Amy's Folly: Once the Roof Goes

One of the cardinal rules of writing is that you should seek to show, not to tell. It’s better for your writing and, especially, for any reader, if you don’t club them with exposition that plainly articulates just what they need to understand. Instead, you should seek atmospheric description that allows a process of discovery and revelation, interpretation that allows a kind of feeling-along-with what transpires on the page. While this rule is avidly observed in the best of literature, philosophers are schooled against it.

In philosophy writing, you want to lead right away with the thesis or (in a word I have come to despise) the point. A philosopher once explained our writing ethos by saying that if a philosopher was writing a murder mystery, the first page would say something along the lines of “in this book, I will show that the butler did it.” I have used that quip so often in teaching philosophy writing that I despair of myself for it. The students need to know the form, but I confess that I miss the chaotic style of work I sometimes got before I learned better how to instruct their writing, those essays that veered and careered all over the place only to end up somewhere unpredictable and weird. Perhaps because I now struggle so much to write at all, I am all sympathy with the fevered confusions of my early students, their tendency to start work with no real idea of where it is going and the ways their work would just collapse into something at the end. The essays weren’t so much finished as ended – with a “conclusion” because one was needed, but not necessarily with a conclusion that had a lot to do with what came before. Sometimes, you just have to stop wherever you’ve landed and tack on whatever you can, so that’s what they did.

I want here to write something about the crumbling one room schoolhouse that sits atop a fine hill near my farm. That school matters to me, both as a physical structure and as a symbolic totem, though of what I struggle to say. I wish to write of it because it matters to me, but I struggle to write of it, also because it matters to me. I would like not to foul it up or get it wrong. I worry that my powers of show are unequal to it, and I worry that my philosopher’s training to tell will spoil it, reduce it to some altogether tedious point. Better, then, I think, just to say something of it in the style of my early students. Write what you will and end up where you do.

The Fruitville School – for this is its name – is the last and increasingly shabby remainder of a quixotic scheme devised by one Jay L. Torrey. Born in 1852, Colonel Torrey, as he is called around here, was a lot of things in his life: a soldier, a lawyer, a cattleman. He led Torrey’s Rough Riders during the Spanish-American War and was once considered a possible candidate for Vice President, though Teddy Roosevelt beat him out for that. He was originally from Wyoming, but he ended up in our area, founding Fruitville Farms in 1906. During that period, the area was having a bit of a boom, lively with agricultural commerce and trains coming through to carry away our fruit to buyers elsewhere. The small towns nearest us, all with populations below two hundred now, were going concerns, filled with fruit pickers and packers. Perhaps because things were bustling or just because the area is indeed quite fine, Colonel Torrey decided he wanted not only to found a town, but to persuade the state legislature to re-locate the state capital to his new town. Since my writing can only manage so much suspense, I will here dispel some: The state capital remains where it has always been, in Jefferson City. And the “town” itself never got much past the imagined stage. Even so, the school was built and functioned as a school for some years. My grandmother taught there.

The Fruitville School stands atop a hill from which the smaller hills and valleys all round are visible and where it must have caught every cold wind in winter. The foundation is native stone mortared in the puzzle piece configuration common to stone buildings in the area. The school’s single door faces west and its sides feature tall and closely spaced windows, presumably the better to catch all the light needed to read those ABCs in a time when electricity had not yet reached as far as us. The rear wall is solid but for an enclosed chimney and one can still see that it must once have been painted for chalk, with a rail running the length of the wall to hold chalk pieces. Until about fifteen years ago, one of the interior window facings still held an ornate small metal stand designed to hold a flag. I took what was left of that flag stand and have it in a box along with other odd bits I’ve picked up round the farm and surrounds. I don’t know what once grew around the school, but it is shaded now by a grand old oak that, late in the day, lays its silhouette in perfect shadow against the planking walls. These, then, are its physical features, at least those that have abided through time. What else I know of it I only learned from talking to my grandmother.

