The World Is on Fire

by Joni Tevis

  “We enjoyed meeting so many nice people from different places from every state in the union and many outside,” wrote Louisa in 1953, “but we want to rest a while it is too much work for us now.”

  Too easy to look back and call those the good old days. The Walker sisters never even had an outhouse; Margaret Jane said other people would see it and know what it was for, and that would have embarrassed her. But she never scrubbed a floor for anyone other than herself, and at the end, I’m glad she took down the sign that read VISITORS WELCOME.

  11. DIORAMA-CRAFT (SOME CHALLENGES)

  To make a diorama is to try to make a memory physical, to embody the sense impressions and emotions of a single caught moment. You’ll never pass this way again.

  Viewed in this light, the dioramas start to seem almost desperate in their dogged determination to save something of a world that must always be under siege. Here’s a desert, a swamp, a forest: I saved this. But without the living place on which it’s based, the diorama is a useless totem. Is this all we have left, scenes salted away in a dark hall?

  Something of the Gray Fox and Opossum diorama died with James Perry Wilson in 1976. When he looked at the finished scene, did he feel hot wind pulling sweat from his pores, the tight waistband of his dark puttees? The pure, surprising pain of a wasp sting, the crackle in the grass as locusts leapt out of his way?

  12. YOUR OWN PARTICULAR SOIL

  To find the Walker Sisters Home, follow the trail from their childhood schoolhouse. Hairy John helped build it, and families from all over the mountain used to come here for church on Sunday and schooling during the week. Something of the two uses remains. There’s something unyielding about the building, in a poplar kind of way, a wood that ages well and won’t rot, not as soft as pine nor as hard as locust. Good choice for the big square beams overhead. Looking up at the lintel, I can see the adze scars where the men stripped the log.

  We hike the trail to the cabin, passing crested irises and Little Brier Creek. Crows yell in the trees and woodpeckers drum, but we can’t see them. When the trail hooks right, I think of the girls: this had been their path home. Sometimes they hardly noticed, engaged in thought or conversation, but from childhood to old age, this was the scene that welcomed them back.

  Not exactly like this, of course. The sheep are long gone, but you can see where the chickens roosted in the cool springhouse. The gardens have run to grass, but along the edge of the field lilies grow, likely from bulbs the Walkers would have set out, multiplied in the years the house has sat idle. Up on a rise sits the toolshed, a strap from some extinct machine still hanging from a rusty nail. Red clay stains the fieldstones Hairy John stacked to make the chimney. A lilac bush grows on a knoll. When it bloomed, its pale smell would have drifted sweetly into the house through that living-room window.

  I step inside the cabin to stand in the living room, and I’m stunned to find scraps of old newspapers still pasted to the puncheon walls. I didn’t think there would be anything left by now. I lean close, reading the papers in the dim light. Just scraps, so trying to make sense of them is like listening to a fading radio signal. “The route we took was the . . . garden of Eden,” one fragment says. “Cold springs of water . . . crystals hanging from the sides . . . truly marvelous.”

  Most of the clippings seem to come from a magazine called Successful Farming. Headlines include “Value of Fish Meal,” “Pistons Have Stuck,” and “Fighting an Invisible Foe: The Last Days of Bovine Tuberculosis.” Reading these feels like sifting through a stranger’s mail. “This saves the work,” I read. “Brighten up your home,” says another piece, “lighten your work. No more hard rubbing and scrub.” Did the girls ever shake their heads and laugh? “Your own particular soil,” I read. “If your home happens to be situated on sand, why waste time, money and patience trying to raise the same kind of shrubs as does your friend?” On the wall beside the window, where Father and Mother’s bed used to sit, there’s an article titled “Meredith Jersey Farm Produces Silver Medal Cow: Tycoon’s Fixy Maid a Show Cow As Well As a Producer.” Fresh bird droppings streak the crumbling newsprint.

  I’m strangely moved by these little scraps, even though I doubt they had much significance for the sisters. Their eyes must have been tired, and probably they didn’t scald their walls each and every spring like before. The newspapers on the wall became the container in which their hours were held. List of faraway cities, diagrams for how to put chains on a tire. Decorative knowledge they were too wealthy to fool with.

