Whittling at the Edges of Childhood

Home Fires

AROUND 1912 Junie Sullivan, my grandfather, left his father’s farm in Stafford County, Virginia, and came five miles across the Rapppahannock River to Fredericksburg. On two lots that cost ten dollars each, he and his brother Burley built a two-storey, four-room house. Like the common Irishmen that they were, they were also common workers: farmers, railroad hands, carpenters, distillers, roofers, painters. The house was solid and in its original form well-proportioned. By the time I was born thirty years later, the house had been expanded along its left or west side. The new sections included a middle parlor room, adjoining bath, pantry, kitchen, and enclosed back porch. Under the kitchen had been dug a cellar for the canning jars and potatoes, and the cellar roof had been covered over by a lattice porch. Later we built a summer porch along the front of the parlor and kitchen.

Although the house was trim, square, and snug, the work of competent carpenters, it was built in the days before wall insulation. In the summer the silver maples across the front on the south side of the house shaded the porch, and in the evening, we opened the windows and a single electric fan moved the air. In the winter there was little between the cold and the heart but double wallboards and two wood stoves. One of these stoves was in the kitchen, the other in the parlor, and they made the only heat we knew through the winter. The kitchen stove was the day stove. This was the first stove lighted in the early morning and the one kept burning through the day. The parlor stove was not lighted until evening. These were not potbelly stoves but squat elongated stoves with a rectangular firebox and flat tops on which a kettle of water always sat. The kettle kept water hot for tea or coffee and added humidity to the hot dry air of the rooms. Some days a pot of soup or stew was cooked on the top of the kitchen stove.

Behind the house was a nest of wooden buildings, sheds we called them, that housed chickens, feed, tools, and much else. There was a smokehouse with a dirt floor, fire pit, and specially sealed and vented eaves to hold the smoke while the hams and shoulders cured. Next to the smokehouse was the garage/butcher shed, its floor deep in sand, with a wide low platform table that we covered in salt as we cut up the hogs and began curing the meat. In this shed was also the white oak barrel we filled with water and made brine in to cure herring as we cleaned them, before we packed them in salt to last through the winter. One of the sheds was the woodshed, and here was stored, usually two or three pickup-truck loads at a time, the sawn slabwood we burned in the kitchen and parlor stoves. Slabs, the part-round bark sides of logs cut in the mill, were cut again, crossways, into twelve- or eighteen-inch lengths to fit the wood stoves. It was mostly pine with some white oak and hickory mixed into the loads as well. A full pickup truck load cost about $2.50, and it was thrown in a heap into the woodshed. In the winter, Billy Withers, my cousin, and I played in the woodshed and stacked up the wood in parapets to make forts. In the summer, the woodshed was the entire domain of spiders, wasps, and centipedes, and we stayed out of it.

Though I remember many of the activities of my childhood with fondness, I remember filling the woodbox as a chore. I didn’t like to do it, partly because of the bugs and spiders, more though because the directive to fill up the woodbox seemed like a punishment even when it wasn’t. I had the notion that when adults didn’t want children around at the moment, they told them to fill up the woodbox. Generally boys had to do this sometime after school...