Fed Her Tuesday

Chapter One: Skins

There are two kinds of people who strip wallpaper. The first kind wants it gone. The second kind wants to know what was under it. I have made a living for eleven years off the first kind while quietly being the second.

The job that spring was a narrow brick townhouse on the north side of the city, three floors and a half-basement, owned by a young couple who had bought it for the moldings and then discovered the moldings came attached to a hundred and thirty years of other people's taste. They wanted white. Everyone wants white. I told them what I tell everybody, which is that it would take longer than they thought and cost more than they hoped, and they signed anyway, because they always do.

I had the front bedroom down to its third layer by the second week. On top, a builder-grade vinyl from the eighties, mushroom-colored, glued with something that came off in wet gray ropes. Under that, a foil-flecked geometric from about 1968, still garish, the kind of pattern that must have looked like the future when it went up. Under that, and this was the one that made me sit back on my heels with the steamer hissing in my hand, a small repeating rose on a cream ground, printed so long ago the ink had gone from red to the brown of old tea.

I love that moment. I have never known how to explain it to anyone without sounding strange. A house is a body and paper is its skin, and every layer is a year somebody was alive in that room, choosing. Somebody stood where I was standing with a paste brush and a plumb line and decided that this pattern, this one, was the one they wanted to wake up inside of. Then they died or moved or got tired, and someone else covered them over. Peel it back slow and you can read a house the way you read rings in a stump.

I was working the rose paper loose with a four-inch blade, going with the grain of the plaster, when my phone went off in my back pocket.

Unknown number, area code 304.

I let it ring. I have let 304 ring for nineteen years. It stopped, and then it started again, and something in the second ring — the stubbornness of it — made me set the blade down on the drop cloth and answer.

"Is this Opal Wriston?"

A man's voice, older, flat, with the ridge in it. Not unkind. Just closed, like a door in a hallway you aren't going to be shown.

"Speaking."

"My name's Byron Hinton. I'm an attorney out of Culpen County. I do the Wriston family's business, such as it is." A pause where he waited to see if I would say anything, and I didn't. "Ma'am, your mother has passed."

The steamer went on hissing. A drip of hot water ran down the plaster and made the rose paper go dark and soft where it hung.

"When," I said.

"Best guess is Sunday night. She wasn't found until Wednesday. I'm sorry to say it like that but I'd rather say it than have you hear it in town."

"How."

Another pause. Longer.

"Exposure, is what the county's putting on it. She was in the root cellar under the house. The hatch had come down and jammed and she couldn't get it up." He cleared his throat. "Opal, there's some detail to it. You'll hear it anyway."

"Then say it."

"She had worn her fingernails off. Both hands. And she had gone at the cellar wall — the plaster down there, the old lime plaster, she'd taken about eight foot of it clear off the lath. With her hands." He said it evenly, the way a man says a thing he has already said twice that morning. "There wasn't a tool in the cellar with her. There wasn't a mark on the hatch."

I stood in a stranger's bedroom with a blade in my hand and my mother eight hundred feet lower and three hundred miles west, dead four days in the dark under her own kitchen, digging.

"Ma'am?"

"I'm here."

"Burial's Saturday. Your brother's making the arrangements. There's also a matter of your mother's will that I'm obliged to read to all the living heirs together, on the property, and I'd as soon do it Saturday and not drag anybody back." He hesitated. "I'd advise you to come."

"I don't want anything of hers."

"You may want to hear it regardless," Byron Hinton said, "before you decide that."

I hung up and I did not cry, and I want to be honest about that, because a lot of what came after depended on the exact shape of the coldness in me that afternoon. I did not cry. I stood there and I felt something loosen behind my ribs, a knot I had been carrying since I was seventeen, and the loosening felt so much like relief that I had to put my hand flat on the wall to steady myself.

And here is the thing. Here is the first true thing.

The wall was warm. Not steamer-warm. The steamer was three feet away and off. The plaster under my palm was warm the way a sleeping animal is warm, and while my hand rested on it I felt, or I have spent a year telling myself I felt, a slow contraction under the surface. One. Like a throat closing and opening again.

