Devour
I grew up in a house built in 1765. Old for America. My family has lived in the same house for more than fifty years, which has given me time to consider the other humans who haunted these rooms: daughters of 1803, brothers of 1920, teenagers of 1792.
I wasn’t alive when my family moved in, but I like to imagine that first day, when the rooms were bare, empty, quiet. When the house was like this,
packed with emptiness.
It’s not like that anymore.
In the 1960s, my father and mother came to the house after tough times: bad first marriages, custody battles, lost loved ones. They wanted a new start. My mom was pregnant. When they moved in, she spoke frankly to the ghosts even though she doesn’t really believe in ghosts. Except for when she does. “You’re welcome to stay but please, never show yourselves.” Perhaps my mother’s sense of hospitality or curiosity prevented her from asking the ghosts to simply leave. So far, a deal is a deal. None of us have ever seen a ghost in our old house.
Students from the elementary school used to visit our house to learn about colonial dwellings. Once, my mom set the date with the schoolteachers, then forgot. My parents went traveling and left us home with an auntie who was surprised when a busload of elementary school children arrived expecting a tour. She showed them the brick oven built into our enormous chimney. She showed them our outhouse and chicken coop. Then, not wanting accuracy to stand in the way of effective storytelling, she showed the children the back, secret staircase built as a fire escape. “This, children, is where they hid from the Redcoats.” A statement that, while perhaps untrue, speaks to the fearful history of my small town, the site of both a Revolutionary War battle and, earlier—during Kieft’s War—a massacre of five to seven hundred Wappinger people over the course of one night in 1644. For many years I had imagined that, because my town is small, it might somehow have escaped violence and fear, as if in being little it might hide from what is huge and horrible; a story I created.
Our outhouse is a double-seater. When I consider the number of people who may have lived in this house before me, I multiply the number by two, like the toilet seats. I have no idea how many people this house and land have held. A lot. Our narrow dining room and all the Decembers that have happened inside it are like glass slides held up to the light, singularly or layered. The others who sat here before me, warm from wine. What part of this dust is theirs?
The house has beams cut from American chestnut, a species that, more or less, no longer exists. These beams tempt me to think of the house as a living tree. Before furnaces, families hung blankets from the beams in winter to close off rooms and trap the fireplace’s heat in a smaller space. The family would gather in these blanket rooms.
The historical society wants to include my parents’ house in their registers but my mom likes her freedom. She says they can have it when she moves out. I don’t think she’s ever going to move out of that house.
My mother is a beauty, a serious practical joker, an opera fan, a painter, a lover of literature, flowers, carnivals, dessert, travel, children, and people. She is kind, funny, and intelligent. She is a sharp dresser. When I plug a description of her house into the National Study Group on Chronic Organization’s Clutter Scale, it ranks between a Level III and a Level IV. There are five levels. The blindness of categories is a tool to flatten the story.
Olympia Dukakis delivers the best line in Norman Jewison’s 1987 film Moonstruck. To her cheating husband she says, “Cosmo, I just want you to know, no matter what you do, you’re going to die, like everybody else.”
If my mom keeps all her stuff, maybe she’ll keep on living? Seems worth a shot. She doesn’t buy new things. The stuff in her house is old. A copy of Treasure Island inscribed to my father—To Walter Jr. from Dewell and Phelps Christmas 1940, my mother’s well-played-with Ziegfeld Girls paper dolls from 1941—Patricia Dane, Louise LaPlanche, Anya Taranda, and even the inventor Hedy Lamarr, their undergarments printed with stars that seem distant, as if we are seeing their light across the universe and they’ve already burnt out. I find a xylophone made to look like a green caterpillar; a miniature stuffed pink hot-air balloon whose basket hides a music box; an empty tin of lotus tea, a souvenir from my wedding; a tin of pickup sticks; and a cookie box printed to resemble needlepoint—“Saturday’s child is full of grace”—stuffed with crayons. I was born on a Saturday. There’s beauty in her house and lots to look at. Thrift store clothes and art books. There’s little of financial value but much that’s rich in color and meaning. If I started reading the books in my parents’ house right now, I’d die still reading.
In between my visits some things disappear, others emerge. I suspect things in the house are reproducing. The child of a Dutch windmill salt shaker and the old brown velvet couch might be the elegant secretary with an angled tabletop that one day appeared in the kitchen. My mom doesn’t buy things, but things I’ve never seen before, sometimes, suddenly appear.
I tell her, “You can’t hold on to every beautiful thing.” But watching her sort through a pile of old magazines is like watching an Arctic hunter carving up a seal. There’s no part of the beast without a purpose; nothing goes to waste under my mother’s attentions. She finds value in things others might discard. An article about South American frescoes that was written in 1992 holds just as much value to her today as it did when first published—perhaps even more now that a periodical from 1992 might be hard to find. I admire her thriftiness, even if I sometimes worry that what she’s done is built herself a very colorful tomb.
