The One Who Called a Home

I collect other people's paper, and once in a great while somebody's paper collects me. This file began when a county historical society, the kind that runs on two volunteers and a stove, was given eleven years of one man's correspondence by his own hand, indexed, dated, and cross-referenced, with a note that said somebody besides me should hold the copies. Archivists dream about donors like that. I read the finding aid and drove four hours.

The correspondence is one half of a war conducted entirely in writing. The county's men came to his acres with ledgers, wrote down his sheds, lost the pages, and then informed him, on letterhead, that no record existed of the shed they had stood in. He answered every letter, by date, in a hand that never once got bigger or slanted harder, which I have come to regard as its own kind of testimony. I followed the letters to the parcel and ran the title back the way I have run ten thousand titles, and the chain is where this stopped being about the letters.

The deed carries one name. His. The county's books, which have a definition of the word home the way they have a definition of every word worth owning, read the arrangement on those acres in the only language they speak: an owner of record, and persons in residence, paying. Rent entries, regular as rain. And laid against that, in the same drawer of the same courthouse, a declaration he filed the first year, describing what the acres were for, and I will give you its shape and not its words, because the words are his: a place on some acres where people would live together and own the thing together, in time, by the work of their hands. The county recorded that declaration without comment and went on calling him a landlord, because the county reads its own definitions, and its definitions were under the word before he ever said it. Three eviction filings appear in the chain across seven years, each carried through to its end. I have read all three.

Two instruments in the chain I could not at first make sit still. The first is early: a conveyance from his mother, two counties over, of the whole of what her own probate would later call her economies, years of them, worded so the years went to the acres and nothing came back to her. No consideration recited. Abstractors are trained to twitch at instruments with no consideration recited, and I twitched, and then I found her name nowhere else in the file for the rest of her life, and stopped twitching about the instrument and started thinking about the woman. The second is stranger. A recorded amendment to his declaration, entered some weeks after the original, adding a condition on the property, in a hand the register itself flags as differing from the declarant's, unsigned. No county in my experience records an unsigned interlineation, and this one did, and when I asked the oldest clerk about the practice she said the book takes what's written in it, which I did not find comforting, and wrote down.

The testimony at the edges is thin, which fits a man who put everything he had to say into filings. A hired man's granddaughter told me her grandfather ate at a table there that seated eleven the first winter and fewer after, and that nobody at it ever remarked on the change, which he found stranger than the change. A neighbor remembered the animal, her word, walking uneven for one early season and never after. The relief ledgers of that township show the acres giving, in kind, every hard winter on its books, twenty-six years and running at the time the correspondence was donated.

The last letter in the donated set is not from the county. It is from him to the society, transmitting the collection, and it ends with the only sentence in eleven years of his writing that is not an answer to somebody: the ones who lost the pages will be along for these eventually, and now they are yours to lose. There is no photograph in the file. There is no photograph anywhere in the file, and I looked, because files like this one usually end with a photograph, the way a sentence ends with a period. This one ends with a man still writing. Paper that is still being added to has no last page, and I have learned to leave those files open on my table, and this is one of them.

Collected by Nancy Foricourt.