after House by the Railroad, by Edward Hopper (USA) 1925
No one went there if they knew better. A few smart alecks who didn’t believe in evil had trekked the winding hill ready to plant their flags. A concerned Dad went looking for a misplaced boy, thought to have whipped uphill on his new birthday bicycle. And even now no one knows where they’ve gone.
There was a writer who’d been sweet on Agnes. Word was, he’d followed her home from the tavern and never came back. She was vivacious and witty once upon a time, all eyes in the saloon on her. Vavavoom and cherry curls and all of that. And something more. Seductive and sinister. Eyes full of promises, and a smile like a scarecrow or some other dead thing.
In her day, Agnes had taken more than a few of the lonely back home for more drinks when the pub locked up at midnight. The luckiest of them reemerged in daylight soused, bruised, confused. They never went back and seldom talked about what had happened, like the other boys who had come home from the war.
The rest of us understood. How you could get lost there in the shambles.
Agnes’s daughter Esther lived 45 minutes away by car or across the bay like a flash if you had a boat. She hadn’t set wheel or oar on the west side of the water or the rolling hills where she came from since she left. Forty years ago? Sometimes someone ventured up on her porch and knocked. She was amicable enough but had little to say to reporters or evangelists. She only said the shambles were best left to their own devices. She spoke with candor, but there was a steely façade, something hermetically sealed. Esther had once told a real estate hopeful to stay away for her own good. “In this world, there is Mother, and there is her graveyard.”
Most locals have at some point given in to their morbid curiosity and driven past, ostensibly on their way to the big box stores finally planted on the other side of the hills. The old house was in and of itself austere, box style with dormer windows, plain shake siding in refrigerator green, the whole affair now yawning to one side. With all the scraggly trees and weeds and detritus, it was hard to see much of the house. The yard was heaped with rust and compost: piles of spent tires, the remains of a rocking horse atop them, scraps and skeletons of old automobiles and a sea of sad sullied plastic playground props. And something else, something that smelled sick and rotten already from the bottom of that hill.
Kind and brave churchy types left grocery donations by her mailbox on the road. Sometimes the sundries were taken, and sometimes they stayed and joined the ever expanding sea of rubble. When we were young, Agnes was always out and about, filling her granny cart with discarded vases and yellowed paperbacks and whatever bones or shards caught her eye. Yard sale types joked over how she was the clean-up crew and they left their picked over remains for her to scavenge at the sides of their lawns. Other times, she’d been spotted in Wellie boots and a few layers of ruffled cowgirl skirt, hiked up over bony knees, wading through the landscape of refuse at the local dump. But now it had been forever since anybody had laid eyes on Agnes.
An intrepid journalism student from the college had once braved the cusp, briefly. She found a trove of old photos in a firepit in the yard behind, where the cattle roamed on their passage home. She didn’t make it to the front door. Most of the pyre had been incinerated, but what was still recognizable was oddly bundled in winding twine. One of the photos that had been preserved was recognizable- James, the long ago husband who had disappeared. He simply failed one morning to show up for work at the canning factory. Some folks said it was understandable that he had run off. Others were sure he had been consumed by the shambles. There were other photos, too, of people no one recognized. All of them had a strange affect, something scooped out of their eyes.
If you took the most direct path to get gas or jumbo cartons of tuna or cheap cigarettes, you saw the outskirts of the shambles from your car. A half-dozen cracked open bathtubs devoured by Virginia Creeper and full of broken bottles. A protective circle of oily yellow fungi impenetrable around the perimeter.
Eventually the officials sent someone in, with news for Agnes that her daughter was in hospice. It was a sweltering day. There were roiling swarms of boxelder bugs on the hot surface of the door, but the door was ajar. The social worker slipped in grease and broke his arm on the other side of the threshold. The air was fetid with ammonia and rotten meat. They said that there was nowhere to move an inch inside that place, with bundled cardboard and eerie oddments throttling every square foot. And they found her, eventually. In the chimney. She was rigid and sooty. She’d been there for years, maybe decades. A frayed old fisherman’s rope around her gaping maw.
