Paula Carter’s essay “Correction Lines” won Another Chicago Magazine’s inaugural Nonfiction Contest, judged by ACM editor S. L. Wisenberg. First prize is a residency at the Shannaghe Artists’ Retreat in Belfast, Maine.
Where to Begin
Is there a beginning? I don’t think so. Let’s agree. There is no beginning.
Each story, each person, must turn backward to see what came before. Back and back and back until the beginning is lost. I turn to my mother, who turns to her mother, who turns to her mother. We strain to see what is just beyond the horizon. Like Lot’s wife, how can we look forward? The instruction was simple: don’t turn back. But the urge was too great. How could she not try to catch a glimpse of the life that had been? How could she not try to make sense of the destruction? Back and back and back. Until poof, she was salt.
Apparition
My mother tells me stories about when she was little and then makes me promise not to tell anyone. Not even my husband, who is in the other room getting us each a glass of wine. Even now, she wants to hide things away. She is still worried about being shunned. I don’t tell my husband, and I won’t tell you now, the thing that most humiliates her. But I will tell you about the back porch of the farmhouse on highway 4 where her father would hang a slaughtered cow. She describes the skinned cow and how it looked black, dressed in its coat of flies.
“It’s so gross,” she says—using the present tense—and shudders to remember, as if some of the filth could fling from the memory and stick to her now. She repeats the word “gross” a few times to herself. “And you wonder why I want everything clean,” she says.
They didn’t have indoor plumbing. They had an outhouse and a chamber pot, which she tells me “stank to high heaven.” That was true for 48 percent of homes in Iowa in the early 1950s; nationally 35 percent. But for my mother it feels like it was only her family. She tells me about the baby mice nesting in the cupboards and how those cupboards didn’t have doors. Her mother sewed little curtains to cover them.
That farmhouse was torn down before I was born. But sometimes on our way from Illinois to visit family, we drive by where it once stood, and my mother points out the spot. A small inlet remains marking where the gravel driveway had been. The land beyond that has been plowed under and is now a seamless part of the field that stretches to the horizon. It seems impossible there was ever a house there at all. It has completely disappeared, except from my mother’s memory.
Another time, my mother tells me a different story about that same porch. She tells me about spring mornings, just waking up, when she and her twin sister would go sit with their legs dangling over the side and feel the warmth of the rising sun on their faces. How she can feel it. She looks at me to see if I understand. She explains how it is so real that if she closes her eyes, she is still there.
She is still there.
How the Story Goes
This is how the story goes: my family is related to John Cotton, preacher of the first church in Boston. We are related to Richard Warren, who came over on the Mayflower. If you go to Plimouth Plantation, the living history museum in Massachusetts, there is an actor who plays Richard Warren. He is happy to talk about the dismal lives of the people who lived there—so much death and hunger and disease. When I visit with my uncle it is a bright summer day and the people dressed in period clothing make us smile. A woman rounds the corner in a grey-blue dress and bonnet, carrying a basket of greens from the garden and we find her appearance to be a delight. The tourists—who have come from places like Nebraska and Tennessee—look on in shorts and t-shirts. Incongruity is a form of humor. We know the actors are in on the joke, going home to their apartments with microwaves, but they stay in character. Even when someone tries to trip them up, pulling out a cell phone to take a picture. What’s that strange contraption? they say. Ha, ha, ha, it’s so funny.
The little houses with their chimneys and thatched roofs next to the blue ocean make us want to play house. Which is really what we are doing. Playing history. What does it feel like to bake the bread? What does it feel like to put the little ones to bed? What does it feel like to live with stale smoke? What does it feel like to be so cold? Four hundred years later, it feels like an adventure. It feels simpler than now. Which is the lie of looking back. Which is one of the lies of looking back.
Richard Warren and his wife Elizabeth had seven children. Miraculously, they all lived to adulthood, married and had large families of their own. Which makes Richard Warren one of the most common Mayflower passengers from whom you can be descended. And God said to him, “I am God Almighty; be fruitful and increase in number. A nation and a community of nations will come from you.”
How many people each year come to Plimouth and let the actor playing Richard Warren know that he is the reason for their existence? He is why they are in the New World. How many attempt to buddy up to the actor, making it clear that they are not like the other visitors, doused in sunscreen. They have a real claim.
Among Richard Warren’s many descendants? Ulysses S. Grant. Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Alan Shepard. Taylor Swift. Sarah Palin. And me, for whom this story was like a flag staked in my heart.
Lucy’s Memory
Great-Grandma Lucy would scrunch her eyes shut, the muscles around them twitching, as if it were her eyes that were doing the remembering. She might be wearing a blue housedress. Her stories were hard to follow, and we felt she had nothing to teach us, so it was easier to let her words flow over us while we thought of other things.
