Mary Secaur's House
Mary Secaur's House
Embedded Files
The photos read June 28, 2002, so that’s when this visit to Mary Secaur’s house occurred. I wrote this piece quite a bit later, but the photos--though terrible quality by today’s standards--were helpful in recreating the adventure. The house was bulldozed within a few years of the visit. All that stands there now is a field of corn or beans or wheat, depending on the year.
We pull off to the side of Tama Road and park. It’s something you can do in the country. Just park and get out. The nearest house is a quarter of a mile away. This one stands alone and choked with weeds and bushes. We are pushed by curiosity out of our car and up to the house. I’ve driven past it before, even photographed it, but I’d never walked around it or in it. Of course we’re trespassing, though it’s clear no one has lived here for years and years. My companions are family—distant, distant family. We’re linked by blood, vaguely, but more directly by this house. Or at least by a girl who once lived in the house. Probably. Nothing is certain in this case. The house is in the right place, and it looks to be of the right vintage. Beyond that we’re guessing, as always. A little leap into the unknown past.
There’s a rusted iron gatepost where once there would’ve been a fence and a walk. It’s an oddity out here in the fields, especially with nothing to connect it to. Imagine what it would’ve meant amid the fields and scrubby woods of Tama Road when it was put in. As much as the house, itself, it's a presence, a sign of prosperity and progress. This was no split-rail fence; this was a town fence, an iron fence. Even if it didn’t go all the way around the lot, just a bit of it would have been enough. Again, there’s no proof the fence or the gate or the walk was here when she lived here, if she lived here. Still, it speaks of aspirations.
We start across the grass. There is no walk, not even what you’d consider a lawn. Just grass, kept under control by a tractor with a mowing rig tagging along behind. The house is wood frame, two stories, though more a story and three quarters, as the top floor has windows only on the ends. I can imagine myself knocking my head on the ceiling were I to stretch fully upright. My parents had a house with bedrooms upstairs like that; stand in the middle of the room or watch your head! Of course, folks were smaller back when it was built.
In its old age the house is shedding its pretensions. I have a photo of the house that I took seven or eight years ago. Back then more white paint covered the wood, and the front porch yet clung desperately to the façade. Now the porch is a pile of rotting lumber choked with weeds. In the photo the spot where the porch affixed itself to the house was raw, brown, having been covered over since the early days of the house. The porch may even have been original. A porch was something extra, an upwardly mobile sign of progress. Now that bare spot is weathered to a light gray, matching the rest of the house, except those spots where the paint has refused to give up.
The roof is gray slate, patterned originally with darker tiles but over the years patched here and there with negligent reddish brown. The care and expense expended on the original roof hint at pride and ambition in the homebuilder. This was no cabin. This was a house, the home of a family of means. The roof was more than functional. More than shelter. It was a statement. Along the ridge in the middle of the house are two chimneys. One is chipped off by a third, like a tooth.
We walk around to the east side. Two windows have been nailed up with particle board, blasted by the sun and rain and wind into the same gray as the original wood around it. We approach the open window at the back, careful of the tangle of weeds and young trees growing here where the mower doesn’t reach. The glass is gone—there’s something in an abandoned house that doesn’t like glass—and the window is inverted, with the upper sash pulled down.
Looking into the house, we see a single room, painted a light blue, though it’s been other colors before that. In places the plaster has cracked and fallen away. You can see along the wall where electricity was added; a gas pipe thrusts out of the floor. The room is dark compared to where we stand, but plenty of light streams through the front window and the open front door. Through that door we can see the central hallway and beyond to the weeds in front of the house, as the main door stands open. The door at the front of the room has a transom.
Looking through another open door at the back of the room, we can see the kitchen addition, tacked onto the house at some point as was the case with many of these old farm houses. They started with pure frames and the additions just multiplied, each new roofline blending into the next in a line of Matryoshka dolls. The floor here is covered with dirt, shattered plaster, paint flakes, window glass. The floor is wood—wide, solid boards—at least where the linoleum has been torn up. And it’s clear someone has worked at yanking it up. It is the good old stuff, with a pattern to make it look like a quality area rug. Would it have been here when the room was the kitchen? It was probably not original to the house, as linoleum did not begin production in the United States until around the time of our story, but it is certainly old. The woodwork on the doors and baseboards is stained dark. No one painted it over during the rush to paint every surface in the early 1900s. Again, quality materials, solid workmanship.
We decide not to fight the wilderness at the back of the house and swing around to the front. I leave my companions and walk around to a window of the front room opposite the one we had just viewed. This time, the room’s door is closed, and the only view of the front hallway is through the transom. The floor here has no linoleum; it was probably once covered by a rug. And there’s wallpaper where it hasn’t fallen or been snatched from the walls—a dignified print, with a grey pattern on a white background. This speaks of best room. Again, the floor is covered with dust and plaster and glass—here time added a helping of wallpaper scraps.
I walk further to the back and find a room that’s been added onto the main house, a sort of mudroom between a side door and the kitchen. The ceiling has collapsed and the floor is rotted through. Sunlight streams through the slats in the roof, and a light fixture dangles by its black wires from the joists. A Pepto-Bismal-pink wall faces me, framing the empty hole of the door to the kitchen, itself just visible in the gloom. I have no interest in walking into this room, though its outside door is wide open. The floorboards are decayed and many have been pulled up or pushed through. The ground is clearly visible beneath them.
The growth at the back of the house prevents me from heading any further in that direction, so I return to the front. Gingerly stepping over the debris of the collapsed porch, I make my way to the front door, which stands open, inviting me to step inside. Peering into the gloom, I see a central hallway. To the left a stairway leads up to the second floor. I can see a door at the top with twin frosted windows. Does it lead to a bathroom, perhaps? That certainly would not have been original to the house. The second floor hall runs alongside the stair railing to the front, over my head, where there must be doors to the bedrooms overtop the two front rooms. To the right of the staircase a hallway shows the way to the rear of the house, where it meets another door, separating it from the kitchen area. Again there are the transoms, which makes me wonder whether the back room was original to the house. The house certainly looks of one piece from the outside, and such elements make that back portion seem less of an afterthought.
I am strongly tempted to enter the front door. The floorboards look sturdy enough, and the stairway looks like it could handle my weight. But my companions and I are not alone at the house. Through the doorway comes a loud humming. Somewhere in there are bees, and I’d very much like to avoid finding them. Discretion ends up defeating valor, and I give up the notion.
As we walk back to the car, I am glad that I’ve brought along my camera and that my companions are less squeamish about such things as property rights and trespassing laws than I am. I doubt I would have been brave enough to approach the house without them.
Remember, please, that these excerpts are covered by copyright and may not be distributed or reproduced in any manner without my express written consent. Feel free to contact me via email (dkimmel at heidelberg dot edu) if you have any questions!
Report abuse