John the Posthumous (5 page)

In Matthew, the house is a dead bird or a box of thorns. But parables are not always the same as lies. Your dictionary calls them stories, but these we can see behind the child. All right—let us put it a different way. The man returns in the morning. He stands at the window. The woman departs in the afternoon.

In the third story, the child lights a candle on the anniversary of his mother’s death. But the candle topples during the night, and the flame finds the drapery, one corner and then the next, traveling now with considerable haste to the edge of the rug, which catches, naturally, carrying the flame to the wall, to the door, to the foyer, and then up the stairs and along the hallway to a room—where a pair of shoes burns first, and then the nightstand, and the blanket and bedsheet, and the father asleep in the bed.

A
nimals, yard and road, 1848: fall. The birds ignore the birdhouse, a few pipes and a wire. Mauled house cat, north side. Three carriage accidents, south side. Field, 1871: fall. A man drowns ten rabbits in a stream. Town,
1887: fall. They cry a porcelain lion on a wooden
platform, hickory or deal.

Were you to gather the blanket this way, and set it on a chair, in winter, in the sewing room or the sitting room—horses on the wall; a wolf on a shelf—or in one of the rooms named for a color—late in the afternoon, the light terrifically dim—it might conjure, finally, the form of your boyhood dog.

Animals in the walls, child’s room, 1952: summer. The parakeets shriek for three days. Master bedroom, 1954: summer. The rats run from east to west, late at night, behind the headboard—walnut; a bend at the center; six feet across—and back again, from west to east, returning to the attic early in the morning.

N
ew Street, 1858. Daniel Anderson: merchant (suit of clothes, burnt). Charles Barnett: gentleman (brick house, two horses). James Berger: surgeon (“My son
kills moths under the awnings”). William Brown: care
taker (“It was my greatest unhappiness”). John Cole: unknown. Samuel Cole: unknown. Theodore Cole: unknown. Nathan Dixon: gentleman (frame house, horse and carriage). Herman Fine: trimmer (drawing of a city bridge, ball-peen hammer). Francis Hoffman: cordwainer (irregular pulse, weak heart). Edward Hunter: clerk (“My brothers fell that morning from the widow’s walk”). Aaron Jackson: gentleman (“My father wore the horns”). Jacob Leach: watchmaker (hives, stitch, anemia, fever). Walter Moore: shut-in (house and lot, horse and carriage). Alexander Morton: slater (doll’s head, hollow). William Munson: unknown. Thomas Nelson: unknown. John Nicholas: gentleman (“We were married in every town”). Bartholomew Ott: merchant (“I once received letters like these”). Richard Pollard: coffinmaker (catalog of animals, red umbrella). Isaac Rice: driver (jaundice, palsy, blindness, stroke). Arthur Ritter: clergyman (cabinet of English linen, revolver). George Sexton: lawyer (house and lot, two horses and carriage). Timothy Skinner: tailor (chestnut secretary, burnt). Timothy Skinner, Jr.: unknown. Edward Todd: constable (“Charlotte won my heart”). Peter Turnbull: dyer (“If only I had hastened home”). Frederick Twitchell: clerk (lesions, bleeding, pleurisy, seizure). John Wilton: gentleman (two place-settings, garden spade).

H
ousehold calamities, 1863: spring and summer. An attic collapses under cannon fire. Lightning destroys a porch awning, a Dutch door, a wedding trellis. A cyclone destroys eight chimneys and a balcony. (Mr. Porter, the lodger, removes to the cellar with a fowling piece, a flannel hat, a crate of dirt, and a pasteboard face.)

How to survive a household fire, 1905: crawl to the door. Or remain in place. Or hang a white bedsheet
from the window—and cry out your wife’s name.
Family disaster plan, 1926: three pages, in triplicate. Or four diagrams with broken lines. Or a map of the town, evacuation route in blue thread.

Household accidents, 1957: fall and winter. They carry the father to an empty room, loosen his collar and necktie, cover the wound. An icicle finds the child’s left eye—and then the right. Collapsed ladder, soldier. Four poisonings, boys. Stove fires, various. (Mrs. Gray, the neighbor, drives an automobile onto the lawn, and then onto the walk, and then into the front room.)

