I would like to express my deepest gratitude to the Eccles Centre for American Studies at the British Library, where I was a Writer in Residence in 2013. The generosity of the Eccles Centre, both in terms of financial assistance and the kind support and advice of the research staff, greatly enriched the gradual development of this novel. My particular thanks to Professor Philip Davies, for his immense kindness, patience and encouragement through what was, at times, a fraught period.
I would also like to give thanks to the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD) for their immense generosity and support during and after my fellowship in Berlin. This book could not have been completed without that support.
At an early stage of the writing of this book, I wrote to several people, asking for advice on historical matters. One of these was the American radical organiser, author and prisoner, David Gilbert, whose kindness, patience and example made me ask serious questions about what this novel was really about. My sincere thanks to him, as well as my heartfelt admiration.
Huge thanks to Carne and Karmen Ross, who continue the real struggle daily, and to Patrick Deer and his students at NYU, all of whom did me that rare honour of active listening, when this book was still just a notion.
Finally, a note on Yonas Sax, the man who gave the secret of the A-Bomb to the Soviets. This character is very loosely based on Theodore (Ted) Hall, who was a kind friend to me for many years. I greatly miss his supreme integrity, his kindness and his rigorous intelligence.
FICTION
The Dumb House
The Mercy Boys
Burning Elvis
The Locust Room
Living Nowhere
The Devil’s Footprints
Glister
A Summer of Drowning
Something Like Happy
POETRY
The Hoop
Common Knowledge
Feast Days
The Myth of the Twin
Swimming in the Flood
A Normal Skin • The Asylum Dance
The Light Trap • The Good Neighbour
Selected Poems • Gift Songs
The Hunt in the Forest
Black Cat Bone
All One Breath
Still Life with Feeding Snake
NON-FICTION
A Lie About My Father
Waking Up in Toytown • I Put a Spell on You
John Burnside is amongst the most acclaimed writers of his generation. His novels, short stories, poetry and memoirs have won numerous awards, including the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, the Whitbread Poetry Award, the Encore Award and the Saltire Scottish Book of the Year. In 2011 he became only the second person to win both the Forward and T. S. Eliot Prizes for poetry for the same book, Black Cat Bone. In 2015 he was a judge for the Man Booker Prize. He is a Professor in the School of English at St Andrews University.
It is 1999. Kate Lambert, a grieving, semi-alcoholic film student, invites an elderly woman to take part in an oral-history documentary. The woman, Jean Culver, declines, but makes her a bizarre counter-offer: if Kate can stay sober for four days, she will tell her a story. And if she can stay sober beyond that, there will be another, and then another, amounting to the entire history of one family’s life.
Though still shattered by the death of her father, and by the desultory abuse imposed by Laurits, her enigmatic collaborator and erstwhile lover – Kate is soon drawn into a Scheherazade-like matrix of tales, some painfully final, some still unfinished, in which Jean gradually offers a heartbreaking account, not only of one family, but of the American century itself, from World War II to Vietnam and the Weather Underground.
A profound, mysterious, deeply moving novel – a meeting of love and grief, like water on arid soil – Ashland & Vine is the story of an unlikely friendship that transcends time, age and the limits of narrative to reveal the unexpected grace that comes of listening to another’s history, while telling, as carefully as we can, what we know of our own.
The day I met Jean Culver was also the day I stopped drinking.
For a long time, I tried to believe that this was mostly a coincidence. True, it was Jean Culver who proposed the experiment, but she only did it in passing and she didn’t press the point. I could do what I wanted, that was always understood. There was no judgment, no expectation that I would stop forever, no demand that I should join some support group. I just had to choose to stay sober for a while, to show that I could do it. That was how she tricked me, in the beginning. She made me think that quitting was what I already wanted to do. Or if not wanted, then needed. The truth was, I needed a rest. I needed to create some distance between Laurits and me, to go back to something not quite defined, but secret and transformative, like the place you go back to in old pop songs. Most of all, I needed to stop blanking out each day’s end with whatever makeshift oblivion I could achieve and live with whatever came – the memories, the second guesses, the repetitions of the same old questions. I needed to break out of the sheer tedium of my repetitive existence. Get drunk, sober up, get paranoid, get drunk again. Maybe, by then, that was worse than anything else. That tedium of the self. Not myself, but the self as random burden, imposed on a whim by some malevolent visitor from an old fairy tale. Some myth, say, from the forests of Estonia, where Laurits always said he truly belonged.
Nevertheless, I wasn’t thinking about any of this on that first morning. In fact, I wasn’t thinking at all; I was just going through the usual motions. When I opened the gate to her yard, I had no idea that Jean Culver even existed and what I wanted more than anything was to go home and lie down in my narrow, chalk-white bedroom, waiting for some kind of miracle to happen. I had been working for three hours by that time, if you can call what I was doing work, trailing around in the heat with the same eleven questions for anyone who answered their door and was prepared to give me a few minutes of their time. Mostly, the doors stayed shut, and the questions remained unanswered, but that wasn’t unusual, even in a more pleasant, middle-class neighbourhood like this one. Still, after nursing my hangover up and down a dozen driveways to houses that were, or at least seemed to be, empty, I was close to giving up and taking the rest of the day off, and I don’t know what impelled me to make one last call before I headed back to what passed for home. Maybe I was thinking about what Laurits would say if, as usual, I came up empty, and maybe it was simple curiosity: Jean Culver’s house wasn’t even on my list, which was odd, because Laurits was always painfully thorough about that kind of thing.
