crushed against the ground.
“I’d shake your hand if I could,” I said.
“Don’t worry about a thing.”
“We’re kin somehow, I know,” I said.
Sue smiled. “Your grandmother was my daddy’s aunt,” she said, slowly. Sue’s daddy being Grandmama’s nephew made us second cousins.
“Close enough for me,” I said, leaning on the mattock.
“Keep working,” Sue said. “I’ve been wanting to stop and say hello. I saw you all out in the yard.”
“Glad you stopped.” In between chopping and digging and pulling, I listened. Daddy was asking after Uncle Mike and what they would do with the squirrels. The lantana was too deeply rooted for a shovel, the pipe embedded in its tan roots. Excusing myself, I went for an axe. With a few blows, I twisted the pipe out of the root-grip and it broke open under the house, spilling raw sewage across the dry dirt. A Cracker house is built two or three feet off the ground for ventilation, so I climbed under and started shoveling fast, dumping the sludge into a five-gallon bucket. It was sure stinking under there, and I was embarrassed. It was an awkward time to have company, since I couldn’t very well quit. At least fixing the pipe was easy now—simply fit it back together. But Lord, the stench.
I’d heard Sue raised rabbits, that she knew how to fish and how to tan hides. I’d heard she liked to get out in the woods, that she liked heart-pine houses and worn knives and good stories. She knew things I wanted to learn. I finished under the house and crawled out, filthy, hair chaotic, and not exactly smelling like a rose.
“You gotta come to the syrup-boiling,” she said. “The day after Thanksgiving. It’s at Tommy Davis’s place.”
“Where’s that?”
“Not far. On the other side of the church.”
“I hope you mean it. I might show up.”
“You’d be welcome.”
Houses Mourn, Too
The family farm is seventy acres that Great-grandfather Walt deeded to Grandfather Arthur, in a settlement in upper Appling County peopled by the descendants of pioneers. My ancestors have lived here since white settlers forced their way into south Georgia, in 1818, displacing the Creeks from their prime hunting grounds. I own none of the farm. When my grandmother died, she divided it among her seven children. They have children and grandchildren of their own, who live in cities not so far away. My mother has a section of field and a strip of the branch past the water hole. The piece with the farmhouse, built by my grandparents in the 1920s out of heart pine, belongs to the eldest boy, my uncle Percy.
We call the place a farm because it still grows soybeans, corn, rye, and cattle for Uncle Bill Branch, really my mother’s first cousin. Southerners often use the word “uncle” as a term of respect for elder kin. Uncle Bill leases land from my aunts and uncles, although many parts of the farm are long forsaken.
The town of Baxley is located at the crossroads of two recently four-laned highways, U.S. 1, which runs from Maine to Miami, and U.S. 341, the principal artery from inland Georgia to the coast. Baxley is a place people pass through going somewhere else. At the center of town, on Main Street, is a courthouse built of marble in 1907. Four clocks, one facing each of the directions, are inset in its cupola; the four clocks do not keep the same time, and sometimes they stop altogether. The courthouse is painted every decade or so, and is now yellow and gray. On its lawn a conifer gets decorated at Christmas with blinking lights. Here on Saturday afternoons, when I was a girl, street-corner preachers would park their old trucks, equipped atop with powerful loudspeakers, and blast passionate sermons—warning against sin and predicting Armageddon—at passersby.
One block south of the courthouse, parallel to Highway 341, are railroad tracks, upon which trains run too fast to the coast with loads of pine chips, and too fast back with loads of shiny new cars. The town has a few beautiful old churches downtown, but most of the historical buildings were bulldozed in a 1970s flurry to be “progressive,” or to raze the past; during that era, both 341 and Main Street were four-laned, destroying the small-town feel, the angle parking, even the front lawns of some townspeople. A department store at the main stoplight has a mural of the town’s history on its side, from the Creeks through timber rafting down the Altamaha, through tobacco farming and turpentining. History ends at the far right of the brick wall with an image of the nuclear plant built on the river in the 1970s, not anything we are proud of, but rather a fact to be documented.
Until I was grown, Baxley had one stoplight. Now there are three, with more on the way. In my town, people still drive slow and they wave even at strangers by raising one finger off the steering wheel. If a funeral procession is encountered, they pull their vehicles off the roadway until the last mourner passes.
The farm is north of Baxley, toward the river, miles best taken in the rusty green 1972 pickup, sitting high, with the dog in the back, pecans on the dashboard next to a bird’s nest, and empty soda cans rattling back and forth in the doors (the lower panels are gone). The road from the highway is dirt, shaded by trees until it makes a ninety-degree turn around the corner of a field. Along the fencerow, Chickasaw plums and wild cherries grow among a hodgepodge of oak and sweet gum, their origin ascribed to the seed-eating birds that land on the fence.
At the house, the road narrows and turns sharply down to the branch, and you have to slow here; the road cuts on one side through a steep clay bank covered with short vegetation, vines, and fallen leaves. A third of a mile past the farm, the road splits and both paths run to paved country roads within a mile, and to more roads and to highways and to interstates.
I will warn you that if you were to see the farm, you would not see the same one I see, the place where I spent happy days as a child. Turning in, you’d see a working farm fallen into disrepair: a farmhouse half obscured by six-foot azaleas; Uncle Percy’s mildewed doublewide trailer; a huge water oak between the two domiciles; other tall, ancient trees in the yard. You’d see the outbuildings gray and weathered, rotten here and there, and the tin that covers them rusty and buckling, flapping in windstorms. You’d see a car shelter, connected to what we call the packhouse; a boiler shelter, where they used to make syrup, with a decaying washroom; a big barn where Granddaddy fixed cars; a garden-tool shed; a corn crib (the prettiest building); and a log chicken coop where I store wood. These original outbuildings are leaning, missing boards, or sinking into the ground. Others, like the privy, are gone, rotted and fallen back to earth, never to be replaced.
The house, though dear to me, is timeworn and tacked together, sided these last thirty years by sheets of brown asphalt shingles of a design resembling brickwork. What wood lies beneath we do not yet know. Poor and dilapidated it may be, but it is a falling-down place that I have known all of my life and that I love. The house is a sixty-by thirty-foot rectangle with eight rooms, two by two: living room and dining room, living room and kitchen, bathroom and bedroom, second bedroom and third bedroom, which has become a study. Each room has at least three doorways and sometimes four. Because it is very open inside—the traditional Cracker style of architecture designed for air flow—you can see straight from the front door to the back. From one front corner, you can see diagonally to the back corner. It’s a plain, unpretentious house, built quickly, with eight-foot ceilings that allow room for summer heat to lift above head level.
This is the second house that was erected on this spot of ground. My great-grandparents lived in a pine house over on the highway, what is now U.S. 1, although it was only a dirt trail when Uncle Percy was a boy, with a ford at the creek marked now by concrete culverts. Walt Branch divided his land between his sons, and Granddaddy got this piece. He was thirty-one when he married Grandmama but had no house for her, so after they married she returned to her own parents’ house until he could build one. Their first home was not many years old when it burned, its pine shakes set afire by a spark from the fireplace. Walt was a renowned carpenter, so the house had been lovely. The replacement was cobbled together in a hurry to get a roof over the family’s head. That was in the early 1930s.
When