allways // entry six

entry six

HOME & REGRETS

The plan for this ongoing review had been to neatly chop these entries up into two-to-four hundred page blocks, as the chapters seemed to flow tidily enough. At some point, the story began to flow incredibly quickly and I realized I was tiptoeing towards page 900 and the finale of the book, perhaps. I had to (hold my horses) pull back a second and gather my thoughts. It seems as if an entire lifetime of action had passed since my last gathering of notes. [1]

It has been a very tiring journey for our protagonists. They have traveled quite far, especially if we’re going by vertical distance. There is a lot of natural (and supernatural) wonder as Tom’s Crossing continues, and I realize once again that I've sort of taken those whimsical elements for granted. It doesn't feel out of place or belonging to pure fantasy. You immediately accept things as they are given. This may be due to the structure of the narrative: there are plenty of offramps for those logically-inclined. Things like, "depending on who you ask," and "at least that's how it seemed..." are seen more and more as the tale goes on and sometimes becomes more absurd in places. But again, this all feels totally fitting. It's a tall-tale that continues to spiral and you want to believe it as our heroes directly experience it. You know it's real to them and what’s most likely not far from reality (if at all, any different).

Though far and away not in any similar format to House of Leaves, structure-wise... it's not really all that different when you take a step back. Instead of footnotes and referential details, the still-unknown (though I have my suspicions...) narrator can go on endless tangents. They frequently quote conversations, both casual and academic, from dozens (hundreds?) of random speakers from all over the world, but who are all discussing the events of the story, from a unique point of view. Some of them are professors, some are people who grew up in the small town in Utah, some others are... more familiar than others. This all builds on the feelings I last wrote about. This makes it all feel like a well-known piece of modern urban legend and folklore, as well-known as the Bermuda Triangle or Bigfoot. But based in concrete, news-covered reality. I am wholly able to believe that this all happened, and am slightly terrified about learning how it all comes to a conclusion. With all of the trepidation up until this point, dwelling on that not-too-distant future that we're speeding towards, I can't help but feel worried. [2]

And that's exactly the point.

In addition to all of these various points of views being offered, MZD continues to dig into many characters, and many of these side-characters, and their worlds of minor guilt. Each of them sometimes dwell on a mistake or an option of variables that were at hand. Sometimes, the narrator does this theorizing for them (building on the anxiety that we as the readers feel). But all of these What-Ifs (sometimes referenced literally as such) sow the seeds of both self and narrative doubt. How reliable are secondhand accounts? How reliable are media accounts? How reliable is anything we're reading? For one, we know it's fiction, but which part of it do we want to believe? Which part of it do we choose to believe?

Damn, man. Do I love this kind of story. [3]a

Tom’s Crossing continues to harp on the theme of regrets and the choices made forever altering one's future. This feeling can be applied to anyone, anywhere, about anything. But the narrative frequently reflects this back towards individual characters and their own, specific, flaws. For instance, Kalin's mother Allison, frequently muses on how often she had run from problems in her life. How hard it was to feel like a place was home. How much of that feeling of safety was foreign, and how desperately she wishes that Kalin could feel that security, somewhere... but even when that's within reach, there is always something that pulls her small family away from that safety net, whether it's dire poverty or her criminal husband.

Though I can't directly relate to those specific struggles, having all of the minor, bit-characters who add their opinions on the events of the story, combined with Allison's disillusions about home, did kind of congeal into a personally meaningful allegory for me. I think about and miss numerous classmates and friends from over the years, people who I haven't spoken to in just as long, and feel that we are now only strangers. I know they haven't thought of me as much. Even if I could reach out to them, it probably wouldn't mean as much to them as it does to me. I guess I can relate to "not feeling at home," but with not being able to feel those innocent friendships anymore, relationships that are impossibly contained to childhood. And that's growing up, that's becoming older - but it doesn't make it any less disheartening.

And then, to that extent, I'm still now choosing to not act on that manic potential, of reaching out to them. I mean, for some, it's simply the fact that they're no longer alive. No one talks to the dead for free. But even still, action or inaction, that's a decision, one that's easy to regret, no matter which way you go.

Thinking on all of these matters, it's easy to also reflect on the settings of these topics of thought: previous homes, the places you grew up, places where you overcame traumatic events or experienced the most joyous of times. MZD also segues into this perfectly within the thematic framework.

The town of Orvop becomes a character itself, both vividly described and accented by the mountains where most of the story takes place. It feels like a distant relative or old friend, because every character and bit opinion is somehow linked to it, or at least offering their two cents. There's a lot of beauty in the nature surrounding it, but it itself is never really highly regarded in the narrative, though that's mostly a reflection of the characters, potentially overinfluenced by characters with a negative mental framework. Perhaps that is something I should pay attention to in further reading: do I detect any love for the town itself, or just from particular inhabitants? How do they feel about town, about home itself?

