HOUSES
                   by Eugene Hutchinson Mallory 2


                             CHAPTER 1
                          GRANDMA'S HOUSE

     It is to be understood this is grandmothers house and hers
alone. I was very short of grandfathers.

     Grandfather Mallory died just weeks before I was born and
Grandfather Ferris was a kind of blurry ghost, although he lived
on until I was fully grown.

     I had heard of my phantom grandfather, but I only saw him
once. I was playing in the yard at the old old house on Bridge
Street, the Park's house, we called it. This old man with
whiskers came into the yard and asked if my mother was home. I
said she was and he knocked on the door and went in. He was tall
and thin. He was dressed in neat old fashioned black suit and
could have played the undertaker in a western movie without
make-up or costume.

     I was not introduced and I do not remember him leaving. I
suppose I was whisked away to Grandma's house. I expect I was
not supposed to know who he was, but I knew. I was only about
six years old.

     I found out many things at grandmothers house. There were
traces left and anyway secrets were not so closely kept.
Grandfather Ferris was always referred to as Gramp and had left
his traces there and I could fill in the history of that black
clad ghost who walked through the yard and asked for my mother.

     Grandma's house was fascinating anyway. It was high and
square with a full height attic full of things. There was a
ladder and hatchway in the attic that led to a little flat roof
above. The house was on a little hill and from that deck you
could see all directions over the trees.

     There were four bedrooms on the second floor. Four rooms, a
big kitchen and a summer kitchen and a primitive bath on the
first floor. There was a cellar below and below and to one side
of that a regular dungeon with a massive door and three inch
bridge planks overhead that was called the cyclone cellar or the
cave but more often served as a refrigerator.

     There was also a square barn almost as big as the house
with a haymow empty except for a few old tools and a little
ancient dusty hay. It had a regular stairs instead of usual
primitive ladders and there was a partitioned off room with a
window and everything. This was supposed to be Grand's room.
There were also a nailed up trap door in the floor of the buggy
room. That was supposed to be a root cellar. There was another
caved in root cellar in the yard. What a place for a child with
imagination and secrets to detect.

     One of the first floor rooms was Grandma's bedroom. In
modern terms it would be the master bedroom. There she lived and
had her things and ruled the roost. The queen bee with the drone
cast out.

     What a life she had led to reach this haven. Her parents
were converted to the Mormon religion in England. They had begun
the pilgrimage to the new paradise in Utah, the fabled state of
Deseret. On the way she was born in Novia Scotia. Her parents
died as did so many who died before they reached that earthly
paradise. I hope they made it to the other one. Grandma survived
and was raised a Mormon, but when she reached that age she
fended off the amorous patriarchs with several wives already.

     This was an act of extraordinary daring for Mormons and
regular Christians were killing each other about as freely as
Christians and Moslems in Lebanon are now. For Gramp I gather
danger was just a normal situation. Later, she held the fort at
the Ferris cattle company in the Wyoming mountains when the
starving Indians came around with propositions that were very
hard to refuse. Government and railroad hunters had killed all
the buffalo to starve the Indians and take the grass for cattle.

     When Gramp's woodyard burned she sold her furs and bought
mules and leased them out to labor on the grade for the Union
Pacific. When that was not enough she started a boarding house
and fed the Irish immigrants who came to lay the track. She said
they were much like the Indians hungry and uncivilized.

     Grandma labored on that hardscrabble farm in Butler County,
Iowa while gramp chased wild horses in the west. Aunt Netty, her
oldest child walked many weary miles with heavy sack to gather
the red and knotty roots of the wild rose from the fresh turned
sod, they were fuel for the hungry stoves in that slew grass
prairie. There they ate the last of the prairie chickens a fowl
too innocent to live with humans. They could be killed with
sticks.

     When they moved to Hampton and Gramp's nursery failed that
was enough and Grandma sent him away to live on the pension he
had earned on the stricken field of battle at Apache Canyon and
Pigeon ranch and in the agony of the 64 mile march that had kept
the confederacy out of the west.

     Grandmother had born five children, three boys and two
girls. Two boys died in tragic circumstances. Aunt Netty never
married. My mother married William Sidel a railroad conductor.
He was killed on the Missouri Pacific and mother came home to
bury him and bear a dead man's child.

     Grandma was there as always solid and sure. So began the
tasks of another generation for this small frail woman. As we
always said little, but mighty.


