815 Western

Creative Nonfiction by Sara Gerend

he photos from our former neighbors arrive in the mail just after Christmas. In one image the garage leans dangerously low to the ground. In another, the excavator’s jaws bite into the roof like it is made of cardboard. In the last, the inner walls of my old bedroom stare up at bare tree branches and an expanse of gray sky. “Looking at these pictures is like looking at someone dying,” my sister hisses, setting them down. She is right. Gazing at the demolition of the Western Street house, my childhood crumples up into a ball.

When we were little, from time to time my parents would take a detour from our house in Marshfield, Wisconsin on our way to Grandma “Tinkertoy’s” house in Wisconsin Rapids. At the paper mill, my mother would point at a triangular patch of yellowed grass: “That’s where we lived.” In the space staked by smokestacks and dried-out pine trees I would try to conjure a two-story white wood-frame house, much like our own, Grandpa’s garden bursting with vegetables, and the infamous creek where mom and Uncle John caught crawfish. Unimaginable it seemed then to think our own home on Western would share the same fate. Some day, too, I would want my son to gaze out a car window at an empty lot while I half gestured toward the ghosts of once-familiar landmarks — that tree now strangely small, those bushes all wild and untrimmed, the hill, an odd bump, when once it was a mountainside.

Even though winter dominates any year in central Wisconsin, it is always summer at the 815 Western house in my memory. Tall windows brighten like eyes with lightning and breathe in the damp thick air of Midwest thunderstorms. Screen doors whack open and sigh slowly shut. The stone walls in the basement sweat in the darkness, cool against my palm. In a banana box in the stuffy closet of the pink room, Nutmeg’s latest batch of caramel kittens writhe. Amid multicolored rags tinged brown with dried blood, we scoop them up only weeks old and cuddle them under our chins.

Outside the front yard is mottled with morning sun and shade through the canopy of the maple tree. A pile of bikes pools at the base of the long sidewalk. I scrape my knees on the gravel drive. My fingers stick together with pitch as I climb the cypress, swing on the low branch of the crabapple, and jump into the tall grass. I crouch as low as I can among the blackberry reeds to attempt the inner sanctum where the best fruits hang plump but get scratched all over my arms and legs anyway. I creep between the rows of wet wood, pushing smaller sticks into the pile’s crevices. I get stuck in the garden’s thick mud and clamber out of my boots, little knowing I bring tears of laughter to the eyes of our elderly neighbor Mr. Kleiber, who watches from the back window of his home, now a hospice.

One summer Dad tore apart the old garage and recycled its best materials to build a new one. Every day we kids squatted with him over grey boards covered with peeling white paint to search for nail heads to pound out. Like picking rocks out of the field on my cousin’s farm, this novelty thrilled us. Each morning the next-door neighbor kids, Aaron and Renee, sorted through piles of wood to help too. Some nails came out clean and free with a few taps of the hammer. Others, more stubborn, bent and twirled endlessly in a circle until we abandoned them in frustration and searched for another plank.

“Get to work,” Dad would call out as Dave Weis raised a hand in greeting from across the street. Home from his shift at the shoe factory, Dave would saunter over, smoke, and stand looking at Dad as he bent and stooped. Whether he was knocking down a concrete stairwell to build another, chopping fresh wood and rolling splintery armfuls of it into a wheelbarrow, rinsing stubbly paintbrushes or his own flecked hands under the stream from the gasoline drum, assembling a backyard brick fireplace, repairing the front walk at a diagonal, fashioning a large rectangular planter from disused railroad ties for mom’s daisies, or painting a door from one of his rental properties shiny with lacquer on rickety sawhorses, my father never stopped moving. It seems like the only time I saw him completely still was at the dinner table or kneeling during the benediction at St. John the Baptist church — his eyes shut, head bowed, hairy black knuckles white with prayer.

When the summer of the new garage ended, Mom or Dad took a picture of us four children plus Aaron and Renee sitting in a row on the apex of its steep pitched roof. It must have been August. The sun beat down on us. In shorts and tee shirts we smiled wide with pride and accomplishment as though we were single-handedly responsible for the building renovation. Today someone would probably call the police on my parents. A child could have slipped off the top and broken an arm or a leg. An eight-year-old finger could have been smashed on the cement. A rusty nail could have driven itself through the smooth flesh of a galloping heel.