But there might be a story Lucy told that stuck. Like the one about the man who crossed the Mississippi on foot in the dead of winter when it was mostly frozen, or the time there was a ghost in the three sisters’ dorm room. How every night they would stack the pages of their thesis on the desk in a tall pile. And how every night a breeze with no discernable origin would blow the pages all over the room. They later learned a student working on his thesis had committed suicide right there in that room. Hanged himself in the closet.
Wait, who were those three sisters again?
Lucy would grab us by the wrist as we were walking by. She would call us by name. Then she would close her eyes. 1854. 1904. 1924. Don’t forget.
Outside in the sunshine we could hear our other cousins laughing about something. We wanted to be out with them. History was the past; we were the future.
Because of Lucy’s muddled way of telling it, the family history became mixed-up. Each person had their own way of trying to put it all together. Someone said the person who had walked across the Mississippi had been John Cotton, but then someone else said that couldn’t be because John Cotton had died years before, in Boston. Later, someone would remember that there had been a whole string of John Cottons—the first, and second, and third—so they could both be right.
But they weren’t both right. When an aunt finally found pages of one of the ancestor’s journals typed out by Lucy, who had painstakingly deciphered the loopy, inky handwriting, we learned that although John Cotton III had crossed the Mississippi River, it had been in a boat. It was his son-in-law, George Pascal, who had walked across it to secure a home for his new wife and son.
That much we all knew: that George Pascal had come to Iowa and started a homestead for his wife and son, a family that would eventually include seven more children. We all knew that it was because of this that we were from Iowa. It was because of this that the gaping black fields of spring, smelling of manure, could cause your heart to slow, like a sigh.
Angels of Destruction
Lot had offered the travelers a place to stay. So when the mob came knocking, calling for the travelers, seeking to harm them, Lot didn’t know what to do. He told everyone to be quiet and pretend no one was home. He extinguished the oil lamps, and they all sat in the dark. But the mob wasn’t fooled and kept chanting, “Turn them out! Turn them out!”
Lot could hear the crowd searching for something to break down the door, so he tried to bargain with them. “I have two daughters,” he called. “Virgins. You can do what you like with them.” Lot’s wife looked to her husband, startled. “What are you doing?” she whispered harshly. His daughters began to weep.
As the story goes, the travelers were not travelers, but angels sent to destroy the city. Not for the infamous reason, but because the people were arrogant, overfed, and unconcerned. They did not help the poor.
In a moment of mercy, the angels struck the mob blind and told Lot to take his family and run. Which he did. He ran into the hills and was spared. He was spared because he had offered his hospitality. He was spared for protecting the travelers, for being a relative of Abraham, for having once kept Abraham’s secrets in some kind of ancient bro-code. Offering up his daughters to be devoured didn’t factor into any of it.
With no other choice, the daughters followed their father out of the city, suddenly warry of him.
Tallgrass Prairie
The foundation of the grassland sea was roots 12 feet deep, white strings interlacing like the best sailors’ knots. Better. The reef knot and the clovehitch; the lines were cast to steady the tallgrass sails against the wind. Into the drift little rootlets pushed one millimeter at a time, until billions had been sewn into the earth.
If you could have sliced the prairie in half, you would have found an intricate tapestry, embroidered like the best handiwork of any farmwife. Better. But you can’t slice the earth in half. And you could hardly slice this earth one little inch. A cubic meter of Big Bluestem sod was made up of more than 20 linear miles of roots. A day’s journey bound up in one spot. 90 percent of the tallgrass prairie mass lay below the surface. What leviathans swam there?
When white farmers moved west from places like Vermont and Pennsylvania and their cast-iron plows met prairie, the prairie did not yield. Those knots did their job. They clung to the dense dirt for dear life. For the farmer, the work was hard and tedious and, most importantly, slow. A few acres here and a few acres there. By the sweat of your brow will you have food to eat until you return to the ground from which you were made. The furrows inched along throughout the first decades of the nineteenth century.
How could the work be made just a little bit easier? How could the ground produce just a little bit more? The farmers had no other questions. One more mouth to feed. One more bushel to sell.
Then, like a battleship glinting on the horizon, the steel plow arrived. The steel scoured the sticky soil and the inland sea parted, yielding up a sunken treasure. A treasure they did not fully understand.
Correction Lines
When George Worms Pascal first came to Iowa in 1853, the land was prairie. In his diary, George wrote, “The country was new and wild. We made our home near DeWitt. I surveyed for many years and traveled over the almost trackless prairies with my compass.”
