relative who owned the house and was allowed to stay there after Grandma Elsie’s death. She didn’t change things much. I was living in Virginia by then and didn’t visit often, even when I went home, because being in that house brought on a sadness that left me aching. The furniture was still in place, the family pictures clustered on walls and tabletops, beds made and ready, the chest freezer still packed tight with garden harvests that the matriarch herself had preserved for Armageddon or an ordinary Sunday dinner, whichever came first. The same sprawling Christmas cactus filled the same space in the corner of the back porch. Despite all that, I mainly felt absence. You can’t really pinpoint a thing like that, but as I have thought about what was missing, it comes down to how the place smelled.
My grandmother never owned a dryer and, in every season, hung her clothes to dry on a line. She seemed to love the ritual, and I can see her now standing there with wet shirts and underwear and towels thrown over her shoulder as she moved along, pinning each piece extra—she was a cautious woman—to protect it from the occasional wind that might cause her to have to wash it all over again. There were lots of whites, and they were name-brand Cloroxed, always. There is no scent quite like that of linens and towels cleaned in bleach and finished in fresh air. They gave the entire house a perennial air of crispness, of clarity. The beds, stripped every week, were especially dependable. Anywhere under that roof, in that air, you felt all right, like everything in the world was going to be fine.
Until it wasn’t.
Once, toward the end of the time she lived in the house by herself, I found that my aunt had put a cinnamon-scented Renuzit solid air freshener on the back of the toilet in the bathroom. It made me queasy.
My aunt moved out one spring. The second husband had persuaded her that he was reformed; more to the point, he was having some health issues and “really needed her help.” Her decision was probably influenced, too, and not a little, by the fact that the house itself was falling apart. Its condition was poor enough when my grandmother died, having served her and the family dutifully for close to forty years combined. But without my father’s continued intervention, the flooring had developed soft spots, suggesting that the substrate was decaying. The sloping had returned in places, too, most notably in the bathroom, where the fixtures were now pulling away from the wall. All around, windows had to be padded to keep air from blowing in through cracks in the casings, and the roof over the front porch was near collapse after a branch falling from the pecan tree had whacked the corner during a storm. Outside, the asbestos siding was flaking away in patches, like scales. I know that people live where they can, or must, and they can make do with extraordinary resourcefulness and tolerance, but by the time my aunt emptied the house and moved on, it would be hard to imagine an inspector certifying the place as livable by modern standards.
The house sat vacant for a few months. We were told that the relative who owned it had decided to tear it down rather than attempt repairs and try to find another tenant. There was just too much to be done, and the tiny rural community where the house was located was one of the poorest in the second poorest county in the state of South Carolina. There would be little hope of recovering any investment. My father, my grandmother’s firstborn, made several final trips to the place, taking things first out of the pack house—old farm implements, hand tools, tobacco sticks—mementos, really, nothing of any value. He dug a piece of root from the colossal pink camellia bush that near the back door, got it started in a nursery pot, and eventually delivered it to me 300 miles away in the Shenandoah Valley. Inside the house, he got Grandma’s ancient gas stove, which no one wanted, but which still worked and he would put in his “shop”—a country-Southern version of the man cave—for cooking things on his own terms. He told me he also removed some glass doorknobs and a blanket chest that he had built for Grandma out of plywood when she first moved back there after Dillon. He had affixed it to the wall, as a permanent addition in her bedroom, and couldn’t bear leaving it there in the end.