P
ortrait of Albert Post,
1864. A man in a uniform stands before a field tent. Second Lieutenant, 45
th
Regiment, Pennsylvania Infantry. (He dies eight years later.)
Execution of the Bridegroom,
1868. A man in a tailcoat stands before a house. The door is thought to recall a hood or shroud, the windows—shuttered—crosses or closed eyes, and the steeples at the roofline a pair
of horns. (The church burns to the ground in a
subsequent painting.)
Execution of a Jew
, 1873. A man hangs—upside down, arms in chains—between two dogs. The beam is far darker than the posts, which are far darker than the cart. (The second panel depicts a row of houses on a road.)

One year passes for the family, and now another, town by town, door by door, room by room, despite the color of the bedclothes, and despite the objects, hers or his, or theirs—an old knife in a pail, if you like, and a wooden animal on a platter—beside the bed.

Diorama, 1959. An automobile, a felled tree, a visitor at the door. (He is without a proper hat or a suitable coat.) The house is brown, with yellow trim. There are ten rooms, a cellar, and an attic. The father, in a near corner—returning to, or retiring from, the foyer. (“I had hoped to fail more grandly.”) The son hides behind the shed. (It can be sad in a yard, can it not?) Firewood and a scythe, a dog on the porch. There are chalk drawings on the cellar floor. A stranger, in a hallway chair—a mousetrap and a teakettle at his feet. (“I wore the room poorly.”) The mother, evidently preparing to cry, turns away. (And what does she see?) There are three windows across, and open curtains. Wires, a lamppost, the daughter on the walk. (She carries an uncomely valise.) The street ends at a red fence.

I
V.

W
hereupon: I would repair from the landing to the hallway—it was rather narrow; a garment of some sort comes to mind, woolen, in the company of another object, a larger one, something copper or brass—at the end of which stood my bedroom door.

T
hey believed me enamored of the color red, which may explain the blanket and the wallpaper and the lampshade, if not the configuration of items—mangled animals, at least as the shadows had it—on the windowsill.

D
id you see, on certain evenings, your brother’s face in the drapery? I would divide the ceiling at the wire, and then list all the letters in the names. I would find the seam in the carpet, and then subtract from ten, from seven, from five. But at what hour? The closet door, in this inventory, was a matter of no account.

H
ow unfortunate, furthermore, the condition of the trinkets, shattered with a hammer—and the bedsheets, on the top shelf, ripped from end to end. I would disarrange the articles with great address, holding each one to my throat. The slant of light, I think, permits mention of the partition. Eightpenny nails lined the bottom shelf.

I
n the photograph, I was the child on the right, beside a stray mark, a mistake at the edge of the frame. I should like to recount, at this point, before I fall ill, or am overtaken by distraction or melancholy, how we lost the house—but I can no longer remember the story.

V
.

T
he gun room has two doors, or three—compare the first, if you please, with the father’s body—and a table painted gray. The parlor wallpaper, from afar, through the garden window, or as it appears in a photograph, torn out one afternoon from this book or that, or from the family album, and then marked in a number of places—with X’s, unless these are crosses—seems to display a row of green lions and black hatchets, or perhaps a formation of brown towers around a blue lake.

The conduct book describes a wooden house on a creek, all the doors and windows nailed shut. The household almanac describes a stone house, a cottage, the blind son in bed. The marriage manual describes a Colonial house, where the maid prepares a room for Mrs. Hand, a friend from town.

The bedrooms—four small disappointments, according to the father—display photographs in chrome
frames, or silver ones, and collections of broken objects.
The dining room has a drop-leaf table—a spoon clicks
against the man’s tooth; the woman chokes to death on
a pheasant bone—and a sideboard with a false drawer.
The powder room takes its name from an eighteenth-
century chamber—but here the wig is covered with blood, and falls to the floor. The hidden room—off the front hallway, or beyond the rear staircase, or behind the pantry wall—has a trapdoor, from which hangs a ladder to the cellar.

I
n the cellar: a pull saw and a hasp, a jack plane, a wrecking bar, and a claw hammer. A tin contains a cap screw and a razor blade. A jar contains the remains of a carpet beetle.

I dismantle the chairs and place all the parts in a crate. I station the broom beside the garden spade.

The killer in the cellar, in folklore, is discovered by a mute child. The prisoner in the cellar survives a fire or a storm—but is later mauled by wolves.

