The World Is on Fire Read online

  © 2015, Text by Joni Tevis

  All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher: Milkweed Editions, 1011 Washington Avenue South, Suite 300, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55415.

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  Published 2015 by Milkweed Editions

  Cover design by Mary Austin Speaker

  Cover photo by Alberto Masnovo

  Author photo by David Bernardy

  15 16 17 18 19 5 4 3 2 1

  FIRST EDITION

  Milkweed Editions, an independent nonprofit publisher, gratefully acknowledges sustaining support from the Jerome Foundation; the Lindquist & Vennum Foundation; the McKnight Foundation; the National Endowment for the Arts; the Target Foundation; and other generous contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals. Also, this activity is made possible by the voters of Minnesota through a Minnesota State Arts Board Operating Support grant, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund, and a grant from the Wells Fargo Foundation Minnesota. For a full listing of Milkweed Editions supporters, please visit www.milkweed.org.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Tevis, Joni.

  [Essays. Selections]

  The world is on fire: scrap, treasure, and songs of apocalypse / Joni Tevis. -- First edition.

  pages; cm

  ISBN 978-1-57131-898-5 (ebook)

  I. Title.

  PS3620.E95A6 2015

  814'.6--dc23

  2014038727

  Milkweed Editions is committed to ecological stewardship. We strive to align our book production practices with this principle, and to reduce the impact of our operations in the environment. We are a member of the Green Press Initiative, a nonprofit coalition of publishers, manufacturers, and authors working to protect the world’s endangered forests and conserve natural resources. The World Is On Fire was printed on acid-free 100% postconsumer-waste paper by Friesens Corporation.

  For David

  And for all this, nature is never spent...

  There lives the dearest freshness deep down things...

  GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS (1844–89)

  “GOD’S GRANDEUR”

  CONTENTS

  OVERTURE

  What Looks Like Mad Disorder:

  The Sarah Winchester House

  ACT ONE

  Damn Cold in February:

  Buddy Holly, View-Master, and the A-Bomb

  Beautiful Beyond Belief:

  Rock City and Other Fairy Tales of the Atomic Age

  Ten Years You Own It

  Backstage with John the Beloved Disciple

  Something Like the Fire

  The Measure of My Days

  (Buddy Holly Reprise)

  ACT TWO

  The Lay of the Land

  Warp and Weft

  Brain Sweat and Blueprints

  Coathook in an Empty Schoolhouse

  The Scissorman

  We All Drink from that Fiery Spring

  (Ode to Heavy Industry)

  Hammer Price

  (Song of the Auctioneer)

  Pacing the Siege Floor

  INTERMISSION

  Girl Power:

  Ode to the Demolition Derby

  ACT THREE

  What the Body Knows

  The World Is On Fire:

  The Cave of the Apocalypse

  Touch the Bones

  Somebody to Love

  FINALE

  Some Memory of Daylight

  Notes and Acknowledgments

  If a thing is iron, then what? It rusts, you see. That’s fire, too. The world is on fire. Start your pieces in the paper that way. Just say in big letters, “The World Is On Fire.”

  That will make ’em look up.

  SHERWOOD ANDERSON,

  “A MAN OF IDEAS,” WINESBURG, OHIO

  OVERTURE

  The rust and the dust hold tales untold.

  ROSS WARD, CREATOR OF

  TINKERTOWN FOLK ART INSTALLATION,

  SANDIA PARK, NEW MEXICO

  What Looks Like Mad Disorder:

  The Sarah Winchester House

  San Jose, California

  Midnight, she knew, tasted of bitter water but smelled good as damp dirt. The dark hours had taught her that as she’d slid from room to room. A big house creates its own sink of nighttime silence, ponderous as weather; how quiet the place back east had been. But these rooms were as noisy as she wanted, alive with the ring of dropped nails, chuffing saws. Hammers swung all night at her command.

  She slept, if she slept, in a different bed every night, or else waited patiently at the little desk in the séance room. She went over accounts and sketched plans for the next day, chewing on dried apricots grown in her own orchards. Tough little suns, flat and orange—they caught in her teeth. One night she drew a spiderweb on a sheet of paper. It would become a design for a stained-glass window.

