by Chris Eaton
Cordelia’s own father was said to have been an inspiration for one of Bennett’s characters, to which the signature and inscription – To a great friend – can attest. Every day, Great-Grandpa Barratt stepped gingerly across the West Coast Main Line railway and the A500, from Newscastle-under-Lyme to Burslem, past the crimson chapels and rows of little red houses and amber chimney pots, and the gold angel of the Town Hall. From the window of her bedroom, Corrie could see all the sedate reddish browns and reds of the composition all netted in flowing scarves of smoke, harmonised exquisitely with the chill blues of the chequered sky. For centuries her father’s family – the Barratts – had worked making felt hats, an industry that at one point employed nearly a third of the city’s entire population. Then in the late 1800s, for reasons that were initially blamed on resentment towards the upper class, high-priced hats suddenly went out of fashion and the whole family was forced out of their livelihoods. Similarly on her mother’s side, the Hanleys (for whom the area known as Hanley Green had been named) had been employed for generations in the fashioning of clay pipes, until the industrial revolution effectively made the hand-carved puffer an object of historical interest rather than purchase. Without a family business to inherit, even through his inlaws, Corrie’s father was forced to sink beneath his station and find something more menial. The youngest of nine children, he’d never been properly prepared for making hats anyway, and so was more disposed than his siblings to taking on something else, several of whom must have turned to stealing loaves of bread and/or dysentery. The only thing holding him back was the optimism he’d been raised with, spoiled for so long by all his siblings that he was sure some fine job would eventually come his way. Once Cordelia was born and he discovered pessimism to be just as agreeable, he was able to take a job sweeping floors at the Wade Ceramics company in Burslem and be just as satisfied.
For young Corrie, things could not have been better. Her father was permitted to accidentally break two pieces per fortnight without a dock in pay. Instead he broke nothing, and rewarded himself by smuggling two unbroken pieces home inside the pockets of his coveralls to his daughter. In those days, Wade Ceramics was just shifting their focus from traditional pots to the burgeoning industry of collectibles: mostly small animal figurines but also Biblical scenes, and during the first World War, comical caricatures of the German Kaiser in compromising positions; so every second week he absconded with a hippo or a wise man, and once or twice, a British Mark IV tank.
Corrie only left the area after meeting Burnell, who entered her life by securing a position as a driver for one of the country’s first fleet of rubber-tired trucking companies, acquiring finished work in the Potteries and transporting them safely (on a cushion of air) down the A500 to London and beyond. Daimler and Benz were the first things the Germans dropped on the UK, long before the wars and no more than half a day from each other in Cannstatt and Manheim, both independently releasing light-weight trucks in 1896, and hitting British shores by 1900 with the five-tonne model. Burnell Eaton was not always the best driver – on his first day on the job, he backed the truck out too soon and took out the passenger door on the side of the garage – but he showed an immediate aptitude for cramming more goods into his van than anyone else seemed able to manage. Most of her figurines were destroyed in the move to Sheffield, crystallized beneath the dance of a large gilt mirror that she hated. The mirror, of course, emerged completely undamaged.
The author’s signature on this book is a forgery, crafted by a friend of great-grandpa Barratt to impress his daughter on her sixteenth birthday.
Architecture for Worship by Edward A Sövik (1973) – When Cordelia Eaton first became disenfranchised with the extravagance of the religious establishment, her son loaned her this book and she never gave it back.
An American architect of Lutheran faith, Edward Sövik is held responsible in many circles for the unwarranted torture and systematic disfiguration of sacred architecture. This book, the one that started it all, is about the state of contemporary sacred architecture in the West, and how the period between the Norman conquest of England and the Reformation lured both Roman Catholic and Protestant church architects away from God’s original intent with the promise of their own personal immortality.
Sövik begins with the three natural laws of that middle period, used in evaluating local churches: verticality (reaching to the heavens), permanence (transcending space and time), and iconography (the building itself as art), and then dispels them as counterproductive to the original tenets of Christianity. Naturally, early Christians had worshipped in homes, fearing persecution from the Roman authorities. But after its legalization under Constantine and gradual adoption as the Empire’s official religion, one-room wooden sanctuaries sprang up across Europe. In the Middle Ages, just as advances in building technologies allowed more and more spectacular feats of construction in the name of God, the separation of man and ministry became even more distinct, dividing the worship space into the nave, for the meeting of the congregation, and the second was the dominion of the clergy, where Mass was observed, while the parishioners observed from afar. Returning to the religion’s roots, he claimed, and restoring the idea that God was everywhere, Sövik re-imagined the church as a one-room meeting place again, in the most unassuming structures one might ever imagine. Only God can make a building a Church, he said. And He could make it out of anything He wanted.