Laurits. He was the reason I was out there, hot and sticky and hung-over, with a mouth like sandpaper and cramps in my legs. Laurits – nothing else, no Christian name, just Laurits, which he said was Estonian. My boyfriend, housemate and, now, my supposed collaborator – though how this project was a collaboration I still failed to see, since I was the one wandering around in the heat, having doors closed in my face, an object of derision, pity or both. I didn’t know what I was doing or why, but when I asked him to explain he said all I had to do was follow the instructions he had provided: pick an area of town, more or less suburban, where people might be home during the day – old people were always the best subjects – and ask them the eleven questions he had prepared. Questions like: What do you remember best from childhood? What was your happiest moment? If you were to be reborn in another form, what would you choose?
‘So what then?’ I said. ‘I mean, if they even speak to me, do I have to get them to sign something, or can I just go ahead and record them?’
‘No recordings,’ he said. ‘All we need are the stories.’
‘So I write them down?’
‘No. You just make notes. Not verbatim, nothing like that. Just enough so that, when you get back here, you can remember what they said, more or less.’
‘More or less?’
‘Yes.’ He studied my face to see if I understood what was required. He had told me, more than once, that what he needed was always very precise in his own mind, it was just hard to explain it to other people. ‘I want you to hear the story, and then come back and tell it to me in your own words. As well as you can remember it. It doesn’t have to be perfect. Just what you remember – and maybe, hopefully, what you add of your own accord.’
‘Add?’
‘Yes.’ He smiled. ‘Little – embroideries.’
‘And what? You film me telling somebody else’s story?’
‘Maybe.’
‘But you pick the questions.’
‘Definitely.’ His smile widened. ‘That’s my part of the collaboration.’
This was all typical of him. He complained that he found it difficult to explain things, then made his explanations deliberately vague, with a touch of the absurd thrown in. That was Laurits, who was – well, what exactly? An artist? A film-maker? No – nobody bothered making films any more, not according to Laurits. Or not the way they used to do. Now, everybody was an anthropologist. Yet he did make films, or rather, he made collages of found movie stock mixed with scenes he shot himself and, even if they didn’t have stories, even though most of what they contained were things he’d taken from somewhere else and spliced together out of context, they were still films. Laurits was attached to the Creative Arts department at Scarsville College; he got grants and research funding to develop his work; he had a PhD in Film Studies and taught undergraduate classes on Literature and Film. But he wasn’t a film-maker, he said; he was an anthropologist. Film-makers tell stories, even if they try not to, but he wasn’t interested in stories. For Laurits, a story was just the string on which the real pearls were threaded. What he wanted was atmosphere, texture, weather. When people tell stories, he would say, they lie about what happened, but they don’t lie about those other things – or not deliberately, at least.
That was the gospel of narratology, according to Laurits. I was out in the June heat wandering from door to door as part of an anthropology study into all the ways people lie when they remember the past. At least, I thought that was why I was out there. On most projects, Laurits didn’t do anything. He just handed a basic script to his so-called collaborators – he had several collaborators, all of them as confused and in need of verification as I was – and left them to figure out the minutiae. The only difference between me and the others was that I lived with him. We shared an apartment. We got drunk together most nights. Sometimes we made love, though I’m not sure making love is the right term.
I met Laurits in Sidetracks, which was the closest Scarsville came to an arty student bar. By then, I was a few weeks into my second college career. I’d given up my first when Dad died; then, after waiting vainly for his ghost to find me, I applied for a place at Scarsville and, to my surprise, they accepted me. By then, the house at Stonybrook was gone, and I didn’t have much money, so to save on rent, I moved into a cheap room in the least elegant part of town and ate nothing but rice and fruit. Dad had been dead for months, but I would still wake in a panic every morning, with the thought in my head that he had never actually existed. That I had dreamed him – or rather, that he had been someone quite different from the man I knew, and I had just imagined him the way I wanted him to be. In fact, if he could come back and look inside my head, he wouldn’t even recognise himself. It was a different kind of dawn in that part of town, a slow, non-committal light coming in along the back alleys, finding small pools of former times here and there between the houses, smashed plant pots and broken fences and yards that used to have dogs in them, but didn’t have anything now but stale earth and smashed glass. Not like home. At home it was so – crisp. Clean. Sun on the flagstones I had helped Dad lay out, watching him work with all the care of a man who knew that, as far as landscaping went, at least, he wasn’t a master craftsman. Naturally, in my disturbed state of mind, it took me less than a week to fall in with what the old-time movies used to call the wrong crowd. Of course, I didn’t think of it in those terms then; I didn’t think of it in any terms, I just drifted from drunk to sober to bitter to maudlin nights by the radio, listening to the songs Dad used to like and, though all this outward drama seemed to be going on, I wasn’t really feeling or thinking anything. It wasn’t like I was even very attracted to Laurits that first night. If anything, I thought he was crazy, a bored man wasting his time with people he didn’t much like. I mean, it’s not as if we gazed at each other across a crowded room, or any other such nonsense. If anything, we met by accident, as people drifted off or moved from place to place to get beside the persons that they had been gazing at across a crowded room. So you could say that it all happened by default. But then, that was how everything happened during those years, for people like Laurits and me. We weren’t the kind of people who were out there in the night looking for a relationship. For us, that word conjured up an emotional dishonesty that we had no choice but to refuse – and there really was no alternative. Everything we could ever feel or think or say in such a situation had already been scripted and televised. There was nothing left to say. All we had left was the quality of our refusals.
