Depression House: A Fable of Exorcism

I was in construction until the crash, which some of us still remember. Those who do remember how we survived. After my last job in Chicago, I took a Greyhound home. The big construction man was whipped. If I’d cared to be a farmer, I'd have stayed home, but farmer I became and proud to have the option.

When Aunt Lillian died in '28, her old farm went to Mama. I could work it for the taxes, a burden on Mama even if they weren’t but fourteen dollars. That's how tight money was. What was left from my Chicago paychecks covered seed, an old mule, and enough to get me through a crop. There was no thought of fertilizer or other frivolities. Like in the parable of the sower, whatever dirt the seed fell on, it could look out for itself.

But the farm did back on High Log Creek with sixteen acres of bottom that ought to feed Hard Times and me in spite of Herbert Hoover. Growing up, I'd learned just enough about farming to prefer construction, so it was lucky the mule was my only dependent.

The farm had gone to seed, and not the kind from the store, not the kind bagged on my wagon. It was still Lillian and Vance's, familiar from my visits as a boy, but it was raveling back into nature. In the lane, tall grass hissed against the axles. Scrub trees scarred the pasture.

The double log cabin, bracketing a "dogtrot" we'd call a breezeway, had a wood-shingle roof, unscreened windows, and rock chimneys.The room Lillian and Vance slept in was softened with dust and cobwebs in the afternoon light. It felt like a tomb, the bed inviting a different kind of sleep. I found a bent broom behind the black mass of the stove and swept as best I could. Dust rolled out the door.

The wardrobe, hand-made of wide pine planks and big as a closet, was dense with feed-sack dresses, moth-pocked coats, overalls, a brown suit, hats in drum boxes, and shoes blue with mold, untouched since they found Lillian on the iron bed where she and Vance lay childless for half a century. Over the mantel, grim ancestors stared through me. A table with turned legs held a kerosene lamp and yellowed farm magazines.  Lillian's pedal Singer was the sole machine.

Aunt Lillian's place had been like Eden when I worked there summers, spoiled with fried chicken and light chores. But the farm didn't feel like love that first night in country darkness. It felt like death.

It was only a feeling at first, insomnia and noises in the dark, dreams impossible to remember. I compare the feeling to the night Edna and I returned from Six Flags to find our back door kicked in, all the drawers dumped out in our bedrooms.

The next morning I ate a cold breakfast and found Vance's plow, cultivator, hay rake, harnesses, and hand tools and knocked rust off then with a wire brush. That afternoon, I broke dirt in Lillian's garden below the house. By sunset, I'd planted half the plot in squash, beans, onions, and sweet corn. It had been a long day, but I couldn't sleep. I slipped off maybe two hours before dawn with more bad dreams and dread.

The next day, I finished the garden and broke the bottom all the next day and the next, pausing only for hoecakes and water. I was young and traded on that. If I dozed after dark, comatose with fatigue, the least sound woke me. A bobwhite or rush of wind in the yard oak. The days seemed endless, my body heavier as I lost weight in a fever of motion.

The world moved, not me, as I zigzagged across the bottoms, pushing back sunset. Each night, I slept less. Something unnamable drifted like a black fog, sowing desolation from its edges. It covered me like a cloud of seeds. It swarmed like gnats under my blanket. That Saturday morning, I pulled on my overalls and boots and worked. I didn't dare stop.

Saturday night, shapes walked in the darkness, steps without footfalls. Faces gaped over my pallet. By midnight, I was in the yard, deliriously alert. Mummy-wrapped in a quilt under the yard oak, I saw in the darkness behind the windows a woman and a man and a thing. My return to Eden was slow suicide, my mind so broken that I feared only its slowness. Sunday morning, I paced outside the yard until I collapsed on the roots of the oak where the lane met the road..

I opened my eyes on a man who hadn't changed. When I was a boy, Uncle Ezra was ancient, his face like old leather. He lived in a derelict shack and hitched rides to town for staples and soda water. Everybody called him uncle but nobody was kin. He did odd jobs, and they said he'd end up in the poor house unless somebody claimed him. He died before I could.

Ezra stood on the grass between ruts. My eyes were bruised, my hair tangled, my faced burned and stubbled. He saw this and more, taught by years at the edge to see through surfaces. He saw I hadn't slept the night before. Maybe he saw that six nights in that house had brought me closer to the grave than his eighty years. And he knew me.

"Master Tommy," he knelt and took my hand, "you ain't in that old place by yourself?"

I nodded yes.

"You come with me," he said.

I felt bones through his old flesh as he helped up a young man who had climbed high steel in Chicago and plowed thirteen-hour days. He led me up the lane.

"You tell old Ezra what's the matter."

"Can't sleep."

He blinked at the gray dogtrot house and overhanging trees.

"All by yourself?"

I nodded again.

He shook his head. "Yo mama ought to know better. Place been like this, in hot and cold and dry years. You leave a place, Master Tommy, and things move in."

"Can't stay," I told him.

He searched my eyes for a long time and then grinned.

"Shoot, Master Tommy, we'll fix that. Young folks move to town and forget. Uncle Ezra don't forget. Yo Mama ought to know better. Bring the wagon round, son."

When I got back with the wagon, Uncle Vance's brown suit stood on the porch with Uncle Ezra's smile over the collar. 

"We the same size!" he shouted. "I need me a Sunday suit. Come hep me, Master Tommy."

We hauled heaps of clothes out—overalls, dresses, pants, and shirts—and piled them on the wagon. We dumped drawers of notions and underthings into croker sacks. 

"These here go to my house," smiled the man in Vance's suit. "Folks can always use clothes."

I moved without fatigue, in relief and adrenaline. Ezra made me pull the covers off the bed—and the featherbed and the mattress too—and lay them over fences and hen houses out back. He said to sun them three days. We rearranged the furniture, the bed to the far side and the reading table by the window with Progressive Farmers. They were old, but it was twenty cents for a subscription.

We shoveled out ashes and built a fire. I scrubbed the floors with ash water. While I was scrubbing, Ezra fetched an armload of weeds that burned milky, smelling like licorice and pooling smoke at the ceiling. Ezra opened the doors and let the white smoke float over the porch.

"Scrub the porch too," he said.

 The sun was low when we finished. Everything personal to Lillian and Vance was on the wagon, leaving me only tools, pots, lamps, and a half-drawer of plain buttons. We loaded up the Singer because it had too much of Lillian.

Ezra grabbed a hank of hair over my forehead. He had scissors.

"Holt still, Master Tommy."

He tied four hanks with white string.

"You watch now. You got to see."

At each corner of the yard he laid a hank on a post and struck a match. The hair flamed oily. Ezra turned from the last one as it flared:

"This place yours now."

I took him home in the wagon. I could visit any time. We piled clothes and croker sacks in his house until they crowded his bed and table. He'd let folks know, Ezra said. They'd come fetch stuff. I guessed he'd take dimes and nickels in exchange. I hoped he would.

Back home under a moon, sleep was rising like a tide as I stabled Hard Times and staggered into the dark house. Wrapped in a blanket on the floor, I slept all the next day. About sunset, I got up, ate, read a magazine by lamplight, slept again, and woke at sunrise, stiff but reborn. 

Rains fell. Crops grew. I paid taxes, ate beans, saved money. and in 1936 enrolled at Auburn. A few years later, I started a civil engineering firm in Phenix City that my oldest boy manages now. The other boy’s a lawyer, and my daughter's on the county commission. When Edna retires next year from teaching fifth grade, a Winnebago is in the driveway. I call it Ezra.

                                                                                        Tom Carter, 1978