One thing in this line of thinking that immediately comes to mind is one of the Porch brothers, one of the only ones that seemingly had a chance to be decent, even if they failed, and their view on the setting. "He hated Utah. But he missed it every day." What a simple, devastating statement.

Something else I'm thinking about is how literally wide open the spaces most of the setting is, but again how claustrophobic it can all feel. I know I felt that way in my last entry, mostly due to the suffocating chapter involving the mine, but I'm coming to the realization that sometimes, feeling boxed in is simply because the characters may be even closer to the sky. [5]

What an odd thought. The purest natural freedom puts our characters in the clearest, most visible, most suffocating, danger.

Footnotes

[1] Continuing themes about running away and getting stuck on choices made versus what may have been.

[2] Upon reading this portion of the book, I have repeatedly come back to thinking about Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space (1958). Here is a brief overview for those who may be unfamiliar. It is unlike other philosophical work, as it speaks of architecture as the canvas through which to view life and how it influences us, how it affects everyone, and how our perception of the spaces in which we live reflect our innermost feelings and our views of the future and our ambitions. It is both philosophical and whimsical.

Sometimes the house of the future is better built, lighter and larger than all the houses of the past, so that the image of the dream house is opposed to that of the childhood home…. Maybe it is a good thing for us to keep a few dreams of a house that we shall live in later, always later, so much later, in fact, that we shall not have time to achieve it. For a house that was final, one that stood in symmetrical relation to the house we were born in, would lead to thoughts—serious, sad thoughts—and not to dreams. It is better to live in a state of impermanence than in one of finality.

The primary antagonist of the novel, Old Porch, spends a lot of his time scheming and only occasionally dwells on previous missteps. He is calculating, there is hardly a mistake to regret, as it usually and eventually works out in his vile favor. That does not mean he is free of guilt or cynicism regarding how things have ended up, disgusted, at times, at the current state of things. Whether or not he has the capacity to place the blame (justifiably) on himself, remains to be seen. We read about the constant, cluttered state of disrepair and half-hearted renovation of his homestead. It can read, perhaps, as an on-the-nose metaphor for his life and what he has built up until this point, for his family, but mostly for him.

There’s a lot to be “proud” of, but is there anything to cherish? Has he already lost the things he would or should have been holding onto (or even, the capacity to recognize them)?

[3] In a rare sort of dream, I hadn’t thought about a family gathering or reunion of family friends. Instead, I recall a weird conversation between myself, my brother, and my uncle. We were messing around with a small handful of tools. I found a lancelet, a small bit used to draw blood for testing purposes. I purposefully shot myself in the thumb, and we laughed about it. I felt the pain and saw the small bead of blood pool up. My uncle asked to try it next. In dream logic, I quickly handed it off to him, and then applied pressure to my own injury. Suddenly, I felt intense panic and the sweeping realization of what he was about to do, however minor. I turned to him, immediately urging him to stop, when I heard the click of the mechanism. I woke up before he drew blood.

[4] Murder by Gaslight: A Crime of Passion

[5] Shoutout to robert s. Dinsmoor.

End Notes

The whole ordeal had sat a little oddly with me. It wasn't like reopening an old wound or anything, for we were never super close to begin with, but having the entire decade or so since I had seen the kid summed up and closed so dramatically was just a weird space to sit in. Too many friends, classmates, and loved ones have died since I was a kid. At the time, it was just shocking and sad. I know for a fact that I never took the time to really sit with it and process them. It's taken a few years in therapy now to properly work through the really significant ones, but it's still a tab that I'm paying back. Would poor Jamie Clough be added to that list? I guess time would tell.

When the rest of the week had gone by and I was still thinking about that five minutes of scrolling on my deceased schoolmate's page, I felt the need for action. Not that I knew what that would look like or what it would resolve. I looked back through the pictures and comments that were now only echoes and came back around to his check-in at the old jail now functioning as a museum.

The weather had finally broken and it was sunny and warm out again. I figured visiting a cold, stone structure was the perfect afternoon out.

The building itself is a lasting image. Just a rectangular monolith of stone and concrete against a short lawn. I was proven correct as I entered: the temperature seemed to have dropped by at least ten degrees once I moved away from the foyer. I know the serendipitous move would have been to track down a volunteer or museum employee and ask about my classmate by name, they'd light up and say that they knew exactly who I was talking about and he was a good kid and would put my feelings of discomfort at ease. They'd pat me on the back and I'd leave the prison with a pamphlet describing the deeds that undid the apparent crimes of his ancestor.

Obviously, that did not happen.

I learned about the history of the building and some notable criminals that ended up there. That's where I met the ghost of a ghost.

