Growing Things and Other Stories, page 16
Ten thousand years ago, Tiller’s Swamp and the surrounding lowlands were formed by glacial retreat. There is argument in local scientific circles as to whether or not Tiller’s Swamp is a true swamp or merely a marsh, which is another type of wetland. Such classifications are meaningless, of course, particularly to the monster.
As far as our closely guarded public records are concerned, the true story of Tiller’s Swamp and the monster does not begin in the Ice Age, but begins, instead, in the mid-nineteenth century with one Joseph Tiller. Descended from Quakers, Joseph was a small, brutish man with a left leg three inches shorter than his right. His left boot and equilibrium-enabling rawhide lift can be found in our swamp museum. In part inspired by the great landfill projects that shaped the geography of his beloved hometown of Boston, Joseph formed a company of simple-minded recruits and helped to drain parts of the Great Black Swamp in Indiana so it could be converted into valuable farmland. Tiller and his men were among the thousands of workers digging tiers of drainage ditches. The members of the Tiller Company earned distinction by the speed with which they dug and by famously not succumbing to the fevers and shakes associated with the bad air of the swamp. Doctors had yet to discover that it was the enormous clouds of mosquitoes and other bloodsucking insects spreading fever and disease, not the swamp air. Regardless, “Tiller was one of the cogs of that great wheel of human progress” (quoting the plaque that accompanies his left boot in our museum).
Upon hearing of Tiller and his heroic deeds, our heady, media-savvy ancestors conceived of a plan: they extended an official invitation to live in our town to Joseph and his men. Our town council offered free plots of land upon which to build homesteads and communicated a somewhat dubious claim that our town had an inordinately high population of unwed young women waiting for the right man, or, as it were, men.
In what was considered a coup, Joseph and his company of men decided to accept our invitation and relocate from Indiana. Upon arrival, they found that their free plots all abutted the nameless swamp, which, ironically enough, was thought to be only a marsh, or even a bog, back then. The unwed women quotient turned out to be a considerable exaggeration as well. Tiller and his men, exhausted from the Great Black Swamp gig and the rigors of mid-nineteenth-century travel, shrugged, threw up their hands in frustration, and stayed anyway, thinking they’d improve their collective lots somehow.
With such improvement in mind, and in an effort to attract media attention (and young singles from the neighboring communities), Joseph and the town council agreed to set up an elaborate marsh-draining ceremony.
The rest, as they say, is history. History records that they ran out of wine and cheese before the ceremony, which was a huge public embarrassment that still resonates with our residents, who now are never without the proper amount of wine and cheese.
Also, the monster decapitated Joseph Tiller before the first tossed shovelful of ceremonial dirt hit the soggy ground. The monster then went on a rampage, razing the town (sparing only the Little Red Schoolhouse) and laying waste to any living creature in its path. The siege lasted two full days. Luckily, an anonymous heroic citizen thought to save and preserve the left boot and lift of Joseph Tiller for future generations.
For the monster, there is no past, present, or future. There is no time, at least not in the way we conceive of it. The monster measures time in layers of sediment and in blood.
Regardless of what folklore might imply about the monster’s territoriality, or some sensationalistic or even salacious notion of its seeking revenge, its consciousness and motivation, for lack of better terms, are totally alien to us. If we’re being honest here, we have to admit that we cannot know what or how it thinks, if it can even be said to think at all, at least in terms of how we understand thinking. Let’s put it this way: asking why the monster chooses this moment to emerge from Tiller’s Swamp is equivalent to asking an earthquake what its favorite color is.
On this day, the monster moves like a tectonic plate. It sloughs an ancient skin of mud and peat, soil and weed. Stagnant water, green and thick with algae and lily pads, bubbles and shifts as the monster rises. Within the swamp, there are now waves where there should not be waves. Water rushes past its boundaries and crashes over the hummocks, the swamp’s small dry-land islands, washing out shrubs and other adolescent wooded vegetation that never had a chance.