                             CHAPTER 2
                           CHI PHI HOUSE

     The year is 1935. It is a bad year in Iowa. In 1933 the
farm industry had no prices. Most commodities were not worth
enough to pay the freight to market. Worthless livestock not
worth the little it cost to feed them, roamed the country roads.
In 1934 the drought came and very little grew. Prices went up,
but there was little to sell. Now in 1935, crops were fair, but
prices were falling like wounded ducks. The whole state already
drained of money was thinking, 'Here we go again.'

     The place was Lincoln Way "fraternity row," Ames, Iowa. I
had just stopped the car in a spray of flying sand at the curb.
Something is wrong. The Chi Phi house, the house that was never
dark, is dark and stares blankly back at me.

     Dorothy, my wife of two years, was with me. We were on our
way to the house in Hampton where I grew up. We both knew at
once what must have happened, but neither wished to say.

     The Chi Phi house had been home to me during the years
after my mother's death. My father had lain upstairs in the
Hampton house, lost in the ruined corridors of his mind. What
horrors he found there he could not, or would not say. One look
into his eyes made the looker grateful for the silence. I had
fled that house as soon as I could, and found refuge here, a
second home. Now it, too, was gone.

     The Chi Phi Alumni had owned this house. A downtown bank
had owned the mortgage. The bank had ended in that strange sad
holiday, the bank holiday of 1933. As long as the student
residents could generate enough revenue for the alumni to keep
up interest and taxes, the house went on. The alumni had made up
shortages before, but were too hard pressed themselves to do so
again. The bank liquidators had no choice either. The word was
"foreclose." How many dreams and plans and lives too had been
foreclosed in those bitter years! The word hovered a chilling
presence in the air between us, but we did not speak. I thought
I could make out the Chi Phi name plate beside the door and
said, "I think I can see the name still there. I am going to
look." I left, before a woman's realism could end the faint and
futile hope.

     Halfway up the walk I was sure the bronze was there. CHI
PHI. We did not flash our Greek around. The Greek was reserved
for the plain red and gold badge. "Badge, not pin, you clod." I
touched the name plate to be sure. The door was locked. It
should not have been, but unless repaired, the back door could
not be locked.

     I went across the lawn and down the steep and rutted drive.
The flat unpaved lot held no cars, or did it? There was
something at the back. I had a little feeble light. A flash and
I recognized the hulk. Stu's ancient and decrepit Auburn
Speedster. It had brought him from Chicago in style, but once
down the drive it never had the strength to bring itself back
up. I turned away, leaving the carcass in its trap.

     I headed for the kitchen door, pushing aside almost
tangible memories. Freddy Wilson's new hat, the endless verses
of "God, but it's cold in Iowa." The door yielded as I knew it
would. The outside air was sharp with cold. Inside, the air was
colder still, and lifeless and heavy in the chest. What was in
this house? I had met death in that other house, on the days
when caskets banked in flowers had stood before the curved glass
of the parlor windows and old Mr. Bebee came to leave his card
and pay his respects to those whose lives had worn away. That
was a house where death had come. What went with death, death
and desolation. Desolation had come here.

     A verse from Scripture I had learned in this house came
slowly back to mind. The Chi Phi founding fathers had used it in
the ritual they wrote a hundred years ago. It was natural since
six of the twelve had Reverend before their names. "---the
flower of the field flourisheth. The wind passeth over it. The
place thereof knows it no more." Indeed, some ancient seed had
sprouted and come to flower here. The wind had passed and here
it would be no more.

     I suddenly realized that, lost in thought, I was wasting my
feeble light. Did I need a light to think? I snapped it off and
soon found that in this place in this darkness, I did not think
so well. The light came back a little stronger and I decided to
look into the dining room.

     Something was crunching underfoot, the Chi Phi china
smashed upon the floor. Vandals had been here, the tribe that
ravaged Rome. Could they never die?

     The huge oval table was still there, but my light would
hardly reach its length. It had been stripped and only rags of
padding covered the naked lumber.

     I called back the vision of the last formal dinner I had
seen here. The small town and country boys sweating in their
stiff collars, hard shirt fronts and black bow ties. Our dandy,
Melcher, at ease and resplendent in white tie and tails. The
girls, bare arms and shoulders gleaming in the candlelight. The
strapless ones a bit uneasy at to just how much was gleaming.