There were fleas last year, and squirrels the year before that.

The foundation plan of the Burrows house, on Market Street, in Durham, Pennsylvania—built 1875; sold 1878; destroyed, by flood, 1914—indicates, upper right, a furnace room, divided in two, and a disappearing staircase.

In the attic: a stump doll, a child’s rifle, a wig on a wooden peg. Grandmother’s hat-stands—the initials
in cursive—are set out on a metal ledge. A suitcase
contains five nightdresses and a carriage bolt.

There is a mark on the doorpost, in pencil, forty-one inches from the floor.

Mannikins—Mary Casket and John Coffin—would hang from the rafters in Colonial attics. Dollhouses, in Victorian attics, were sometimes arranged to form foreign towns—and, it turns out, to capture bats.

I place the poison in each corner. I find the bodies behind the door—that morning or afternoon, or by the end of the week.

The cross section of the Grimes house, on Oak Road, in Thornton, Pennsylvania—built 1906; sold 1938; torn down 1939—indicates, among other things, an attic door, ajar, and blackout at a ridge vent.

I
would prefer a dragon beam, actually, fractured or otherwise, if not jack rafters and a scissor brace, or even queenposts on a tie beam, or hammerposts on a
hammer beam, the purlins having been ravaged in the usual manner. But these elements, alas, occur
elsewhere—a few doors away, or down a block, or over a hill and toward the river, crossing the bridge now into the next town.

T
he roof often appears a peculiar blue. At this distance, anyway—from the lawn and the walk. The dormers are somewhat darker.

Your standard roofing nail, nine gauge or ten, barbed, lands on the awning or on the garden path.

Slating: copper wire. Shingle: cut-iron or steel.

Is it true that the mansard roof was named for the form of Mansart’s coffin?

But now we are north of the boy.

Poor boys fall from chimneys only in the morning, according to that old saying—just as a gentleman drowns only at night. Either way, a windstorm next August will carry off the neighbor’s weathervane.

I paint the eaves and doorframes every five years. I have twice replaced the flashing at the ridge.

The shakes are cedar or pine or cypress, hand-split and stained.

Pitch: 12/12.

The gambrel roof was named for the gambrel stick—bent like a horse’s leg, and from which butchers would hang dead animals.

Lightning strikes the ladder, several rungs down.

My father’s house, on New Street, in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania—which I visited as a child, in 1969—was a brown Colonial with four columns, dentil molding, and a widow’s walk.

The cornice vents attract various insects—crickets, termites, flies.

Flat wire: one foot square. Single bead: soldered.

And now we find a cat’s tail near the downspout.

The gable roof was named for the gable wall—brick, in this case, with an ornament on the door.

From above, the man on the roof—just east of the dormers; prone—may appear a branch or a pitchfork, or perhaps a tiny gap in the valley.

T
ulips are rooms in red blood. Have I mistaken the phrase? Horsetail grows in the yard. You weed and you weed, but in it creeps.
Lawn
also refers to a linen of some sort—and
plat,
at one time, referred to the shape of a blade. Imagine a dagger or an ax, or those swords designed to resemble bodies. Women of a certain station, I once read, were not to be seen in the presence of knives. And so the ancients would place their artifacts at the doorpost, and take away on a glass plate a portion of the offering.

T
he porch light: this scatters the cats. I sweep the patio every two weeks, and clean it with bleach in summer and fall. The wind in the pickets, I should think, terrifies the mice. But now I have lost the sun again. A squirrel drowns one Monday in a flowerpot. I bait the traps with meat, and cut the branches along the path. I trip—you see?—on the last step.

The object nailed to the tree: something small and wooden, but not a doll.

The Rowan children would feign death on the
doorstep of the first house; and in the yard of the second
house, before a shed and a hedgerow; and in a field of weeds beyond the third house, next to a barn, the name and the hex sign upside down.

A newspaper account describes a boy of five,
caught beneath a maple gate for sixteen hours—out
side the Milton house, on Bird Road, in Whitebriar,
Pennsylvania, 1953.

In folklore, the orphans cross one road and then another—having traveled due south for three days, or perhaps four; and having discovered a breach in the greenery; and having surmounted a low wall or fence—arriving at your door in the middle of the night.