A Short Memoir of Two Houses

Vinn McBride, First Place

1. The house on B Road went up for sale maybe a year after he exhaled his last on the kitchen floor. It was a great old house, a true old house the kind of old domicile that only gets sold to people who eke out soil-living. The poverty of it, the flaws in the crafting— intolerable. Great old house. Cellar-with-a-lifting-door hardwood-floor-with-rugs, taxidermy-mounted-gaping-heads bedroom-with-bed-on-floor, great-upstairs-rooms-with-sliding-doors pine-painted-oak, century-turn luxury. Great old house. She learned to hate it, I think, she had to go, I know, she fled and took her brother with her, and safely built a new fair lodging with great lifted ceilings, hardwood floors space galore, a basement you can breathe in- no ghosts of the past, too young to be a haunted house. Great Uncle never spoke about life with grandpa, but his eyes twitched tight when in conversation he came up— careful, thoughtful Uncle, 6’4” to his baby sister at a spare 5’4”,

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a study in contrasts, but he watched her carefully, always, the pair of them chattering and bickering— him stooping only to hear her better. The house on B Road I last saw at the funeral.

2. The funeral is more like a party everyone there milling around the house and talking playing in the leaves outside fall, and all of us in fine dress and noise on noise on noise I carry a tiny kitten everywhere (who will grow with me and die in my arms, precious and beloved) the boy cousins are using his canes to prove dexterity holding them with both hands and leaping to bring them forward leaping bodies horse-lean and quick in the brown of the living room leaping fences for the joy of it. I slip behind the couch to listen to it all cocooned away in safe silence. I can’t find grandma. I don’t think she wants to be found, I think she is hiding with the ducks.

3. You’re just 9 years away from being older than he ever got. I keep wondering if my mother looks at my grandmother, small and frail and still stubbornly living alone and feeding her chickens at 95 at the house on 15 and O Road, the house free of haunting, and knows

that she will carry on in a line of woman-without-man a person by herself a house to herself, in time. She is all sharp eyes, my mother she is diamond, she is crystal, she is sharp glass and ice rains — my mother is untouchable. But she watches you, close, careful as grandmother gets older and another house takes up a haunting another place you poured work into comes to the end of its life. 9 years is not so long. 9 years is barely a breath, 9 years and you will be beyond him, the man who rode the desert and mined the singing golden stone that ripped apart the world, 9 years is not so long.

4. I called because I couldn’t remember the number of times I was in that house anymore. I still don’t know if the number you told me is right. I was born in ‘94, and he expired on the floor in ‘99, when the baby was just a year, and I was just past 5 for a few months- wait, no, it was autumn, I don’t even know the day on his stone- wait, why does it matter when he died? It doesn’t. B Road. You insist I was in that house at least twice a year, since you went out to help on account of the fact that he wasn’t much one for walking anymore, given he’d had stage four cancer for near ten impossible years (God give mercy, you are 67, you were a miner, even if you mined coal and not uranium I do not know if you will bear the ripped open scars of a body devouring itself whole, Maker I am begging that my mother does not find you on old linoleum). No. So. So. B Road. Madre says that no, we didn’t go every year, because of disease risks so, let’s assume

no more than seven times I was in that house, from the time before I was able to think real words and remember real memories, but I do have some, from later I watched them pry the frozen mammoth from the earth with him, on his tiny old TV, in that house that was all earth tones and colors and my grandmother was in the kitchen, because I could hear the sound of saucepans on stovetops, but here is the thing, here’s the thing. I don’t remember her voice until after he died.

5. In my dreams I am back behind the couch with leaves in my hair and a kitten in my arms, 5 years old tucked behind a couch from the 70’s and listening to the adults talk Uncle Dev and Uncle Myles-who-is-Claude seated on it while the boys leap. There are no women in this big open living-dining room, where the table is set and waiting for us to eat after the service. Alex is asleep, away, she is still so small, and so is my sister. They in the room all talk loud and fast and clever, and you are not there. (years later I learn the word silvertongue. That is them all over. Silvertongued.) I think if I slip up the old and creaking stairs clutching the great square finial and then pulling myself up along the spindle rails to the floating second floor, the airy breathing lung of the household where he could not go, he could not climb where Great Uncle has his shoebox room and my grandmother has a great spacious workspace flooded with light for her sewing— I think there I may find my diamond mother asleep with you, if you are not out feeding geese and ducks and checking

on the horses. I don’t know that you want to be found either.

6. Someone has to hate him for the silence he left behind in all of you. I am all cold rage, a delicate mix of your smoldering forest fire and her cut diamond, so here, my father, let me hate him for you. Listen. In the new house, we had a reunion, where there were clamoring sounds over and over, and do you know, not once did I hear the sound of saucepans on the stove. The house was blissful silent in the morning— just her and I, alone in the house, which was full of sunlight and we ate on the sun porch and we spoke little before the droves descended. In the house on 15 and O Road, someone teased her, my lovely grandmother who has seen so much, about the idea of remarrying. I think I was the only one who saw her hand twitch, her jaw quiver (“The only person I wouldn’t want to come up against in a dark alley is her,” my ice shard mother says to you, full serious, even as you crackle like a campfire laughing) She previcates. Says no, says some people are only meant for the one love. I think about that great open sunroom where she does her stitching, the little flock she keeps to escape to, the vast open space where no dangers have space to lurk in shadowed corners safely alone, unbothered and ghostless treeless and sunwashed, in the house on 15 and O road.