The Best American Essays 2015 (16 page)

ANTHONY DOERR

FROM
Granta

1. The House

I
AM DRIVING
my twin sons home from flag football practice. It's September, it hasn't rained in two months, and seemingly half of the state of Idaho is on fire. For a week the sky has been an upturned bowl the color of putty, the clouds indistinguishable from haze, enough smoke in the air that we taste it in our food, in our throats, in our sleep. But tonight, for some reason, as we pass St. Luke's Hospital, something in the sky gives way, and a breathtaking orange light cascades across the trees, the road, the windshield. We turn onto Fort Street, the road frosted with smoldering, feverish light, and just before the stoplight on Fifth, in a grassy lot, I notice, perhaps for the first time, a little house.

It's a log cabin with a swaybacked roof and a low door, like a cottage for gnomes. A little brick chimney sticks out of its shingles. Three enamel signs stand on the south side; a stone bench hunkers on the north.

It's old. It's tiny. It seems almost to tremble in the strange, volcanic light. I have passed this house, I'm guessing, three thousand times. I have jogged past it, biked past it, driven past it. Every election for the last twelve years I voted in a theater lobby three hundred yards from it.

And yet I've never really seen it before.

2. Jerry

A week later I'm standing outside the little house with a City Parks employee named Jerry. A plaque above the door reads T
HIS CABIN WAS THE FIRST HOME IN
B
OISE TO SHELTER WOMEN AND CHILDREN.
The outer walls are striped with cracked chinking and smudged with exhaust. The ratcheting powerheads of sprinklers spatter its back with each pass. An empty green bottle of something called Übermonster Energy Brew has rolled up against its north wall.

Jerry has to try three keys before he manages to push open the front door.

Inside, it's full of old leaves and hung with the pennants of cobwebs. Little fissures of light show through the paneling.

No furniture. It smells like old paint. Through the dirty steel mesh bolted over a window I can watch cars barrel past on Fort, sedans and Suburbans and pickups, maybe every third one piloted by a sunglasses-wearing mom, a kid or two or three belted into the back seat. Any minute my own wife, ferrying my own kids to school, will come charging past.

“How many people ask to come in here to look at this?” I ask Jerry.

“In four years,” he says, “you're the first.”

3. Boise Before Boise

Take away the Capitol building, the Hoff building, the US Bank building. Take away all eighteen Starbucks, all twenty-nine playgrounds, all ten thousand streetlights. Take away the parking garages, Guido's Pizza, the green belt, the fire hydrants, the cheat grass, the bridges.

It's 1863 in the newly christened Idaho Territory and we're downtown. There are rocks. Magpies. The canvases of a dozen infantry tents flutter beside a cobble-bottomed creek.

Into this rides a man named John.

John has a gnarly, foot-long beard, a wagon full of tools, and a girl back in Colorado. Born in Ireland, he has sailed around the globe; he's been to London, to Calcutta, around Cape Horn; he has heard the
whump
of Russian artillery, saw men die, won a medal.

For years he was a sailor. Now he's a prospector.

He's something else, too. He's in love.

John stops at the tents and asks the infantrymen who they are, where he is, what they call this place.

Camp Boise, they say. Boise Barracks. Fort Boise.

John unpacks his wagon. To his south a green river slides along. To his north the shadows of clouds drag over foothills. All this time he's thinking of Mary.

Mary is seventeen years old. Big-nosed, wavy-haired, as Irish as he is. Good with a needle, good at seeing into people, too. Her eyes, curiously, are like the eyes of a grandmother. As if, though she's half his age, she knows more about the world than he does. She, too, has seen a measure of the planet: born in Cork County, sent to the New World at age nine, enrolled at a convent school in New Orleans, married a man in Philadelphia at age fifteen. Gave birth to a girl. That marriage caved in, God knows why, and Mary found John in Louisville, or John found Mary, and they got married and rode two thousand miles west into the unknown, into Colorado, and now he's here, another thousand miles farther on, in this place that is not yet a place, to look for gold.