I was with a girl in my American Cinema class, a beautiful, dark-eyed Minnesotan called Ruth who was not only hugely intelligent but a real poet, as well. I mean, truly. I’d read a couple of things in student magazines after we first met and, no question, she was good. Trouble was, she was also beautiful and popular and she seemed to know everybody, which was how we ended up more or less attached to the group of slightly older people that Laurits was with, a mixed band of around ten later-twenties postgrad and free-theatre types sitting around two big tables, all of them halfway drunk, all listening to Laurits argue with some guy who was in the group, but not really with it – a fellow traveller, someone who was tolerated rather than accepted. The guy’s name was Eric, which I quickly discovered, because Laurits was one of those people who called his antagonist by name all the time, laying it on all the way through the argument, completely unnecessarily. Eric had just said something in defence of a certain kind of wealth, the usual stuff about how the mega-rich were actually good for the economy, how they created employment, how they were always setting up foundations to dole out money to the deserving, not to mention the arts, and in particular theatre and film-makers, people like Laurits, in fact, and so, bearing all that in mind, surely it was better to learn from their successes and try to emulate them, than to run them down all the time like they were criminals or something. And wasn’t what made the US so successful as a nation, and maybe also why we were so different from Estonia (at this a hint of a sneer came into Eric’s voice, though at the time, I didn’t know why), wasn’t it that ability to work hard and grow and aspire that made America great?
Laurits listened politely. It was clear that Eric was irrelevant to him, that his argument wasn’t even worth answering. But it was also clear that he wanted to play – and he liked having an audience. The fact is, Laurits was a natural performer, though he only performed because he was bored. I didn’t know it then, but that was his reason for everything. He was bored, so he made films and wrote essays in obscure journals. He was bored, so he argued with his intellectual inferiors in bars and pizza restaurants. He was bored, so he drank. I tell myself, now, that the arrangement we had was different, that it meant something, but I can’t be sure. On the other hand, I can’t be sure what drew me to him, either. He was tall, good-looking, highly intelligent, imaginative; he was an artist, with a resumé to prove it and there was the added attraction of a dark side, which had gotten him into trouble on a couple of occasions. I thought those stories were exaggerated until the first time I saw him get into a fight. Those stories were not exaggerated. He had a dark side, and it wasn’t pretty. Still, if I think about him now, I don’t think of him as someone I loved. As I described it then, as I describe it now, we had an arrangement, mostly tacit, but an arrangement nevertheless. That word itself says all that needs to be said about my relationship with Laurits.
‘Sure, Eric,’ he said. ‘You are absolutely right. It’s much better to aspire to wealth than to actually have it. Because it’s the journey, isn’t it? It’s climbing the ladder, working hard, being the best you can be and making use of your God-given talent, isn’t it, Eric? Being there with all that money is such a drag, looking down at all the people you fucked over on the way up is a drag, Eric, and it’s a drag to look at a TV and see all those starving kids in refugee camps, naked and abandoned, their families dispersed, their tribe going extinct – extinct, Eric – just so some asswipe in the so-called developed world can have a bigger yacht. Thousands of seabirds washed up on some far shore because your company cut a few corners. Better to be on the way up than to be that asswipe, because if it turns out that you do have one human bone in your body, if it turns out you’re just not enough of a psychopath to believe the whole world is your own personal toy, then you are going to fail, and failure hurts, Eric. Failure hurts, even when it’s honourable. Hollywood is always telling you that the good guy, the guy with a heart, is happier than the billionaire alone in his mansion with nobody to love him, but it’s not true, Eric. It’s not true. It ought to be true, but everybody knows that, in America, if you don’t got money, you’re nothing. And that’s the dilemma, isn’t it, Eric? You want to say, leave it to the other guy, leave it to the psychopath, but in America, if you can’t be that guy, you’re a failure. And all the time you know that guy is an asswipe, because no matter how hard he works to prove that he’s not, everybody knows he is, and then it’s such a drag for him – almost as much of a drag as it is for you being a failure. It’s such a drag to have to stop stockpiling yachts and Old Masters and Scottish castles and dedicate yourself to your foundation. It’s a drag, Eric, but then it’s always been a drag. Look at John D. Rockefeller. Look at Henry Clay Frick. They all had their foundations and their good causes but that was all a big smokescreen for what was really going on. I mean, you must have heard about the Matewan Massacre, Eric? Homestead? Or maybe Ludlow, Colorado, April 20th, 1914? That was another high point in the history of American philanthropy, Eric. You should look it up.’
