When the Cook homestead had surfaced on the market, they were the first to arrive at the open house. They were instantly disappointed. The kitchen was painted a ghastly white that sheathed the ceiling beams like mold. There was a stainless steel refrigerator and marble countertops. They had considered letting the house go, in favor of something less corrupted, but now Cheryl appreciates their luck. Having been inside nearly every home on this stretch, she has seen the hidden grotesqueries, the interiors revamped without compunction. Relative to those, the Cook house is pristine. The original post and timber framing is intact, the catslide roof is solid. The exposed oak beams are as strong as ribs along the ceiling of the first floor, and the central chimney and hearth—spine and heart of the house—exude the smell of ancient smoke.
It hasn’t been difficult to undo the past sins of previous owners. They’ve replaced areas of strip flooring with wide chestnut boards—each scrupulously pillowed, sanded, and planed to match the originals. The front door, incongruously Victorian with inset stained glass, has been swapped with a plank of reclaimed barnwood, unpainted and unsheltered. It gladdens Cheryl to know that whoever visits this house on a rainy day will get wet waiting to be let in, just as they would have in 1740. They have kept electricity and plumbing, but done away with the microwave oven and sprinkler system. They have removed recessed lighting in favor of sconces and lamps. Lastly, they’ve pulled off the shutters and blasted away the exterior paint, a silly periwinkle, and returned the house to its native state: the uniform, heat-saving brown alluded to in Hiram Cook’s probate papers.
The Cook house has been re-crowned the king of Cannonfield Road. People stop their cars to take pictures in front of the Grand Union flag on the door. Magazine journalists visit. Cheryl and Roger pose for interior shots, dressed in period attire. Among those who enter the house and listen to them speak, there is a sense of awe, even bewilderment.
All this has been lost on the children, of course. Comfort Cook delivered seven babies in this house, she would remind her own pair of offspring in answer to complaints about cramped bedrooms. In lieu of frivolities like a finished basement, closets, a swimming pool, they should feel fortunate for the opportunity to grow up in the manner of their forebears, the chance to absorb history with every breath, to build their bones with it.
“Only three of those babies survived to adulthood,” the children would reply.
Cheryl and Roger’s compatriots had warned that this would happen. It had been easy when the children were young, when there was an element of play in dressing in period clothing, in using a loom or a lathe. But at the exact age of thirteen, just as the other parents predicted, each of their children had undergone a hideous transformation, questioning the efficiency of hearth cooking, demanding cheaply made store clothing, refusing to participate in tavern nights and encampments. This was a universal phase, the others assured them, every child’s way of orienting himself to the whirl of modern life, of observing and assessing it, and then, with any luck—and assuming his education has been sound—choosing to reject it. Cheryl and Roger were not to worry; their children would come back to them.
And today they are coming back—flying home from their respective California colleges for four weeks of winter vacation. Before driving to the airport, Cheryl finishes sewing bobbin lace trim to the neckline of a linen chemise for Rebekah. For Amos, she’s found a reproduction pocket watch: a nickel-plated beauty with beetle and poker hands and the old-style Roman numeral “IIII” on the face. These are things her children would never dream of buying for themselves. She knows they might prefer digital gadgets, video games, but as the years pass, she’s found it increasingly difficult to purchase such ephemeral objects. She is more hopelessly drawn to the qualities of handmade things. There is something almost sentient about natural material: a warm consciousness in wood, a primal heat in forged iron.
She waits in the arrivals terminal, trussed in an anonymous black parka, her heart beating in her gullet as if awaiting a lover. She detests the airport. The overhead lights blare like interrogation lamps, designed to expose every ugliness, to illuminate with dumb democracy things not meant to be highlighted. Here is the same humming tension she feels in every modern public institution: supermarkets, chain pharmacies, post offices. Entering these places has become progressively disheartening, coloring her perceptions for the rest of the day. She finds herself juggling contempt and pity for the fretful people she sees around her, scrupulously avoiding one another’s eyes. Even when she frames them as tragic orphans disconnected from structural meaning, it is difficult not to place blame. Within the course of just a generation or two, the inviolable structures of religion, community, honest labor—the bedrock of this country—have been disposed of like used coffee cups, replaced by the dual Styrofoam obelisks of economy and convenience.