Made Holy: Essays

By Emily Arnason Casey

In haunting prose that will follow you for days to come, Made Holy tells the story of the American family. Love, loss, and addiction entwine in this moving debut collection. Emily Arnason Casey employs the lyric imagination to probe memory and the ever-shifting lens of time as she seeks to make sense of the disease that haunts her maternal family tree and the alchemy of loss and longing.

The lakes of her childhood in Minnesota form the interior landscape of this book, a kind of watery nostalgia for something just beyond her reach. “I know this feeling,” she writes. “We travel along the surface of time and then suddenly the layers give way and we are in another year, another body, another place.”

Casey’s willingness to honestly examine the past and present with contemplative lyricism offers fresh perspective and new understanding. In electric moments that are utterly relatable, she weaves a tale of love and commitment to the truth of her experience despite the incredible desire to keep alive a legacy of secrets. Like the mullein plant she invokes in the final essay, these essays form a kind of “guardian to the lost.”

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Release date: Sep 1, 2019
• ISBN: 9780820355986

Emily Arnason Casey

EMILY ARNASON CASEY is a faculty member at the Community College of Vermont. Her work has been published in Hotel Amerika, American Literary Review, the Normal School, and other journals.

Book preview

The Cabin

Before my parents sold the Burnt Shanty Lake cabin the year I turned thirty, I sometimes went there alone. It was down the road a mile or so from my grandparents’ cabin, where my mother had spent her childhood summers and my aunt, uncle, and cousins stayed during the summer. One afternoon, my first summer home from college, I made the forty-minute drive from my parents’ house to visit it. I parked the car at the top of the steep and winding driveway. The grass between the tire ruts grew to my knees. Birch and poplar trees stood tall. The quiet, cut only by the choir of birds, eased me. I carried a notebook and pen, and though I daydreamed about spending a month there with just a typewriter and a stack of books, I never stayed long. After a day spent immersed in solitude, as night hinted at the sky, I’d long for the noise of my large family, the traffic of daily life.

In the cabin, the window slid open. I found a rag and wiped the table. Cans of beans and jars of peanut butter were stacked beside bottles of bug spray and shampoo in a wooden cupboard my father had made. I left my notebook on the table and walked down to the dock; it groaned and swayed as I made my way to the end. I sat and looked down into the water. Both sides were weedy now, though the lily pads had not yet made their way to the swimming side of the dock. The island seemed so close, as though I might dive off the end of the dock and surface at its shore. My sisters and I had spent hours swimming back and forth to the island as girls, careful to never let our toes stray too deep and graze the weeds that lay at the bottom of the shallow parts of the lake.

From the dock, the cabin looked rundown: the red paint had faded and moss grew in places on the roof. Long, wispy grass bowed in the breeze. The front of the cabin stood on cinder blocks, which left a large crawl space. Lumber and lawn chairs and old toys collected there, along with perhaps a beat-up lawnmower. As soon as we arrived at the cabin for a stay, my father liked to cut the grass. The job of collecting the sticks in the yard so he could mow was preferred to sweeping and mopping the cabin floors or making beds and unpacking groceries. Other than a few pines my father had planted, the yard was filled with birch that grew tall into the sky. As a younger man, my father pole-climbed them to hang swings or once an enormous Styrofoam bear as a joke.

In ten years, my parents would sell the cabin they had bought the year after I, their first child, was born. And though we had only lived there during the summers, it was our first permanent home. The new owners would tear it down and rebuild. Perhaps they paved the impossible driveway that we had avoided navigating for fear of losing a muffler on one of our used cars, parking instead at the top of the hill and hiking in our stuff: coolers, blankets, bedding, paper bags of groceries, extra fuel for the lanterns, chubby paperbacks, and playing cards. By the time they sold the cabin we hadn’t spent a significant amount of time there for at least fifteen years, and more recently, we had barely made a single summer visit. But it remained a nest of memory for me. My childhood tethered to its homey comforts.

The sunlight caught in the tall grass as I ran down the hill from the cabin to the lake. Ten years old, I chose my steps carefully in order to avoid hurting my feet on rough patches of grass or sharp sticks. I always ran the hill. Walking felt entirely a waste of time. The lake reflected sky and stood still in the morning light. An occasional breeze washed off its surface with a quiver. I stood alone beside the water waiting for someone to join me before slipping from the dock into the lake. Morning smelled and sounded different than any other part of the day: the angle of the sun and the chorus of birds, the soft comfort of a well-rested body, new with morning and youth, vibrant and eager, made it the best part of the day. All that long summer of my tenth year, the water of the lake offered relief from the heat and pleasure. I made an offering of my body, diving in, swimming long, floating on my back, watching the white, sun-crested clouds drift above. While on the hill, the cabin stood like a secret guardian of my inner world.