Nobody said anything. Eric sat staring at Laurits, blinking behind his glasses, the half-smile on his face extinguished now. Then everybody laughed and started drinking again. A guy in a faded black Huey Lewis T-shirt, sitting three away from Laurits with a very pretty, overdressed blonde, raised his glass. ‘Christ, Laurits,’ he said. ‘Did you rehearse that? Come on. Tell me true. Did you just invent all that stuff?’
Laurits shook his head. ‘Look it up,’ he said. ‘It’s in the history books.’ He feigned seriousness, and it was obvious that he was returning to a familiar theme, one that he knew would annoy Huey. ‘Americans don’t know their own history . . .’
That was a big part of his shtick, The Forgotten History Of America – and on the rare occasions that I thought there was some good reason why I was out walking streets where nobody ever walked, it was that Laurits believed somebody out there remembered something about that America. It didn’t matter what. Anything would do. I had been pursuing this for over a week, going from door to door, hung-over, tired, bathed in sweat, and I hadn’t come up with a single story. I had been repulsed by all kinds of people, from snippy hausfrau types to a muscle-bound Korean guy with a pit bull collared in each fist; I had walked up to one perfectly pleasant-looking house, on a perfectly ordinary street and felt – what? Some strange sense of threat or incipient nightmare that prevented me from ringing the bell or knocking, no matter how hard I tried? Or had I just panicked, because I knew something was in there, behind the sunlight and the stillness, behind the closed screen, something terrible, waiting in the hallway? Two days earlier I had been trudging round a leafy suburb with Copland’s Quiet City in my headphones – the Bernstein live 1990 performance, which I shouldn’t have been playing, because it was one of Dad’s favourites – and I just hit a wall in my mind and came to a stop, ridiculous, helpless, staring up into a willow tree and sobbing like a child, my face wet with tears and snot, my T-shirt sodden with sweat. I had stood there a long time, unable to go on, and it was only after several minutes that I came to myself, with the sensation of being watched, and looked around. Nobody was visible. There was nobody on the street, or in any of the front yards. Maybe somebody was observing me from a window somewhere, but if they were, I didn’t see them. I pulled off my headphones and tried to dry my face, but it was useless. I was a mess.
Now, as I stood at the gate to a house that wasn’t on the list, maybe I was thinking I had finally come to the right place. Only, it wasn’t on the list, and I wasn’t sure if I should check it out – not because I wasn’t curious, but because I didn’t know what Laurits would do, when he discovered that I had found a house that wasn’t on the list. Maybe, if I did find somebody here, their story would be invalid for some reason. Lack of provenance, insufficient documentation, that kind of thing. Maybe this house didn’t exist and when I tried to come back for the follow-up, it wouldn’t be there. Because it wasn’t on the list and it wasn’t on the map he had given me either and, in my present state, I was all too ready to believe in phantoms.
Not that it would be hard to miss, tucked away behind a stand of trees at the far end of Audubon Road and I might have walked straight past that narrow entrance gate, if I hadn’t been drawn in by the sound of someone chopping wood, a sound I knew from a previous existence, when Dad was still alive. It was a sound I loved: a steady, dark, vigorous sound that brought back vivid and painful images of our old house at Stonybrook, my father in his faded blue shirt, the axe glinting in the sunlight as he worked, splitting each log with a single, clean blow then moving on, only stopping occasionally to listen to the quiet of the woods. As a child, I convinced myself that the woods around our house went back to a time before the settlers arrived; ancient Iroquois lands, full of blue jays and cardinals and families of tender, sweet-lipped deer. They were my private, haunted realm when I was a child, my small promise of heaven and, at the same time, proof of the history my father claimed as his own, for was he not at least part Native American and therefore entitled to look at those woods in a different way from his neighbours? Now, like the house, those woods are gone, and so is my father, killed by an illness he kept secret from me, but not from his lady friend, Louise, till it was too late even to say goodbye.
After the funeral, I kept thinking he would come back. Not alive, like Lazarus, but as a ghost, coming into the house at night from the darkness of the woods, where he had joined the many ghosts of his people. I had never been alone before, I had never existed in such a vacuum and I thought the least he would do – the one thing he would know to do – would be to come back and haunt me. My own, private haunting; my own secret ghost. I wouldn’t need to see him. He wouldn’t have to make himself visible, like the ghosts in old films. I wasn’t looking for a misty shape coming up through the yard in the early morning; I didn’t expect his likeness to be waiting for me in the kitchen when night fell. I just needed to feel that he was there. A presence and, now and then, a voice. Or maybe nothing more than a minor, even disputable irregularity in the natural fabric of things. The sense of someone moving in an upper room, while I was sitting in the kitchen, staring out at the snow. A cup or a glass mysteriously finding its way to the sink, when I was convinced I had left it in the hall. I wasn’t asking much by way of evidence. I didn’t need proof of life, just some glimmer of an afterward when he had turned around and looked back, just for a moment, before he proceeded into whatever was to come.