  She must have seen something she recognized in the spider. How every night she spins herself a home, and every dawn destroys it. How she anchors herself in a sturdy spot, reels out a loop, and adds the weight of her body. From this triangle, everything begins.

  Once upon a time there lived a baby girl, the only child of parents rich beyond measure. But when she was just a few weeks old, that baby died. Some years later, her father died too, and her mother was left alone. The mother had been the hub of a small family and now was the center of nothing, drifting from room to room, eyes dimmed by grief, hands empty. Maybe she felt a curse had fallen upon her, and maybe one had.

  So she went to Boston and found a soothsayer who told her to move west, begin building a house, and never stop, lest the spirits that had taken her daughter and husband come for her. There were legions of those ghosts, the medium said, all the people killed by her husband’s guns. For this grieving woman had inherited the vast fortune of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company. Sarah was her name, Sarah Pardee Winchester, and this was her house.

  We’re standing in the courtyard, my husband, David, and I, waiting for our tour to start. The fountain beside us sparkles and spurts. We hear occasional honks from the traffic outside on Winchester Boulevard, and kids squealing as they horse around in the Victorian Gardens—it’s a busy place, and we squint in the sun, tickets in hand.

  We’re between jobs, all our things stacked in a storage unit across the country in a new state, in a town called Apex. You have to go where the work is, people say. Well, we’ve done that, following jobs from Texas to Minnesota to North Carolina. Will one of us get a steady job when the hiring season starts up again next month? If not, what then? “We’ll get by,” David says, but right now, I can’t see how.

  In the meantime, we’re taking a few days off, finagling frequent-flyer miles and a spot on our friends’ sofa into a California junket. When we started packing, we couldn’t find our suitcases—they were buried too deep in that storage unit. So we stuffed our clothes in a box that a coffee pot had come in, taped it shut, and heaved it onto the baggage belt. An awkward fix, but it would have to do.

  The intercom crackles: Tour number seventy-one, prepare to depart from the side entrance. Twenty of us line up, a mixed bunch: retired couples, a father with two children, a boy in a Zapata Vive! T-shirt. Our guide, a stony-faced college student with dark hair cut in sleek wings, lays down the law. “Keep up,” she says. “Stay with the group. If you get lost, you’ll have to find your own way out. Nobody will ever find you.”

  With that, we step inside, through what used to be a service entrance. Nothing grand, just this threshold over which Sarah used to walk, sometimes wi
th her favorite niece, but most often alone. And entering here, I feel off-kilter—will feel off-kilter for the whole mile-long tour, through this 24,000-square-foot mishmash of a house. No time to ponder that as we shuffle up the shallow Easy Riser steps—built late in Sarah’s life to help her arthritis—into the $25,000 Storeroom, as it’s now called, still stocked with expensive wallpaper and stacks of stained-glass windows; along endless rubber-runnered halls, stopping here and there to hear paragraphs of the guide’s spiel; and occasionally passing other groups, whose guides repeat the same anecdotes with the same scripted language. Does anybody believe this stuff?

  Here’s the first story they tell: workers left nails half-driven when they heard of Sarah’s death. She paid them three dollars a day, in cash—double the going rate. Many of them lived on the property, either in regular servants’ quarters or in apartments below the water tower. And she kept them working at all hours. The Boston medium’s prediction included the warning that Sarah had to keep renovating her new house constantly. If the hammers fell silent, the spirits would come for her. So she made sure that never happened. When she moved into the house, it had eight rooms, and she was three years a widow. When she died in 1922, thirty-eight years later, it had 160 rooms, some of which she had remodeled six hundred times.

  Right away someone asks, “Was she crazy?” The question sticks in my craw. It feels too knee-jerk, too dismissive. What can you call that level of revision but obsessive? And yet something in it resonates with me; maybe she just wanted to get it right. I tuck the question into my notebook and hurry to catch up with the rest.