Every now and then, important things do get lost in the ramble of her home. We had my dad cremated. My mom put his ashes in an old cookie tin, then she put the tin into his well-loved briefcase. Then she put the whole thing under the bed they had shared for thirty-odd years.
After some time, my mom started to date other people. Maybe it became strange to have the ashes of her dead husband underneath her bed when she had a boyfriend. She moved my dad into another room.
A few years later one of my daughters asked, “Where’s your dad?”
“He smoked cigarettes so he died.”
“But what happened to his body?”
“We burned him.”
I’ve been honest with my daughters from the start. I tell them what I can about sex, death, birth, all of it. It seems easier to slip these truths in from the beginning when everything is equally surprising/unsurprising. Carrots, sandwiches, cancer, hand jobs, menstruation, tulips, decay.
My daughter wanted to see what my dad’s ashes looked like. I asked my mom, “Where’s Dad?” We looked. My dad was lost. She knew he was in the house. She just couldn’t, at that moment, say where.
There’s a peace that comes over me in this house. Something similar to floating in a warm ocean. Maybe it’s a desire to drown. It is impossible not to find beauty there, interesting ideas everywhere I look, the detritus of humans who make art. The house also winnows out from my life anyone who is uptight. The house reminds me that order is temporary and that it is better to learn to feel at home in spaces that lack order, rooms that don’t make a human sense. The peace I find in this house is that of being lost with no desire to ever be found. It is surrender and the realization that I am also part of the house and my mom’s collections.
I left New York City soon after my landlords replaced the wooden front doors—doors that had stood since the turn of the last century—with plastic ones. Now, only a decade later, those new doors have already peeled and paled. They are self-destructing. The lies capitalism tells in order to sell more things. I was out of my apartment barely a week when, passing back by, I found our seven-foot-long pink cast-iron tub. It had been left at the curb as rubbish. It had cleaned bodies since the 1940s. It was one of the best things in the apartment. Nieces and nephews would come visit just to bathe in our pink tub. I tried to take it with me but couldn’t even lift one corner of that old tub, made, as it had been, to last forever. I wonder where that tub is now.
As a family of eight, camping was how we spent our vacations. It was cheap enough. Our tent was a heavy green canvas number, so difficult to erect that it often took half the family to set it up.
I remember one victorious camping trip. My mom and her sister, both married to alcoholics, were fed up, so they packed me and my cousin Christine into a station wagon and we left. We didn’t arrive at our campsite until after dark. The moms went to battle with that tent. In the past they’d always relied on the men. That night turned out to be no different. After cursing so loudly, for so long, they stirred our campground neighbors to sympathy. Two brothers arrived with a hammer and had the tent set up shortly thereafter.
Recently I found that old green tent in my basement. It hadn’t been set up in over twenty years, but none of us have the stomach to junk it. How long and well it held us all together. It leaked in the rain. My mother would wake and construct beach towel dikes to divert the flood. Such tenderness in that tent, a place I remember as being kind, sturdy, exhausted. I set the tent up with my daughters, thinking it would make a summer fort. And it did, for a day. But now the tent’s been up for weeks and I’m the only one playing in it. The daily thunderstorms that rip through here knock it down, soak its insides every afternoon. So I set it up again, in order to dry it out before I put it away. Or I set it up again because each time I step inside, the musty, earthy odor zooms me into the past, a terrifically fast time machine. I mentioned the scent to my sister Amy over the phone. It’s such a deeply lodged sense memory that even six hours away, she could smell that old tent too.
I’m happy to make meaning out of any old thing I find. Here’s the past in my backyard. The past is hard to keep standing up. The past is also hard to take down. The tent weighs more than I do. I note that the past has completely killed the summer grass that had been growing beneath it. I hoist the bagged-up old tent onto my shoulder. I carry it across my back. It’s easy to imagine the tent is my father’s dead body. It’s the right shape, the right weight. He loved this tent. I lug, I hug, and sometimes I even ask myself, Why am I carrying around this heavy dead thing that kills the grass?
After my dad was gone I took books from his library, thinking I could build a small replica of him inside of me by reading what he had read. My father had been so smart. He had been full of book learning. Having him with me was like having a walking work of reference before the internet. I could ask him anything and chances were good that he knew something—not necessarily on every topic, but near every topic. If my interests were Irish holy wells, he might tell me something about Appalachian springs. A tangent that might become a new path, like browsing the stacks in a library and not finding the book you’re looking for but finding the book you weren’t looking for.
