HE IS THAT HOUSE

Excerpt from Abandoned Arkansas

(Soon to not be published by a major publishing firm)

           I put one hundred tiny short stories together in 2008 after taking thousands of pictures for a book that was to become Abandoned Arkansas, I'll post a few of the stories here in the next year or two. This is one.

 

Oh, sure. That ol’ cabin out by the road was built by my great-grandfather before there was even a town down at the crossing.

No, there warn’t no stores around here. O’ course not. Whatever you wanted, you made or grew. Or did without.

People was too busy back then to care about what they didn’t have. A full belly and a dry head made more diff’runce than nice clothes or a fast buggy.

You’d think buildin’ the cabin was the hard part, but it wudn’t. Ever’body helped each other back then. And in this valley, they still do.

But my great-grandfather was Eli Crawford, and he knew ever’body in this valley and all the surroundin’ ones. If there was a barn needed buildin’, he’d be there, just like his neighbors were for him when it came time to raise that house.

Eli and his brother did most of the fellin’ and hewin’, but it was the other farmers that did a good deal o’ the raisin’. And when Eli’s first crop came in heavy, ever’body in the valley got a bushel o’corn, even them what didn’t help. Didn’t matter; they was all in it together.

No, I wouldn’t think o’ sellin’ it. Not for love or money. I know you want to reassemble it somewhere else and restore it. You already tole me.  That don’t matter. It’s a part o’ this land just like the grass or the trees. You think I’d sell them off? Well, I wouldn’t. And if it goes back to the land, well, that’s fine by me.

I look at it like this. That building is part of the land, and I work this land. My great-grandfather worked it, too. Cut it from the forest. He made these pastures. He dug the well out back. Dug it by hand! You know what that takes?

Eli Crawford is in this land. He’s in that house.

Hell, he is that house.

 

                                   Notes on the Stories

This may be the tether, the grounding rod, the foundation of the ideals in this book. So many ‘abandoned’ buildings are kept in their present conditions not because of opportunistic neglect, but because there is a very decided reverence for the fact that their present owners’ forbearers should have a temple for their descendents to gaze upon. Never mind that it cannot be used as a dwelling, or that it might want to be.

I can see the failing, barely-able-to-walk form of great-grandpa as he hobbles about the pasture, tightly holding the hand of his five-year-old thrice-removed scion.

“Do you know that I used to LIVE in this house?” he smiles.

The little boy looks up at him, eyes wide in wonder.

“This is a house?”

This is how history is passed down.

 

The cabin in Boone County.