There was work to do. George did not have a problem with work. He set up his family on a small farm and took a job as a surveyor. Iowa had been a state for only six years. Small communities were forming, but if you found yourself alone between these settlements, it was impossible to know what year it was. The shrubs and brush gave no indication of time. The birds sang memoires from thousands of years ago and tomorrow. It seemed just as likely you’d catch sight of a woolly mammoth as a steam locomotive.
The men carried their equipment, their food and their beds. They traveled in groups of four, camping most nights. They hauled a sixty-six-foot chain containing 100 links, known as a Gunter’s chain. Eighty lengths of the chain equaled 5,280 feet, or a mile.
George, who appreciated mechanical devices, would have protected and tended his compass like a gold watch. He had immigrated from France in his teens, so he would have had a bit of a French accent. Perhaps the other men laughed and imitated the way he did not pronounce this and that correctly, unable to get his tongue to make a sound that clogged his mouth like mud. Or perhaps the other men all had accents, too. Swedish and German.
The Land Ordinance of 1785: The Surveyors, as they are respectively qualified, shall proceed to divide the said territory into townships of six miles square, by lines running due north and south, and others crossing these at right angles. Each township was divided into thirty-six sections, one square mile each and numbered one to thirty-six. The Land Ordinance of 1785 set a minimum purchase amount of one section or 640 acres for $640, $1 per acre. Which was much too high for most men. Later the minimum purchase was lowered and then lowered again.
George wrote: “I traveled over the expanded prairies with my chain and compass, spread out my tripod from place to place and surveyed a parcel to be the future home of those who come to share our hardships and enjoy hopes and pleasures. And with much delight I watched hut after hut and shanty after shanty rise on the prairie.”
If you look at a map of Iowa counties, you’ll see it is comprised of ninety-nine little squares lined up in rows. Neat and orderly. It is almost perfect. But it is not perfect. The problem with surveying land into squares is that the earth is not square. It was George’s job to bring the earth back into line. As the surveyors went north, they had to correct for the curvature of the earth. So every twenty-four miles they made what is called a correction line. If you drive north through the fields of Iowa, every twenty-four miles or so you must turn, a jog in the road: a correction.
What is being corrected? The earth, for its meandering tendencies? Or men, for fighting what is?
Let’s Get Our Story Straight
All: We have to get our story straight. How do we want to be remembered? How will they be remembered?
Chorus 1: As pioneers. As the builders of our great state. As the family with the big house just out of town with the clock, the ingenious clock, and the seven ingenious children.
Chorus 2: They will be remembered as colonizers.
Chorus 1: They will be remembered as embracers of progress.
Chorus 2: They will be remembered as takers.
Chorus 1: Makers of progress.
Chorus 2: They will be remembered for ripping up the land to plant corn.
Chorus 1: The family with the happy Christmas parties and the sleigh.
All: We have to get our story straight.
Chorus 2: Someone has torn out pages of the journals.
Chorus 1: That’s for the best.
Chorus 2: There was a letter that Talitha wrote that said George tried to hit her with a hammer. Someone burned the letter. The letter was burned.
Chorus 1: That’s not what people want to hear. People want to hear about the clock.
Chorus 2: Lucy. Lucy burned it.
All: We have to get our story straight.
Why Did She Look Back?
Lot’s wife was disobedient, like a willful child testing the boundaries. The angels said not to look back, and she did it anyway. She had to be punished. If God didn’t follow through on his threats, no one would ever obey him again.
Some say she couldn’t let go of that life—a life of wealth, glamorous parties and beautiful things. She didn’t want to leave it behind.
Some say she wavered in her commitment to God. She could not keep marching forward when she had doubts. Who was this God anyway, who would destroy everyone she had ever known? Lydia and Japheth who lived next door, Miriam and Togarmah who would come over to listen to the harp and drink wine.
Others say she wanted to see God’s face and the sight of it is what did her in. The sign that stands at the bottom of Mt. Sodom, where the landform known as Lot’s Wife still presides over the valley, says: “She couldn’t contain her curiosity.” Like a cat, it killed her.
There is also the story that says she turned to see if her two eldest daughters, left behind in the city with their husbands (who had been told to leave, but thought it was all a big joke) had decided to come with her after all. Perhaps they needed her to reach out her hand to help them over the rocks. When she saw them, she planned to call out, “We’re over here. Come this way.” But of course, she never got the chance.
Implicated
My mother and I are trying to choose something to watch on Netflix. We notice Hillbilly Elegy. I say I don’t think I want to watch it; I’ve heard the criticism. She is unsure of what I mean. She read it—or more precisely, listened to the audiobook when she couldn’t sleep—and she very much enjoyed it. I say I didn’t read it but have heard something about how it does not accurately represent the plight of the Appalachian people. On my phone, I quickly Google the title and the word “criticism” and one of the first headlines says, “Does this memoir really explain Trump’s victory?”