Decades later, the danger is strangely reversed, though similarly unheeded. I am home from college for a week in the summer and a high school friend picks me up for lunch. As we pull away from the curb of my parents’ second house on Cherry Avenue, he asks with a hint of caution, “Are you sure your father should be up there?” referring to my seventy-year-old father who wears a back brace for scoliosis bending over and sorting through asphalt shingles on the front porch roof. “Ha! You tell him to come down,” I exclaim, fully aware of what my friend is not, that my dad would sooner depart this earth with a tool in his hand than stop toiling.

A few weeks after my visit back to Marshfield, I dig up an old picture of my father from our early days at 815 Western, one I know so well, and look at it again. There he stands in front of the shelf stuffed with books from my parents’ college days, smiling with full-pursed lips, holding and looking down at my infant brother. My dad’s hair, sideburns, and eyebrows are still dark and fuzzy, and his thick black work glasses are wrapped with masking tape at the corners. A plaid scarf winds loosely around his neck. He wears an old college sweatshirt stained with oil or grease. Under it, I spy layers, a sweater, thermal underwear, the sleeve ends slightly frayed, his fingernails caked with dirt, his muscular hands around his bundle.

Then an item jumps out at me. I had never really noticed it before. It is large and silver, an executive’s watch, an obvious remnant from his days as a Personnel Director at St. Joseph’s hospital, a profession he abandoned shortly after my birth. Fragments would come to me over the years about doctors not wanting to obey the rules, about how he quit before he was fired again. And as a young adult, I would wonder like Willy Loman about my life if only he had kept that golden hospital job. Would it have meant not being dropped off at the Catholic school in the upper-class neighborhood in a rusted-out station wagon? Would it have meant not hearing how my father sometimes labored alongside peers at seasonal factory shifts?

Years later, after a less than satisfying professional position, however, my perspective suddenly shifts: What if he had been deeply unhappy? And what if, like my best friend Cristi’s father, he had taken his work frustrations out in blistering rage on his own family?

When Mom first wrote to me about the old house being bulldozed, I thought back to the last late summer afternoon I had seen it. I’d approached from the backyard in growing disbelief. The mini apple trees we’d used as bases were so big I didn’t recognize them. The large window of the orange room, where I remember watching with elation Ronald Reagan winning the 1984 election on a black and white TV, was covered with a rough opaque plastic, one end flapping on the ground. The white house that had stood so upright in memory was sunken, small, and dilapidated. Poor and unremarkable. Blocks away Dad had been admitted to the hospital to dissolve some dangerous clots in his leg, and when my parents were talking to the nurse about blood thinners, I’d decided on a whim to take a walk. I found myself across the far employee parking lot that abutted the back of the old property. Only now can I see that moment for what it was — one of those thresholds when life changes irrevocably. Standing there, I could neither freeze the place of my childhood, embracing it to me as it had once been, nor warn my father that no medicine could stop a vein from bursting like a bomb in his brain in six month’s time.

I was the last to arrive at the ICU. Long after everyone else had left but my mother, I took my father’s swollen arthritic hand in mine and just held it, not wanting to let go. At one point the nurse who had been mutely ministering to him hummed, “Excuse me, but did you once live on Western Street?” It turns out she had rented from my parents a lifetime ago when she was just starting her career, and 815 was still a duplex. She had moved around above us, alone in the little apartment that Dad later converted into our bedrooms and a playroom. Strange that she was there with us now, a graying angel untangling the wires that were keeping my father breathing, placing a cold compact on his forehead, and preparing him for the next world, for rest.

I imagine her for a moment back at 815 as though I am her, as though I inhabit her. I am young in a white nurse’s cap, tiptoeing down the back staircase at dawn headed for my hospital shift. I lift the silver eyehook lock of the storm door, push it open with the full lean of my body, and skip down the steps. Cutting through the backyard, I kick a bucket back toward the sandbox and run my hand lightly over the rough bark of the big tree. I pause then to pick a handful of blackberries from the bushes and savor their dark sweetness. As I start to walk again, I catch out of the corner of my eye, a sight so commonplace I almost miss it: my father, headed toward the garage, a hammer in his hand.

Sara Gerend is an Associate English Professor at Aurora University where she teaches courses in writing and literature. She has a Ph.D. in English from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and has taught at various universities in the midwest for the last seventeen years.