Dad used to say, in his usual, half-muddled, half-joking way, that the best house is the one you don’t know is there unless you already know it’s there. That was true of our old house and it was true of this one, which provided a first point of resemblance, but what also drew me to this stranger’s home – or rather, to this stranger’s yard, since I couldn’t see the house itself at that point – what drew me in, like the child drawn, involuntarily, to the witch’s house in a fairy tale, was the teasing memory it offered, a memory that said I really had been happy once and, based on that evidence, could be happy again. The trees were different – mostly cottonwoods here, where once there had been birches and pines – but everything else had the same air of natural disorder, a disorder I hadn’t seen in the other houses on that suburban road, with their perfect lawns and picket fences with ornate, slightly ridiculous finials. Mailboxes in the shape of birdhouses and birdhouses that looked like mailboxes. Old Glory fluttering from a miniature flagpole above the porch. Alongside the surprisingly long driveway that ran up to the house itself, wild flowers grew in tangles under dogwoods and mock orange, and there was enough shade and cover for the other forms of life – the swift shadows that skitter across a night-time lawn, the trash eaters and whangdoodles and varmints – that the neighbour folks’ yards were designed to scare away. This yard didn’t belong to a gardener. There was no order, or nothing that came out of a book or a landscaper’s blueprints. This was wild, or as near wild as it could be – and that reminded me of home too. Meanwhile, as I walked up the drive and turned the slight curve it made through the trees, I was drawn in by the sound of logs splitting, a steady rhythm characteristic of someone who knew what they were doing. Like my father. So maybe what I was expecting to see, as the house came into view, was a ghost with an axe, a palpable, everyday ghost, working in the afternoon heat in a faded blue work shirt.
The sight that greeted me wasn’t a ghost, however. The faded work shirt was the same, more or less, but everything else was different. I suppose I had been expecting to find a man there, axe in hand, labouring in the wide, sunny clearing between the trees and the house, and I had probably anticipated someone younger. What I found, instead, was a woman who, at that stage, with her back to me, looked to be in her late fifties or early sixties. She was tall and slender; not stick-thin, by any means, but thin enough to suggest that this work ought to have been too heavy for someone of her age and build; an elderly woman in an old shirt, cream-coloured jeans and a pair of scuffed, ankle-high boots. As I stood watching, taking her in, she seemed totally absorbed in what she was doing and, because I thought she was unaware of my presence, a stranger in her yard, staring, I didn’t know what to do next. A long moment passed; then, when I had decided to get out while I still could and head back to the road, she turned around, axe in hand still, as if she would strike me down with it if I made any attempt to deceive her.
‘Well?’ she said. She spoke brusquely, but she didn’t seem hostile, only matter-of-fact. Or, it wasn’t brusqueness so much as propriety. Her speech was formal, and she had a slight accent, though I couldn’t have placed it. ‘What is it, exactly, that brings you to my door? The US Mail hasn’t had business here in some time and I do not encourage visitors.’
I didn’t know what to say. The way she looked at me, the curiosity that showed through the outward formality, was unsettling and I found myself tongue-tied, idiotic, a foolish and unwarranted intruder, breaking into her perfectly regulated day with nothing to say for myself. Earlier, I had set out a basic script; now, faced with this axe-woman, I realised that it had never felt natural.
‘I’m conducting a survey,’ I said. It was exactly what Laurits had told me never to say. What I was offering these people wasn’t a survey; it was an opportunity to tell a story. A chance to be heard, the secret tissue of truth and lies that everyone conceals in their heart, hinted at and, though only half revealed, exposed to the kindly light of another human being’s attention. Not everything would, or could, be divulged, he said. What he was after were the hints, the clues, the points at which the private account of the world diverged from the official position. The soul’s narrative. But then, after that had been divulged, it was supposed to be left to chance as to how much of it was carried forward. Was it only now, face-to-face with Jean Culver, that I could see how insulting that would have been, had it even been possible?
‘A survey?’ The faintest trace of a smile, not unfriendly, but tinged with something close to contempt, passed across her face, though her look wasn’t contemptuous of me, and there was something in her expression that, while I could not have said how, conveyed as much. ‘What kind of a survey?’
I shook my head. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘it’s not exactly a survey. More a kind of . . .’ I cast around for some acceptable description. ‘It’s more that . . . I’m collecting people’s stories. Life stories. Oral . . . histories.’
‘I see.’ She wiped her forehead on the sleeve of her shirt. ‘You’re not very good at this, are you?’
