For history and legend sakes, certain attributes, character traits, have to be appointed here at the beginning of This old house (B. 1742), home for more than half a century of my life, and This old room, dressed with a computer for 28 years. Yet I swear thick-cut Edgeworth pipe tobacco bears its welcome as strong as my grandfather’s creaking chair, diminutive Johnny Igoe’s chair. This most memorable compartment was also his room for 20 years of literate cheer, storied good will, pleasantries of expansive noun, excitable verb, and his ever-lingering poems, each one a resonance, a victory of sound and meaning and the magic of words. Yet be of stout spirit, for the chair mocks time only in the clutch of darkness thick as the eternal void, and the tobacco’s no longer threatening in its gulp.
To walk these stairs, up or down, a signal for day or evening in the heart of an otherwise silence is to hear sassy children underfoot, the underlings of square nails stretching their might, hanging on for 277 years’ worth of treads and risers and hand-hewn stringers. Ah, pingsnap! Last night I heard one letting go, tired of the holding on. Without doubt, age talks back to you at night. Pingsnap! Pingsnap! Oh, woe! Hear that message, hear that voice.
Likewise, on a few major beams, newly exposed by my reach back into the house’s beginning, some broadly a foot across, ax marks permanent as severe scars, bark on round edges of odd main beams clings in place, refusing to let go. That refusal boggles the mind to think these beams were slabbed out of trees closing now on three-hundred years of being, if not already there. Their span spans uncounted generations, their grip hangs tenacious.
Another note; a special window snugs close by the porch roof. How many times it has been the way in or out for generations of youth on to daughters or destinies we’ll never know, where my sons and attesting companions saw one Halloween night, stars mere, the moon absconded with light, the shadow of a man in a felt hat. A strange man, they swore and swear. So strong the sight that all these years later they step aside passing through the back hall, as if making room for the dusky persona grata, granting memorial space for the solitary and dark intruder, though it’s also sworn he wore the hat of a kind last seen hereabouts only on my father.
From a most personal confrontation comes another point of house lore. Standing by the twin windows of the bathroom one weekend morning, I watched two of my sons and a daughter at early play. The day bristled and crackled, leaves were at heavy spoilage and thick of pile, golden and myriad red Persians at a momentary standstill of their October march. My eyes trained on my own beginnings where an old barn, sloped at ridge beam and atilt, leaning forever, continued to loose energies and imaginations.
In the barn, rain hung on like old statements. Soft corners kept themselves wetter than rooting, heaved mushrooms out of droppings swept from stallions now but bone. Spider webs, taking up their dew, walked on railroad silver, aimed for stars locked at night where roofed pine knots fall, or the moon, needing a drink, dropped its straws down. It’s wetter likely underground, but can’t smell like this: old blankets out all night, dog’s breath, leather still breathing hide work a mule threw off his brewed chassis barreling the field all day. My intent was to watch and marvel at child’s play and hustle, to propose and endure love from a distance, tempest of the far heart.
Mysteriously I was joined by another father who peered over my shoulder, sharing my intent. This man, this visitor, appeared out of the damp air of the room, a specter of comfort and custom, trying, I assumed, to take his place again, steal something back he had lost. I told him without looking back at him, sort of indirectly at first, and then most pointedly, that this time was mine. That father, and who knows how many others in conjunction with him in the same space, went quietly back to his eternal comfort. There were no tears, no ministrations or implorations, no wringing of hands, no fright wrought out of his visit, as though an inalienable right had been invoked.
For true appointment with time, this house was, in another heyday, in its infancy, the Oyster Inn, a stagecoach stop on the Boston-Newburyport run late in the Eighteenth Century, old Route One. Part proof of that portrayal is the layer of discarded oyster shells that every garden attempt in the backyard has revealed, a thick, white archeological strata most likely boasting both pre-Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary chalk, and remnants of America’s First Iron Works, 50 yards away. Such digs have uncovered old sump holes, dried and rock-throated wells gone harshly back to earth again, leech fields and cesspools also bearing rock and all laying a way of drainage off to the river a quick 200 feet away. Who knows where those fluids went? The theory is after 17 feet of such plunging through sand and soil their purity is re-established, resurrected.
This is a house whose rafters and beams of its three floors are either 9×12 or 10×13 or 8×11 or thereabouts in its barn-body mix, leveled on the top for floor or the bottom for ceiling sighting. It is where ancient coin has been deposited by carpenter or builder as a token fetish on a base sill thicker than a lineman’s thigh. And where, inside one wall and atop one window coming down in constant maintenance of the years, came forth a child’s high button shoe nailed with a square nail to a lintel as a carpenter’s statement. The old shoe’s sole is worn extremely thin on one side as if that carpenter’s child or builder’s child had dragged one foot through a period of her early life. The shoe most likely is a fetish, a buttoned talisman or an amulet, or, as my father once pointed out from his worldly tours with the Marines, an antinganting, which a legendary Filipino had left impressed on his storied mind.
Oh, that child haunts me yet. She comes back each time I look upon the shoe framed in a recess of glass with a museum of house nails and clay marbles exhumed from beam restoration or foundation gravel. Each night dousing the last kitchen light, emptying out day, so much like a shopkeeper at the till, I think she might be the daughter of the other father who looked over my shoulder that day in the upstairs bathroom, where my territory, my time, was invaded, with a quiet retreat following. Honor among parents, perhaps, or the Good Carpenter, Joseph himself, making a stand for his tradesmen.
A house is where boards in the roof are sometimes thirty-six inches broad in their endless cover. It’s a house where a portion of one cellar is a single stone no horse of theirs could have moved during construction and became part of the house’s support. It is where archways of red mickey bricks out of a long-gone nearby kiln stand as tunnels through the basement, and two and a half centuries later continue to hold up for needed warmth all eight fireplaces including two beehive ovens. Some nights alone, letting all my genes work their way into a froth of knowledge, or letting them free of baseboard or wainscoting, I taste the bread and the beans from those ovens, know the mud that sealed these domed cooking chambers, feel the kitchen work its magic.
From the front yard I can, even today (approaching my 91st birthday) throw a stone well into the First Iron Works of America, Cradle of American Industry. Waiting to sit again in that front yard, is a smooth granite hitching post, four hundred pounds or better, buried for a century in the backyard. There is a hole drilled through ten inches of that column where the wrought iron ring has fled back into the earth. Though one son, I know, will put both back where they belong, time coming, time allowed, tools at home in his hands, and history.
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