Attached to this book by an elastic band is a small moleskin notebook. Cordelia had become obsessed with Sövik’s theories, and had nearly filled this notebook cover to cover with small sketches she’d made of her own hypothetical churches, each one dated carefully in the upper-right corner so that they knew she’d been working on them for decades. When her husband had been off counting cars at the parking lot, Corrie had often spent her days hunched over the miniature collapsible linoleum kitchen table, beginning with ideas much like the professional designs of Sövik – albeit much cruder – but then building on them to become even smaller and more speculative. If God could make a building a Church, could He not then do the same for small boxes, or whisky tumblers, or bathtubs, or even objects with no insides, like trees or clothespins, or abstract concepts like sorrow or happiness. When her husband died, for example, she made a Church out of her sorrow, which she depicted in her sketchbook as an area of complete emptiness, devoid of anything, because that was what she felt. She’d never shown the sketches to Burnell because she was afraid he might not understand, and laugh. Similarly on another page, there was only the spot that was left when she pressed the pencil so hard against it that the lead snapped, leaving an uneven smudge with no room for any sort of extravagance or personal baggage.
C D B! by William Steig (1968) – Slightly out of place at first glance, a children’s book with the story told in large letters read phonetically in the place of words (e.g., See the bee!), this book also contains an inscription: C, I U, A. After her husband was murdered for pocket change, Cordelia would sometimes play bridge at a nearby church, a Catholic survivor of both wars, trying her hardest to ignore the flashiness of it because she needed the social benefits. Unfortunately, she also found the competition levels severely wanting. But before she could stop, she was recruited by one of the supervising parishioners to deliver “meals on wheels” to less mobile seniors, and it was here that she met Arthur, who was not invalid so much as he was afraid to leave his home. He wouldn’t even come to the door when she rang the bell, but would wait behind the curtains until he could see the automatic lock on her car doors click down. One day she left him a note with his bowl of stewed prunes, asking if he might like to accompany her to the end of his block and back, which was something he had not imagined in years, and he accepted. The next week, she sat beside him while he wrote a letter – he had no one to write to, but he didn’t want to tell her this, so he invented a story about a man in a boat – and then walked with him to the end of the subdivision so he could drop it in a post box. They sat on a park bench witho
ut speaking. They read the marquee outside the VUE cinema at the Meadowhall Shopping Centre and then just kept walking. She showed him her church sketches, and he didn’t laugh. At the blank page, he cried.
The Stieg book was the only one Cordelia could read in her final years, a gift from Arthur, and she read it daily.
At the funeral, Arthur introduced himself as their grandmother’s lover. His satchel was full of Wade figurines he’d been collecting off eBay and waiting for the right time to give them to her. For the next year and a half, Chris Eaton’s parents invited Arthur over every Sunday for dinner. On a handful of occasions, he brought wine. But most of the time he brought nothing.
Then, one day, Chris Eaton’s father received a call at his office:
I loved her so much, the man sobbed into the other end of the phone.
…
I miss her so much…
Me too.
Several hours later, Chris Eaton’s father was called to come down to the police station. None of the figurines in Arthur’s pockets carried even a scratch.
There are so many ways to die. But it all ends up in the same place.
PART 2
There are twenty-seven bones in the human hand: eight carpals in the wrist; five metacarpals in the hand itself; and fourteen phalanges, which are the same bones that are used to construct the toes. Each finger has three phalanges (the distal, middle, and proximal). The thumb only has two.
These are the things that make us who we are. This shape. This biology. Or, so we imagine. But a bird’s wing is also supported by the equivalent of the bones in the human hand. Instead of having five distinct fingers, however, birds have adapted their digits to create a specialized wing for flying. Some of the digits are fused together, while others never develop beyond the tiniest stump. But they’re exactly the same bones. And this is the innate potential of beginnings. While some developments are always more probable than others, there remains the constant chance that something more exciting could happen. A twist. A surprise. We begin as idiot invalids without the faintest idea of what the world has in store for us. But who’s to say where we’ll eventually end up?
In its embryonic state, a baby bird is completely indistinguishable from a baby lizard.
Or even, in its earliest stages of development, from a baby boy. Or girl. Or something in between.
It’s almost as if, in those early days of fertile gestation, with no more consciousness than the need to feed and grow, each human goes through every historical decision of evolution, from subdivision to the formulation of a spine to growing separate fingers and opposable thumbs. Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. And every single one of us takes the safer route when, instead, we could emerge as fantastic beasts of light and hope. Or destruction. With hard outer shells, torsos completely covered in fur, powerful dorsal fins…
If only we had the courage.
Chris Eaton had a mother and a father. Granted, most people did in those days. Especially in Maine, where technology sometimes came to vacation but never seemed to stay. Even the championship pumpkins his father started under the 400W metal halide bulbs in his ebb and flow hydroponic marijuana system could be traced back through a distinct lineage, year after year, beginning each season where the last year’s best performers left off. They were his kids, and he even named them, following an alphabetic system based on the rules of naming purebred cattle, so you would know the year they were born, yoked with handles from the ‘soaps’ he watched while tending them. Alice was nothing to brag about. And Bo would still have had him laughed out of the county fair. But by the time he reached Hope, appropriately, the other competitors acknowledged him with friendly nods. He wasn’t exactly competition, but he was certainly respectable. He tipped his Black Bears ball cap back to them, fingering the fishing lure he’d pitched along its brim.