One of the books I took from my dad was Joseph Twaddell Shipley’s The Dictionary of Word Origins. I’m not sure what this book meant to my father or even how often he referred to it in life, but after he was gone I asked the dictionary the things I could no longer ask him. Word Origins became a place for talking with the dead, a tool of divination. It’s never far from my hand. One of the best parts about Shipley’s dictionary is that, in an effort to be efficient, he points out the relationships between words. He builds beautiful and astonishing connections. On a day when I miss my dad I might look up the word “die,” searching for a hint or a way to better understand sorrow, and Shipley, because his dictionary is capacious, responds with:
die, See sequin
The hole death made isn’t filled but it flashes with glitter. Romantic trouble? I ask and Shipley, sounding much like my dad, writes:
boy, See alas
When my body was battered by doctors, Shipley told me:
gynecology, See banshee
His work is poetry. It illuminates and broadens my understanding, as verse does. It makes me feel a part of all. It makes gentle sense, spreading joy and curiosity. It suggests that wisdom is not hierarchical—there’s no ladder going up—but cyclical, relational. Sometimes I have no question but open Shipley to any old page, throwing the bones. phantom, See focus. fashion, See defeat. rape (turnip), See alcohol. Sometimes I don’t even follow up with Shipley’s reference word, enjoying and imagining the electric distance between phantom and focus. Other times, I keep reading and I’m further rewarded.
devour, See sarcophagus
sarcophagus
The ancient Greeks buried bodies in coffins (or pits) made of a kind of limestone, which supposedly consumed them. They called this coffin a sarcophagus (from Gr. sarx, sarc—, flesh + phagein, to eat).
The full definition goes on to include references to geophagy, omnibus, carnal, coronation, carnival, sarcasm, morsel, and mausoleum, among others. Shipley’s act of reference, X, See y, teaches me that everything is connected, everyone is related. X, See y. Y, See o. O, See 3. 3, See tree. In Shipley we are linked. We are part of a whole.
Merlin Sheldrake, the author of Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures, writes, “The authors of a seminal paper on the symbiotic view of life take a clear stance on this point. ‘There have never been individuals,’ they declare. ‘We are all lichens.’” And lichens, Sheldrake tells us, “flicker between ‘wholes’ and ‘collections of parts’ … Lichens are stabilized networks of relationships; they never stop lichenizing; they are verbs as well as nouns.”
What book do you use as oracle? What book don’t you use that way? What book is not a work of reference, pointing in the direction of every book our author has read, job her parents have worked, meal she’s eaten, film she’s seen, road she’s walked, rock she’s kicked, microbe she’s never even imagined?
My dad had been sick for about a year with lung and colon cancer when he collapsed upstairs. I was at work, but my brother Charley took care of him. From the floor, my dad said, maybe if he had something to eat he’d regain his strength. Charley brought him a chocolate doughnut with rainbow sprinkles, the sort of confection my father loved. My dad ate half of the doughnut before admitting that something more serious was wrong with his body. Charley and my mom took him to the hospital.
We created a lot of stories when our dad was sick, things to believe in, like: Hospitals stop death, or, Maybe you just need something sweet to eat, then you’ll feel better. Once, my dad sent me to the store for some Preparation H and we shared a moment of believing that the tumors in his colon might actually just be hemorrhoids, a fiction that felt temporarily courageous as hope. When my dad was still in our home, we felt we were still in charge of the narrative. We are good with fictions. Our house is made for fictions. They seem to crop up there like mushrooms. When my dad was admitted to the hospital, the story changed. Our beliefs, however fungal, were scrubbed clean. Other people got involved, people who side with nonfiction. One doctor, perhaps noticing my skill in self-delusion, told me, “He’s going to die. You know he’s going to die, right?” I asked her to leave. Denying death is foolish, I know, but there’s still a part of me, a very immature part of me, that believes my dad would still be alive if I’d kept him better wrapped up in stories.
The morning after he died, I lay down in that place where he’d collapsed at home. It had been a week since he’d fallen there. From this position I had a good view underneath the cabinet. There among the dust bunnies, I found the other half of the chocolate doughnut. I swallowed the half doughnut quickly, before I could think. I suspected that if I didn’t eat it right away I’d be stuck with this doughnut for the rest of my life, making a monument out of a half-eaten piece of cake. Yes, I shouldn’t be so attached to objects. I went on to eat the hairs that remained in my dad’s humble hairbrush, remembering some distorted childhood wisdom that said hair lasts seven years in the stomach. It was an experiment. I enjoy conducting experiments. I thought if I could keep him with me for seven years, maybe, by then, death would hurt me less. That turned out to be very true. Seven years later his death hurt far less. But that day with the doughnut, I was still unhinged by my dad’s dying. He was seventy-one, not too young, but it seemed there was much more he should have seen in life. His death seemed an impossible thing—like someone vanishing into thin air right in front of my eyes. I was distraught by the loss of stories he hadn’t yet told me.
Like Shipley’s, the poet Heather McHugh’s knowledge of etymologies runs deep. Sometimes her sentences overwhelm with doubled and tripled meanings, some of them maybe even unintended. Her lectures are built like New Orleans graveyards; coffins and meanings are stacked three or four high. McHugh once told me, “Language’s orders are of means: grammar and syntax. Its disorders are of meaning.” Like finding eros in the word “erosive.” That’s an important one for me, student of geology, the place where desire and rocks meet. McHugh went on to tell me, “Etymology is etiology.” I had to look up the word “etiology.” It’s a term most often used in medicine, meaning the cause of a disease or abnormal condition. So, words as illness.
Copyright © 2022 by Samantha Hunt
