Fairfield
While finishing Teju Cole’s Black Paper at the dog park this weekend, I was struck by his short sentence about a burnt stump. It cued a memory of being nine years old in Fairfield, Montana, sketching a stump in the front yard of Great Aunt Margie’s home. I mastered with pride the shadows of the bark strips, the way the root slipped below the grass line. A basket of flowers crowned the head of the stump, and I drew that, too, tiny petals clustered in teardrop ovals, shadows curving beneath them.
It was my second visit to Fairfield, a freckle of a town with summer parades and a public pool. Three summers prior I had met another little girl there, age six just like me, named Abbie with auburn hair and a ruffled suit. For hours we lapped and bobbed in the chlorine, held our breaths beneath the bright folds of water until our moms called us.
Fully prepared to never see one another again, as children who meet on playgrounds and in pools often experience, we were surprised to discover our mothers knew one another and that both of us had a Great Aunt Margie. Turns out, we were cousins.
Thrilled, we reunited that afternoon, and then again three years later on that grey day in the yard when the grass was green and we sat sketching that stump together — immortalizing the flowers, left there by an unknown hand.
Many years from that moment, at university, Abbie would prove herself as one of the most exceptional artists in the program. Watercolors sweeping yet controlled, oils rich, sketches built with greyscale confidence, her portrayals of the world were exact in both visual and emotional quality. And, like her paintings, Fairfield in memory is hardly one story, but a collection of things: false books clapping open; a soft sweatshirt bought at the parade; a basement with old iron bed frames and photographs and clothes from the 1930s, clip-on earrings and hats with lace trim and gloves for slender hands.
As a child I did not discern that I was wading through the beginnings of Margie’s mental illnesses. Her forgetfulness not yet dementia, her “keeping” not yet hoarding — holding tight to past things but forgetting them, too, years-old receipts and spoiled gelatin.
When Margie died, and Mom helped purge the home, she explained Margie’s tendency to “keep” likely had to do with growing up during the Depression. Nothing tossed, everything spared. My mother’s memory of the home and its things was more elaborate, and complete.
Near the homestead they collected arrowheads, saw teepee rings. As a teen she’d sneak out the window on warm nights to kiss neighborhood boys. Served at Margie’s tiny table near the window in the kitchen were Midwestern “delicacies” that also spoke to the Depression: cheese casseroles with mixed meats, fruit suspended in Jello. Wedding cakes were Margie’s one impeccable excellence — frosted tiers embellished with spiked icing, rosettes, and curlicues. My mother’s cousins left young and came back older every summer — meeting at the pool, walking beneath tall trees, sweeping their hands along crops on the edge of town.
Fairfield lies in the Sun River Valley, a place praised for its agricultural value. But there was something in the dirt, in the water, my mom’s cousin Troy said — a toxic fallout that made its way into the bodies of the people. My grandmother contracted breast cancer when my mother was 15 and died of it two weeks after my parents married. In our family there were tumors and lung diseases and dementia. Even Abbie went into surgery as a teenager for a tumor in her belly the size of a melon — not cancerous but life-altering nonetheless. By Troy’s thirtieth high school reunion, many were sick or dead.
There are other factors of course, factors various family members would propose or argue over. Perhaps my grandmother would not have gotten sick, or maybe at least would not have gotten sick there, in her chest, had it not been where my grandfather shoved her into the television when she was pregnant with my mother. Perhaps Great Aunt Ira, who lived in a teepee with her lover in Northern Idaho and was said to practice witchcraft, welcomed little demons of anxiety and depression that plagued the family. Perhaps had there not been arguments over Aunt Jan’s money, some of the family would not have split, perhaps if first cousins had not married in the 1800s there would not be autism, perhaps perhaps perhaps.
Or perhaps there were less nuanced reasons for the way things went. Maybe it really was just genetics, or the land disturbed by mining waste and nuclear accidents. But there is something about even that which has haunted me — something about the idea of young people in earlier days chewing on malted barley straight from the plant, or drinking water from the hose on a hot day, completely innocent of the knowledge that something horrid lurked there, first on the outside of them and then on the inside, sowing dense little seeds of diseased destinies unwanted.