In secret, however, he despised the whole lot of them, slamming the garage door behind him when he returned from the annual Clarence weigh-in, head drug low, fists at his sides like diseased burls. In 1986, when the World Pumpkin Federation promoted a one-thousand-pound pumpkin challenge, most growers said it was impossible. But once money became involved (the first to break the mark won an astonishing $50,000), so did the chemical companies. The trick had always been finding ways to coax the pumpkin into believing it could absorb even more water than it normally would. Once a pumpkin reaches its maximum capacity to take on more water, any further expansion is offset by a progressive thinning of the outer shell, and a larger pumpkin might actually begin to weigh less. Then the scientists took over. In 2003 alone, the number of North American entries to break the thousand-pound barrier was forty-three. As far as Chris Eaton’s father was concerned, you might as well paint an elephant orange and let it walk to the fair under its own power. And he stubbornly refused to use anything that wasn’t one-hundred-percent organic, nurturing them on one hundred and fifty gallons of water per day and a secret sixty-ingredient compost including powdered sugar, liquid molasses, blood meal (all for heating the compost to make it churn harder), hardwood sawdust, brewery by-products, animal manure, pine bark, sandy loam, rice hulls, coffee grounds, cornstarch, tomato paste, scum from cleaned lobster tanks, egg yolks, live bees, and when Spring washed up on the coasts of Maine like a disoriented whale, wet and awkward, seaweed. Lit only by the moon and his undying hope, Chris Eaton and his father hustled great polyethylene bags of it back to the garden. Mixed into the regular compost and Canadian sphagnum, it served dual-purpose by increasing water-holding capacity and protected against any late frosts. The winds off the compost pile made Chris feel dizzy and loved. When it was freshly turned, it released an acrid drift, warm and rank like his father’s breath.
He lost again and again.
Of course, seaweed is not only an excellent source of trace elements for growth, but also contains Iodine-127, making both plants and humans resistant to the absorption of Iodine-131, an element that is constantly being released into our atmosphere by the so-called normal operations of nuclear power plants and weapons facilities. If you’ve been anywhere near a nuclear explosion or fallout, you know exactly what normal can mean. The sodium alginate in kelp is capable of binding with ingested particles of toxic strontium-90, cesium-137, and various heavy metals in the digestive tract. After Chernobyl, the Russians isolated the polysaccharide U-Foucauldian in kelp, an excellent sponge for radioactive elements. They fed the extract to Eurasian glass lizards and found their ability to regenerate their tails was not diminished by repeated exposure to nuclear radiation.
All of which came too late for the children of Chernobyl, who walked straight out of the womb with feet like pumpkins, heads like flattened salamanders’, without eyes, the bones of the hands fused into solid hammers of flesh and osseous, their legs like welded bows…
These were the ones with true courage. They were the future.
The only way they resembled their parents was that they spoke the same language. If they had mouths.
Or they died early.
Chris Eaton’s grandfather never went to war, avoiding Woodrow Wilson’s draft in 1917 by faking bad genetic eyesight. So when war broke out again in Europe, even with two young children to support, Chris Eaton’s father read the newspapers back in California with careful interest. And as soon as the US decided to join the Allied forces against the Nazis, he was off to the local conscription office. After two short months of basic training at Fort Ord, and some additional amphibious training at the British Centre in Invarary, Scotland, he was assigned to join the 1st Infantry Unit, fresh from fighting in Italy. In the Normandy invasion, he stumbled in the water immediately upon exiting the boat, and was sucked under the churn of the Mark 5 LCT transport.
Accounts at his funeral one year later said he was held under for close to five minutes. But somehow he survived, yanked out by the Captain of his unit, and they all started thinking of him as their good luck charm. Seemingly blessed with a second chance at life, an opportunity to start over, Chris Eaton’s fa
ther returned to the US and to his practice. He took up golf, and hit a hole-in-one. He swam every day, and took up poker. Then, he joined a private tennis club with some fellow doctors, and less than a year later, an attendant found his body in the hot tub. Since they could find no trauma to his head, the coroner ascertained that he had passed out due to dehydration from excessive sweating, after which his body must have slipped below the surface and was filled like an empty jug.
Chris Eaton’s parents could have done anything, too, but instead they ended up together, while she was trying to force her extracurricular activism into a Master’s degree and he was trying to single-handedly demolish the fish stock up at Belews Lake. She’d been canvassing for Mondale for nearly a year and a half; he hadn’t even voted. But when Chris Eaton’s father crashed his mother’s election party with a Reagan mask obscuring his sight and screaming “Born in the USA” at the top of his lungs (Reagan had attempted to steal the hit as his campaign song, until Springsteen himself demanded he stop), she knew she’d finally found someone who understood, cornering him at length on social injustice, gay rights, the growing divide between rich and poor, and the need for a strong female presence in the White House (“Are we really better off than we were four years ago? Really?!”), some of which he partly understood (and much of which he couldn’t hear through Reagan’s oversized latex ears, anyway), and then they went back to her place, got married and because of complications, induced a girl, a boy, didn’t matter, and perhaps because of their story, or their decision to have our hero on a predetermined day – his understanding of what it takes to make a baby: one sperm, one egg, and five tablets of Buccal Pitocin – Chris Eaton tends to think everything will eventually work out.