The monster that finally, irrevocably steps onto dry land is a hulking, featureless, stygian mass. No one is ready for it. Most of us will succumb to it as weakly as the washed-out shrubs and trees. Only a precious few will understand the monster for what it truly is. Brent and Hannah, our new and presumably happy homeowners, will not be counted among those precious few.
Ironically enough, Brent and Hannah are fucking like animals in their new home, in the downstairs guest bedroom, when the monster attacks. We can’t know for sure, of course, as previously noted, but it’s likely their fucking has no effect on the monster. Their fucking is as inconsequential to it as the dragonfly that briefly rests on its shoulder.
In the throes of their, frankly, impressive passion (aided by a bottle plus of cheap merlot and a porno documentary they watched on HBO), the couple do not hear the monster emerging from the swamp, nor do they notice when it rips open their home. Their sexual position is an athletic variant of missionary. Hannah’s eyes are closed, as she doesn’t like seeing Brent’s facial contortions during lovemaking: he looks old, his hairline exposed as thinning; then he appears angry, gritted teeth and thick veins like tree roots in his neck; then he’s someone else, someone she doesn’t recognize at all, a stranger, but not a fantasy stranger, not an arousing stranger, certainly not anyone like the Realtor. Although Brent’s transformative stranger is a familiar one, if that makes sense. He becomes the same stranger who mindlessly thrusts his hips and clumsily paws at her breasts, and leaves her thinking Who is this man? Usually, if she closes her eyes, everything is okay.
We know that everything is not okay. Before her horrifying death, Hannah is the recipient of one final, fleeting, and random bit of fortune. She doesn’t see the monster open its swinging-gate maw and she doesn’t see the top half of her husband (starting, roughly, at his solar plexus) disappear. In the darkness of her own making, she feels Brent become slight, and she senses his falling away from her. Then, after a blunt-force trauma that crushes her skull, she feels nothing more. Or so we hope.
The monster makes short work of the gift shop, museum, and fan club. The graveyard is the next stop on the monster’s frenzied path. The headstones, which serve as a final record of who lived and died in our town, the final statement of who we were, a statement proffered by people who loved us and thought we mattered, turn to dust under the monster’s feet.
Caleb finishes telling Teddy his brief monster story. “Okay, then. Now: the town is a monster. It’s a Frankenstein-type monster because we created it. The houses and buildings are its blunt teeth, and one day soon, it will close its great mouth and swallow us whole, devouring everyone and everything.”
The monster overhears but is unmoved. It picks up Teddy and plucks off appendages as a child might pluck petals off a flower.
Caleb returns to playing his handheld video game but is no longer playing well. He says, “I have another story: the degradations you, the monster, visit upon us are many, too many to be documented. Instead we lavish care on the details of only a few victims. The lucky few, right? Why do we do this? Do we fear that we’d buckle under the weight of all the accumulated sorrow, tragedy, and loss? Perhaps we fear complacency instead of vigilance within the shadow of your destruction and chaos?” Caleb throws the game player behind him and reaches out a small hand to touch the monster. “Or do we only tell some of the victims’ stories because we fear not complacency but overexposure; we fear losing a perverse sense of mystery, because then you and we—your victims—wouldn’t be special anymore?”
The monster crushes Caleb’s complex and terrible brain under its foot. Caleb’s flesh mixes with the gravestone dust, making a gory, pasty mess that leaves a trail on the road to the Little Red Schoolhouse.
We will not linger here in the schoolhouse, where there will be no survivors. The chaperones will die first, nobly trying to protect the children. Mr. Butler, confronted with a real monster, not one constructed of self-pity, will not be heard over the screams. He will walk toward the monster, resigned, and saying, “Go away,” like the punch line to a long and not particularly funny joke. He’ll die in the monster’s hands, thinking of Vera and how he’ll miss her memory.
