the potency of the past? Like a shad finning toward the certain muskiness of birthplace, or a homing pigeon with a message around its neck, I went home. Mostly I went home because I was afraid of losing what could have been mine. I don’t mean property. I mean the fat drops of dew that fall from the maple. I mean two brilliant redbirds, both male, in a nearby holly, and the red-shouldered hawk, whose very ancestors perhaps had circled high over the branch, whistling, causing my own ancestors to raise their faces.
I was of two minds about the return: either I would fail and leave after a year or two or I would revitalize my grandmother’s farm, buying it piece by piece from aunts and uncles, and I would die where seven generations of grandmothers had died before me. Maybe, just maybe, if I could slay the demons of childhood memory, knowing what I now knew, I could carve out a life that would be courageous, and gratifying, and of a piece.
In August of 1997, seventeen years after I fled my hometown for good, eager to quit its smallness and its unfor-givingness, my son and I moved into my grandmother’s heart-pine house, amid tobacco fields and cow pastures in Spring Branch, a farming section of northern Appling County, Georgia.
Restoration
The day after we arrived was the first day of school. I enrolled Silas in third grade and set to work, packing Grandmama’s dusty and cobwebbed past into boxes marked “linens” or “kitchen.” During the last hot, dry, sun-searing days of August, I emptied her things from cabinets and cupboards and replaced them with ours. The water to the house was off because of busted lines, so I hauled water from an outside spigot to clean. Within a couple of days, Daddy came and helped me fix the water line, so we had running water.
For a week I washed shelves, walls, and ceilings. I relined the kitchen cabinets with fresh newspaper, and laundered curtains and linens. I vacuumed the dead wasps. Before a week was out, I set up the computer and dared, with a house in chaos, to write in the mornings.
The first weeks were hard. I was alternately full of fear and full of peace. Afternoons, when I heard the school bus struggle to a stop to let off Silas, I turned off the computer, unplugging it and shutting the window behind it against a chance of sudden thunderstorms. Daddy would show up with Mama to work in the ninety-five-degree heat while Silas positioned his plastic action toys on battlegrounds of weedy flower beds. Uncle Percy would emerge from his trailer to join the activity—the proposing of solutions, the fetching of tools, the repair—even if he mostly watched. Mama took care of Silas and helped with the renovation if her arthritis pain would allow it.
We replaced a corroded section of copper pipe that ran to the gas space heaters—“we” being Daddy and me. What we discovered on the way to fixing the gas leak was a spray-bottle-size leak in a hot water line, then another leak in the gas line, then we (mostly Daddy, thank goodness) wrenched a fitting apart while screwing in the new section of line. The lines were under the house in the dirt, with the black widow spiders and the rattlesnakes. We had to cut off the water and the gas and drive seven miles to town for new fittings.
“Can you do without water tonight?” Daddy asked.
“Is there a choice?”
“Not really. It’s too dark to fix this now.”
“I did without it the first two days. I can again.”
“We’ll get on it first thing in the morning.”
“I need to write in the morning. Can you come in the afternoon? I’ll do without water.”
“Better go draw up some jugs, then.”
“Why don’t you and Silas come eat with us tonight?” Mama asked. “You can take baths at our house, too.”
“Thank you, Mama. We’ll get by here. I can make sandwiches, and sponge off.”
After five days of cooking on a camping stove, I fixed the real stove by cleaning out its orifices. Daddy and I got the hot water heater working again. Mama and I swept and mopped. We fixed busted water pipes and cleared blocked drains. We repainted and rescreened the front porch, where Grandmama’s two rockers sat alongside our canoe paddles and walking sticks. We tidied flower beds and planted hens-and-chickens—Mama had given me cuttings of the succulent—in concrete pots on either side of the front steps.
After nine years of neglect, a hundred tasks jostled for our attention: repair the oven, paint the kitchen, rake pine straw around the blueberries, prune the fruit trees, saw up the fallen tree, clear away the smokehouse it fell on. Uncle Percy and I set about rebuilding the kitchen screen door, which was rotted and rusted. The jamb needed replacing, and the inner door was deteriorating as well. “If the termites weren’t holding hands,” I heard someone say, “the house would fall down.” The railing along the kitchen stoop needed paint. We worked at the tasks, pegging away, a little every day toward a new home. Slowly we made the house ours.
Despite how my heart was wrenched, faced as I was with the hardest reminders of childhood (being where the memories happened was making them raw again), I’d never been more content than at the farm, as if I’d lived my whole life to come back. Those August days the air was thickly green, waterlogged, and charged with heat. It smelled of fallen pine needles clumped in the grass, and decaying water oak limbs, and also of deeply wet earth. Tough fists of sand pears dropped from the trees and rotted on the ground until my father came in his dilapidated pickup and gathered washtubs full for the wild hogs penned in his junkyard. Scuppernongs, which I had reminisced so often about, ripened on the vines, carrying fall’s pungency, a scent different from the sweetness of the tangled pasture, where Uncle Bill boarded cows. The days were longer than days had been in years. They were long and eerily quiet.
How can I say “quiet” when frogs were honking and cicadas yea-saying and the fan whirring continuously on low and fat drops of rain smacking catalpa leaves? Quiet, with the distant grumble of thunder and determination of cars on the highway? The magnolia shading the bedroom window clattered its noisy castanets, discarding them on the ground. Yet a vast silence lay upon the land; wide as gauze, it enveloped me and drifted away with me. The long, quiescent days were vessels for an odd freedom, like wearing overalls instead of a Sunday suit. One can move inside silence, like air moves inside overalls.
I loved the farm.
I’d promised Silas a puppy for our new life, and we searched for one among those abandoned at dumpsters, or along roadsides.
“What about him?” I would ask. The dog would be too mangy or too big. Near Lane’s Bridge we spotted a short-haired, brown-and-white pup with little legs and perky ears, ranging through wrappers.
“OK,” Silas said eagerly. I pulled over, bumping to a halt. The dog spotted us and took off like a rocket, legs streaking. Because it seemed to be running sideways we burst out laughing.
“Let’s follow it,” I said, but the dog cut across a field and disappeared into woods.
We procured a free puppy from a neighbor who already had four or five unspayed dogs. Silas picked the runt of the latest litter not because he was small or sported a white tip on his black tail but because that dog, of them all, came up and licked his hand. He named him Enoch, after a carouser in The Education of Little Tree, a book we’d been reading aloud.
You should have seen my son’s joy as they tore around the yard, racing between the aged pines, coming upon the feel of swiftness, that elation you get only from running
