The World Is on Fire. Joni Tevis
slept, if she slept, in a different bed every night, or else waited patiently at the little desk in the séance room. She went over accounts and sketched plans for the next day, chewing on dried apricots grown in her own orchards. Tough little suns, flat and orange—they caught in her teeth. One night she drew a spiderweb on a sheet of paper. It would become a design for a stained-glass window.
She must have seen something she recognized in the spider. How every night she spins herself a home, and every dawn destroys it. How she anchors herself in a sturdy spot, reels out a loop, and adds the weight of her body. From this triangle, everything begins.
Once upon a time there lived a baby girl, the only child of parents rich beyond measure. But when she was just a few weeks old, that baby died. Some years later, her father died too, and her mother was left alone. The mother had been the hub of a small family and now was the center of nothing, drifting from room to room, eyes dimmed by grief, hands empty. Maybe she felt a curse had fallen upon her, and maybe one had.
So she went to Boston and found a soothsayer who told her to move west, begin building a house, and never stop, lest the spirits that had taken her daughter and husband come for her. There were legions of those ghosts, the medium said, all the people killed by her husband’s guns. For this grieving woman had inherited the vast fortune of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company. Sarah was her name, Sarah Pardee Winchester, and this was her house.
We’re standing in the courtyard, my husband, David, and I, waiting for our tour to start. The fountain beside us sparkles and spurts. We hear occasional honks from the traffic outside on Winchester Boulevard, and kids squealing as they horse around in the Victorian Gardens—it’s a busy place, and we squint in the sun, tickets in hand.
We’re between jobs, all our things stacked in a storage unit across the country in a new state, in a town called Apex. You have to go where the work is, people say. Well, we’ve done that, following jobs from Texas to Minnesota to North Carolina. Will one of us get a steady job when the hiring season starts up again next month? If not, what then? “We’ll get by,” David says, but right now, I can’t see how.
In the meantime, we’re taking a few days off, finagling frequent-flyer miles and a spot on our friends’ sofa into a California junket. When we started packing, we couldn’t find our suitcases—they were buried too deep in that storage unit. So we stuffed our clothes in a box that a coffee pot had come in, taped it shut, and heaved it onto the baggage belt. An awkward fix, but it would have to do.
The intercom crackles: Tour number seventy-one, prepare to depart from the side entrance. Twenty of us line up, a mixed bunch: retired couples, a father with two children, a boy in a Zapata Vive! T-shirt. Our guide, a stony-faced college student with dark hair cut in sleek wings, lays down the law. “Keep up,” she says. “Stay with the group. If you get lost, you’ll have to find your own way out. Nobody will ever find you.”
With that, we step inside, through what used to be a service entrance. Nothing grand, just this threshold over which Sarah used to walk, sometimes with her favorite niece, but most often alone. And entering here, I feel off-kilter—will feel off-kilter for the whole mile-long tour, through this 24,000-square-foot mishmash of a house. No time to ponder that as we shuffle up the shallow Easy Riser steps—built late in Sarah’s life to help her arthritis—into the $25,000 Storeroom, as it’s now called, still stocked with expensive wallpaper and stacks of stained-glass windows; along endless rubber-runnered halls, stopping here and there to hear paragraphs of the guide’s spiel; and occasionally passing other groups, whose guides repeat the same anecdotes with the same scripted language. Does anybody believe this stuff?
Here’s the first story they tell: workers left nails half-driven when they heard of Sarah’s death. She paid them three dollars a day, in cash—double the going rate. Many of them lived on the property, either in regular servants’ quarters or in apartments below the water tower. And she kept them working at all hours. The Boston medium’s prediction included the warning that Sarah had to keep renovating her new house constantly. If the hammers fell silent, the spirits would come for her. So she made sure that never happened. When she moved into the house, it had eight rooms, and she was three years a widow. When she died in 1922, thirty-eight years later, it had 160 rooms, some of which she had remodeled six hundred times.
Right away someone asks, “Was she crazy?” The question sticks in my craw. It feels too knee-jerk, too dismissive. What can you call that level of revision but obsessive? And yet something in it resonates with me; maybe she just wanted to get it right. I tuck the question into my notebook and hurry to catch up with the rest.
We don’t know which eight rooms comprised the original farmhouse; we don’t know where Sarah began. So start with a nail, one end blunt and the other end sharp, ready to bite its beam. I wonder if nails pleased her as they please me; if she found them waiting for her on the sidewalk or in the street; if, when she bent to pick one up, her dark veil belled around her face. If, all day, her fingers worried it in her pocket. Nails were newcomers here, in the Valley of Heart’s Delight, as she was. Resourceful people had whittled pegs before. Now they prized crates apart and hammered nails free. A good nail could be used more than once.
How different things might have been had she married a maker of nails. But she had married a gun man, William Wirt Winchester, and after his death she became the weapon his family had perfected, repeating, her hammers’ plosive stutter reshaping the rooms. Walking these hot halls, past oscillating fans that don’t do anything to move the air, I shift beneath the weight of the guilt Sarah chose to bear. What stories do we tell ourselves about who we are? If we repeat them often enough, we’ll start to trust them.
“Recently,” our tour guide says, “a psychic contacted Sarah, and do you know what she said?” She flicks her eyes over us, waiting. “What are all these people doing in my house?” As soon as she says the words, I know they’re true.
It started with a man’s dress shirt: funny to remember that. Her father-in-law had found a way to make it fit better through the shoulders. From shirts he moved to guns, shot, bullets: the Winchester rifle, the Gun that Won the West. Eventually, Winchester factories would turn out products as diverse as meat grinders, scissors, fishing tackle, and roller skates—“The Skate With a Backbone”—but then as now the company was best known for its firearms. Back in 1866, the year baby Anne was born and died, the Gun that Won was underwriting Sarah’s life in New Haven, Connecticut. That gun paid for roast duck, hothouse greens, down-stuffed bedticks; it kept her servants in board and uniforms; it paid for doctors, ministers, and, at the end, the sexton. That gun hired a stonecutter and paid for a small casket, lined with silk.
And a few years later, after her husband died, Sarah must have known she couldn’t build the $25,000 Storeroom without the warehouses of guns, ready to be loaded into crates, into railcars, into waiting hands ready to shoot Apache and Pueblo by the thousands. Lead soldered water pipes and joined panes of glass; lead made ammunition. In the Winchester shot tower, seven stories of carefully engineered furnaces and molds terminated in the water tanks where hot shot was dropped to cool, hissing and steaming. Soothsayers used to employ lead rings to divine your future, holding the circles aloft with threads, burning through the threads, and marking where the rings fell. But Sarah asked her questions of the Boston medium, who scratched out answers with a planchette one letter at a time.
By all accounts Sarah’s days in California were busy ones. The weight of her body anchored her here, on thick rugs that showed no wear and polished floors that glowed like gunstocks. Sarah became an entrepreneur, buying real estate, running her farm, selling walnuts by the barrel. She stored up spade and mattock and blade, oil and whetstone, homing pigeons and ivory leg cuffs, screws cast from solid gold. She invented a sink with a built-in washboard, and a window clasp modeled after a rifle’s lock, paying homage to both cleanliness and defense. And although she set up the house to be self-sufficient,