As distasteful and unpopular as it is, the children will die horribly. There are no Hansels and Gretels here. Most of the children will die wondering how this could be happening to them. Some will remain convinced this should not be happening to them, thinking it’s like Mr. Butler was saying before, There must be some kind of mistake. The ones who will be eaten last suffer terribly, having had to watch their classmates eaten before them. Their suffering will be no fair trade, please do not think that, yet these final children will be the precious few who come to understand what the monster is and what it means.
Perhaps if we were to actually tell the real monster story and fully confront all the tragedies mentioned above, we might glimpse an awful and beautiful and most elusive wisdom: of how to love and live with each other and with the terrible knowledge of the unknowable, uncaring, and undiscriminating monster.
Of course, it should be noted that the next new-and-improved set of official town records will not document the attack on the schoolhouse. In fact, the next town record will report that the schoolhouse was spared, just as all the previous sets of town records (going all the way back to Joseph Tiller’s era) fictitiously, erroneously reported the monster had spared the schoolhouse. Instead, the surviving council members and the always professional Realtor will concoct a story about how our town’s faith and fortitude overcame another attack. Our future locals will spend years discussing and digesting the fictional last-minute heroics of a town selectman and a Methodist minister.
The new official story will go as follows: the two men filled the town selectman’s twenty-year-old American-made pickup truck with raw meat and lured the monster away from the school, to the cheers and smiles of the twenty-six little faces they saved. The minister prayed hard and the selectman drove hard, right into the swamp, setting the trap. The monster jumped on top of them, the accumulated weight of monster and machine sank the heroes and their perfectly good pickup truck into the depths of the swamp, and that’s where they all stayed.
The future locals will fill in personal details concerning both the selectman and minister, reveling in their past sins and weaknesses, which will serve only to make their sacrifice and ultimate redemption all the more sweet. Some future locals will insist they heard the selectman and minister were alive and living happily anonymous lives in another town. In our future pubs and themed family restaurant bars, future beers will be wagered upon whether or not there was a spectacular Hollywood-style explosion when the monster and pickup truck hit the swamp’s bottom.
What will not be debated or questioned by the future us is the moral of the town’s newest official monster story: don’t worry, we’ll all be saved and everything will be all right.
A Haunted House Is a Wheel upon Which Some Are Broken
Arrival
Fiona arranged for the house to be empty and for the door to be left open. She has never lived far from the house. It was there, a comfort, a threat, a reminder, a Stonehenge, a totem of things that actually happened to her. The house was old when she was a child. That her body has aged faster than the house (there are so many kinds of years; there are dog years and people years and house years and geological years and cosmic years) is a joke and she laughs at it, with it, even though all jokes are cruel. The house is a New England colonial, blue with red and white shutters and trim, recently painted, the first-floor windows festooned with flower boxes. She stands in the house’s considerable shadow. She was once very small, and then she became big, and now she is becoming small again, and that process is painful but not without joy and an animal sense of satisfaction that the coming end is earned. She thinks of endings and beginnings as she climbs the five steps onto the front porch. Adjacent to the front door and to her left is a white historical placard with the year 1819 and the house’s name. Her older brother, Sam, said that you could never say the house’s name out loud or you would wake up the ghosts, and she never did say the name, not even once. The ghosts were there anyway. Fiona never liked the house’s name and thought it was silly, and worse, because of the name preexisting and now postexisting, it means that the house was never hers. Despite everything, she wanted it to always be hers.
Fiona hesitates to open the front door. Click here
Fiona decides not to go inside the house after all and walks back to her car. Click here
The Front Door
It’s like Fiona has always and forever been standing at the front door. She places a hand on the wood and wonders what is on the other side, what has changed, what has remained the same. Change is always on the other side of a door. Open a door. Close a door. Walk in. Walk out. Repeat. It’s a loop, or a wheel. She doesn’t open the door and instead imagines a practice run; her opening the door and walking through the house, stepping lightly into each of the rooms, careful not to disturb anything, and she is methodical in itemizing and identifying the ghosts. She feels what she thinks she is going to feel, and she doesn’t linger in either the basement or her parents’ bedroom, and she eventually walks out of the house, and all this is still in her head, and she closes the door, then turns around, stands in the same spot she’s standing in now, and places a hand on the wood and wonders what is on the other side, what has changed, what has remained the same.
