“And,” she said, “that means you have to trust me to make my own decisions. That means it’s time to trust me. Now. You’ve taught me everything I need to know about handling life.” As she spun away, her words trailed off and I couldn’t mistake the blithe note in her voice as she said, “We may not always agree . . .”
“No tattoos,” I repeated as I grabbed my purse. “And no piercings, either!”
The next morning, I dropped Ellen off at school and drove out to the old homeplace.
In those first years after the fire, Ellen and I had visited Cooper’s Hollow often. We’d worked together in the shade, cleaning up the graves and sharing our memories. As she moved from elementary to middle and then high school, she became less enthusiastic about going. It seemed to me her attitude was normal and healthy for a teenager. Life seeks life, and young people are like magnets for each other. Ellen went less often, but nothing changed for me. It was important to me to keep the memories fresh, along with keeping the graves weeded and neat.
Going out there with Roger for the preconstruction visit would be different. There would be workmen and strangers with big clumsy equipment and their own agendas. It would be nice when the construction was finished, I didn’t doubt it, but Cooper’s Hollow would be changed forever.
Nothing stays the same, I reminded myself.
This might be my last peaceful visit. The house had burned down twelve years earlier, yet each time I saw the blackened pile of debris, the acrid smell rose again—at least in my memory—and reminded me of our fear that night and of our loss. Beyond the dark, charred heap of what had been our home stood the outbuildings. Those rickety old buildings of weathered gray wood had been untouched by the fire. They still stood, but in varying degrees of collapse. The chicken coop was in shambles. Same with the dog pens. When my grandfather died during my senior year of high school, Gran gave the dogs away to his hunting friends. With the dogs gone, the coyotes grew bolder, and we gave up keeping the chickens.
Grand’s toolshed still stood. I hadn’t opened the door in years. I suspected the junk filling the shed kept it upright as much as its construction did. Beyond the shed was a ramshackle barn. Its stalls had sheltered a few cows and goats through the years. Even a barn cat or two had called it home. We’d had a horse for a short time when I was a child. Upstream, the springhouse was almost lost amid the trees. It straddled a natural spring and caught the water as it bubbled up from the ground and flowed down the hill to Cub Creek. Closest to hand, very near the burned house, was the original log cabin.
No one knew how old the cabin was, though Grand had mused about it a time or two. His great-grands had built the “new” house where I’d lived growing up. It was roomier than the cabin with a living room, two bedrooms, a kitchen, and, eventually, indoor plumbing. The log cabin was used for storage, but when I was teenager, it was where I worked my potter’s wheel and where Grand had set up the kiln. He’d ordered the parts by mail, assembled it, and rigged the kiln to work with propane. The wheel was secondhand but a beauty, and Grand was as tickled to give it to me as I was to receive it.
He ran an electrical line out to the cabin to make it work and for me to be able to plug in a lamp for light. An old treadle wheel my grandmother’s mother had used was stored in a dark, musty corner of the cabin. Grand said the old treadle wheel was too heavy to move because it might fall apart and break Gran’s heart. I was happy with the electric wheel, plus I had a table for wedging and handwork. When I was young, Gran would sit out there in a chair by the hearth to keep me company. She’d share advice while I worked the clay. I had plenty of room, and over time I moved more of Grand’s stuff out of the way. By then we’d stopped calling it the old cabin and referred to it as my pottery cabin.
Grand died while I was in high school, and his death, more than anything else, marked the biggest change in our lives and in our plans, though we didn’t necessarily understand it at the time. In our grief, we simply mourned. He was laid to rest in our cemetery, the Cooper family cemetery. Its stone walls occupied a spot across the creek and up the hill—the natural stone aged and blending in with the trees and leaves and shade, such that, sometimes one could hardly pick the cemetery out from its surroundings. Grand’s remains rested there with his parents, my parents, and others whose graves weren’t marked.
In the years since the fire, when I came out here to the homeplace to reminisce and tend the cemetery, I always paused in the driveway in the spot where Ellen and I had huddled together in shock as the flames rose, and the old wood snapped and crackled, and smoke filled the air, and had watched as our home and our worldly goods were consumed by a mindless force.
As the curtains had flamed in the windows and fire bloomed up from the roof, men did arrive. They brought a tanker truck, but it was far too late for the house. They prevented the fire from spreading into the forest and gave us a ride into town where a local pastor and his wife took us in for a few nights. Ellen and I didn’t sleep that first night. We bathed to rid ourselves of dirt and ash, but the smell of smoke was stuck in our noses, and the night-terror images were too stark in our brains. Our daily lives and our possessions had been so freshly in our hands. I found myself repeatedly staring at my palms as if the lost items might suddenly be there, perhaps a favorite book or Gran’s doilies. Even her pearls, safely stored away for many years, and one of the few nice pieces of jewelry she’d had, were gone. I’d let them burn. Not by choice but by action, along with my drawings, our keepsakes, and everything in the house not on our backs. More than once, I’d relived the memory and wondered if I should have left Ellen outside and dashed back in to grab things, anything, that meant something to us. These many years later, as I stood here in the driveway, and though our losses had been sad, I was also grateful.
At the time of the fire, as young as I was, it had felt too late for me but not for Ellen. She was reaching school age. Would I have left our secluded Hollow on my own? Would I have recognized her need to be among other children and attend school and allowed it to conquer my fears? I liked to think I would’ve put her first, but honestly, I wasn’t sure I would’ve had the courage to risk it.
The fire had been tragic. It had also been liberating in a way I couldn’t have foreseen at the time.
This morning, I took my work bucket from the trunk where I kept my tools for cleaning the cemetery. I slipped on my rubber garden clogs and gathered my gloves, my spade, and the rest of my gear. It wouldn’t do for the cemetery to look shabby. The workmen would be coming in a few days. I wanted them to understand that precious people, gone from this earth but not from my life, had lived in Cooper’s Hollow, and their remains and their memorials dwelt within those stone walls.
The workmen, and anyone else who came here, should tread carefully and respectfully among my memories and my past.
And not judge me.
CHAPTER TWO