The cabin’s red outer walls and big front windows faced the lake. From the beach, I looked up at the windows. I could see my mom in the loft standing over her bed, smoothing out the covers. My feet in the sand felt cool, and the smell of the hot sun baking the grass lingered in the breeze, creating that particular smell of summer at the cabin. I walked to the end of the wooden dock and peered down into water, tinted a sage green. Around the swimming side of the dock the bottom of the lake was sandy, but the other side was thick with weeds, its surface covered in slick green lily pads. I stood alone looking into the murky waters of the lake and then out across the water to the tiny island. Further, to the opposite shores with their tiny cabins, miniature speedboats, or smoke coiling from the chimneys of saunas in the evening.

I looked back at the cabin where my father was opening the sliding window he’d salvaged from his grandma’s house. Diamond-shaped cut glass fashioned a mosaic belt across the top of the window; it slid back and forth on metal tracks. Contrasted with the sparseness of the rest of the cabin—its uninsulated walls and rustic furniture Dad scavenged from the open-pit dump nearby—it seemed a treasure.

Dad! I yelled, Dad, are you coming?

He looked through the window. Go ahead, just stay close to the dock, he called back.

My feet curled around the rough wooden edge of the dock. I bent my knees, then launched myself out over the water. My hands in prayer above my head cut the water upon entry. Underwater, I kicked once, twice, and then surfaced too far beyond the dock. But no one was looking at me through the cabin windows, so I ducked down and swam out further, the water growing cooler with depth. On the floor of the lake, green weeds undulated over hidden treasures: lost toys, sunglasses, Mom’s empty bottles of LaCroix mineral water tipped and blown in by the wind. I swam along the surface, careful never to let my foot kick deep enough to touch the bed of mossy weeds.

With no one watching, I floated on my back staring up at the sky imagining I was someone else. I liked to pretend to be the character from whatever book I was reading, to dream these other worlds pressed into my own. I got out, spread my towel over the dock, and lay down to warm myself in the sun. My sister Hannah appeared, interrupting my game of make believe. Can I share your towel, Em? she asked.

I looked up at her, feigning distress, Where’s yours?

She shrugged. Without waiting for my response, she sat down at the end of the dock, away from my towel.

Wanna come swimming with me, Em?

I just went swimming, I said and rolled over onto my side to look at her. She was chubbier than me and cuter. Her hair was blond and curly, and she wore a blue swimsuit with a white ruffle. During the years before she entered school and received speech therapy, I acted as her translator. Frequent ear infections had produced a slight speech impediment in her. Hannah would start to speak with confidence and then noticing the confusion in someone’s face, her voice would trail off. I explained.

But she was eight now and her speech had improved.

You go. Dad said we could go in if we stayed by the dock.

No, I just wait for Mom, she said and turned away from me.

We would be close our entire lives, not because we spoke daily to each other (though sometimes we did), shared intimacies, and lived in the same town, but from a sisterly need: a desire to cleave—both to cling and to cut away from each other. She was my first sister, my first love and envy.

We returned every year to the cabin on Burnt Shanty Lake and spent the summer. Though we moved often then (my father going to school in North Dakota, then taking a job in West Virginia), the cabin remained our constant summer home, a place to retreat from the world. It was a world apart, without a phone, a television, or even electricity and running water. The cabin shaped our closeness as a family; we built up our tolerance of each other all summer in such tight quarters. But at age ten, in the crowd of my family—I was the oldest of five girls, and my brother would be born in three years—I began to long for singular selfhood. My mother’s pregnancies with my fourth sister and later my brother felt insulting to me as a child, not the welcome surprise my parents might have hoped for. I knew better than to reveal this, however. As the oldest child, I had an acute awareness of my parents’ emotions and a sense of responsibility for them. Once I had lightheartedly insulted my mother’s wedding dress while looking at photos of her wedding; I found the visible pain it caused my mother unbearable. That really hurt my feelings, she later told me. Perhaps because it was one of the first times I felt I had betrayed her or because I didn’t really mean what I had said, but was trying on a snobby persona as children do, I carried the shame of my error for years. I had let her down. She rarely let me see that part of her. But how effective the truth is to a child. How confusing to try and translate the secret shame of grown-ups.

I stood on the side of the steep hill looking down at the lily pad swamp. I held the coarse rope of the saucer swing that dangled from the upper reaches of a leaning birch. Swinging drew calluses along my upper palm. At night in bed, falling asleep, I liked to run my fingers over them. A small knot in the rope, two feet above the seat, provided a place to grip. I wrapped my legs around the seat, leaned into the hill, grabbed the knot, and sat down. Airborne over the lily pad swamp, I held my breath until the swing reached its full outward suspension and turned back toward land. The more I swung, and it became a compulsion for a day or two at a time, the more daring I became. I let my head hang back so that my shoulder-length hair fell loose or I’d straighten my arms and lean back, point one leg in the direction of the sky. Below, frogs hopped from the warm mud of shore onto the lily pads. Water lilies bloomed like white teacups. I was a fearless trapeze artist swinging over a lake of snakes in a sparkling costume of red and blue sequins or Anne of Green Gables giving Gilbert the cold shoulder, running home to help Matthew. I was Cassie Logan, defiant and proud as she faced injustice.