That June, my sister and I decided to make a final visit to the house. Daddy tried to prepare me, but I wanted to see it one more time before it was bull-dozed. I should not have gone. We found the key under the flowerpot on the back porch where it always was, but beyond that nothing but the floorplan was familiar. There was no power, so we moved in darkness, by memory. It was late afternoon, yet I felt as if I had never been anywhere so absent light. Once my eyes adjusted, I could recognize some features I knew—the crude wooden latch nailed to the doorframe of Grandma’s bedroom, her clothes pin bag hanging on a nail, the bare lightbulb with its chain-pull in the cool front bedroom. The place was supposed to be empty, but the floor of the living room was an obstacle course of broken boxes of picture frames, books—I think but can’t be sure I saw my grandmother’s prized set of World Book Encyclopedias—and assorted junk, from stuffed animals to worn-out appliances. The walls appeared manifestly what they were, dingy painted boards; and the whole house, once animated by voluminous life, seemed squalid and decrepit, made alien by absence. The air was stale, and I was having trouble catching my breath. I needed to get out, but paused for a moment when I realized I was in the bedroom where I’d spent so many nights of my childhood. My eyes registered some bit of light in there, filtered by an overgrown Rose of Sharon bush outside the window. It wasn’t enough, not nearly enough—and so I left, Beth, my sister, calling after me to wait, she was coming too.
We had been inside perhaps a total of twenty minutes, but that short bit of time is reason for this essay.
I have long admired a poem by Ted Kooser, Iowan, former Poet Laureate of the United States. It’s called “Abandoned Farmhouse” and details an encounter with ephemera discovered in a house like my grandmother’s. It speculates, challenges nostalgia.
He was a big man, says the size of his shoes
on a pile of broken dishes by the house:
…
A woman lived with him, says the bedroom wall
papered with lilacs and the kitchen shelves
covered with oilcloth, and they had a child,
says the sandbox made from a tractor tire. . . .
Kooser concludes:
Something went wrong, says the empty house
In the weed-choked yard. . . .
Something went wrong, they say.
The poem has been helpful as an antidote to the romanticism that has fueled my attraction to empty houses.
It’s a lifelong obsession. Somewhere in my Virginia basement, there are slides from one of the earliest rolls of film made with my first serious camera when I was in high school. I haven’t looked at those images in a long time, but I can tell you that one of them shows a long-abandoned tenant house in a soybean field near the Celotex factory, a few miles from where I grew up in the Temperance Hill community, Marion County, South Carolina. There was a tree pushing its way up through the middle of the house that I observed season after season. I studied the structure’s slow collapse, and came to think of the scene as a sweet abstraction, a portrait of evolution, of the idea that nature prevails, without violence, just inevitably. I was enthralled—and at 16, the idea felt profound.
Way before that, when I was seven or eight, one of my favorite places to play was a vacant shack at the sandy edge of a tobacco field. The house was separated from ours by a stand of pines. No one had lived there for years, never that I had known. It wasn’t a ruin—just musty inside and gray outside from the exposure of bare wood to the elements. In summer, it was ringed by an orange blaze of mongrel daylilies. The floor plan was traditional shotgun. Beyond the screened door, miraculously still on its hinges, there was a small porch, then one perfectly squared room after another, ending in the kitchen. You could stand at the front door and see straight out the back. Sunshine flooded the space through windows on each side, illuminating scraps that seemed like archeological treasures. Once, in a corner pile, I unearthed a box containing envelopes of Simplicity dress patterns like the ones my mother sometimes bought, a bundle of unopened bills, and some pages torn from a telephone book—why I remember that, I cannot understand now. But then, the place was a perfect hideout for a loner country kid with a raging imagination.
My outlook on all of this changed with the demise of the structure at 1819 Bonsal Court.
I don’t try to reconcile empty houses with my romantic ideals anymore. I don’t allow my imagination to play with what remains of lives that transpired. I don’t want to suppose Kooser’s sense of tragedy or indulge my own imagination of what either was or might have been. When I see an empty house by the road—and I notice an awful lot of them—I think of the dust and dirt and the end of the line that I found in my grandmother’s house, where things, like life, just diminished. I think of the final grinding exit. The end.
In The Poetics of Space, Bachelard writes, “An entire past comes to dwell in a new house.” But what happens, I wonder, when a house is exhausted, genuinely empty—when it cannot do anymore?
Is it wrong of me to dream of fire?
