smiling, young children bouncing on a trampoline. Spanish moss drapes elegantly across the boughs and awnings. The father wears a white chef’s cap and sauce-stained apron. I knew him. Not well, but enough to nod as our shopping carts passed each other down grocery aisles, by the condiments, the charcoal, the bleached white breads. Bill Dreiser. A civil service engineer from three streets over who, rumor had it, made enough in a sudden stock windfall to buy this same pictured family a second home somewhere in the Pacific Northwest, near Portland or Seattle or somewhere in Northern California. Rumor had it he also bought a sailboat.
And then, while clear-cutting his new property one afternoon last summer, a tree fell on him—crushed him in the flash of an instant. When his family couldn’t find him for dinner, they searched the grounds, only to discover a trace of his shirt under the fallen log. And when, after several hours of cutting, they were finally able to remove the colossal trunk, using two pickups and over a dozen men, there was nothing recognizable beneath, nothing distinctly human for his grieving widow and children to claim—only bone and hair and pulp.
In his still-smiling photograph, I notice Bill’s graying mustache is trimmed crooked, angled upward on one side. I seem to remember this about him in person, too. One of the young girls on the trampoline, wearing a cartoon print T-shirt of a blue genie, appears caught in mid-fall, slightly blurred, frozen in time and space, as she gleefully shoots us the finger.
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Hero arrived in the middle of what she mockingly termed “The Reconstruction.” At 407 St. Francis Avenue, the two-story manor house I inherited a few years ago after my grandfather’s death, the structure of things is in perpetual flux. It’s a long-term renovation, piece-by-piece, as I have sought to restore the home’s original splendor. In its 170-year history, mirroring my own family’s evolution from Southern aristocracy to significantly poorer but quietly respected, the building has evolved dramatically as generations of my family have sought to move the structure farther and farther away from its roots—dragging it, awkward and uncomfortable, into their present. Officially, no new work had been done on the house in a hundred years—no zoning permits, no building plans of any sort; yet the house I now occupied bore little resemblance to the one laid out in the original blueprints I’d recovered from the county clerk’s office, which to the untrained eye revealed only the faintest traces of its early eighteenth-century roots.
A variety of odd additions had been made to the back and sides of the building, including a den with three walls, an attached chapel with no walls (just a stucco oval without windows) and a glass dome for a greenhouse out back. The only thing I found that seemed still directly connected to its past was the crumbling family burial plot, with its newest addition, my grandfather Devon, as Old South as they come, joining seven generations of decomposing Browns.
Most of the additions were shoddily done. My first inspection revealed mismatched lines running throughout the structure, water damage and other sure signs of leakage, irregularly shaped doorways and windows. The upstairs bathroom was missing a section connecting the sink to the drainage pipe, and half the sand dollar tiles had been stripped from the walls with what might have been the tip of a Phillips screwdriver, leaving trails in the plaster like asterisks, drifting off into incomplete thoughts.
When I learned I’d inherited this house, I couldn’t wait to move back in, despite these unsightly and potentially unsound changes, because I knew just how rare it was to find a vacancy in Magnolia Grove, and someday living in Magnolia Grove is the goal of every authentic Southern son who grows up knowing its name. But it will take years, perhaps decades, to finish restoring the place to its former glory as our family’s traditional antebellum manor house. A lifetime, even. I began almost immediately after taking possession, and six years later I still felt that I was only just getting started, the past still far out ahead of me.
In the cool of the mornings, Hero and I took our breakfast on the cracked back patio, which I hoped soon to demolish in favor of the original wraparound porch. The newly retro-designed kitchen was still on the planning board. So much was still on the planning board. I’d blown through a large chunk of my inheritance just to complete the few projects I’d started, and I was already beginning to venture into debt. It was worth it, though, I reasoned, and someday, Hero would be able to stay in this house of our ancestors, maybe even live here herself once I was gone. All of this assuming, of course, that we survived this first visit.
“Why don’t you have a pet name for me?” Hero scowled from across her newly discovered favorite breakfast: cheese grits.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, other fathers call their kids dumb things like Sugar or Pumpkin. All you ever call me is Hero.”
“Which is the name you came with.”
“So?”
“You want me to give you a pet name?”
“I want to know why you don’t call me anything.”
After almost a week of meals filled with blank, silent stares, we decided something had to be done, so we developed this method of discussion: In the morning we asked each other a question, some tidbit about our respective pasts, presents and future dreams. Those little joys and tragedies that gain significance by sheer accumulation. Nothing too personal. Then after dinner, during dessert, we’d ask a follow-up and sift for some significance amid the random flotsam gathered in our nets. This was Hero’s idea, so naturally her questions were better. I would ask some banal question about her school or friends, carefully avoiding any area that might seem too personal. She, on the other hand, like any good predator, knew how to go for the jugular.
“You hate my name. Don’t you.”
This was after dinner and partway into dessert. All day I’d been struggling with our morning session, foolishly hoping she’d let the matter drop. I swallowed uncomfortably and scratched my knee.
“Why would you say that?
“I don’t know. Something in your face. Your nose scrunches up when you say it. Like you’ve eaten something sour.”
“It doesn’t matter what I think.”
“I didn’t say it did. I’m just asking.”
“Fine. I probably would have picked something else.”
She smiled. Once again, as had happened so often during her visit over the past week, it occurred to me that I might have found just the wrong thing to say.
“And what would you have called me?”
“One thing at a time,” I stalled, taking an earnest spoonful from my bowl. “I’m still working on the pet name… Puddin’.”
She frowned over her grape Jell-O.
“That’s the best you can do?”
“It’s a start.”
“That’s barely even trying. Why don’t you call me Hamburger? Or, wait! What’d we have for dinner last night?”
“I’m doing my best.”
“Spaghetti! Or how about Meatball?”
“You’re the one who suggested Pumpkin,” I said.
Hero’s face puckered. “That was an example.”
“I’m just saying.”
“My sweet Noodle,” she mocked, bracing her chin on folded hands. “My darling little Marinara.”
“Marinara’s kinda nice,” I said. “Let’s go with that.”
As evening set in, we walked the neighborhood. It was for exercise, so naturally her idea, and it was a rare opportunity to explore the place I lived. After six years living here again, I had not found the time or been pushed by strong inclination. Most often, I was either racing to or from work, or buried deep in one project or another, observing the necessary detachment from streets and houses and landscapes beyond the borders of my front lawn.
But here at the close of the day, we