Fiona opens the door. Click here
Fiona is not ready to open the door. Click here
Fiona decides to walk back to the car and not go inside the house. Click here
Entranceway
Fiona gently pushes the front door closed, watches it nestle into the frame, and listens for the latching mechanism to click into place before turning her full attention to the house. The house. The house. The house. Sam said because the house was so old and historical (he pronounced it his-store-ickle so that it rhymed with pickle) there was a ghost in every one of the rooms. He was right. The house is a ghost, too. That’s obvious. That all the furniture, light fixtures, and decorations will be different (most of everything will be antique, or made to look antique; the present owners take their caretakers-of-a-living-museum role seriously) and the layout changed from when she lived here won’t matter because she’s not here to catalog those differences. She’ll have eyes only for the ghost house. Fiona says, Hello? because she wants to hear what she sounds like in the house of the terrible now. She says hello again and her voice runs up the stairs and around banisters and bounces off plaster and crown molding and sconces, and she finds the sound of the now-her in the house pleasing and a possible antidote to the poison of nostalgia and regret, so she says hello again, and louder. Satisfied with her reintroduction, Fiona asks, Okay, where should we go first?
Fiona turns to her right and walks into the living room. Click here
Fiona walks straight ahead into the dining room. Click here
The weight of the place and its history and her history is too much; Fiona abruptly turns around and leaves the house. Click here
Living Room
Dad builds a fire and uses all the old newspaper to do it, and pieces glowing orange at their tips break free and float up into the flue, moving as though they are alive and choosing flight. Fiona and Sam shuffle their feet on the throw rug and then touch the cast-iron radiator, their static electric shocks so big at times, a blue arc is visible. Mom sits on the floor so that Fiona can climb onto the couch and jump onto her back. A bushel and a peck and a hug around the neck. The fire is out and the two of them are by themselves and Sam pokes around in the ashes with a twig. Sam says that Little Laurence Montague was a chimney sweep, the best and smallest in the area, and he cleaned everyone’s chimney, but he got stuck and died in this chimney, so stuck, in fact, they would not be able to get his body out without tearing the house apart, so the homeowners built a giant fire that they kept burning for twenty-two days, until there was no more Little Laurence left, not even his awful smell. Sam says that you can see him, or parts of him anyway, all charred and misshapen, sifting through the ash, looking for his pieces, and if you aren’t careful, he’ll take a piece from you. Fiona makes sure to stay more than an arm’s length away from the fireplace. Of all the ghosts, Little Laurence scares her the most, but she likes to watch him pick through the ash, hoping to see him find those pieces of himself. There are so many.
Fiona walks into the dining room. Click here
Fiona walks to the kitchen. Click here
This is already harder than she thought it was going to be; impossible, in fact. Fiona doesn’t think she can continue and leaves the house. Click here
Dining Room
Fiona and Sam are under the table and their parents’ legs float by like branches flowing down a river. The floorboards underneath groan and whisper and they understand their house, know it as a musical instrument. Dad sits by himself and wants Fiona and Sam to come out from under the table and talk to him; they do and then he doesn’t know what to say or how to say it; her father is so young and she never realized how young he is. Mom isn’t there. She doesn’t want to be there. Sam says there was an eight-year-old girl named Maisy who had the strictest of parents, the kind who insisted children did not speak during dinner, and poor Maisy was choking on a piece of potato from a gloopy beef stew and she was so terrified of what her parents would do if she said anything, made any sort of noise, that she sat and quietly choked to death. Sam says you can see her at the table sitting there with her face turning blue and her eyes as large and white as hard-boiled eggs and if you get too close she will wrap her hands around your neck and you won’t be able to call out or say anything until it’s too late. Of all the ghosts, Maisy scares Fiona the most, and she watches in horror as Maisy sits at the table trying to be a proper girl.
