by Jim Hanas
Back in the 1940s, they have no trouble finding ways to die. His grandfather left with his brothers to make sure this import-export business, this trade of bullets and bombs, was not unilateral. And oh, how they died! The eldest never even saw battle, and instead drowned during training procedures at Fort Ord when he convinced one of the tank drivers to let him take one for a spin, steeping the Crusader in the river. The next, Great Uncle William, who was schooled as a mining engineer, was selected by a special missions unit to tunnel under German lines and set off charges beneath the enemy trenches, just like they did at Messines Ridge in WWI, except using nothing but a pick-axe, a canary, and a compass; he had already succeeded in undermining the fronts at CLASSIFIED and CLASSIFIED, and was making his way towards CLASSIFIED when his compass was attracted to the iron deposits of the mines in CLASSIFIED, and he mistakenly created another underground effluent for the nearby river. Exhausted during the rainy march to the front, Great Uncle Nelson pitched face-first into a mud puddle and never looked up again, although most likely he would have eventually died from the venereal disease he picked up from a prostitute in London before even shipping out. And Great Uncle Timothy, the youngest, who liked to collect exotic fish and sail paper boats down the canal behind the steelworks, constantly devising special folds in order to create more and more elaborate rowboats, lifeboats, and double-ended sailboats, dinghies, Turkish caïques, Irish currachs, cobles and coracles, kayaks and umiaks, punts and junks, luggers and nuggars, galleons, battleships, and aircraft carriers, gradually perfecting his craftsmanship to create everything from a catamaran and trimaran through septamaran to dodecamaran, halted only by his inability to find a sheet of paper large enough to fold into a vessel with thirteen hulls side by side; Great Uncle Timothy, the sensitive artist, who managed before he was even twelve to harness the power of the nearby creek to run a small generator his sister could use to power a tiny oven for making small cakes; Great Uncle Timothy, the innovator, who tumbled into a pool when he was three, and subsequently wept at any attempt to teach him to swim until his parents simply gave up; Great Uncle Timothy, the crybaby, was captured in France in 1941, and deported to Germany a year later, where he spent fifteen months in captivity before being shot because the camp was running low on rations. When news of the first three deaths reached their mother, the poor woman refused to take another bath, or even go out in the rain.
She only dies after the first of her sons — the drum major — returns alive from the continent, standing at the curb and wringing his hat in his hands.
When his grandfather returned from his post in the war, planting his drumsticks in the front yard like they were a flag, like he was marking this part of Sheffield as his territory and God help anyone who so much as stared cross-eyed at it, there was a hole he could not fill. A hole he could not explain. Something was missing. So he started with the roof, and the ceiling in his mother’s room. Then he filled the holes made by the incendiary missiles in the fields behind their house. Against the recommendations of friends and neighbors, he packed the entire bomb shelter with soil and covered the entrance.
This made him happier.
Still, it was not enough.
Luckily there were even more holes in London, which were then being filled with American greenbacks, provided to the U.K. through the Marshall Plan, which was created as much as an American PR stunt to repel communism as it was a fund for rebuilding Europe. A similar financial offer was made to the Soviet Union, on the condition they follow a list of demands that would lead to their political and social reform, but the American government was so afraid the Russians might just take the money and run that they made the demands almost impossible to meet. Boarding the train to London each morning, Chris Eaton’s grandfather shovelled dollars into ditches and sat back to watch the American seed money grow in the only way it knew how: straight up, blossoming into residential towers and high-rise flats, great plumes of brick and reinforced concrete that weighed heavily on the soil and choked out the skyline. Chris Eaton’s grandfather was elated (having long since begun to carry the oppressive weight of the holes he could now feel in the sky above him). Then someone wrote a study that said high-rises made people depressed. It was the birth of the suburbs. Discouraged, he stopped boarding the train.
Around that same time, the government started up a program for vets, facilitating their transition to civilian life by training them as security guards, cross-walk guards, valets, mailroom management, mailroom operations, couriers and dispatchers, weigh-scale operators, managers of complaint desks and wildlife control. He chose the parking lot because, although it wasn’t the most exciting job in the world, it involved filling more space.
Then, towards the end of the seventies, the average car length dropped from twenty feet to seventeen. He repainted his lines and found he could fit another dozen cars — fifteen if he parked them himself. Through the eighties, another two feet fell to history, and he discovered that pivoting the entire layout, running it parallel to the street instead of perpendicular, brought him another four vehicles. (By this time, he parked everything himself.) While he used to spend half of his days reading the newspaper or playing solitaire, he now used all of his time arranging and rearranging the cars in the lot. Parallel, perpendicular, diagonal. In star patterns and spirals.
In 1611, Johannes Kepler challenged himself to discover the most space-efficient way to pack oranges, leaving as few gaps as possible. Mimicking the stacks of cannonballs he witnessed on ships, Kepler found he could make the exotic fruits occupy 74.04% of the total space inside a crate. So Chris Eaton’s grandfather tried that, staggering the cars, alternating rows between cars that faced north-south and east-west, producing even more space in some cases depending on the particular makes and models. He also tried parking them in self-contained squares: two cars parallel followed by two perpendicular. And by the end of it all, he’d find space for another five cars. On a good day, six.
It just made it harder to get them back out.
He spent more and more time at work, requesting overnight shifts at lots where he knew people parked overnight, for maximum time with the same vehicles. Sometimes he’d fall asleep at his calculations and Mr. Chisolm, who came around at midnight to collect the cash from the register, would have to poke him with his cane through the box where he accepted the money, or shake the entire booth. There were normally only a few people who would pay to park after that time, and it was the unspoken rule that whoever worked the late shift could keep that extra money as a tip.
In the February 8 edition of the Sheffield Star, 1992, the name of the war veteran who was knifed for £27 as he was getting ready to head home from his job at the car park is not even mentioned.