  We don’t know which eight rooms comprised the original farmhouse; we don’t know where Sarah began. So start with a nail, one end blunt and the other end sharp, ready to bite its beam. I wonder if nails pleased her as they please me; if she found them waiting for her on the sidewalk or in the street; if, when she bent to pick one up, her dark veil belled around her face. If, all day, her fingers worried it in her pocket. Nails were newcomers here, in the Valley of Heart’s Delight, as she was. Resourceful people had whittled pegs before. Now they prized crates apart and hammered nails free. A good nail could be used more than once.

  How different things might have been had she married a maker of nails. But she had married a gun man, William Wirt Winchester, and after his death she became the weapon his family had perfected, repeating, her hammers’ plosive stutter reshaping the rooms. Walking these hot halls, past oscillating fans that don’t do anything to move the air, I shift beneath the weight of the guilt Sarah chose to bear. What stories do we tell ourselves about who we are? If we repeat them often enough, we’ll start to trust them.

  “Recently,” our tour guide says, “a psychic contacted Sarah, and do you know what she said?” She flicks her eyes over us, waiting. “What are all these people doing in my house?” As soon as she says the words, I know they’re true.

  It started with a man’s dress shirt: funny to remember that. Her father-in-law had found a way to make it fit better through the shoulders. From shirts he moved to guns, shot, bullets: the Winchester rifle, the Gun that Won the West. Eventually, Winchester factories would turn out products as diverse as meat grinders, scissors, fishing tackle, and roller skates—“The Skate With a Backbone”—but then as now the company was best known for its firearms. Back in 1866, the year baby Anne was born and died, the Gun that Won was underwriting Sarah’s life in New Haven, Connecticut. That gun paid for roast duck, hothouse greens, down-stuffed bedticks; it kept her servants in board and uniforms; it paid for doctors, ministers, and, at the end, the sexton. That gun hired a stonecutter and paid for a small casket, lined with silk.

  And a few years later, after her husband died, Sarah must have known she couldn’t build the $25,000 Storeroom without the warehouses of guns, ready to be loaded into crates, into railcars, into waiting hands ready to shoot Apache and Pueblo by the thousands. Lead soldered water pipes and joined panes of glass; lead made ammunition. In the Winchester shot tower, seven stories of carefully engineered furnaces and molds terminated in the water tanks where hot shot was dropped to cool, hissing and steaming. Soothsayers used to employ lead rings to divine your future, holding the circles aloft with threads, burning through the threads, and marking where the rings fell. But Sarah asked her questions of the Boston medium, who scratched out answers with a planchette one letter at a time.

  By all accounts Sarah’s days in California were busy ones. The weight of her body anchored her here, on thick rugs that showed no wear and polished floors that glowed like gunstocks. Sarah became an entrepreneur, buying real estate, running her farm, selling walnuts by the barrel. She stored up spade and mattock and blade, oil and whetstone, homing pigeons and ivory leg cuffs, screws cast from solid gold. She invented a sink with a built-in washboard, and a window clasp modeled after a rifle’s lock, paying homage to both cleanliness and defense. And although she set up the house to be self-sufficient, with its workshop, water tank, and gas reserves, still she answered the call of the outside world—rosewood and teak for the floors, German silver inlay for doors, pipestone for a fireplace.

  In the end, she knew none of it mattered. She signed her thirteen-page will thirteen times, leaving provision for the house to be sold at auction and the furnishings to be left to Francis, her favorite niece, who took what she wanted and sold the rest. A practical way to dispose of things: leave the gaslight chandelier with thirteen jets; leave it all, with minimal instructions, so that mountain of stuff won’t hold you back. Set aside a sum to hire a man to deal it all out once you’re gone.

  How I love a good auction, the auctioneer’s chant braiding buyers, goods, price. His chant is a ballad that lasts all day, and each lot is a verse. What will you give me, he cries, what’ll you give? More, always more: rugs scrolled like scripture, bareheaded lamps shorn of shades, books on orchardcraft, cobbler’s tools. Sales used to be regulated by candles; bidding lasted, like a séance, until the flame guttered dry.