‘It’s an academic study,’ I said, suddenly feeling that it was important not to be sent away. I didn’t know why but, all of a sudden, I felt desolate, alone in the world like a child lost at the fair and I thought, for that moment, that I would give in to tears. I tried again. ‘It’s different from the usual approach to oral history, where—’
‘Does this have something to do with the millennium?’
That took me by surprise. It was only a few months away, but I never thought about the millennium. For me it was something that belonged to television and popular magazines. ‘No,’ I said. ‘It’s a narrative project that—’
She made a face at this and waved her hand – and though I couldn’t have said what seemed different about her, I suddenly saw that she was considerably older than I had guessed. It wasn’t her face, so much, that gave this away; it was how she moved. An economy she had developed over years that reduced all effort to a minimum, without seeming infirm. ‘Forget all that,’ she said. ‘It’s a hot day and I’m tired from chopping all this wood that I probably won’t even use.’ She smiled, as if she had just made a joke, then she looked back at me and gave an abrupt, though not unpleasant, laugh. ‘Can’t help it though,’ she said. ‘I have to chop a little wood every day. It’s a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation.’ She looked at me to see if I recognised the reference, then she laughed again. ‘Come into the house,’ she said. ‘I’ll make you some herb tea.’ She looked me up and down, then shook her head. ‘I’d offer you something stronger but I can see that would be ill-advised.’ She smiled again. ‘Come on in,’ she said, her voice kindly this time, though the kindness felt like some courtesy she had just remembered and didn’t usually bother with.
I felt the sting of her remark, but I didn’t know what to do. I had no desire to go into this strange woman’s house – which was odd as, officially at least, to gain entry was the very reason I was out there in the cloying heat – but I couldn’t summon the energy to do anything else. The woman turned and headed toward the side porch, where a door stood open to the quiet of the woods and to the gaze of whatever might be out there and it reminded me of how Dad would do the same thing, throwing the kitchen door open on a summer’s morning and leaving it ajar all day, as if in welcome. Even in the winter, even when the snow was falling in the pale blue space between our house and the birch woods, he would sometimes just leave that door halfway open, and you would smell the cold, crisp air when you went through to fix a pot of coffee.
Jean Culver didn’t look back to see if I was following her. I guess she didn’t care one way or another. It was time for a break, she was tired, as she had said, and, if I wanted to come, I would come. I did follow her into the house, though, and maybe the reason I did was the sense I was beginning to form – an intuition, I guess, since I had nothing to base it on – that this woman was different from anybody else I had ever known. She was someone who had made peace with the world on her own terms, someone who had stopped caring about minor things in order to concentrate on what really mattered. Not that I had any idea of what might matter to an old woman who lived off by herself in the woods. For, as I came up the porch steps and encountered the pure stillness of the house, I was certain that she was vitally alone in the world, and that she liked it that way. The porch was neat and tidy, with small trees in ornate pots set around the edge of the space and a few chairs backed up against the wall; inside, a narrow hall led directly to the kitchen, where the woman was already filling an old-fashioned, non-electric kettle.
‘I have camomile, cinnamon and apple, and peppermint,’ she said, scanning the counter next to the stove. ‘Let’s see now. Rooibos. I’ve never quite taken to that. Sea buckthorn and Honeybush, somebody gave me this one, but I haven’t tried it yet.’ She looked to see if I was paying attention. ‘Lapsang souchong. Orange pekoe. Darjeeling. Or maybe you would prefer a cup of coffee?’ She waited patiently for me to answer, though she could probably see that I didn’t know what I wanted. I just needed to sit, to be still. She was smiling, still. ‘Let’s try the buckthorn, then,’ she said. ‘I’m told it’s very refreshing.’
I nodded. The kitchen was a wide, high space and, with all the windows open, it didn’t seem to belong entirely with the house, as if its true allegiances were to the garden. In the middle of the room was a huge, square table made of what looked like pitch pine, so old that you could imagine it being put together from the salt-washed timbers of the Pequod, the grain open and long and dark with age. Houseplants dotted the table and the counters, a long row of geraniums and African violets lined the window shelf that ran from the sink in the corner to the door. Other than that, the room was uncluttered; functional, though not bare. It looked like nothing had changed there for fifty years, but it was clean and fresh and everything was in good order, which made me think of a poem by Marianne Moore, for some reason, something about fluted columns made modester by whitewash.
The kettle boiled and Jean Culver went about the business of making tea with no great haste. Though I was quite sure, by now, that she lived by herself in this house, she didn’t seem like some lonely old lady grabbing the chance of some company when it happened along. On the contrary, it was clear to me that she was happy with her own company. There was no sign of a pet, no cats pacing around the space in the middle of the sunlit floor, tails high, studying me for signs of malice or weakness, no yappy little dog barking and scratching at a door somewhere in the interior of the house. Her conversation was considered, and not at all urgent; she seemed not so much curious as aware of a politesse that demands certain enquiries, questions about home, or place of origin at least, questions about family and career and suchlike things. I noticed that she did not enquire further about my supposed survey. When the tea was made, she set it all out on the table – cups and saucers, a plain white ceramic teapot, another, more ornate pot full of thick, dark-golden honey and a plate of home-made cookies. We sat down. There was a long silence, in which she was clearly waiting for me to say something. Remembering my manners, I asked about her family, which I immediately realised was not what she had expected, or wanted, from me.
