1
In her last years, my mother claimed she did not remember the fire. I didn’t force the issue. By then, I accepted that we had experienced most of our family history separately and alone.
Though I was only four years old, I remember the crackle of grass splitting into flame, the roar of heat tumbling over the field, the sirens’ wail—a low tremolo at first, then something that howled. I see the flames—which flashed orange, then red—eating the sun-bleached grass.
Beside the hydrangeas that bordered our drive, I watch the firemen carry their hoses over our back lawn and into the field. An occasional cinder sifts from the sky. Ash flakes rise on the wind, then disintegrate. The flowers’ sweetness mingles with the tang of smoke.
When Mother saw me standing there, she thundered, “Go to your room. You’re in the way.” To go to my room would be to admit guilt. I had not set the fire. My brother had dropped my father’s lighter: a silver box engraved with letters. Then he had turned and run inside. I held my ground.
And as I watched the blaze, I willed myself not to cry. I knew the field could be ruined, that the fringed pine at its edge could explode. I wanted to free the dogs from their kennels; their barking told me they were terrified. I was rooted to the spot from which I had yelled Fire!
When the firemen had doused the field and loaded their equipment back on the truck, I rushed to the beagles and knelt before their fence. First Punch and Judy, then Biscuit and May thrust their noses through the wire, licked my fingers, and snuffled noisily. Suddenly behind me, my mother demanded: “Do you know what you have done? Leave the dogs alone and answer me. What have you done?” Her face was clenched.
“I didn’t do anything,” I said.
Her voice cracked when she replied. “You will make things worse by lying.”
What could I say?
2
The field behind our backyard had always offered me refuge. I liked to stretch out in the tall grass, flatten it with my body, and make myself invisible. I watched ants climb the milkweeds’ hairy stems and bees drowse on Queen Anne’s lace. In the late afternoon, the sun tinted everything gold.
The field was marked differently after the fire. For months, I didn’t cross its threshold. Spaded over, the earth had been mixed with ash. I didn’t want to carry a reminder of the fire into my mother’s house.
In May, the daisies returned. Summer arrived and greened every scar. By mid-June, the milkweed was in bloom.
Time had smoothed all vestiges of the flames. Still, I avoided the field. It reminded me that my mother believed I had lied. It had also become my brother’s territory: his preferred route to escape our home.
3
Brain-damaged at birth, my brother David, who was three years my elder, never learned to speak. He communicated with us by whooping, grunting, and banging on the table, but preferred to be alone. When someone entered a room in which he was sitting, he would rise, squeeze himself into a corner, and close his eyes. Sometimes he paced the house, rattling each door to see if it might open. When he discovered that a door had been left unlocked, he shot outside, headed for the field or the woods behind it.
I vividly recall my mother often chasing after him. Her voice would punch the air with his name until he slowed or hesitated. Then she spoke softly, cooing. Coaxing my brother to stop, she walked to him, leaned down to where he sat, and pulled him close. She tucked his head beneath her chin, then crooned a song made popular by a 1955 Walt Disney television show: “Davy, Davy Crockett, / king of the wild frontier.”
I always watched from the edge of the field. Mother had warned me never to follow.
4
My mother sang Fess Parker’s “The Ballad of Davy Crockett” to my brother long after the song had disappeared from the Saturday night Hit Parade. The lyrics filled our house in Mother’s smoky contralto:
Born on a mountain top in Tennessee,
Greenest state in the land of the free.
Raised in the woods so he knew ever’ tree.
Kilt him a b’ar when he was only three.
I didn’t think these words suited my brother. How could a boy who spent his days rocking himself and sucking his thumb know anything? How could someone who couldn’t speak ever be a king?
At some point, my mother altered part of the ballad’s refrain, naming Crockett as “son of the wild frontier,” rather than its “king.” Looking back, I wonder if her variation suggested that David was somehow beyond our reach, that his exploration of the world, spontaneous and unafraid, outdistanced our own and, in this, conjured wonder.