John is almost forty years old. Try for a moment to imagine all the places he might have slept: hammocks, shanties, wickiups made of willows, the lurching holds of ships, the cold ruts of the Oregon Trail. Curled on his side next to a mountain stream with his mules hobbled and elk bugling and wolves singing and the great swarming arm of the Milky Way draped over them all.

John rolls away rocks, uproots sage. Cottonwoods are bunched along the river, plenty of them. They're lousy with caterpillars, but they're lightweight, and they're close. He cuts his logs and drags them to a flat area beside the creek and uses the blade of a broadax to wrestle their crooked shapes into straight lines.

A simple rectangle in the sand. Three feet high, then four, then five. Into the spaces between he jams clay and leaves and sticks. He leaves two low doors and two windows to cover—for now—with paper. Later, maybe, he can put in real window glass, if window glass ever makes it all the way out here along two thousand miles of ruts and raids and storm.

If he's lucky. If this place is lucky.

He starts on the roof. Mary is coming from Colorado in a train of fourteen wagons. Already she could be pregnant. Already she could be close.

He fashions wooden pins for door hinges. He installs a stove. He nails fabric to the insides of the walls. Just get here, Mary. Get here before winter.

4. Hope

Three hundred yards from the spot where John O'Farrell raised what would become the first family home in Boise, my wife and I used to pick up drugs from a fertility clinic. We wanted to start a family, but we weren't getting pregnant. Month after month. We went through the expected stuff: tests, doubt, despair. Then I got a chance to move from Boise to work at Princeton University for a year.

Then we got pregnant.

Then we found out it was twins.

Hope
, wrote Emily Dickinson,
is the thing with feathers—

        That perches in the soul—

        And sings the tune without words—

        and never stops—at all.

All autumn in New Jersey we worried the pregnancy wouldn't last, biology wouldn't work, the fetuses wouldn't hang on. But they did.

When my wife went home early to Idaho for Christmas, I stood in our rented New Jersey apartment, in the shadowless gray light of a snowstorm, and let myself believe for the first time that it was actually going to happen, that in a couple of months we would open the squeaky back door and carry in two babies.

The apartment's walls were blank, its stairs were steep. It was not, I realized, ready. Was not a home.

Who hasn't prepared a welcome? Set flowers on a nightstand for a returning hospital patient? Festooned a living room for a returning soldier? Stocked a refrigerator, washed a car, laid out towels? All of this is a kind of hope, a tune without words. Hope that the beloved will arrive safely, that the beloved will feel beloved.

I stood in that little apartment in 2003 thinking of my wife, of the two unknown quantities siphoning nutrients out of her day and night. How she never complained. How she ate Fruit Roll-Ups by the dozen because they were the only food that didn't make her feel sick. Then I drove alone to a shopping mall, not something I've done before or since, and bought foot-high fabric-covered letters—A, B, and C—and a night-light shaped like a star and something called a Graco Pack 'n Play Playard and set it up and then stayed up till midnight trying to figure out how to fold and zip it back inside the bag it came in.

When you prepare a welcome, you prepare yourself. You prepare for the moment the beloved arrives, the moment you say,
I understand you've come a long way, I understand you're taking the larger risk with your life.

You say,
Here. This might be humble, this might not be the place you know. This might not be everything you dreamed of. But it's something you can call home.

5. Questions

Mary O'Farrell leaves Colorado in the summer of 1863. Lincoln is president; the Emancipation Proclamation is five months old. Across the country, in South Carolina, Union batteries are bombarding Fort Sumter and they won't let up for two years. On the long road north, does she remember what it was like to be a nine-year-old girl and leave her home in Ireland? Does she remember the birds she saw at sea, and the light heaving on the immense fields of the Atlantic? Does she hear in her memory the Latin of Irish priests; the Gaelic of her parents; the terror when she showed up for her first day of school in New Orleans, and heard those accents, and saw faces that were utterly different from every face she had known before? Does she think of her first husband, and their first night together, and does she ponder the circumstances under which she—a sixteen-year-old with a newborn daughter—left him? Does she think of that decision as a failure? Or as an exercise of courage? And was it that same courage that kept her from turning back when she saw the storm-racked brow of the Rockies for the first time, and is it courage that keeps her going now, Pike's Peak at her back, her daughter at her knees, very possibly a new, second child growing in her uterus, the wagon pressing into newer, rawer country, the bench bouncing, wheels groaning—courage that keeps her from weeping at the falling darkness and the creaking trees and the unfettered miles of sage?