I took my hand off the wall. The strip of rose paper hanging loose above my knuckles curled a little further down, the way paper does when the paste lets go.

The couple came home at six. The wife stood in the doorway with her keys and said, "Oh, that's actually pretty," about the roses, and I said yes, it was, and that we'd have it gone by Friday.

I grew up on a ridge above Yarrow Fork, West Virginia, in a house my family had been in since before the Civil War. Nine rooms. I want that number in early because it mattered later, and because I have never been able to put it down.

We were four when I was small. My father, Arnold, who worked the seam under our own ridge until the seam closed, and then worked whatever there was. My mother, Doreen, who was beautiful in a way that scared people, who could stop a room by walking into it and did not seem to enjoy the power. My brother Curtis, two years younger, who was born loud. And Kayla, who came six years after me, and who my mother loved the way a person loves the one thing they are afraid of losing.

When I was nine years old I counted the rooms in our house and I counted the doors, and I got nine and eight.

I did it again. I did it walking, then I did it on the back of a feed store calendar, drawing the floor plan the way my father had shown me to draw a mine map, in squares. Front parlour, back parlour, kitchen, pantry, my parents' bedroom, the back bedroom, the little room over the kitchen, the room at the north end that we called the sewing room and never sewed in. That was eight, and eight doors, and the house was longer than eight rooms.

There was a stretch of the downstairs hall, on the north side, between the sewing room and the wall at the end, where there was no door at all. Eleven feet of hallway with a wall on one side and nothing behind it. From the yard you could see the window. A window with the shutters closed and the glass painted over from inside.

I asked my mother. I remember I asked her while she was making biscuits, because I remember the flour on her wrists and how she did not turn around.

She said, "That's the ninth room."

I said, "How do you get in it?"

And she said, "You don't," and then she said, in a voice that was not the voice she used for anything else, "Don't you go knocking on that wall, Opal. Don't you knock on it and don't you answer it."

And I was nine, so I laughed, and she turned around and hit me across the mouth with a floured hand, and then she sat down on the kitchen floor with her back against the stove and cried until my father came in from the barn.

Nobody ever explained it. That is the thing I would want understood. In that house nobody ever explained anything, and we learned young to stop asking, and by the time I was old enough to ask properly I had my own reasons for leaving and I used them.

My father drowned in the cistern the summer I was seventeen. Face down in three feet of water, in a stone cistern with a lid on it that a man does not fall into by accident, and the county wrote it up as an accident because in Culpen County that is what you write when the alternative is a lot of paperwork about a family everyone would rather not think about. My mother did not cry at his funeral. She stood at the graveside in a good black dress with her hands folded, and she looked, more than anything else, tired. Relieved and tired.

I screamed at her in the yard that night. I said the word. I said, You did it, and she looked at me with those flat gray eyes and she said the only thing she ever said about it, which was: It's done and it's kept and you don't know one thing about it.

I left the next morning with a duffel bag and forty dollars. I hitched to Charleston and got a bus and I did not speak to her again for nineteen years, and now she was dead in a hole with her fingers worn to bone, and Byron Hinton wanted me on the ridge Saturday.

I finished the townhouse. On Friday I bagged the last of the rose paper, and before I did I cut out a hand-sized square of it and put it in my toolbox, because I always do.

I want to be clear that I did not go for the money. I did not know about the money yet. I went because a woman who has spent nineteen years hating her mother finds out the hate has nowhere left to sit, and she will drive three hundred miles to look at the hole they put it in.

I loaded the truck Saturday morning before light: steamer, buckets, scrapers, two hundred feet of extension cord, the good four-inch blade, a five-pound hammer, my headlamp. I didn't think about why I was taking the tools to a funeral. It was habit. I don't own clothes that aren't work clothes.

I have thought since that the house knew what I did for a living. That it had been waiting a long time for somebody in the family to come home who read walls.

I take it back. I don't think the house knew.

I think she did.