I recognize now that the ballad is full of bluster, that nearly every line swaggers into being with an accented first syllable. But Mother’s face was always blank when she serenaded David with this song. Perhaps the frequency with which she performed its lyrics dulled their power to surprise. Perhaps she offered them by rote.
Her performances were often plaintive rather than stirring. Her voice didn’t rise as it cataloged a hero’s feats; it lingered in the refrain that sounded my brother’s name.
5
On an August afternoon in 1957, my mother lifted a coonskin cap from a brown paper bag and placed it on my brother’s head. We were sitting on the screened porch with my Aunt Beth Ann and cousin Jamie, who had brought the hat as a gift. David pulled the cap from his head, crammed its striped tail in his mouth, and gnawed its tip. Mother tried to tug the tail from his teeth, but he pivoted away. Beth Ann said, “Let him do what he wants with it. It’s his.”
My four-year-old self wanted that cap. Certain it had been fashioned from a real raccoon, I believed it could show me the secrets of the forest: the riddles of leaf and stone. I worried David would destroy its powers by shredding it apart. I knew he would never let me have it.
6
Fall came and Mother bought David a full Davy Crockett costume at the Towson Plaza five-and-dime, a two-story establishment that sold everything from parakeets to lipstick to frying pans. Fringed with imitation buckskin, the costume’s shirt and pants felt sueded to the touch. A badge as large as my hand on the shirt’s front pocket displayed the hero brandishing his rifle over his head. Beneath this emblem, orange flames spelled king of the wild frontier.
A black-and-white photo commemorates our Halloween visit to our closest neighbor that year. In it, Mother holds David by his hand. I lag behind and to the side. My face is tilted. My eyes search the ground. For my costume, Mother had tinted a small sheet brown, cut a hole in it for my head, and pinned to its reverse side a tail twisted from dark wool; pink gloves and a black felt beanie with large plastic ears completed my look. I had begged Mother to draw whiskers on my face so people would know I was a dormouse, not a Mouseketeer, but she had said no; the whiskers would be difficult to scrub away.
I knew that I shouldn’t envy David’s costume that evening, but I did. As soon as we exited our front door, mine flooded me with disappointment.
As the three of us threaded the boxwood path leading to the Debaughs’ front porch, I tried to master my distress by studying the whispering sway of my mother’s full skirt. It was one of my favorites: black, dotted with orange, tied with a sash. Still, I felt a kind of gloom. I couldn’t understand how Mother could dance on her toes, how a smile could brighten her face when Agnes Debaugh exclaimed, “Wonderful! It’s Davy Crockett and a Mouseketeer.” Mother’s happiness ignored my disappointment. It also seemed forced, a sham that set me beyond the scene and made me feel alone.
As we reversed our steps, David began to eat a Milky Way still in its wrapper, then spat it on the ground.
Mother walked on: “Pick that up and don’t let him have it.”
7
Two photographs dated JUNE 1958 confirm how intently Mother tried to capture happiness. Each presents David and me doing something together as if we were ordinary siblings. Considered quickly, each evokes a summer idyll: a time of make-believe and play.
I remember my mother’s face in these midsummer photo sessions as if I am standing before her now. Her eyes are bright; her voice rises in a lilt. With steady hands, she holds the camera before her blue shirtdress and offers gentle instructions: “Look at me now. Smile.” She beams, as if to encourage us, then lifts the camera.
In one photo, David and I hold papier-mâché dolls that nearly equal us in height. David lofts his striped-shirted Raggedy Andy above his head and tips the hollyhocks planted behind him; his skinny-armed feat suggests bravura, but his eyes dip from the camera. I hug my pinafore-clad Raggedy Ann to my chest like a human shield; the doll’s face blocks my own. Studying the photo, I believe it reveals something David and I shared: a tension in being on display.
The second picture shows something else. In it, I watch David drink from a hose I am holding in the garden. My gaze is dark with fear. David liked to throw the hose over me like a snake, knock my teeth with its nozzle, and force me to drink. I hated the taste of brass, the smell of rubber, the pressure of his grip about my throat. I also hated the rebuke I knew would come from my mother: “Stop screaming. Take the hose and squirt your brother. Have fun.” Or, “Laugh,” she might declare, her voice rising with a kind of haughtiness and an insistence that made me cry.
