A Natural History

My father is a hoarder, clinical, not colloquial. I know this because the photo on Wikipedia’s hoarding page looks no worse than the rooms he inhabits.

To his credit, he has no concept of hoarding as an aspirational quirk. He simply hoards. He has never been medicated or gone to therapy. He is fully functional, more functional than so-called functional alcoholics.

Risks, of course, loom: my mother used to joke that he would be like the Collyer brothers in Harlem, who died trapped under their own belongings. But he does a good job of keeping his junk towers at an earthquake-resistant height.

As a child, I missed all the signs. We once got a ping pong table. Within a year, it had been engulfed by stacks of newspapers and magazines. He had a box of golf balls that he had recovered from the golf course near our house. He did not play golf. No one could accuse him of being a Luddite because he especially liked keeping the circuit boards from used electronics.

Ancestry enabled him. Much of the stuff in our home had come from Annesdale, the antebellum Italianate villa he had grown up in. After his parents died, he fought for his share of the heirlooms. He got the ivory-keyed grand piano, a grand coup. But he was just as excited about the empty jars from the basement.

I never thought much of it until my cousins visited during the holidays. One of my cousins would say, playfully, he didn’t know how my sister and I were alive. But my cousin was not a scold: he would marvel at the organization in my father’s disorder. My father, my cousin said, always knew where the best stuff was, even as the collective heap looked like a junkyard. When he wanted to show you something, he was like a docent, guiding you through a carefully planned museum. My father, my cousin would say, had taste. There were no pizza boxes, but many fossils and meteorites. In our entry hall, one met Nero in profile.

The other month, he was showing me his trilobites and ammonites. He did not say much about them, but stood before the slab-bound preserves, expecting me to marvel with him. I realized that he had a deeper appreciation of time than most people, even as he does not concern himself with the details of the past. He would hang on dates that are naturally too large to conceptualize. It was important to him that a meteorite was four billion years old, and not two billion years old.

I liked to believe he had a gift: he could differentiate between two billion years and four billion years, the way an ordinary person could distinguish between two and four. That was not to say he was good at math.

He used to be a prodigious shot, though. He could place a bullet eerily well at the farm, my cousin emphasized.

My sister used to ask him how his thoughts worked. My sister liked words. She won writing awards. She was garrulous, not in the southern way, but in the manic way. She said he told her that when he thought there were no words.

The other month, he wanted to show me the development at Bob White Farm in Southhaven, Mississippi. I had heard rumblings of it over the years, but never bothered to visit. When I was a kid, we kept horses there. Now it was a strip mall.

Before we left, my father took me to the basement to show me an original map of the farm. He said they had originally raised mules there because mules were very valuable in the 1920s.

He made space for me in the backseat next to a red gasoline canister. To get to the farm, you drove past the airport, past the road to the Hollywood Cafe, the one Marc Cohn sings about in “Walking in Memphis.” My mother would begin regurgitating her usual tales. One was about a lawyer named Fat Mac. He had gotten very drunk at the Hollywood. When her party left, he suddenly disappeared. Finally, they found him face down in a cotton field.

But my father had no stories about the area. He only wanted pictures of the rotting barn next to a supermarket. While driving, he saw a walnut tree, craned his neck in the way that made my mother scold him for jeopardizing our lives, and began to expound on the value of walnut trees. I told him that I should think walnut trees were a very illiquid asset.

I was always disappointed by his lack of stories because it seemed like he should have had many. He had grown up with John Bayard, the youngest son of Colonel Snowden, at Annesdale. Recently, I began to probe his memories of John Bayard. What had John Bayard said about the Colonel? He had been born just after Reconstruction and the worst of the yellow fever epidemics. He must have thought something of it all.

But my father remembered nothing of him. John Bayard had been very diminished from the heart attack, he said. The John Bayard he knew was a husk of John Bayard, who was already a husk of the Colonel. He haunted the halls at Annesdale and said nothing. The best you could get out of him was rattling in the radiator. They were all mute at Annesdale, save my one uncle, who liked to drink in the sunroom with my grandmother. They later found human remains in the fireplace.

But my other uncle (my father’s brother-in-law) knew about John Bayard. He was a lawyer, so he cared a great deal for stories, even about the family he married into. He liked politics—another lawyerly habit. He knew what his father-in-law thought when LBJ came to Memphis, what he had said on Mayor Loeb’s behalf during the sanitation strikes.

We would visit their home, which my father had designed in a Frank Lloyd Wright style, outside the city on the holidays. The floor was terracotta tile, swept viciously. There were posters for the Crump machine on his bathroom wall. Over drinks, my uncle would recount the stories from Annesdale that my father never learned. Someone had once asked John Bayard what the greatest invention of his lifetime was, to which he had answered: the screen window.

On the way home, my father would always remark that Uncle Bob had a very clean home.