  Sometimes, back in the Museum, artists left newspapers in the habitat displays to document the date they finished construction. You can’t see them, looking in, but the people who work there sometimes discover these secret gifts. No matter where you find it, an old crumpled newspaper gives off a whiff of time’s passage. And once, one of the curators found a homemade measuring stick that James Perry Wilson had used to mark the curved backgrounds. He had tucked it in the diorama where visitors couldn’t see, the key to his secret, a relic, a tick-marked walking stick. With it he translated miles of sight lines into tiny closets. He slipped a world into a bottle, where it expanded against the glass but couldn’t escape. Sealed the door behind him and stuffed steel wool in the breathing tube to keep out mice.

  Think how it might have been on a day like today. The sisters sitting in the wide-planked living room on a damp afternoon in late spring, fireplace lit to take off the chill. Lick of green flame hovering close to the hickory and a pop and a hiss when the wood releases old rain.

  A ladder stands in the back corner and I climb up it to look around the loft, where sun shines down through chinks in the shingles. The ladder is plenty sturdy, not a bit of wobble to it, and its wood is as smooth as the inside of your neck from all the palms that have gripped it over the years.

  And as I stand there, suspended between loft and floor, I realize that for me, this ladder is the tie-in, the place where the three-dimensional sculpture touches, and becomes part of, the two-dimensional painted background. This is the border where the illusion works, these polished rungs of the ladder. The cabin feels not haunted, but alive.

  In one photograph taken of her, Margaret Jane smiles broadly, and her eyes are bright, hopeful, even friendly. Maybe she mellowed near the end. She died in 1962, aged eighty-two. Louisa, the last of the sisters, followed in 1964. I wonder what it must have been like for her, living those last months alone in a house that had always been shared.

  After Louisa died, the National Park Service took possession of the cabin and all its furnishings. I paged through the list. Among many other things, the Walker sisters had owned a “rifle,” a “trunk,” and a “chair (rocker), split bottom,” made by their father. A “yoke for roguish cow,” a “shoe repair ‘chisel,’” glass pharmacy bottles, and a pair of crutches. The men’s brogans they’d worn. In the loft over the main rooms, “when asked what was stored there, one source said, ‘Lord, everything.’”

  After we leave the cabin and drive home, I’m researching the Walker sisters when I discover an awful document: architect’s blueprints for restoration and stabilization of the cabin, circa 1969. Remember, at that point the house had been empty for only five years. But the Smokies have a moist climate with snowy winters and hot summers, and the rain only needs a toehold to pull down a house.

  I knew something bad was coming when I read, under the heading WORKMANSHIP, “The restored structure shall retain the primitive character of the original building.” When replacement wood was needed, the workers were to use a special saw to recreate the adze marks that Hairy John had made. New nails had to be fabricated the old-fashioned way, one at a time, with flatter shafts than the round wire-cut nails of the present day. I was afraid to read on. Of the newspapers on the walls, the document recommended, “Salvage as much of the original covering material as possible for reuse and reference. Recover the walls in accordance with the photographs with similar material of the same historic period.” This was getting complicated. And the
final insult, “All new covering shall be stained to match in color the reused existing material.”

  There was a subheading just for “LADDER: Repair and refasten.” My mouth was agape, my heart crushed—I had been living a lie! “If the public is to be allowed access to the garret,” I read, “replace the existing ladder with a stronger and safer reproduction.”

  I called my sister, who took the long view. “Clearly the park wants the visitor to have the experience of seeing the cabin and believing in it,” she said. “They value that experience, and they value the cabin. They want to preserve them.” I knew she was right, and my argument wasn’t with preservation, but with the idea that I had been lied to. I thought I was really seeing these newspaper scraps, little archaeological moments that the archivists hadn’t cataloged. I didn’t know what to feel anymore. How could I trust my senses?