     All so young, rehearsing the glamour and sophistication of
the lives they hoped to lead. The vision was hard to hold. The
malignant gloom devoured the candlelight. My little light was
fading too, its battery sucked dry by the darkness and the cold.
It was time to go.

     When I reached the car, I told the news, "I got in all
right, but they are gone and the place is vandalized."

     Dorothy put her arms about me and said, "You are shivering,
Gene. Let's go home."

     That car was new and fast. No killing wind could pass over
us that night. The Hampton house was home again. The next time I
was on fraternity row, the Chi Phi house was gone and the
basement yawned an open grave.

     The details of the break-up, I never knew. No one was ever
hopeful enough even to write and ask for money.

     Money and hope were both in short supply in the Iowa of
1935.


                             CHAPTER 3
                        THE ANDREWS' HOUSE

     The time was not long after I found my second home, the Chi
Phi house, deserted and vandalized and with my tiny light had
fought the desolation for one more glimpse of what had once been
there.

     Now, I was in my own house, my parents' house, the Andrews'
house, named for those who built it. The Sunday morning sun was
bright and the bevels of Belgian glass in the big window were
making little rainbows on the worn Oriental rug. The English
grate is filled with glowing coals and the house is warm and
alive in the way that only visible radiant heat can make a house
warm in the Iowa cold.

     That stubborn grate that had so disappointed my mother by
refusing to work properly, never-the-less, until her death, she
had protected it from my inquisitive hands. Once in charge, I
had had my way. I spread its many parts upon the floor and
discovered the source of its malaise. Now it burned clean and
bright. It was too late!

     The house, too, was clean and neat. Dorothy, and Irene
Williams our friend and cleaning lady, and a real lady she was,
had brought it all to order Saturday.

     Dorothy and I were reading the Sunday Des Moines Register
as all proper Iowans did every Sunday morning in those times.
With us was our tiny Boston terrier, Annie. Orphan Annie,
because the breeder had given her away since she was a runt and
he said we could never raise her. Well, Dorothy had nurtured her
into eleven indomitable pounds of healthy dog, so smart that we
had to spell the words we didn't want her to hear.

     The door bell rang, and I found an old lady in Sunday
clothes on the porch. She said, "I'm Mrs. Andrews. I'm visiting
the town after all these years, and I wondered if I could see
the inside the house."

     Mrs. Andrews, a legend at our door, maybe even a ghost.
Legend or ghost, a lady in distress, that was plain to see.
Would she weep, or turn and flee, worst of all do both? A
weeping, wailing, fleeing ghost on fifth street---that would
never do!

     "Yes, Mrs. Andrews, come right in. We have often thought of
you. My wife loves this house. She will want to talk with you.
Do come in, it's cold out there."

     She came in, my wife came up, and I closed the door and
made the ladies known all in a flurry of activity. Then the
tears came down. Dorothy led the guest away to console her tears
in women's ways and I was left a helpless man to wonder what
memories had loosed the flood.

     Was it daughter Clara, just grown up, to be taken by a
cancer, or was it the heroic daughter Maude. Maude had gone to
nurse the soldiers who fought against the German Kaiser's men.
She had labored in the stricken wards where the Spanish
influenza raged until her strength was gone and the flu had
taken her.

     I had a horrid thought. Dorothy's father had the railroad
restaurant in Des Moines at the time of that Spanish plague. As
a little girl, she had seen the bodies of the soldiers from the
fort, all wrapped in burlap with tags upon their toes. Seen them
on the platform, stacked upon the baggage trucks, waiting for
the trains to take them home. Their dreams of glory done. Had
Maud come home like that? But, no, she was commissioned. For
her, they would have found a box.

     Could it be the quiet times? Sometimes these are the
hardest memories to bear: The mother and the daughter in the
sewing room upstairs, the husband and the son hard at work in
the basement building that famous boat, so big they had to take
away the wall to get it to the water. I had always wondered--did
it float?

     The husband, I did not even know his name--E.P. he was to
all, E.P. he was to me. We would have to guard our tongues.
Strange noises in the library, that no one could explain. We
just said "E.P. is looking for that book again." That joke would
not be funny while our guest or ghost was here.

     There was no library ghost. If this house had a ghost I
should have found it long ago and I knew just where. At the end
of that long dark upstairs hall, the one leading to the maid's
room and the kitchen stair. Yes, I would have found it there,
crouching in the stairwell like a troll.

     Enough of this, our present ghost is better now and she
will have some tea.