‘I was raised by relatives, after my parents died,’ she said, her voice matter-of-fact, even a little hard. ‘Also, until recently, I had a brother.’ She looked straight into my face as if she was trying to work something out. ‘He died last fall,’ she said.
‘I’m sorry for—’
‘Don’t be,’ she said, her voice sharper now. ‘He was old. Older than me, even. I can see from your face that you find that hard to believe.’
‘Not at all.’
She smiled. ‘Being old has its advantages,’ she said. ‘One of them is knowing that death isn’t that far away. Your own death, other people’s, it’s all the same. So one day the phone rings. You are halfway through making fried apple pie, but you put the rolling pin down and go answer . . . Then you go back and make the best pie ever. It was his favourite, as it happens, but that wasn’t why I was making it.’ She smiled again, sadly it seemed, as if she had accidentally remembered something she usually kept at bay. Some old happiness that was too difficult to hold in her mind for any length of time. ‘Later, there would be a season to pick out something black and book a flight to Virginia for the funeral, which turned out to be a pretty thin affair, just me and a couple of people he knew from work. I didn’t know them, and they didn’t talk much, afterward. A short passage from Ecclesiastes – neither of us was ever religious, but it seemed appropriate.’ She lifted her head slightly as if she was about to recite those same verses, then had second thoughts. ‘When you get to my age, most of your friends are dead people. But that’s not how you think of them. You remember the lives, not the deaths. I’ve never been one for funerals, but you do your duty. Meanwhile, there are pies to bake and logs to chop. By now, that feels like a good enough life.’ She poured me some tea; it smelled summery and green and a little bitter. ‘I’m not talking about happiness. When I hear people talking about happiness, I have no idea what they mean, but then, it’s not something you talk about, it’s something you do. Bake pies, chop logs. At a certain point, the mere sense of living is joy enough.’ She gave her abrupt, short laugh. ‘Goodness, listen to me talk,’ she said – and her accent, whatever it was, seemed more pronounced. Virginia, she had said, but I didn’t know if that was it. ‘It takes a lifetime, for some of us at least, to know that the best things in life are the boring, everyday things.’ She helped herself to some honey. ‘They’re not really boring, of course. It’s just that we lack the imagination, when we’re young, to see those everyday chores and rituals for what they really are. And all the big adventures,’ she twirled the spoon in her tea and smiled, to herself mostly, though I didn’t feel excluded. ‘Well, they’re not so great while they’re happening.’ She looked at me closely. ‘You don’t know that yet,’ she said. ‘But there’s still time. And then, I promise you, things get much clearer than you ever expected them to be.’
I had no idea what she was talking about, of course. In fact, I didn’t understand much of what she said that afternoon. Yet I have to confess, she intrigued me. Not because what she said seemed very appropriate to my life – after all, what did she know about my life, other than that I had a hangover? No: it was how she was, how she moved, her strange economy, that sense of someone totally self-reliant that she projected without making any effort to project anything – that was what intrigued me. The tea was bitter and the cookies were a little dry, but that didn’t matter. It didn’t even matter that I found her conversation bewildering at times, especially when she talked about my life as if she knew all about it. What mattered was that I envied her. I envied that economy. I envied that self-reliance. I wanted to be like her, which was absurd, because, as the afternoon slipped by, I had every chance to study her face in closer detail – and it was clear that she was very old indeed. Too old to be chopping logs, for sure. Too old, even, to be living alone. I wanted to ask her when she was born, just to confirm my estimate of – what? I didn’t know. I just thought of her in this house, alone, in the winter. How did that work? Did someone come in? Did she have a car? I would begin framing a question and making ready to ask it, but she kept skittering away like this was some kind of game, like she knew what I wanted to know and wasn’t ready to let me ask it by roundabout means. She didn’t want me to be polite about it. If I was going to ask, she wanted me to ask. Directly. Honestly.
Finally, I found a gap in the flow of conversation. She had been talking about food, about the recipe for fried apple pie that she had learned from her guardian. She promised she would make some for me sometime – and that gave me an in. ‘So,’ I said. ‘Is that a Virginia thing? Fried apple pie?’
She smiled and permitted herself a slight nod. ‘Not just apple,’ she said. ‘You can make it with peaches. Apricots. For apples, I would add a little more cinnamon.’
‘So that’s where you’re from,’ I said. ‘I can hear an accent but I can’t quite—’
‘I’m not from anywhere you would know,’ she said. ‘But I’ve lived in several places, including Virginia.’ Her eyes sparkled. Yes, that old cliché – but she really was brighter and more alive than most young people I knew. ‘Is this part of the survey?’
‘No.’
‘I don’t mind,’ she said.