  The cabin had become like a habitat display for me. I knew there was an element of fakery to it, yet it drew me in. What’s real, and what’s not? Newspapers left inside displays for curators to find. A clue, a bit of non-canonical “trash.” Yet I value it.

  What moment do we privilege as the real one? Think of the photo of Dad before he shipped out to Vietnam. So skinny, so young. He does not look as fully himself, to my eyes, as when I remember him from growing up. So, too, the cabin is privileging, say, 1936. Why then and not 1962, with its roll of roofing that Louisa tacked up to keep the rain out? Which hen nest should we recreate? Yet consider the swallow’s nest in the kitchen. The droppings that streak the wall in the living-bedroom. Fresh, real, of this very moment.

  Later, when I asked the park archivist about the cabins, she told me that the newspaper bits likely are original after all. Thanks to budget constraints, most of the recommendations the architect made were never implemented. We think; we can’t know for sure.

  I don’t want to know. Draw me in; dazzle me with detail, so I can imagine myself inhabiting life after life. We live in the tie-in, the eye-fooling line between past and future. The tie-in looks like home.

  13. THE SACRED HARP (1844)

  The singers sit in an open square and take turns to lead. The music responds to the plain wood walls and presses against them, rolls up to the roof. Four-part harmony, and if I call it “otherworldly” don’t mistake it for satin robes beyond a crystal sea. Sinew and scar, old blood. Sore feet and bowed limbs, a hard debt put to paid.

  They’re singing “Nearer, My God, to Thee,” and it’s one I know. But I like it best when they aren’t singing the words. At the very beginning of a song, they sing with fa so la syllables, to get a feel for the song and for each other. The banks of the river channel the current that shifts them. Today began as an arbitrary date on a calendar: second Sunday in July, first weekend in August. But by the time they make it to the chorus, we’re not in this country anymore, nor this age.

  Don’t think Margaret Jane didn’t know what she was giving up by claiming her one inimitable life. Sister Caroline married; her husband took the family photographs, and joked to a reporter from the Saturday Evening Post, “Reckon I’m about the only man that had courage to bust into that family, or else the rest of them girls got discouraged when they couldn’t get me and just quit.” Margaret Jane traveled to church conventions around the state, ordered needles and nails from catalogs. She knew something of the world beyond but chose to root here, to know her sisters’ bodies as she knew her own, binding and plastering sore joints; plucking barbs from stung palms; washing and combing long hair after it dried in the sun. Together they wove cloth for each other’s dresses from sheep that shied if they saw anyone wearing pants.

  No piano or organ, no pitch pipe or tuning fork. No cushions, stained glass, or wall hangings. I’ve felt that music so strong, I heard one boy say, it was like you could almost stand up and walk on it. Some nights they sang the old songs together at home. Spot of light glowing in a knothole. Poplar planks their daddy had planed and pegged. No matter how raw the night, the roof he’d raised sheltered them, and the apple cakes Mother had taught them to bake were still the pride of Little Greenbrier. It wasn’t that Margaret Jane valued some earlier day more than the blessed present in which she now found herself. More that the homemade tools the antique dealers badgered her to sell were things she still used. “We’d have the money,” sister Martha said, “but what would we work with?”

  After the last sister passed, the Park Service had the notion to have a ranger live on-site in the cabin, as the sisters themselves had lived. This idea seems never to have come to fruition, and I’m glad of it. Playacting someone else’s life, too bound by its scores of dicta. Impossible to capture the slow breathing of a sister asleep, huckleberry crumble made from wild warm August fruit, the poke bonnet Margaret Jane pieced and stitched and hung on its peg, linsey-woolsey chin straps hanging free.

  14. WHAT KIND OF MOMENT

  By the time I left the Museum, the afternoon was broiling, and I made for the subway. The walls at that stop were inlaid with mosaic creatures in bright thumbnails of glass: grasshopper, frog, turtle, giant cockroach. “Stand clear of the closing doors, please!” said the voice, and we were off, passing through interesting country, dark walls and red lights, train cars swinging right and left. The connecting springs clipped to their loops jounced, and I caught flashes of other people in other trains, then the cold white lights of the platform.