                             CHAPTER 4
                              REQUIEM

     In a recent year I went back to Iowa, not by the magic
bridge at Blair to old Iowa as it was, but by airplane to Iowa
as it grew to be in the years I was away. I was the guest of the
last Mallory in the town, my cousin Dewitt's widow. At
eighty-five, she made me welcome in her well-served house. I
read to her my mother's record of those long ago family times we
both remembered, but she told me things I was too young to know
and filled in many dim and missing places in that written
record.

     I also tried to see the old town, but I found the changes
most confusing. I was chauffeured about by friends and
relatives, but all remained confused and strange. Bill Robinson
had given me the keys to his little Saab and I tried to drive
myself about, but that was worse.

     All the street names had been standardized by order of the
postal people and I was looking for the streets of my childhood.
I had not come 2000 miles to see standard streets; I could find
those anywhere. I wanted Fifth and Bridge.

     So I decided I would walk and see the little things and
even things no longer there. After all, the town was small and
the distances were short in blocks if not in time.

     The modest spire of St. Patrick's little church was the
first thing I saw that roused a memory and fixed me in familiar
space. I had seen old St. Patrick's go up in holy smoke and I
had seen this one built stone by stone and brick by brick.

     Soon I was in the front of the old square frame house where
Father McMahon had lived next door to the church. But I can see
a sign upon the church front beside the door that does not look
holy to me. "Franklin County Alcoholic Rehabilitation Center."
Well, I knew that Father McMahon had surely gone to his reward
and I suppose God has moved to a bigger house across town, like
everybody else. After a little thought, it seemed right that
this once-hallowed hall still served the good, but it did seem
strange.

     At any rate, I know just where I am. Once round the church
corner, it is two blocks up the street to old house and only one
more to the end of the street, but I don't recognize old house.
I know it is there because my hostess said she had been inside
not so long ago, and had even left a tear or two behind. I can
see Frank and Julie Smith's fine brick house. Old house should
be just across the alley. No wonder I'm bewildered, the alley is
gone. Who would or could steal my alley?

     That alley where men and patient horses had brought our
groceries, our ice, our coal and the Gaithers, the lowest of the
low, had come with that old wagon with four wobbling wheels to
take away the garbage, the ashes, and the trash.

     A little closer, and I see there is a new double garage
where the alley used to be. It must belong to the Smith house.
There was a garage built into that house, but it was very small,
too small for later cars, before the Arabs shrunk them down.
I've found old house, hiding behind a coat of muddy green.
Someone has read that Victorian houses should be painted in dark
colors. He should give up reading. I don't like the look, but
it's not mine.

     I wonder who got the alley closed and built that intruding
garage in the alley where I played. Roy Hamilton bought their
house when Frank and Julie died. He liked big cars and he died
in one amongst the flying glass and rending steel.

     I remember how proud Roy was when Vice-President Henry
Wallace came to visit. Even though that was about the time when
Henry was so ridiculed because he proposed to send our surplus
food to feed the Hottentots. What a foolish man! At least now we
know enough to send such folk our surplus tanks and fighter
planes.

     Well, whoever took my alley, I forgive. I do not need that
alley anymore.

     Old house is alongside now and here is my new garage. The
one I built attached to old house. It is not authentic, but it
blends well and is so convenient. We could reach the car in
winter without braving arctic blasts and it would start not sit
there like an iron statue. It would go.

     Oh, I was too clever. If I had kept my old garage entrance
by the alley, no one could have taken that alley. The apple
trees, the Wealthy and the Whitney Crab, had stood where my new
driveway ran. Those elegant lattice fences, so expensive to
replace, had to go, comfort and convenience bought at too high a
price. It was a way of life.

     Yes, old house, I did you wrong. Like Carryl Chessman I can
only plead the incredible folly of my youth. Much good that plea
did him. It is but a poor excuse, and don't you tell me that we
who lament our youthful follies are only mourning our inability
to repeat them. I know it all too well.

     Where are the other trees? I was told my giant tree was
still there. How could I miss it? It towered a hundred feet in
the air and sent its whirling helicopter seeds spinning down to
fill the gutters. I see it now a rotting, mutilated stub, not
twenty feet in height. Only the massive trunk still defies the
chain saw. Well, trees are mortal too. The Elm, the fragrant
Linden, and the bountiful Butternut, all are gone. That
Butternut was young and strong. Someone should pay for that, but
I cannot accuse. If I could total up the score, I have cut down
more trees than I have planted. I am not proud of that. It is
not the Mallory way or the Ferris either.

