Four in Hand
WINDSOR
I have always tied my father's ties. At the time I started tying my father's ties, wide ones were in style. My father bought big wide ones in woolly fabrics, ones with length. He liked the knobby triangle of the Windsor knot. That's what he had me tie. It was like a fist at his throat. After I tied the tie, I slid the knot down along the narrow end, leaving it knotted, making a loop big enough to slip over my head. I gave the tie to my father. This went on for years. It went on until the day my father died. I learned to tie the ties from following the diagrams printed on a pamphlet I got at the department store where my father bought the ties. “Dad,“ I said, “this is easy. Just look into the mirror and follow the directions.“ He directed me to hang the tied ties on a hook in his closet. I'd tie three or four of them at a time. This wasn't good for the ties. It ruined them to leave them knotted like that. The Windsor was in fashion when I started tying my father's ties, a big wad of cloth at his throat. Then that look went out of fashion, and the tie widths and fabric changed. But then ties got wider once more, and my father looked okay again.
BOW
I myself wear a bowtie when I wear a tie at all. Most people think the bowtie is hard to tie, but it's not. It is the same knot everyone knows and uses when tying a shoelace. It's just in a different place. Under your chin. I told my father that. He watched me tie a knot in the mirror. I poked one bow through the loose knot. He had taught me how to tie my shoes. He used his thumb to make the loop. My favorite part of tying a bowtie is holding the loops and the two unlooped ends at the same time, drawing the knot tight in the middle. And I like how easily it falls apart when you untie it simply by pulling one end. I thought I would wear one when we buried my father, but I thought better of it and went with a half Windsor, a neat and subdued knot.
HALF WINDSOR
In the mail, I got boxes of untied ties. Sometimes these were my father's new purchases, but, more often, they were gifts I had given him or ties I had tied years ago for him that had come untied somehow and that he needed retied. Those ties were wrecked with wrinkles, and when I tied them, I could never tie them in such a way that the creases fell and crimped where they had before. After my father died, I undid the lot of these same ties, ironed the ones I could, and gave them to the Salvation Army. Once he called in a panic. He had a new tie he needed to tie. I was a thousand miles away. So I looked in a mirror and tied a tie talking to him while he followed along. My head and shoulder squeezed the phone to my ear, my neck craned. He followed along on the other end of the line. It was hard. I could hear the silk slapping the phone's mouthpiece. I could hear him breathing. I thought a half Windsor would work, depleted as it is of wrapping and tucking. My hands moved by themselves at my throat. I heard my voice and I heard my father's voice repeating what I was saying in the silence between the words I was saying.
FOUR IN HAND
“I can't do it,“ he said at last. And he never would learn, he said. I told him it was easy, especially the four in hand. Just wrap it around and tuck it back up, under, and through. That is what I tied when I tied the tie he wore in his coffin. The tie was new and polyester. It will last forever, I thought. The department store pamphlet I have with directions for tying the different knots said that the four in hand was popularized by King Edward the VII. Think of that. I watched my father sometimes as he slipped a tied tie over his head. It ruins the ties to keep them tied. He slid the knot up the narrow end. He folded down his collar and flicked his fingers through his hair to fluff it up. He turned to me, and I straightened the knot snug at the collar. For a second, I pressed my hand flat on his starched chest beneath the two ends of the tie and made sure it all looked all right.
Antebellum
THE PRESIDENT'S MANSION
The story goes that the president's wife, brandishing a broom on the veranda, shooed away elements of the Iowa Cavalry sent to burn the college. The event is re-enacted each fall. The dragoons slump in their saddles, exhausted by the hard ride and the day's fighting. They watch a woman race back and forth on the porch above them like a carved figure wound up inside a cuckoo clock bursting from its doors on the hour, while their mounts, nearly blown, shit on the trampled flower beds in the formal gardens.
GORGAS HALL
They'll tell you that back then this brick building was the college commissary, and it was saved because the Yankees were hungry and thirsty after burning the rest of the college. Today, it's used mainly as a venue for fancy weddings where the young women in the bridal parties wear the antique hoopskirts and crinolines of the time before the war. Around back, next to the ongoing archaeological excavation, the wood privy is still intact, or has been reconstructed exactly, and the students working the site watch as a bride fits herself and her organdy train into the tiny neoclassical house beneath the magnolia.
THE OLD OBSERVATORY
That night, the flames from the college still burning brightly made any star in the sky impossible to see. The guidon bearer, bivouacked there, curried his horse beneath the cracked copper dome where the telescope, long before scrapped and melted for its metal, once stood. Even then, the college kept a little museum of curiosities there. The corporal ended up claiming as contraband a shard of iron like a chunk of grapeshot shrapnel that had, one night before the war, fallen from a very starry sky, striking a house in Pickens County and lodging, finally, in the headboard of the owner's bed while the owner and his wife lay there staring up at the ceiling.
THE LITTLE ROUND HOUSE
Legend has it that this Gothic octagon was the only building of any military value at the college. It was built as a guardhouse and lookout and seems, considering the destruction, to have failed miserably in both those roles. The federal troops used it as a surgery where today, still, a hand-lettered sign indicates the bloodstains of a half dozen or so hurried amputations. From the roof, the signal corps tethered one of their new balloons, which floated above the smoldering ground for weeks, its observer gazing over the green horizon for relief or reinforcements which, in both cases, failed to materialize.