I shook my head but, suddenly, I wasn’t sure. If my curiosity wasn’t part of the survey, in a way, what else was it? ‘I just thought,’ I said. ‘You mentioned earlier that your brother was in Virginia and I seem to remember—’
She gave her short laugh and nodded. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I have to go somewhere in a while, but I’ll tell you my story, if you like. Not today, but soon. I think you might find it interesting.’ She leaned forward and fixed me with her eyes. ‘All you have to do is make me one promise.’
I was taken aback by that, of course. ‘What promise?’ I asked.
‘You must promise to stop drinking for five days.’
And that was the moment, right there. It was a preposterous request, but that was the moment when my life changed. Not because of what she said, but because I didn’t get offended and walk out of that kitchen and back to my daily round of booze and hazy sex with Laurits and wishing for a ghost that I knew would never come. I didn’t even argue that whatever I did or didn’t do was none of her business. I just felt an odd, airy sensation in the middle of my chest, a sensation that I can only compare to the wind blowing through an open window, billowing the curtains, then letting them fall back, empty. When I did speak, my voice was thin and far away and so uncertain that it might as well have been an admission of guilt. ‘Excuse me?’
She shook her head and gave what might have been a sad smile, as if she was already beginning to regret what she was about to say. ‘If you can stay sober till Tuesday next, come back then. Maybe I’ll take you to Sacred Grounds. We’ll call it an excursion. Do you know it?’
I nodded. Sacred Grounds was a local café. I had never been there, but I had heard of it. A year back, some big chain had come to town and set up five doors away from the local café and hunkered in, waiting to take over. It was a standard tactic and it usually worked. In this case, however, people rallied round. They organised a boycott. They handed out flyers. If anything, Sacred Grounds did even more business than usual. The chain withdrew.
‘It’s a coffee shop, mind,’ she said. ‘They don’t sell liquor.’
‘I know that.’
She laughed. ‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘I’m just teasing. You have to put up with that, when you consort with old people.’
And that was all. She didn’t make me say anything, and I knew she had no way of telling whether I would stay sober for the next five days, but an agreement appeared to have been reached and now, with the tea finished and the unspoken contract there between us, she fell quiet and we sat like two old acquaintances with nothing much to say, in a kitchen that I sensed was once the heart of the house, an almost public place where people came and went freely, family and friends, say, maybe even a neighbour or two, before the neighbourhood had become a series of neat suburban streets in which a house like hers seemed so out of place. But then, it probably wasn’t like that when she first arrived. Maybe, then, it had been cottonwoods and wild flowers all along the road, animals trailing through the gardens undeterred, owls calling in the night. I don’t know why I thought that, but it seemed to me there were stories to tell, and, as she led me back out through the hallway – I caught a glimpse of a large room with rows of bookshelves through a half-open door and a scent that I couldn’t identify – I felt that I was carrying away something more than the promise of a story.
When I got back to the apartment, I found Laurits draped over a chair, watching TV, a row of bottles from his favourite microbrewery lined up on the floor beside him. On screen, Gregory Peck was staring inscrutably at some distant object, that classic Peck gaze, and I knew the movie, but I couldn’t remember what it was. Not that it mattered. I wasn’t in the mood for film talk and, even though I hadn’t agreed to Jean Culver’s strange sobriety deal, I didn’t want to have a drink, not even a beer. I wanted to shower, then lie down in my own bed. Laurits rented the apartment from a friend, and technically I wasn’t a tenant, I was just his live-in girlfriend, but we had our own rooms and, mostly, we slept alone in them. My room was small, narrow, very white, and almost perfect. The kind of room a nun would inhabit, not a Christian nun, maybe, but someone from another denomination. A Buddhist nun, say, if there are such people. They had Buddhist monks, so I guessed they would have Buddhist nuns too. Not that the denomination mattered. It was just, I didn’t want a cross, or a Bible, or anything like that. Just the white walls and a comforting narrowness, like I was only taking up the exact amount of space I needed to sleep and wake up and get dressed in. Laurits had the one large room in the apartment, but it was darker and more elaborate, with old, maybe antique and certainly meaningfully provincial furniture, most of it from his friend’s store, Blue Barn Antiques, all patina and local provenance and character. When we had sex, we did it in Laurits’ room. It was a kind of unspoken agreement, which for me had something to do with keeping my little nun’s cell intact, though I have no idea what it meant to Laurits. I think he thought the atmosphere was more appropriate. His room had narrative. That was one of his words, narrative – meaning, not that there was a story to something so much as that, whether it was a place, or a person, or a situation, it was something that lent itself to the possibility of a story. Of story itself, which was more than things just happening. Laurits had a whole heap of theories about narrative. One time, he explained at length to a group of SIU students we met at a pizza place in Scarsville how the real tragedy of American life, back in the 60s, hadn’t been that the president was shot, but that he was shot in Dallas, Texas, a place that, for Laurits, had almost no narrative value whatsoever. If the assassination had happened in Washington, or New York – or even St Louis for that matter – everything would have been different. But Dallas