  But for the kitchen, the Grand Ballroom, and the séance room, it’s hard to tell what most of the rooms were used for, and that’s not the only thing that gives the Winchester House a rickety, kaleidoscopic feeling. There are shallow cabinets an inch deep, and others large as generous rooms. One door opens onto a one-story drop, another onto slats instead of flooring. A staircase ends blind in a ceiling, and another forks into a Y, eleven steps up and seven steps down. Despite the fortune Sarah spent, the house feels temporary as a badly pitched tent.

  Here we stand in the Hall of Fires. It’s lined with hearth after hearth, strange for central California, but the guide tells us that Sarah craved the heat to ease her arthritis. I think of her sitting on this bench, listening to her house: a medium taps out a message from the dead, coins snick like knitting needles, and a gun-shaped latch snaps home. Two swings tap a trim nail true. A burning log hisses, freeing drops of old rainwater. A signal card drops into a slot: Mrs. Winchester needs assistance in the Hall of Fires, and a nurse heads toward her to help. Radiators knock, carrying waves of warmth. The rim of a plate kisses its kin, and the maid clicks the cupboard door closed.

  By April 1906, Sarah had lived in her house twenty-two years. During that time, her workers had built, among many other rooms, the Grand Ballroom. Whereas the rest of the house follows no rules—chimneys stop shy of ceilings; an extravagant rock-crystal window receives only slantwise light—the parquet floor in the Ballroom is precise down to the hair.

  “The floor builder used no nails,” our guide tells us, “only glue.” He would have worked a section at a time, fitting one piece of smooth wood against another in a neat herringbone. This must have been the hushed corner in a house constantly worried by sound, and even now I’d like to stand here awhile, quiet, in this sunny corner.

  I wonder if he heard the remembered racket of other workers when he slept at night, as I have in my own dreams, the carnival jingles of the theater-lobby arcade, the burr and shriek of machine parts turning and dropping off the l
athe.

  Above the glowing floor hang two stained-glass windows with quotations from Shakespeare. From Troilus and Cressida: “Wide unclasp the tables of their thoughts”; from Richard II: “These same thoughts people this little world.” According to legend, only three people ever entered the house through the richly carved front door: Sarah, the man who delivered it, and the door-hanger. When Theodore Roosevelt dropped by one afternoon to express his admiration for Winchester rifles, servants sent him around back.

  But on April 18, 1906, just after sunrise, the earth shook. In San Francisco, the ground liquefied and houses crumbled, their fronts peeling off and their walls buckling and kneeling. There must have been screams and silence—people shaken from sleep and too surprised to speak. When the gas lines ruptured, walls of flame pushed up the city’s hillsides; pictures taken just after the disaster show buildings planed open, whole city blocks of blackened rubble where houses had stood, rifts carved in the countryside, oaks riven, fences fallen, barns sucked flat.

  Later, some witnesses told of hearing “an approaching roar” at dawn, or feeling a cold touch upon the cheek. Others said dogs pawed at doors and birds flew strangely; earthworms wriggled to the surface and tied themselves in knots. In the Daisy Bedroom, a fireplace shook loose and collapsed, and Sarah was trapped alone.

  “Sarah believed she caused the quake,” our guide says. “She thought the spirits were rebuking her for spending too much time on the front part of the house.” So, the guide goes on, she ordered those rooms to be boarded shut and never went there again. No one danced across the Grand Ballroom’s smooth parquetry, no chamber orchestra warmed the walls with music, and no friend paused in front of the Shakespeare windows and asked Sarah what she meant in choosing them.

  But the guide hustles us away too quickly from the earthquake-wrecked rooms, with their crumbling plaster and naked studding, lengths of ship-lathe and dusty little cobwebs. Light bends from a curved window. Torn wallpaper and scrawls of glue stain the walls, and I think of that old line from Pliny the Elder: “Hence also walls are covered with prayers to ward off fires.” The floor creaks companionably, and there’s no armchair to distract, just the bones of the tired old house. I’d stay here all day if I could.