2024 Creative Nonfiction Award Winner: Rebecca Pyle

Heuston Street and Oppenheimer’s Cottage

The last lines of The Living and the Dead about snow falling on the living and the dead are painted, in pastel letters, on an electrical box in downtown Dublin; I saw them last Tuesday from a bus, as I came into town for the first time, and probably my last. (Dublin, the computer says, comes from Norse words Dubh Linn meaning “black pool,” an area of dark water behind a castle somewhere in Ireland—where two rivers meet.)

The Living and the Dead, what a beautiful story and film that was, I thought, all the old sad aunts dressed up for a Christmas party, remembering their youth. The boy came to sing, and then he died. Their party goes on and the winter goes on and the hopefulness and hopelessness of life goes on, just as buses go on their routes. Last stop, Heuston Street, the bus driver now says; but it’s not the last stop, I think, it’s just the stop before starting over and over again. (I’m old enough to think dismal thoughts like this, regularly.)

Heuston, like Angelica Huston and her father, who made the film, I say to George. Do you remember the actors in the beautiful old house in Ireland?

He nods yes.

Where is the oldest house in the world, I ask the computer later that night. At first it said it was in the United Kingdom, on Orkney Island, a ferry ride from Aberdeen; but it said originally the island was Norway’s. Eventually, a dowry gift somehow from Norway’s King Christian the first, but payment was never made, and it drifted to Scottish/British ownership. Some believe the island should be returned to Norway, their oldest house on it, too.

It’s made of stone, which continually absorbs. Absorbing a lot of deaths and snow and rain since it was built in 3500 Before Common Era (B.C.E.) (I like B.C.E. and C.E.—they soothe a lifetime of confusion and disappointment—that time can be kidnapped, owned, by religions. Though, yet, there is no B.P. or A.P., Before Pan or After Pan.)

I wonder if the chimney is thick with soot. It must have a chimney.

I wonder if its doormat is replaced regularly. Do they choose a dark green one?

I wonder how many loaves of bread and how many plates of cooked fish have been eaten in the world’s oldest house. When wine appeared, how often. How many people have died or been birthed inside the house, how many owls flew in open doors or windows. If any owls flew in. How many bees, how many birds, whether anyone with a good voice ever sang inside. How many times old people wept.

I wonder when it is reroofed if the roofers make extra effort, or if they roof it as if it is any house. I wonder, too, what its roof is like. I am hoping there are no baseboards. I hope the floors simply round up toward the walls, and the walls round over at roughly the ceiling point. I hope it looks as if it simply grew out of the ground, as houses in Santa Fe, New Mexico, can look.

Is the oldest house on Orkney Island (old Norwegian meaning of Orkney Island: Seals Island) allowed to have paintings on its walls? How would you choose? The best painting must be a painting of trees, or a painting of the house itself. I don’t think I could paint a good one: the task is too great. Though I once was not afraid to paint Oppenheimer’s cottage on Bathtub Row (the street was named Bathtub Row because that line of houses during the Manhattan Project were the most deluxe houses in Los Alamos, the only ones with bathtubs). The woman who still owned the house, and lived in it, came out to talk to me, while my canvas was a pretty blur, before I’d made decisions about how the painting would go. She came with her nurse and her oxygen tank; she was very, very old. She wanted to know: did I know whose house this had been? 

Oh, yes, I said, oh, definitely yes, I know all about Oppenheimer. And that this was a pottery studio once.

We’ve tried to keep it as much the same as we can, she said. We know it’s historical.

I wanted to ask if I could come inside and look, but I did not. (Now I wish I had; she is now gone, after some years in an assisted living center; and the house has been badly curated. The beautiful living space it once was while Oppenheimer and his wife Kitty were there has become a pained, wooden, cold series of objects lacking any charm of arrangement.) The woman who came out to see me with her oxygen tank told me the number of years her husband had worked at the lab on top of the mountain, how many decades they had lived together in the house, till he recently died; how they were the first to live in it after Oppenheimer departed. I nodded, continuing, in stops and starts, to paint; but I was beginning to hate my painting. I doubted, the way it looked, it would be enough.

Weeks later while the oil paints were still moist I moved the paint in the painting all around, which oil paint will let you do, making you a master revisionist. The house became a dark and vivid red; the stovepipe coming from its roof became unlike any stovepipe you will ever see: it was now as if Dr. Seuss had played with it, let it keep changing its direction, like a submarine underwater trying to avoid detection, or a chimney with smoke signals which must be changed into secret smoke signal code, almost undecipherable. Trees once a normal size I made as big as giants: these trees knew full well who lived inside the house, a man who was either turning nature upside down or was maximizing nature, depending on how you felt about all of it, the bomb and scientists and nuclei and the war. Each tree branch became, every one, outlined in a pasty ghostly white, shivering in fear, and awe. Now it was Oppenheimer’s cottage, the place where piano playing and singing and drinking went on many late evenings during the crucial lab years, while Japan didn’t know what they brewed.

Here in Dublin we are staying in one of many surviving old brick brewery cottages, built in the eighteen hundreds for Guinness brewery workers to live in, very near the gigantic Guinness factory. We opened a living room window to cool our rented cottage down, when we arrived—it was June—and a black and white cat hopped through the window. We then remembered seeing one gritty, days-empty milk saucer under the wooden bench beside the front door. So we washed it out and filled it up, and the cat leaned her head down and lapped up almost all the milk. Another cat of many orange and brown brindled colors, very large, appeared, startling the black and white cat away, and it took its turn drinking, as if the milk was Guinness beer. Then both disappeared, but not until the black and white cat hopped one more time from the wooden bench through the window into the house again, then out. Then—they departed. 

George and I are there now, and someone next door—they are small row houses, all tightly joined—is putting their dishes away in their cupboards, and we can hear the sound so clearly we know from the sound of the dish whether it is a saucer or a bowl or a cup. Renovators have raised the ceilings, added giant skylights and coved modern lighting, all to make it brighter and taller and modern, and it is pleasant enough. We love the added height and light. But what would we give to see a cottage preserved the way it was in the eighteen hundreds? A cunning black iron stove, cunning cupboards, cunning dishes, cunning curtains, in the popular or beloved colors of those days, and the beauty/homeliness of whatever rugs were like then, round or fringed or floral. Now it’s a typical space-race kitchen, one that looks like an astronaut’s or an airliner’s kitchen, lab-like: almond-pale cupboards, double-glass windows, no blinds or drapes. A view out to all of the still proudly feral cats fighting for their milk. And down the street, quite a ways, after several turns, the Guinness factory, with such graceful huge arched windows they are castle-like, and making you think of the well-guarded characters Guinevere, and Lancelot, and Maid Marian, and Robin Hood, characters who stepped out of the woods and mist and were to be imagined in times of trouble. And no, they didn’t need, ever, to be real. Better not to be. Being unreal can be the greatest gift of all: like great singing, which can be like an unexplained miracle, or mirage.

Rebecca Pyle lives in northern New Mexico. Her fiction, nominated for both the Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize, appears in Post Road, Guesthouse, and Pangyrus Literary; her essays, reviews, and creative nonfiction, in Cagibi, Grist, 15 Bytes of Utah, and Common Ground Review; her poems, in Eclectica, Red Ogre Review, and The Honest Ulsterman. She is also a visual artist whose drawings, paintings, and photographs are in dozens of art/literary journals, including New England Review, MAYDAY, The Courtship of Winds, Rathalla Review, and The Vassar Review. See rebeccapyleartist.com.

2 July 2025