“Seven Houses” by Jeff Burt

Seven Houses

I was born to a lonely woman who clipped and stole red bottlebrush branches in full bloom from her neighbor’s tree and held the branches high to get bees to follow to her garden. She wanted a hive that dripped honey on the side of our house. But no matter how often she stole, in a few days the bottlebrush had withered and the bees were gone.
Mrs. Grossfeld, the owner of the bottlebrush, had warned mother that she’d hit her with a stick if she caught her stealing again, and had caught her, but assigned the caning to her husband, a lethargic, thin man, shorter than my mother, who simply grimaced when Mrs. Grossfeld assigned him the task. Mr. Grossfeld knew that my mother, being athletic and used to a life of physical activity, could outrun him, even carrying a bundle of branches, so he never tried.
We lived in a small pocket of houses, seven in total, only fifty yards from the busy highway, but without a connection to the highway for six miles. The houses had been built for railway workers in the 19th century, so stood near the old railway, which had been dug up and repacked with smooth, gold gravel for bike lanes, with overgrown Black-eyed Susans, wild purple statice, wild mustard, and hemlock rising up to the waists of the bicyclists, making it appear, as they passed, that they had no legs and barely any bike except the handlebars, a torso riding on top of the wild vegetation.
The houses were tiny but all freshly painted, as if it were a contest among the seven neighbors, brilliant blues and reds — four blues, three reds — alternating as they ran across the pocket. Old well pumps existed for all seven of the homes and all worked, with varying forms and finishes of large buckets or troughs beneath the faucets. It was into this small row of homes, seemingly forgotten by progress, that I was born to the woman who stole flowers to steal bees.
Not all of the old rail line had been torn out. A spur about a quarter of a mile from our house remained. It was there my mother spent her springs, summers, and falls while a small child, and I did the same. When she referenced growing up, that spur was nearly always mentioned with a far-away, dream-like gaze in her face, her words slowing and grateful. She often said her father was lonely after losing my grandmother to cancer, but that she, Emma, was just fine as a solitary, single child in an immense playhouse with thousands of things that spoke to her. She would end most of her recollections with the phrase, “not that I don’t see that now as a peculiarity.”
She was not cold but abrupt — not, she said, because of efficiency, but because of curiosity. She did not want to hear something repeated or banal, which is how people yacked, if it meant new information could be heard instead. Surrounded by a thousand plants, she said she could hear a thousand different conversations on a thousand different subjects. She worked as a supervisor for a federal home loan processor, with more than one-hundred employees under her. As for her employees, it did not take long before no one spoke with my mother and all she heard was the sound of her own voice. The more she spoke — the more often she spoke — the more her speech ran perpetually like a wide and swollen river, and her employees stood silently amazed and terrified as if welded to a bridge. She was fired.
I was conceived two months later, father unknown.
When I went away to college, the maze of the city’s existence opened its door, and I gladly raced, bumping into walls with sharp turns, running into dead ends, dating and non-dating hoping for romantic success. I missed my mother, our little out-of-the-way home, but, the truth is, I rarely called, and I tried to avoid going home. I saw Mr. Grossfeld a couple of times in the city for lunch and knew he would report back to my mother, so I always put on the happy, successful mask.
When I graduated, my temporary jobs could not pay my bills. I could not seem to land paying work. I returned to what I thought of as our home among the seven houses, which was not my mother’s current address, as it turned out. But I rested there a few days, walking the old circuit my mother used to take, and, just once, entering the Grossfeld’s yard and spying on the bees up in the bottlebrush.
“The house never belonged to your mother,” Grossfeld said, when he caught me sleeping in my car. “Your grandfather owned it, but he sold it to the doctor when he couldn’t cover a surgery, and the doctor let your grandfather and your mother live in it for a cheap rent. All those years. Must have been thirty years. Your grandfather, after he moved to a nursing home, he’d help her out once in a while with a payment. When the doctor died, his children decided to sell it, and the new owner wanted a lot more rent. About four times what your mother had been paying. She found a nice place, though. I visited her once. It’s cramped, maybe two-hundred square feet, just enough room for a kitchen and a bed and a bath, but magnificent windows that overlook a downslope to a creek full of willows. You should hear her go on about the bunnies that poke out of lilacs in the spring. At least, that year I visited her. I suppose you know all of that.”
I didn’t. I had assumed that it was our house, our home, free and clear, not tethered to a rent payment. When Grossfeld moved on, I trembled and, before long, shook.
I looked up my mother’s address and drove. I knocked, but she was not home, so I set out on foot toward the street with shops. I saw my mother a block away, peering through the window of a second-hand store. She wore a kerchief over her ears to keep her nerves protected from the wind. She bowed ever so slightly to peek through the glass and stood in that crook for over a minute.
I knew this was not window browsing. An object had drawn her into memory. I did not go forward and break that spell but admit I followed her from a safe distance. I saw, as I passed the shop, a photo of a girl in a white dress on a swing set near her father, who wore a white shirt, suspenders, and black trousers and had a garden rake in his hands.
My mother stopped in the local drugstore — or five-and-dime, as she still would have called it. She stopped in the tiny grocery store that had but two aisles and a well-waxed, if waffled, wooden floor and carried out a package of custom-sized meat for home, probably a pork chop.
She stopped in the park, raised her head to look at the pines and the needles furiously tossing in the wind, and smiled. No birds were skyborne. She leaned against a tree a little off the walkway and kept on looking up, at times seeming madly happy. It was then I knew she was a little girl again, spending time with her father near the seven houses.

Jeff Burt

Jeff Burt is a writer from California who has work in several different publications, including Williwaw Review, Willows Wept Review, Red Wolf Journal, HeartWood, The Nervous Breakdown, Spry, Atticus Review, and Gold Man Review. He was also the 2015 featured poet of Clerestory’s summer issue, and he won the 2017 Cold Mountain Review prize for narrative poetry.

Headshot: Linnaea Meyer

Photo Credit: Staff