     Well, old house, no tears for you, although you were the
place where there were little rainbows on the rugs and Dorothy
plied a ghost with tea.

     Across the street, the Manatt house looks much the same.
Maude and Doc lived there. Behind it I can just see the Loven
bungalow where May Loven lived alone. A little drama happened
there. One day, weary of the pain of life, May locked her doors,
turned on the gas and let down the oven door. Then she knelt
before that lowly altar and put down her head to die.

     Maude saw her through the window and called Doc, but he
said he could not get in. She called me, I said I could. I came
and broke the door and brought May out. Doc revived her,
reluctantly I thought, but with Doc it was hard to tell for he
too was gassed, but with alcohol.

     I'll not cross the street. Over there I have done enough,
perhaps too much. Anyhow, this is Fifth Street, or it was. Now
it is called Central Avenue South East, also Iowa Highway 10.

     I'll turn here. It is only one block to Bridge Street. I
was born on Bridge Street, one short block back the way I've
come. That house is no longer there, nor is the Colorado Blue
Spruce, the perfect one that my prideful father planted just for
me. I have outlived my natal tree.

     As I make the turn, I can see old soldier Krone's little
house snuggled close against old house's bulk. There is plywood
in the windows and it too is painted muddy green. Oh, how angry
old Krone would be, but he long since rejoined that grand and
ghostly army that marches on forever to fight Abe Lincoln's war
against the rebels of the south.

     A little farther and I stand at Fifth and Bridge. For a
moment I see it as it was. Three graceful houses and Walnut
Castle standing tall. Oh, it was not a castle, just Claude
Raymer's pretentious house, but it was as close as Claude could
make it.

     There is the old highway sign: Jefferson Highway--New
Orleans to Winnipeg--Palms to the Pines. All the telephone poles
are stenciled with that J-H monogram, the one that marked that
long and crooked way. Those were hardy souls that followed those
marked poles in Model T's and Overlands.

     The traffic light clicks over and old Iowa is gone. The
real thing is here and I try to think how things got this way.
Walter Robinson had bought the Raymer house and he and Grace
lived there. She loved it so she called it her Walnut Castle for
the beautiful wood inside.

     The depression came and broke the bank. As cashier, Walter
was a ruined man. Diamond DX Oil wanted a station on that
corner, for Jefferson was now U.S. Highway 65 and Fifth was Iowa
10. They did not want the house, just a little station on the
lawn, and here are 8000 lovely dollars. Oh, zoning laws,
environmental impact statements and all those lawyer things,
where were you when we needed you. Walter took the money and
went away in shame.

     They felled the noble trees and cut away the lawn. The
little station cowered against the tower's base, the saddest
joke I've ever seen.

     The major oils felt they must compete on that corner, so
they came with money too. Harry Henderson, our county school
chief was first to take the bait although he must have known his
dreadful secret must come out. When they took the house away, it
was plain to see there was no sewer, no toilet in his house. In
the garage was a secret privy. Oh, Harry! A privy on our street!
How could you!

     Diamond's funny little station could not compete, so
Diamond bought the castle and tore it down, and built a bigger
station. Soon two other major oils bought the last two houses,
but when I look around I see only three oil stations. Not
enough? Where the castle stood is just a parking lot and a tacky
lunch room. Those major oils are tough competition.

     I could have a cup of coffee there, but was that lofty
tower leveled and those massive walls thrown down that I might
have coffee. No, I will be moving on.

     I look back and see old house sitting there in this ruined
neighborhood, in this poky town. I tell old house there is
nothing I can do for you. Your doom was sealed when Walnut
Castle fell. Someday a bulldozer will come clanking down the
street and it will have come for you and it will crush your
bones.

     This I would not want to see. So I will be moving on.

     As I walked away, my thoughts came trippingly along with
me. Goodbye old house, I have no tears for you and, what is
more, when I get back to California I'll tell Dorothy all I've
seen and ask her why she wasted all those tears on you.

     The next thought was like a screaming cannon ball. You
idiot, she is not in California. You will tell her nothing. Ask
her nothing. But if you are bound to try, walk on. The cemetery
is not so very far and you can always find her there.

                   Put not your trust in houses
               For they are cruel and tricky things
                  And they will have their price
                 In tears for all they do for you.