Homekeeping

This originally appeared in the Spring 2025 edition of Artifact.

Below is a fragment of a novel that has barely sprung to life.

I don’t remember much about Christmases growing up. Neither do my brothers or sister, Ellie Grace. Like most things from our past, Christmas memories are more like misassembled snap shots. I squint my mind’s eye in hope of seeing a moving picture, but I merely zoom in on the still, small frames to see in greater detail the only things my mind will allow me to recollect.

I see the screen door banging shut and hear that muffled snap it always made as the whitewashed wood hit against the doorframe. The door is chipped near the edges and dappled with the brown hue of the unfinished wood underneath. I see my father’s large back, hunched and enormous, heaving like billows as he feeds the flames of his rage toward us or mother or whoever decided to be born two thousand years prior. He mumbles something as he starts to lumber toward the shed at the edge of the backyard where we all knew he would swallow his own wrath like a drunk would guzzle beer. He would always return, a half hour later perhaps: he would be quiet with a look of embarrassment in his fallen eyes, and armed with a banal observation or a lame joke told quickly as if he didn’t really need you to understand what he said. The twins would always ignore him, but I always found myself keenly attentive to my father’s sense of prideful regret.

Grandmother would come to visit during Christmas. She’d stay for a week or two at a time, traveling from Iowa with rolls of yarn and a stack of magazines. She would sit in our living room reading or knitting, humming Amazing Grace or Come Thou Fount to the rhythm of her rocking. In the evenings, she liked to turn off the lamps and light a single candle, illuminating the darkness in a faint glow like a gentle whisper in the lingering quiet of an empty church. The house was dark and quiet as the twins went upstairs to play and Ellie Grace went to bed, and I’d shuffle into the living room and sit next to Grandmother on the couch, and she’d talk and I’d listen and we would share grief and loneliness, although I couldn’t put words to it at the time. She would tell me stories about her husband and about her daughter, my father’s sister, who died young in Grandmother’s old age. She was a woman of sorrows, acquainted with grief.

John Wesley and John Henry were twins and the oldest. My father’s name was John, too. He never told us why he named both my brothers John, but I suppose he always wanted to name his first son after himself, and he didn’t want to be so cruel as to withhold his name from an infant who couldn’t keep pace coming out of the womb. Perhaps he thought so highly of his name he felt he needed two sons to carry the weight of it. Or perhaps he wanted to increase the odds that a son named after him would make him proud. Pride is a word he uttered often. Along with family, respect, honor, and Jesus Christ.

Ellie Grace was the youngest, although you wouldn’t know it from the way she talked. She talked older than all of us. And she talked enough for all of us, too. I didn’t mind it much, growing up. I was three years younger than the twins but only fourteen months older than Ellie Grace, and I think I often assumed our ages were reversed. Perhaps I was carried away by how self-assured she sounded about almost everything; I was never very assured about much of anything, particularly my voice, and I didn’t use it much. God gave me two ears and one mouth, so I assumed I was made to listen quite more than I was made to talk. Ellie Grace didn’t seem to mind my silence, either, probably because it meant she’d always have someone who would listen to her. The twins didn’t listen to anybody.

Once during family dinner, Ellie Grace, who wasn’t much older than 9 at the time, was declaring how immoral it was for babies to get circumcized. She must have recently learned about it, because generally her moral diatribes were directed at whatever atrocity she most recently became aware of. The twins started giggling and touching each other beneath the table, and suddenly John Wesley let out a howl and fell backward off the bench. They each were cackling as John Wesley lay on the floor rocking from side to side. Ellie Grace was on the other side, sitting next to Dad as she always did, so she couldn’t see why John Wesley had fallen over or why they were cackling. But she assumed they were laughing at her. Or if they weren’t laughing at her, they were laughing at something else, which was just as bad, because it meant they hadn’t been paying attention. She stood up, her fists clenched and brow furrowed like a girl out of a caricature drawing at the county fair. She stomped off without saying a word. Mother got up and called after her as the twins stopped laughing and looked guiltily at each other and our father. The only time they cared much for what Ellie Grace was saying was when she stopped speaking. For them, her voice was like the hum of the refrigerator, a background noise always going that you never notice or care about until the power shuts off and you can’t hear it anymore.

Father didn’t say much when these sorts of things happened, even though they happened at the dinner table often; but we never considered it much. As a child, the actions of parents always seem to have an inner, unspoken logic that you never think to question, much like saying grace before a meal or taking baths on Saturday nights. It seemed reasonable that Father remained silent at the table, only speaking to say the prayer and to tell us to keep our elbows off the table. And between Ellie Grace’s monologues and the twins’ mischief, there was always enough to keep everyone distracted during those twenty minutes. They seemed so long back then. But now as I eat dinner with my own children who are always clamoring to be done so that they can play outside or watch television, I wish this meal was my entire life, and I could slow down every bite and absorb in silence the sipping and slurping and swallowing that make up the memories of a family.

“Those who share the same name, must share the same table,” my father would say. He reminded us of this often whenever we’d ask to have dinner at a friend’s house or eat dinner early so that we could go out. He would refuse and we would act upset, but I think we all found safety in knowing that we not only had a place at our family’s table, but that it would not be the same table without us. And we wouldn’t be the same people without that table. For that table became the binding force of our family, even during our most divided years. Often we children would yell words like “hate” and “kill,” but when we sat down at that table and shared the meat and drink, we were one.