One day in the middle of July that summer, Dad walked up and down the hill for hours pushing a wheelbarrow filled with sand from the sandpit at the top of the driveway. He dumped the sand along the shore of the lake. It was only a quarter mile, but the hill was steep. His brown hair was streaked with blond and wet with sweat, his body muscled and tan. He wore old running shoes with holes in the toe and loose laces. Every time he came by I’d shout, Come swing, Dad! And he’d say, In a little bit, and tromp back up the hill determined to see his vision of a sandy beach through to fruition. Finally, satisfied with the beach, he left his shoes in the sand, tore off his shirt, and ran down the dock past my mom and sisters.

Come on, he shouted and my sisters squealed. He dove in followed by Hannah and little Bess, just four years old. Come on, Em, he called again.

I watched from my swing, miffed that he was swimming with my sisters and not swinging with me, as I had been the one waiting for him. I leaned back and let go and the swing took me out over the lily pad bay where leeches lurked and snapper turtles lived. I did not want to be part of the family games anymore or to carry the baby on my hip, clumped in a group with my sisters, all of us differing shades of blond as though we modeled one child at five stages of her growth.

Em, he called one last time. I could see my mom looking up at me in question, as I let go again and sailed over the lake pretending not to hear my father. The part of me that still longed to run down to the lake and jump into my dad’s arms was no longer strong enough to pull me away.

To a ten year old, a place of your own is sacred. At the top of the hill down the drive, but not out of sight from the cabin, stood a playhouse built by my father. It was a two-story structure with an A-frame roof and monkey bars off the back. Inside, an upturned crate made a stove on which stood an old metal teakettle for pretend boiling water. My father made a table of a round wheel of wood and cement blocks, upturned wooden boxes for seats. In the loft of the playhouse, I kept an old red lantern, its glass gone. I took that lantern with me the last time I visited the cabin before it was sold and destroyed. The lantern now sits in my bathroom with a paper heart hanging in place of the mantle.

I lay on my back in the loft of the playhouse staring at the white cocoons of armyworms. If I poked them with a stick they’d let out a small puff of musty air. Some years the armyworms invaded and demolished the leaves of the birch trees. When Hannah was a little girl, she fearlessly filled her shiny red purse with armyworms and brought it to show my mom, who laughed with admiration for her daughter’s gift.

Alone, I stretched out on my back and crossed my legs at the ankle like I’d seen my father do. From the hill, Hannah called to me, but I ignored her. She would grow bored of looking for me and return to the dock and the beach, where our three little sisters and mom were spending the morning. I wanted only to be alone in this mysterious solitude—a first solitude, a longing to be separate and unseen. Silence opened up around me like a secret kingdom and what I would one day name reverence filled me in this moment.

I heard only the sound of the wind in the papery leaves of the birch trees and the intermittent song of birds. I smelled the wood and dust scent of the playhouse loft, immersed in forest, tucked away from the world. The ceiling was close enough for me to run a finger over its rough wood if I stretched out my arm.

When I finally climbed down from the loft no one called my name. My bare feet curled around each plank on the ladder. Outside I walked to the top of the hill. Alone, I was someone else, or truly me as my everybody-else-self slipped away. The birch trees, to a ten year old, looked like the city skyscrapers I had yet to see. I walked to the top of the hill. Hannah was digging in the sand on the beach with our sisters. Mom, with her golden hair and thin limbs, sat on a beach towel on the dock, the baby tucked under a makeshift shade.

I was not there (none of us were) when they tore down the cabin. I wonder if they removed the beautiful old sliding glass window before demolishing it. Did they leave the old wooden table and chairs inside? Did they haul out the loft beds to donate somewhere or were they beyond salvaging? Was there a small toy forgotten in a corner, discovered at the last minute, and dredged out for the children to play with? Has a little girl noticed the secret spot in the birch tree where she might store a note to her own mother as I did with mine? Or did they cut down the tree—tucked deep in the bark a final note left by my mom: Meet me at the path to the woods after dinner. We’ll go on a treasure walk.

I now long to walk through the loft of the old cabin, drag my fingers along the rough wood of the ceiling beams, careful to avoid the sharp ends of nails, pounded through the thin roof. I want to lie on my parents’ bed, level with the window, and look out at the lake and the island, to wake at the hollow edge of night to the cry of the loons. The water lapping against the shore, the Worshays’ fishing boat out in the East Bay all morning, and the smell of heat in the grass, wind through the birch tree leaves triggering childhood memories like firecrackers across the sky. I would only stay a little while, so as not to