Chris Eaton’s grandmother, Cordelia Eaton (née Barratt), hated Sheffield until the day she died, popping and snapping down the stairs like a bag of doorknobs, arms and legs forgetting their place and going everywhichwayatonce. She’d been legally blind for two years, but had refused to tell anyone, preferring instead to sit still when people came to visit, and, when she was alone, she would crawl across the countertops to press her face directly against every box of cornstarch and dried soup mix, accompanied by nothing but the high-pitched squeal of her malfunctioning hearing aids.
The only person she confided in was Arthur, the mysterious stranger who later showed up at her funeral and shook quietly in the back of the new modern Lutheran church, of all places, which was best described — and was, according to several of Corrie’s more distant and Anglican relations — as looking like something a child had made with a gigantic shoebox and scissors. Corrie saw the razing of Sheffield as a revelation of its true nature. The place was rotten, she had often said. With its lack of cultural arts and its goonish football thuggery. She was constantly reminding them of her idyllic youth near Newcastle-under-Lyme, dressed in her favorite cream-colored frock with a wide and heavy straw hat, quietly kicking her foal-like legs against the wall.
In Newcastle, people would greet her as they passed. In Sheffield, they had eyes so heavy they rolled down into breast pockets. In Sheffield, their noses were like weathervanes, twisting their faces whichever way the wind blew.
To Chris, who had always aspired to be a writer and who would help her with the crosswords on Sundays, she left her entire collection of books, including:
Anna of the Five Towns by Arnold Bennett (1902)
This was Bennett’s first novel about the Potteries, the name given to the six communities that spread to the east of Newcastle like a fantastic, shimmering soap bubble. The town of Fenton was lost to Bennett mostly because he found the word five much more euphonious than six. The volume is signed.
Inspired by the evolutionary work of Charles Darwin, Bennett was part of the naturalist movement in literature, where characters’ lives were greatly influenced by heredity and their social environment. Bennett believed, like Thomas Hardy and Emile Zola before him and John Steinbeck shortly after, that the lives of ordinary people had the potential to be the subject of interesting books. He also took on the less popular stance that the same could be achieved with the other inanimate minutiae of life, and his books contain prosaic and wearisome lists of pottery, ceramics tools and processes, from the blunger to the sagger or the muffle, sculpting scalloped lambrequins with a half-inch Acacia thumb tool and then applying the most delicate glost with bundled Japanese hemp palm stems. At parties, he was known to entertain people by reciting a comprehensive list of the most famous makes of china and porcelain: Adams, Belleek, Bow, Bristol, Chelsea, Coalport, Copeland, Crown Staffordshire, Davenport, Dresden, Goss, Kofmehl, Limoges, Longton Hall, Matteo, Meissen, Minto, Pietra, Rockingham, Rosenthal, Royal Copenhagen, Royal Doulton, Royal Worcester (thank goodness for five Rs in a row), Schildknecht, Sèvres, Spode, St. Michael China, Sunderland, Swansea (and six Ss), Wedgwood, and Witham.
Cordelia’s own father was said to have been the 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. For centuries Cordelia’s father’s family — the Barratts — had worked making felt hats, an industry that had at one point employed nearly a third of the city’s population. Then in the late 1800s, for reasons that were initially blamed on resentment towards the upper class, the hats suddenly went out of fashion and the whole family was forced out of its livelihood. Similarly on her mother’s side, the Hanleys (for whom the area 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 in-laws, 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 — several of whom must have turned to stealing loaves of bread and/or contracting dysentery — to take on something else. The only thing holding him back was the optimism he’d been raised with, spoiled for so long by 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 anyone docking his pay. Instead, he broke nothing, and rewarded himself by bringing two unbroken pieces home inside the pockets of his coveralls to his daughter. In those days, Wade Ceramics was just shifting its 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 her father 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 it safely (on a cushion of air) down the A500 to London and beyond. This was the first thing the Germans dropped on the United Kingdom: the Daimler and Benz companies, no more than half a day from each other in Cannstatt and Manheim, both independently releasing lightweight trucks in 1896, and hitting British shores by 1900 with the five-ton 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 Corrie’s figurines were destroyed in the move to Sheffield, crystallized beneath the dance of a large gilt mirror that she hated. It, of course, emerged undamaged.
The author’s signature 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, as if their grandiose structures were more important and beautiful than the love and forgiveness of God himself.
In the book, Sövik begins with the three natural laws used to evaluate churches of that middle period: verticality (reaching to the heavens), permanence (transcending space and time), and iconography (the building as art). He then dismisses them as counterproductive to the original tenets of Christianity. Naturally, early Christians had worshipped in their homes, fearing persecution from the Roman authorities. But after Christianity’s legalization under Constantine and gradual adoption as the Empire’s official religion, one-room wooden sanctuaries sprung up across Europe. In the Middle Ages, just as advances in building technologies allowed increasingly spectacular feats of construction in the name of God, the separation between man and ministry became even more distinct, dividing the worship space into the nave, for the meeting of the congregation, and the dominion of the clergy where Mass was observed, the parishioners observing from afar. Returning to the religion’s roots by restoring the idea that God was everywhere, Sövik reimagined 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 with an elastic band is a small Moleskine 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, some going back decades. When her husband had been off counting cars in the parking lot, Corrie had often spent her days hunched over the miniature collapsible linoleum kitchen table, beginning with ideas much like Sövik’s professional designs — albeit much cruder — but then adapting them until they became 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 fear 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 of 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, which happened to be a Catholic survivor of both wars. She was still immensely healthy for her age, however, in both body and mind, and she found the competition wanting. But before she could stop attending, 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 so much an invalid 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 locks 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. This was something he had not even imagined doing in years, and he accepted.