I Stole a Painting of a Unicorn and Wrote My Name on the BackA story about abandoned houses in Appalachia, and what we do to make someone else's history feel like ours
Up and down Irish Creek Road is a smattering of old houses once lived in and now abandoned. There is the old yellow Cash house on the other side of the creek as the road with its paint rapidly fading to grey. It is an imposing structure and one that was surely once grand. It is a two story home and its front windows face the road. For years the lawn was kept mowed and every spring a garden patch would be plowed up and planted with potatoes and corn. Eventually the weather-beaten foot bridge spanning the creek gave way. It was recently replaced with a new bridge of spiffy yellow wood that no sooner went up than started fading away.
There is a collapsed pile of rotting boards down off Irish Creek Road by the creek that I’ve always been told was an old schoolhouse destroyed by hurricane Camille. When we moved up to Irish Creek, the schoolhouse was still partially standing and its walls went straight up though the roof was caving in. Now the entire thing lies flat to the ground and is slowly being reclaimed by the earth. When I was a girl, I loved nothing better than exploring the ruins of the houses disintegrating around us. Up the ridge from our house is the remnants of an old homestead. For a while, the acreage was kept mowed. You could hike up the ridge through the fiddlehead ferns and at its crest stand there and look out across the fields of shorn grass toward the far view of the trees and sky. Blackberries grew in abundance up there during the summer all along the edge of the yard and in clusters down in the field. The only pitfall to picking was the equal abundance of poison ivy all along the edge of the yard where the grass met bramble and bramble met the treeline.
There was an old grey clapboard house set back in the field with its porch bowing under the weight of age. A set of gravel tracks wound through the grass up to the front door. There used to be an old rocking chair on the porch. It looked handmade. It had two curved rockers and the chair itself was a wooden frame filled in with wicker to make for a comfortable seat. I was convinced the chair would break apart and fall to pieces if anyone were to sit in it but it remained a relic of the past to touch. Surely some old woman sat there in that rocking chair made by her husband and rocked on the porch back and forth back and forth into the late hours of the day. Perhaps she shucked corn or peeled potatoes while she sat there and looked out across the fields thinking of days gone by when her family settled on the land to make a home. I explored the old spring house behind the house where a stone tub built into the ground collected water. It had a dank damp smell of moist earth and carried the relentless plink of water. It may once have been full and used as both a water source and as storage for vegetables with the water to keep the interior cool. Over time the floor turned gritty and dusty and the place itself became more gloomy and off putting than it was inviting. Quickly I turned back out the door under the cobwebs into the bright freshness of the air outside. I loved nothing better than to salvage old relics from the ruins of these houses. Among the pieces I held onto the longest were three old paintings. The first was a ratty old painting of a unicorn done on flimsy cardboard about the size of a trade paperback cover. The unicorn was white and portrayed rearing up on his hind legs on the edge of a cliff somewhere. Behind him was the blue and white sky that he almost blended into. The painting was framed by a cheap black plastic corrugated frame pinpricked with purposeful holes. It hung off a bit of string tied through two holes in the back of the frame. The painting itself constantly threatened to fall out of the frame save for two bits of tape I used to keep the whole thing together. Paid subscribers get the full essay, plus everything I don’t post for free: complete personal essays, craft notes from my MFA at Brown, and lit guides to Southern and Appalachian Gothic. $5/month. Come up the holler with me. Continue reading this post for free in the Substack app
|
No comments:
Post a Comment