My grandparents lived in a tiny community in southwestern Virginia called Rural Retreat. My grandfather had been a carpenter and a good one, with a reputation for calculating so carefully, using a flat pencil he sharpened with a knife, that he could carry the leftover materials away on his shoulder. When he married he bought a house on a hill, cut it in half, left one half where it was to become his workshop and rolled the other down about 50 feet to nestle into a dip, and built around it.
The old part of the new house had two rooms. The upper one, which he never completely finished, became the bedroom he shared with his new wife. The lower one was where the family gathered, where my grandmother sat in a cane rocking chair and crocheted, and where my grandfather read his enormous Bible and prepared Sunday School lessons. By the time I arrived, the room held a coal stove that heated that room and the one above, a straight-backed leather couch, and a television. We called that room The House, although no one could tell me why. Many years later, I realized this room was the lower floor of the original structure which had become so much a part of the larger house that its origins were forgotten and the name became its only clue.
My grandfather was a leader in a tiny circuit rider Methodist church, a dour man of German descent who did not drink or hold with dancing, fiddle playing, or working on Sunday. He was awkward with his granddaughters but he always had a box of Hershey bars in the pie safe for us when we came and would call us in the afternoon to drink grape juice he had canned.
When he died, I flew from Washington, D.C. for the funeral, bringing my 18 month-old son with me. When I arrived, the house was filled with people—in the parlor, in the dining room, and The House, where my grandfather was laid out in an open casket, over by the window where his chair had been. The kitchen and dining room tables were laden with food and the women were washing dishes, opening containers, and replenishing plates. My son was whisked away and passed from hand to hand. I was given lunch and told to sit.
Over the course of the afternoon people came and went and by evening there was only the close family left, sitting around the kitchen table. My grandmother went to bed but we lingered and raided the fridge. When we began to think about going upstairs too, we wondered what to do about the open casket. The house had mice. There were mouse traps in the pie safes and wooden lids over the flour drawers, so the question was real. The night was black outside the windows. The vision of what would happen after we went to bed made us shiver. We could just close the casket, of course, but we did not know how it worked. There might be a latch of some kind and then we wouldn’t be able to open it in the morning and that might upset my grandmother. We thought of calling the funeral home director, a friend of the family, but it was too late. Finally my aunt just went in and closed it and we all went up to bed.
My bedroom held two beds, each sitting against the wall in opposite corners. Growing up I usually had the feather bed. I loved to shake up the feathers at night, climb up on the frame and collapse down in the middle, a cloud of mattress on either side. Later I chose the other bed, with the ticking mattress, for its undemanding comfort. The head of the bed was next to the door to a walk-in closet that held trunks and yellowing boxes, leaving no room for a side table and lamp. I turned on the light in the closet by pulling the chain on a naked bulb and sat up in bed, writing in my journal.
The wind blew hard off the nearby hill, the one the cattle grazed on. It made wailing sounds around the house that did not alarm me. I had learned to love thunderstorms here, watching the lightning flash off that hill. Part of my mind wrote, while another part listened to the rise and fall of sound outside the black windows. The light made a pool around the head of the bed. The bed on the other side of the room was lost in shadow.
Gradually I began to hear a separate sound, not the wind or the house answering the wind. The sound was rhythmic, with pauses. I looked up into the shadows, alert now. Footsteps. The heavy, measured, comfortable tread of a man.
We had all gone upstairs. My light was the only light. No one was awake. And yet someone was walking downstairs.
I considered this and decided it was my grandfather. He had lived 60 years in the house and we were going to bury him the next day. He had a right.
I turned off my light and went to sleep.
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Watercolor, by my mother, looking down on the house from the top of the next hill. I watched the lightning flash from the top right window.
“Haint” is an Appalachian word for spirit, or ghost.
One Response
Oh my gosh Susan this is beautiful. So sweet, so evocative. You definitely make the reader “see.” I pictured both the old and new parts of the house, the old and young relatives, the old and new memories mingling and even little Daniel being passed around.
Since I believe in the spirit world and live in a very old house (only the fourth owners since 1793) I can also picture your grandfather taking one last turn around the house while everyone slept. I know the creak of steps on old wooden floors and braided rugs “The heavy, measured, comfortable tread of a man.” Beautiful. The “cloud” of the mattress and the chain-pull light in the closet-I can see so clearly. Just beautiful.