When Ruby taught at Fruitville School, she was obliged to find room and board with a nearby family. In order to teach, she had to be unmarried, but being unmarried meant she also had to find a family with whom to live, for a woman living on her own, alone, was just not done. Her housing at Fruitville was far afield and she recalled the long trek on foot, through whatever weather the world saw fit to offer and up that tall hill, to reach her school. Once there, she would need to stoke the stove with wood to warm the space and, in addition to instruction, her day would include preparing food for her pupils to eat. The region was poor but through New Deal arrangements, the school was supplied with canned foodstuffs. This was how she and her students first came to taste pineapple, though by her later telling most of the children were unimpressed. More commonly, she just cooked beans. She said little of the teaching itself, but I can well imagine how it went, for my grandmother was always committed to the idea that poor does not mean ignorant. She would have taught those children to be well-spoken and write a good hand, for she begrudged the world its readiness to assume the worst of those with little and thought one needed to be well-armed against just this. She never told me anything she knew of particular children she taught or what later became of them, though I did once see one of her students.

When Ruby was living in a nursing home during one of her illnesses, I sat one day in the dining room with her. Ruby never cared at all for the periodic nursing home stays she suffered. She often balked at eating so I was there to cajole and encourage, not least because the pathway back home to the farm would have to run right through her taking some steady meals, however unappetizing she found them. In the midst of my nagging, she asked me if I saw “that girl over there, the girl in the red dress.” The dining room was just then heavily populated, full of wizened and wrinkled residents, but I saw no girl – indeed, already in my late thirties, I was by far the youngest person present. Frustrated with me for not seeing the girl, she finally pointed to indicate a fellow resident. The “girl” herself was now a stooped little creature with a disordered cap of uncombed, fluffy white hair, too old to be counted a “girl” to any except my grandmother, her the “girl’s” teacher almost seventy years now past. I’ve thought of that elderly schoolgirl as I have aged toward the stretched perspective Ruby had then, the power conferred by long time to perceive people not just as they are but also as was and when youth was still upon them. I can sometimes see my daughter as the infant she once was, but it is with the old that I would really like the gift. I’d like to take in a perspective never mine in experience, to see that vast expanse of long life backwards beyond my own beginning, wed the aged present to the youthful past.

Some fifteen years ago when the schoolhouse was not yet so decayed as to pose a hazard to any within it, I stood inside for a time. I had gone there to take pictures but found the place defiant of my lens – sometimes the fragments a camera can get just register as falsehood and you’re better off using your eyes and hoping memory can stick inside what a camera will miss. The light was just then at its best, the sun descended to cast long shadows through the empty doorframe. The school was gold with late day light. So it seemed then almost possible to imagine my grandmother there in youth, done for the day with children, and at rest after her labor. The school itself would then have still kept glass in its window frames, what dust the place played host would have come from chalk rather than the dirt road, the trusses would be concealed by ceiling and would not be refuge to the mourning doves I saw sheltering up there. Ruby would be just a teacher in her school and not yet settled into the life that she would have, the hills and valleys all stretched out to her view. The school would have been intact and whole, but all the rest, the weighty rest, was just open and undetermined, for her and for the children too. She’d not yet have conceived a world where she would share dining space in a nursing home with “that girl” come there to learn. The later world was still many, could still spin out in any of several directions.

To be clear, I did not that day in the school romanticize my grandmother, did not conceive her as a mere “young woman,” blessed then with a world of possibilities awaiting her choices. Among her many gifts was a resistance to being romanticized. She’d have been neither sentimental, nor charmed by children as such. Teaching would have been work – useful work, to be sure, but work by which to live and earn her bread, not a vocation that had her going dewy eyed over the promises of youth and the futures she might there nourish in them. Her teaching wasn’t, even then, the start of work for her. By the time she stood before her pupils, she would have labored much, despite her youth.

My grandmother was born to a family poor, their shared survival a common effort and one that even the youngest of the family joined. By the time she was teaching, Ruby would have been an old hand at farmwork and at shop work – her parents had by then tried both. She’d even worked as a berry picker, though at that she had already failed. As she would in later life, in paid employ she was too choosy with what berries she conceived as good and fit, too selective to work as fast or as badly as the job required. So when I stood in the schoolhouse imagining Ruby at rest at long day’s end, that Ruby was hazy but not rosy in her youth. I could imagine her with so much before her, but couldn’t shake all that was already just behind her, a sense that she herself would have weighed her future with a measure that I – with my more modern sense of “youth” and more blessed sense of “possibility” – could not hope, then or really ever, to assay. If I could have spoken with her as was and before what else she came to be, I like to think I would have recognized her. She might say of her work and youth and possibilities the same she sometimes said of food that wasn’t quite so good as it could be: It’s better than a dirty snowball. This was her wry encomium for what was merely tolerable. She had in hunger eaten dirty snow, so food that is recognizable as such must be counted better than that and, moreover, announcing the tolerable as such can perform a consolation if we need one.