I say I think it got a lot of attention because it came out right at a time when everyone was curious about why so many white, working class people voted for Donald Trump.
With those words, my mother’s tone changes. She becomes angry. “What does working class mean anyway?” she spits. “If you work, you’re working class. And aren’t there working class people in cities, too?”
“Of course,” I tell her. But again I mention that at the time many rural people had voted for Trump; others were curious about what was happening.
“And that’s not what a hillbilly is, anyway,” she says. “A hillbilly is someone who is uneducated, someone who doesn’t really know anything. Would you call George a hillbilly? Would you call Lucy a hillbilly?”
“No, I wouldn’t,” I say. “If anything, they’d be hicks. Hillbilly is specific to a place.”
Which my mother knows. That was a diversion. Because I see now what has upset her. Somehow she has been implicated. Our family—many of whom are from rural areas and did indeed vote for Donald Trump—has been implicated in being stupid, in voting for someone because they don’t know any better or because they can be easily manipulated. The definition of “hillbilly” stipulates that it is offensive and derogatory.
She tells me that the book was not political. It was not about politics. Why must everything be political. It was a story. A story she enjoyed about one person’s experience.
My mother has always loved stories. As did her mother before her. Part of the reason I chose to study literature was because I saw its power reflected back by my mother, who was moved by another person’s striving in a way that facts and figures fascinated but could not move her.
We end up watching a show where celebrities have their closets organized by professional organizers. Their closets are not closets; they are entire rooms.
The next morning my mother apologizes, telling me she looked it up herself and discovered that the book is indeed political and has been made more political by its author who talked nonstop about politics once the book was a success.
“I didn’t pick up on that,” she says. “I was just fascinated by the story.”
Mine
Maybe it’s because the ground was close to me. Maybe it’s because before I could grasp abstract concepts, I had to understand the concrete. Maybe it’s because my world was smaller then, so the things in it took on more importance. Whatever the reason, the landscape of my childhood—our yard in our small country neighborhood—was intimately known to me; I observed and chronicled it unlike any other environment I’ve encountered since.
The black ants that marched around our driveway in the summer, flaunting their small lives. The dirt patch under the bag swing in the backyard. The road in front of our house that was repaved with tar and gravel every couple years, leading my mother to spend weekends cleaning tiny black spots from the bumper of the car.
In the developmental process of individuation, in learning there is a me and a you, this place was me.
The first thing I ever memorized in my life was the address to that house: 110 E. Hazelwood, Geneseo, Illinois. It was important to know in case I got lost or, God forbid, was taken. So I practiced it to ensure I had it lodged in my mind and could recall it even under duress.
When they are yours, words stop being signifiers. Like the name of a lover, they contain too much. They lose their common meaning and take on a private one. 110 E. Hazelwood, Geneseo, Illinois, means irises and apple trees, my mother as a young woman, our dog hit and killed on the road, my brother’s Star Wars sheet set, walnuts from the front tree and those black ants.
As a child, I believed that 110 E. Hazelwoood, Geneseo, Illinois, had been conjured into existence at the moment my parents choose that spot for our family. They both had grown up in Iowa, but were setting off to make a home just across the Mississippi River, closer to my father’s job. It would become, what my mother would call, “our little corner of the world.” But, as every child eventually learns, the world contained all things before I entered it. Nothing was mine.
Stuck
Lot’s wife could not turn her head and catch a glimpse of tomorrow. She could not take a step forward. A pillar frozen in the open plain, she could only look back towards a city now destroyed. This was her punishment: to forever gaze upon the past.
There Is No Beginning
George Pascal’s wife, Talitha, who was a direct descendant of Richard Warren, reflected for the local paper about living in Iowa during the state’s early history. In the clipped out and Xeroxed article that Lucy saved, Talitha said:
“The Iowa weather was unpredictable as usual. The civil war had been over almost a year. The country was in a period of rebirth and rebuilding. Along the Mississippi River the steamboats paddled north with their cargo of supplies and people. In the sky the ducks and geese flew north on their journey up the Mississippi flyway. It has been so for thousands of years. No one knew when it began. The pioneers of Clinton County only took note of it as a sign of the season and a chance for roast duck or goose on the table.”
Where to End?
Is there an ending? I don’t think so. Let’s agree. There is no end. Each story, each person, must grope their way forward. On and on and on.
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Paula Carter is the author of the flash memoir No Relation. Her essays have appeared in The New York Times, Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, Creative Nonfiction, Fourth Genre and elsewhere. Based in Chicago, she teaches creative writing at Northwestern University.
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