  I got off the train, pushed through the turnstile, and was on my way toward the street when the girls in front of me stopped so short I almost banged into them. What was the holdup? Then we all looked up toward the sky, where rain poured down. “This never happens!” the woman behind me said, dropping her wheeled suitcase with a click. I leaned against the wall, just out of the weather, and within a few minutes a crowd had gathered. Wet people rushing down the steps threaded their way through the crush. “This weather is atrocious,” a kid behind me said. “If you go out now, you’ll be soaked to the skin.” A German-speaking family debated what to do, mother tidily pregnant, father holding a foldout map, boys in matching red shirts. The hallway grew moist and warm. A young guy carrying a new broom and a multipack of paper towels slid past me and headed up into the storm. A woman in a purple burnout-velvet scarf sighed and leaned against the wall under faded graffiti that said TEEZ. A woman holding a bouquet of yellow irises in a plastic cone made for the staircase and I watched her go, the muscles in her calves flexing, step by careful step.

  “It’s just water,” said a soaked man hustling down from Fourth Street, the crowd stretching further back now than I could see. “Ha! All backed up!” A grinning boy followed him, wearing a clear plastic garbage bag as a poncho with a slit over his face so he could breathe. He peeled it off, looking satisfied. “This is the worst possible thing for my service,” said the girl beside me, tapping on her phone as filthy puddles collected on the floor. A man wearing a helmet leaned in close, trying to keep his bicycle out of the way of the people hurrying down the stairs. One of the boys in back, he of the atrocious weather, yelled, “Do you know what kind of moment this is? Do you KNOW what kind of moment this is?” Then he tore off his T-shirt, vaulted up the steps, and shouted, “It’s the kind of moment where you run out in the rain and get all wet!”

  Later, walking up Bleecker, I’ll hear a fight explode behind me, a cabbie yelling at a bus driver: “What the fuck, why you hit me? Why you do that, asshole?” Stormwater swirls along the curb and my face burns with blood and I hoof it, wet-footed, past expertly parked cars and tagged light boxes on my way toward my friends, waiting for me by the Astor Place Cube somewhere in the future, along with the Gideon Bible in the nightstand with a torn-to-scraps dollar bill tucked between Psalms 34 and 35 (“The poor man cried, and the Lord heard him”); toward the airport security line and television monitors that read WHY WHY WHY; and later still toward the slow drive down a Tennessee gravel road, where we’ll stop to ease our feet in the cold, clear current of the Little Pigeon, next to a still life of wilted daisies and ferns and toadst
ools, spread out on a flat stone like an offering.

  But here, now, do you know what kind of moment this is? “Good thing we don’t have any place to be,” the girl says, staring at her phone, crammed together with a bunch of strangers in a little space not really large enough for all it has to hold. Once the rain lets up, we’ll climb the steps into the open air under a sky that’s higher than I remembered, and if you walked down those stairs today there’d be nothing to show how it used to be. A receipt for a package of paper towels, a torn MetroCard, an apple core. Lord, everything.

  NOTES AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  After the years it has taken me to complete this book, it is a real joy for me to be able to thank some of the many people and sources who have helped me with this material.

  OVERTURE

  What Looks Like Mad Disorder: I wrote this essay while serving as the Kenan Visiting Writer at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I thank the creative writing program there for its support. Thanks, too, to Jeff Bernard and Julie Chisholm for their hospitality on the California junket.

  Thanks to Anna Lena Phillips and Emily Louise Smith for their thoughtful editing of the piece for Ecotone.

  An important natural-history source, intertwined with biblical quotations, was The Medieval Book of Birds: Hugh of Fouilloy’s Aviarium, translated by Willene B. Clark (Binghamton: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1992).

  For more about earthquakes, specifically the strange actions of animals right before an event, see Motoji Ikeya’s Earthquakes and Animals: From Folk Legends to Science. See also Gladys Hansen and Emmet Condon’s Denial of Disaster: The Untold Story and Photographs of the San Francisco Earthquake of 1906 for more about governmental response to the quake. This book also includes stunning newspaper photos from the time.