It takes Mary four months and four days to reach Fort Boise. Here there are no telegrams, no grocery stores, no pharmacies. There aren't even bricks.

On legs weary from the road she walks into the little house John has built for her. Stands on the dirt floor. Sees the light trapped in its paper-covered windows.

John stops beside her, or in front of her, or behind her.

How many thousands of questions must have been coursing through that little space at that moment?

Is it good enough, does she like it, did I make it all right?

Where will I cook, where will we sleep, where will I give birth?

Will I find gold and will winter be awful and how will I feed us?

Have we finally come far enough to stop moving?

6. Home

Whatever magic John threads into the walls of their house, it works. Fort Boise survives the winter; the O'Farrells survive the winter. John embarks upon a remodel: he replaces the gable ends with board-and-batten siding; he cuts shingles for a proper roof.

Around them civilization mushrooms. By the time the O'Farrell cabin is a year old, Boise has a population of 1,658. There are now sixty buildings, nine general stores, five saloons, three doctors, and two breweries.

John buys wallpaper to cover the interior planking. He builds a fireplace from bricks.

Meanwhile, Mary does not need a fertility clinic. In the years after she arrives in Idaho, she gives birth to six more kids. She loses three. She also adopts seven children.

Their home is two hundred square feet, smaller than my bedroom. There are no
SpongeBob
reruns to put on when the kids get too loud. No pizzerias to call when she can't think of what to cook; there is no telephone, no freezer, no electricity. No internal plumbing. No premoistened baby wipes.

But it's fallacy to imagine Mary O'Farrell's years in that tiny house as unrelenting hardship. Her life was almost certainly full of laughter; without question it was full of noise and energy and sunlight. One day she convinces two passing priests to start holding Catholic mass in her house, and they celebrate Sundays there for four consecutive years.

By 1868, Boise boasts four hundred buildings. Ads in the
Tri-Weekly Statesman
from that year offer coral earrings and eighteen-carat-gold ladies' watches and English saucepans and hydraulic nozzles and twenty-four-hour physicians' prescriptions. A stage line boasts that it can bring a person to San Francisco in four days.

This is no longer a place of single men: by the end of that year, Boise has two hundred children in four different schools.

Eventually John shifts from the unpredictability of crawling into mining tunnels to the rituals of farming: a more sunlit profession. Soon enough he starts construction on a colonial revival at Fourth and Franklin, a real house, made of bricks.

But before it's done, before they move in, John rides to a store downtown and buys panes of glass and carries them home and fits them into strips of wood and builds real French windows for his wife, so she can sit inside their cabin and look out, so the same golden sunshine of a summer evening that every person who has ever lived in this valley knows can fall through the glass and set parallelograms of light onto the floor.

7. Probably I'm Wrong About a Lot of This

Maybe John O'Farrell had some help raising the walls of his cabin. Maybe Mary hated it when she first saw it. Maybe they weren't devoted to each other the way I want to believe they were; maybe I'm trying to fashion a love story out of cobwebs and ghosts.

But listen: to live for a minimum of seven years with a minimum of seven kids in two hundred square feet with no toilet paper or Netflix or Xanax requires a certain kind of imperturbability. To adopt seven kids; to not give out when snow is sifting through cracks in the chinking; to not lose your mind when a baby is feverish and screeching and a toddler is tugging your skirts and the hair-dryer wind of August is blowing 110-degree heat under your door and the mass production of electric refrigerators is still fifty-five years away—something has to hold you together through all that.