When you live as I do, inhabiting the place where generations past lived out their days, you’re always in the traces. Wherever you stand, some one of yours also stood. They, too, paused at the window just so, seeing something like you see, turned the stubborn knob of that door, tread the path from house to barn. Ancestors aren’t residents of any vague or unknown past, but people whose lives and work are embedded in all the stuffs of experience now your own. This can sometimes be a comfort, I notice. I think it so most often in our graveyard, where I tend graves just as they would also have tended graves, our sorrows not the same but, all the same, in common shared. But it has more modest manifestations too, motivating me to work when I stand in sight of the heaps of rock piled here and there across the farm. My ancestors moved all that rock to clear pasture so I can surely muster up the will to cut brush or mow, my labor another installment in an effort stretching long before me. But the schoolhouse doesn’t sit on land we own. That hill belongs to one of the big time ranchers round here, a man with big machinery and hired hands to run it. Maybe this, too, explains why the schoolhouse is a trace I cannot seem to fully fathom. It is a place I watch, not one I walk.

In recent years, as the cares of life have mounted up, I have taken to going to the schoolhouse just to sit. I drive to the top of that high hill, there to stare across the taut barbed wire fencing at the place my grandmother worked. I visit it at any hour that the summons comes upon me. I know its appearance at both dawn and dusk, at midnight and at noon. So, too, I have seen its aspect in a diversity of moods, my compulsion to go there answerable to no narrow need but, it seems, any of the needs – for succor or for celebration, for calm or for agitation. In this, it might just be my church.

The schoolhouse is no longer a place of youth or possibility, but now an empty shell. I could climb through the wire and approach it closer, but I don’t. The externality tells me all I need to know. The rancher who owns the pasture in which the school sits has no use for it, but his cattle do. In hottest summer, they mill about it, congregating in the shade it casts. Its four corners they find a treat in any season, using the sharp angles as a place to scratch the itches they can’t reach. They, or perhaps the elements, have near collapsed the wall that faces north. It bows inward like crescent, the wall beneath one window busted in. Since the caved flooring of the place would be a hazard to a cow, the wall is mended with a stretch of goat fencing to stop them going in. Because the prospect of the land all round is from the schoolhouse fine, wakes of vultures reliably perch upon the trusses. I watch them there and have started something of a study of them. They do not perch there high just to scan for carrion they might like, but also sleep and stretch for readiness. Even when they seem to want no action then to take, they like to cast their wings broad outward, expanding their chests wide, their wings at farthest reach, presumably just for the satisfaction that this brings.

There is a saying in the Ozarks, elliptical but true: Once the roof goes… No one ever finishes the thought with more than just a sigh because the rest is taken obvious. Endings do not come at steady pace. Barns, sheds, and houses can stand for years, enduring damage to walls, windows, and even foundation. But once the roof goes, the rest of the structure will soon, and far more quickly, follow. Buildings need both cover from the elements and the restraint a roof affords – a roof does not just cover walls but holds them in their steady shape. Once the roof goes, endings find first a fast acceleration and then finality. Once the roof goes remarks the point from which one can’t turn back. The schoolhouse roof is almost gone. I bear witness and await the day the school lays down in tumbled heaps of oak hand sawn and nailed in place by hopeful men long dead.

There is a metaphor here, if I could only find it. Or if I could pin it down. If metaphor it be, it surely references too much or not enough. Maybe here I have but scratched my back or extended out my wings. I cannot locate now a point, if indeed I had one. I might have showed something. I might, almost but not entire, have prophesied an ending. I hope my roof for writing has not yet gone. But I do have doubts. Let me here, like my early students, just collapse with that.