8
When I was young, I believed that my mother did not understand fear. I was afraid of many things, especially at night: the soughing of the wind, the light traveling my bedroom walls as a car climbed the hill, my brother’s footsteps when he couldn’t sleep, his keening when he had bad dreams.
Years later, reading Jane Eyre in high school, I thought about my brother’s night noises. Like Mrs. Rochester, David was locked in his room at night, but he wasn’t hidden in the attic; his bedroom was next to mine. When he tapped the wall separating our rooms, I had to decide if I would tap back. Did his knocking advance a code? Would I anger him if I failed to answer in kind?
Every night, I tried to interpret David’s sounds. His tapping, I supposed, meant he was trying to communicate. His pounding translated fury. His wails—which reached a crescendo, then fell apart—signaled despair. I was never confident in these conclusions. My brother’s intent eluded certainty.
When David fell asleep and silence came, I filled it with worry. I counted the times Mother had reprimanded me that day and felt ashamed. I touched my face, searching for the burning signs of impetigo, which David had twice brought home from his school. I revisited lines from the poem—Joyce Kilmer’s “The House with Nobody in It”—Mother read to me every night in bed: “I never have seen a haunted house, but I hear there are such things; / That they hold the talk of spirits, their mirth and sorrowings.” I wondered what our house would hold if we should move away.
9
“The House with Nobody in It” was Mother’s favorite poem in Silver Pennies: A Collection of Modern Poems for Boys and Girls. This little book was a memento of her childhood. Now it is a memento of my own; it sits on my bedside table in Maine. The book’s green cover displays in black silhouette a girl kneeling on a hilltop and raising her arms to the heavens. Above her, embossed in silver, a crescent moon illuminates a stream of stars shaped like small coins.
Mother’s reading from this volume was a ritual wholly dedicated to me. After she had settled my brother in bed, she stole into my room, slipped beneath my covers, and recited a couplet she knew by heart: “Under a toadstool crept a wee Elf, / Out of the rain to shelter himself.” Then she lowered her dark eyes to the book and began to read. Haloed by lamplight, my beautiful mother’s skin glowed like ivory.
Though Mother’s selection of poems varied from night to night, it always included Yeats’s “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” and “The Song of the Wandering Aengus,” Elizabeth Madox Roberts’s “The Hens,” and Robert Frost’s “The Pasture.” Hushed and a bit incantatory, her voice turned my imagination to “Nine bean rows,” “A ruffled sound, like a bushful of birds,” and “the little calf / That’s standing by the mother.” Mother read while rain dashed the windows, while crickets chirped, while the furnace clicked off and on. I heard these sounds in the background but followed her voice shaping the air.
I suspect Mother included the lyrics by Yeats, Roberts, and Frost because their rills and rustlings carried the promise of sleep. This promise, however, was corrupted by the poem with which she ended every reading: “The House with Nobody in It.” My mother recited its opening lines in a voice of melancholy contentment, and fear crawled into my chest:
Whenever I walk to Suffern along the Erie track
I go by a poor old farmhouse with its shingles broken and black.
I suppose I’ve passed it a hundred times, but I always stop for a minute
And look at the house, the tragic house, the house with nobody in it.
Hearing Suffern and Erie as suffering and eerie, I anticipated pain as the poem’s destination and imagined a story unfurled by a ghost. Mother read on, and I wished my mind could be blank.
In retrospect, I believe “The House with Nobody in It” spelled for Mother what she knew loomed on the horizon: my brother’s 1964 commitment to an institution and the void he would leave behind. In childhood, I never considered what the poem might have whispered to her, why she returned to it again and again. I accepted that it signified something I could not understand.
Mother changed when she began reading Kilmer’s lines. She leaned away from me and tipped her shoulders as if they were wings that she wanted to close. Her eyes fluttered, then shut. Her voice was no less sonorous than it had been as she had read Yeats and Frost; there was, however, no comfort in it.