I'll link to a better account of the crime, but I found Jamie's relative, Joel, who murdered, was tried, and hanged in the 1800s. It's a gross, however brief, story about a man who was stood up by the woman he was enamored with, and lashed out when he was rejected, murdering the poor lady. The story following his arrest is also dramatic, detailing his attempted escape from the third story cell, his time in the prison's dungeon, his appealing due to the terrible conditions, and consecutive guilty verdicts. No one was sympathetic to his concerns about the conditions of the jail cells, nor should they have been. It was obvious that he was guilty and eventually he confessed.

There was a recreation of a gallows in the yard when I visited and I assumed that that's exactly where the condemned were hanged. With the prison being famously haunted, I assumed that multiple deaths occurred here. I felt as if I was walking the grounds of the doomed dead man, recreating the path of his last days.

After making the maximum use of my day at the museum, I briefly walked around town before settling at an equally famous local ice cream parlor and sat on a bench outside. Cars passed and children laughed as I sat there, perhaps looking too dramatically at the candied cone in my hand.

It was there that I realized the contradiction that I hadn't understood I had been uncomfortably sitting with, unable to reconcile the thoughts of the day. There was a recreation of the gallows and the museum certainly leaned into its haunted legend and notoriety, but I now remembered the words of an elderly volunteer that was speaking to a group of college kids as I was leaving: no one had ever actually been hanged on the jail's grounds, nor was anyone buried on the property.

Why did this make me so uneasy? I felt as if there was something out there, whipping in the air, not giving a satisfying conclusion to my personal, unspoken journey to salve the loss of my classmate and the short lifetime of mental anguish his ancestor's crime had apparently inflicted.

This offhand comment, all those years ago on the hill past the train tracks, stuck with me, and apparently affected Jamie well-enough that he had visited this same museum where I sat two blocks from, just a year or two before his untimely death. Did he find some peace? Was there anything left to resolve for him? I guess I was being selfish, hoping for the happy ending that for all I knew, didn't and couldn't exist.

I left town before the sun began setting and thought about this on the entire drive home. There was, apparently, one more twist in this story that I had randomly picked up and had begun improvising based on a classmate whom I had not spoken to in over a decade. I felt that I was not the first to walk this path and would have my gut feeling confirmed.

I could not escape the sinking feeling of this story that I had written myself into, and felt myself in the pull of that emotional drain. When I returned home that night, I tried to ride out the weird and unsettling vibe and catch up on one of my favorite publications, Weird NJ. If nothing else, reading the latest issue always allowed me to find a new unique place to visit and hopefully write about. Never could have anticipated this coincidence. This synchronicity.

The final article of this issue was about none other than the Burlington County Prison and its museum. Wouldn't you know, the feature of the article was about the infamous Joel Clough: murderer, hanged man. [4]

The words of the volunteer stuck with me: no one was buried in the grounds of this prison. The sentiment was affirmed by this article, but not as directly as they probably would have liked. Historic accounts of the hanging state that the gallows was erected not that far away, on the Marne Highway, and then the man's coffin was buried "within the grounds of the prison."

Neither of these things are confirmed with history. No evidence of bodies have been found in the dirt of the property. No evidence or accounting of the gallows exists.

Looking at a map, the Marne Highway is now a thoroughfare to the major business highway in the area, Route 38, and the main roads leading back to Mount Holly, where the prison stands. Where this murderer finally lays and rots is nebulous, up in the air and somewhere within the triangle of these locations.

If the gallows were constructed somewhere that is covered by a road in modern times, I still think that some historic society would be able to note that. History is built over all the time, but there is usually someone knowing, or some evidence, of what used to stand there. Hell, H.H. Holmes’ Murder Palace in Chicago is gone, but we know where it used to be, and that a post office now stands over it.

Where were the gallows? Where was this man buried? Why did I feel the need to answer these questions?

Why do I feel guilty about the death of my classmate? Why do I feel that Jamie went through this same journey and self-imposed process of trying to answer an impossible question.

There was nothing more to be done that night. I let the candles around my house burn low and finished my reading of the magazine. As I went to sleep, I saw the triangle I had mentally imposed over the map: Marne Highway and forestation that still stood around it, the road through town, and the old prison. I asked myself if any proof of this piece of history still existed out in the wild. I wondered if Jamie had found it, or if he had ever even cared to.

This line of thinking was an unending hallway that somehow kept looping back around to that afternoon on the hillside and Cameron's confiding in me about the Clough's family history. I resolved to gather my thoughts and then get in touch with him, another friend whom I hadn't really known since I was still a kid in high school.

There were plenty more out there who were still alive that I should have done the same for, but that would have to wait until another day.

Field Notes // House Fragments