Noah & Heather Smith Residence, Elizabeth

The House on the Outside

From the street it was nothing. One of the single-storey, red-brick-veneer houses that had gone up across Elizabeth Park in the early 1970s for the workers the northern plains had drawn, it sat behind a low fence and a patchy lawn, a concrete drive running to a tin carport, a great oak standing in the front yard with branches a boy could climb. Three small bedrooms ran off a narrow hall; the kitchen opened through a sliding door to a dining room where the telephone hung on the wall; the carpet had faded to a tired brown. It was an ordinary house in an ordinary street, and that ordinariness was the first of the things it kept.

The Smiths moved in early in 1986, not long after Noah Smith found steady work as a mechanic at a local Ford dealership — a family of four, Latter-day Saints, the sort of household the suburb was full of. They went to church on Sundays and the boys to Sunday school; the surface was kept. What the surface covered did not show from the footpath, and the family worked, in its way, to keep it from showing at all.

A Mechanic and a Poet

Noah was a gentle man, devout and steady, who believed in God's plan and tried to live as though belief were enough. He wore his late mother's small wooden cross under his shirt for the peace it gave him, though his church did not use crosses, and he turned his hand to whatever the house needed. He was a good man and a kind one. He was also, in the way that mattered most, helpless — able to provide for his wife and sons, unable to reach the thing that was hurting them, unable to heal what his love had not been able to protect.

Heather Marie Smith, born Atwell, was a poet and an artist of real gift, quick and vivid and tender on her good days. She also carried an illness that had never been named or treated, rooted in abuse she had suffered as a child and had never been able to speak of — a wound so old that she could lose her bearings in time, becoming several ages at once, the grown woman and the frightened child sharing one body. What medication she had was unreliable, and when it failed her she came apart. The tragedy of the house was never that she did not love her children. It was that the same love ran through hands that could not always be trusted.

The Weather of the House

Life inside ran on her weather, and the boys learned young to read it the way other children learn to read a clock. There were good days, when she wrote and told stories, smoothed their hair and checked for monsters under the bed and was everything a mother should be. There were bad days, when she withdrew or sharpened. And there were the very bad days — the episodes, when the pills weren't working — when the woman who had read them to sleep became someone they did not know and could not predict.

This was the particular cruelty of the place: not that it held a tender mother and a dangerous one, but that they were the same person in one body, turning from the one to the other between a morning and an afternoon with no warning and no seam. A child could be held and then struck by the same pair of hands and be unable to say where the one had ended and the other begun. The monsters of that house were not under the bed. They lived, as the younger boy would put it long afterward, in the space between a hug and a fist.

What the Boys Learned

Paul and Luke grew up as the survivors of it, and they learned the lessons such houses teach. They learned not to ask where things went — the toys that vanished year after year, the Christmas presents gone within weeks, as though the home were a black hole for childish joys — because asking led to sharp words and sharper hands. They learned to wear the bruises that bloomed where clothing covered them and to say nothing about them. They learned that some things existed only in the silences between ordinary life, and that the silences were to be kept.

Paul, the elder, was the builder — the boy who pulled the wreckage apart and made something from it, grave and capable and old before his time, the brother a younger one measures safety by. Luke was the sorter, the watchful one, who imposed an obsessive order on a kingdom of broken Lego because it was the single domain where nothing changed without his say-so. Where Paul built, Luke arranged and re-arranged, and both were doing the same thing by different means: making, in plastic, the predictability the house refused them.

It was a house that could not be shown, and so it mostly was not. The dysfunction kept the doors closed; the boys rarely had anyone over, because a home like that is a secret before it is anything else, and children feel the shame of it long before they have a word for it. What friendship Luke had, he had elsewhere — chiefly a boy from school named Jamie Greyson, whose company was a refuge precisely because it lay beyond the front door. Inside, his comforts were smaller and stranger: a stuffed toy he called Blue Bear; a ginger cat named Chloe who came and went through the garden and to whom he told the things he could tell no one else; the great oak he climbed to sit above the rooftops where nothing could reach him; and, more and more, his own dreaming — the soft-edged hours, the half-seen shadow with the burning eyes, the inner country he was learning to disappear into when the house grew loud.

The Bad Man

One winter afternoon stood for all the others. Luke, home sick from school and alone in the house with his mother, the day belonging — as the worst days did — to only the two of them, came out of his room into the hall to find her bleeding and wild-eyed and certain that a man had broken in. There was no man. What there was ended with the boy on the hallway floor, his head cracked against the boards and his lip split against his teeth, wetting himself in his terror, while the same hands that had done it smoothed his hair and asked whether he was all right.

Then she went to the telephone on the dining-room wall and called the police, and reported an intruder who had beaten her son, and the boy — bleeding, and a long way from understanding — heard himself agree that yes, it had been the bad man, because that is what a child does when the person hurting him is also the person calling for help. That was the house at its deepest wrong. It was not only the violence. It was the bending of the truth itself, and a small boy taught to bend with it, to protect the parent who had harmed him.

The Breaking

It could not hold, and in the middle of 1992 it broke. The marriage that had been failing for years came apart in a final violent confrontation, and this time Heather was removed from the house and did not return. The police, who had been to the address before, came again; the blood, that day as on others, was partly her own; and as always, in the end, nothing was formally charged. What ended was not a quarrel but a family — the household as the boys had known it simply ceased, mid-line, in the way the worst things in that house always seemed to end.

What the House Held

What remained was a diminished thing: Noah and his two sons going on in the brick house without the woman who had been its difficult, beloved, frightening centre. The secret did not leave with her. The neighbours, asked later, remembered the Smith boys as well-mannered and withdrawn — which was the truth as the street could see it, and not a tenth of the truth as the boys had lived it. The family never reconstituted. In time it left the house too, as the Greysons up the way and so many others left Elizabeth, and the place passed to whoever came next and kept, of everything it had held, precisely nothing.

For the house had held a great deal. Behind one of the most ordinary façades in an ordinary suburb, two boys had spent the childhood that made them — Paul learning the grave, dutiful steadiness he would carry, Luke first learning to vanish into the inner world that would matter so much to the rest of his life, both of them learning to survive a love that could not be trusted not to hurt them. The house knew none of it and kept none of it. The children carried all of it out the door, and that carrying was the whole of what the place had given them.