The Fair Fields

“ ‘Cannot,’ I said, ‘being no child now, nor a bird.’ ”
—W. H. Auden, “1929”

I keep returning to the house in my dreams. It was the house we grew up in, my brother Gabriel and I, and we lost it years ago, after our parents died. I hardly ever remember my dreams, but these scenes persist, reappearing every few months to disturb my sleep with Technicolor clarity and angst. Sometimes I manage to enter the house, but always with the knowledge that it now belongs to strangers, that I have no right to be there, that I’m intruding. If I climb the stairs to my old bedroom, I find it cluttered with alien furniture. I know I’ll be expelled. I tiptoe out, shaking. At other times, I find the front door locked—that door painted bright red, standing out from the blue-gray clapboard façade. Guiltily, but with the determination of a thief, I sneak into the barn, which I find unchanged from our time there, with its dusty beams, a rack against the wall for rakes and shovels and trowels, a shelf for flowerpots. Except, except … our mother’s study, a cramped room at the front, is empty, and our father’s study, a larger room at the back, across from the horse stall, is empty as well, no books on the wall of shelves, no papers strewn all over the floor. Here the dream breaks down as I wake in terror of being arrested for trespassing.

We lived in Fairfield, Connecticut, on what used to be a farm. Our house had been converted from a 300-year-old onion and cow barn that was attached by a long, open shed to a horse barn. The property was still a working farm when our parents bought it in 1953, newly married and knowing that I, their first child, was on the way. The poor cows were exiled from the barn that became our house; I’m told that for a while, they still grazed in the adjoining field, and would amble up, perplexed, to stare through the sliding glass doors into their old dairy, which had become our dining room. Upstairs, which was the ground floor facing the front lawn and the driveway, the front hall welcomed anyone coming in through the red door. On entering, one found the guest room and a terrace to the right, and to the left, a cozy library with a fireplace, and beyond that, a double door leading into the enormous hayloft we called the Big Room, a two-story space as grand as a cathedral. Mighty chestnut posts supported the ceiling; even mightier horizontal beams defined the roofline and the Gallery, the high loft where bales of hay had been stacked, and where we now kept a guest bed and a closet. The chestnut trees that supplied those beams must have been giants. In the core of the house, an open staircase led to the upper rooms: our parents’ bedroom at one end of the hall, Gabriel’s bedroom and mine at the other. My window looked out the back onto a row of dusky, sacerdotal spruces four stories high. From my bed, placed along the windowsill, I peered into their boughs. It was like sleeping in a treehouse.

After our father’s death in 1989, our mother could no longer manage the house and she moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts. The house and barns and fields were sold. A few years later, we heard, they were sold again. And then, from a 2005 article in The New York Times, we learned that the 300-year-old house and barn had been torn down and the spruces felled to make room for a McMansion that was now being sold for $3.7 million. That well-known American writers—Robert Penn Warren and Eleanor Clark—had lived on the site seemed to have had little influence on the property’s value. “That,” said the listing agent’s assistant, “depends on the celebrity. An author might not add the same amount as, say, Brad Pitt.”

The author’s home was once a working farm. The horse barn, shown here, connected to the living quarters (a former onion and cow barn) via a long, shed. (Courtesy of Special Collections Library, WKU)

Childhood, in that protected realm, felt eternal. It was as if the rhythm of our lives had been ordained since the Creation. Our parents worked in their studies from nine until two, during which time they were not to be disturbed. Our mother drove her small, pale green Olivetti typewriter as if it were a cantankerous horse in the dense fug of her Winston cigarettes: those scarlet packets might have been an emblem of motherhood, as far as we could tell. Our father didn’t smoke. In his study at the back of the barn, he battered away at his stately typewriter, moored like a tugboat on his desk; you could hear the clackety-clack of the keys, the bell’s metallic squawk each time he reached the end of a line, the thunk as he slammed the lever to return the carriage and attack the next line. Every once in a while, with a ripping sound, he tore a page out of its rollers and fitted a new page in.

If we weren’t in school, that intense parental activity left my brother and me free to roam. The house and barn perched on top of a long hill. A small vegetable garden lay behind the barn. We mostly grew asparagus there: in the spring, I took pride in being sent out with a knife before suppertime to cut the pale rosy stalks. Beyond the garden, a mown field extended to a line of trees. In the grandest of these, an enormous maple, my brother built a treehouse. Already handy with tools as a small boy, he constructed a sturdy hideout about 12 feet off the ground, with a little plank floor, a patch of roof, and a ladder nailed to the tree trunk. The field swooped down the hill past two apple trees to an immemorial stone wall at the bottom. A narrow opening in the wall led into the field beyond. In winter, when we sledded or flew on our toboggan down the slope, we had to be careful to steer toward the gap in the wall to avoid a crash. It snowed heavily in those years, the 1950s: I seem to be describing an ancient world. Certainly, a different climate.

The whole domain was enchanted. But the most serious magic, for me, resided in the Mud Hole, a small pond at the foot of the hill, off to the side where the stone wall petered out. I spent hours in the boughs of a maple tree that leaned over the pond. I sat there dangling my legs, observing the glossy black water below me, the frogs squatting and burping at the muddy brink, and occasionally a water snake swiveling across the rippled surface. In the fall, pairs of mallard ducks scudded down to occupy the Mud Hole for a few days, paddling, dunking, shaking themselves before taking to the skies, the males with their iridescent green heads and their homely wives, heading south. In winter, the pond froze. Our intrepid mother would sweep the snow off with an old broom and help us lace up our skates so that we could zip around its narrow circumference, giddy with our prowess and speed.

The Mud Hole had necromantic power. Inspired by stories I’d read, I experimented, scooping its murky water into a small iodine bottle and screwing the cap on tightly. For weeks—was it months?—the bottle sat on the dresser in my bedroom, and I pretended to be a witch, pouring drops into miniature teacups for my dolls. They suffered no ill consequences; perhaps their health improved. Perhaps they spoke to each other when I left the room.

Not magic, but majestic, was the huge eastern rat snake our father found one evening in the back field, partway down the hill. Pa came back to the house to fetch us. We followed him out to the field, and there was the snake god, about six feet of him, lazily looped in the tall grass around his hole. He regarded us, we regarded him. I held my father’s hand tightly. “He won’t hurt you,” my father assured me. Slowly, deliberately, indicating that he ruled the field and had no time for us, the snake slid out of sight into his private realm underground.