E-Mail This Article to a Friend Home work Sarah Messer goes ghost hunting BY CLEA SIMON
	Red House: Being a Mostly Accurate Account of New England’s Oldest Continuously Lived-In House By Sarah Messer. Viking, 400 pages, $23.95.

If you list the qualities that make a house into a home — love, family, some sense of stability and shared history — then Sarah Messer’s childhood domicile, the Red House, had them all. The problem, she unveils in her compelling memoir, is that most of them belonged to someone else, and all were haunted.

In her first non-fiction book, Red House: Being a Mostly Accurate Account of New England’s Oldest Continuously Lived-In House, Messer — a poet, primarily — recounts her childhood and young-adulthood living in the 17th-century Marshfield building of the same name, a house her father bought shortly before her birth from the family whose ancestors had lived there since its probable origin in 1647. In alternating chapters, she also narrates the history of the house, from its building by Walter Hatch, who emigrated from England in 1623 to forge a new future in this "outpost of an outpost," to the Messers’ tumultuous stewardship. As the two histories converge, Messer explores the meaning of home: how her family, like the Hatches, set out to establish their own sanctuary, apart from their past, and how that same physical space — the Red House — became the drafty, run-down, cramped, and uncomfortable building that leads the author to question her own sense of belonging.

That could be dry stuff, a narrative of stability. But Messer, who now lives and teaches in North Carolina (in an 1894 cottage "in a neighborhood the Realtors politely call ‘transitional’ "), finds instead a strain of menace, a sense of fatality that carries these parallel stories along with a wonderful, terrible tension. Why, for example, did Richard Warren Hatch sell her father the house when his own grown son wanted it and the town of Marshfield was willing to intervene to keep it in the family? It’s a mystery Messer never quite resolves, one that is complicated by the different versions remembered by various family members. Each version, however, includes that one fateful scene: Richard Jr. returning, and being refused. "He stood on our lawn and said, ‘There has been a terrible mistake.’ Like some sort of omen. Then he left."

This darkness recurs with a chilling inevitability that’s coolly highlighted by Messer’s careful choice of details. "He would eventually replace the mill’s vertical blade with a circular saw," she writes about one early 19th-century innovator, Deacon Joel Hatch. "[A]fter the Deacon was long dead, his son Samuel would hire a man who drank too much, who one time, in a sleepy gesture, or perhaps off balance in his drunkenness, would place his hand down on top of the whirring blade and watch his palm divide in half."

As could be expected with a property this old, and with this much blood on it, the Red House brought the Messers various ghosts, mostly benign. As Messer’s memoir sections make clear, it also encouraged the family to adopt a kind of historical dysfunction, adding a layer of Colonial craziness to their original issues of rootlessness and abandonment. Describing a family project to re-create a "First Thanksgiving," Messer writes, "At first, my sisters and I loved the idea." Soon, however, the weight of centuries drags them down. It’s cold, churning butter is boring, and baby Jessica keeps crying. "Mom, can I have some gum?" one of Sarah’s siblings asks. " ‘Silly, gum isn’t going to be invented for two hundred years! We live here now. This is what it’s like. We’re having fun,’ she said, and then we all had a doomed feeling."

Sarah tries to escape, but like those early Hatches, she’s brought back home, her first flight almost disastrous. Without descending into melodrama, Messer notes, "In one phone call, I’d fulfilled every parent’s worst nightmare of teenage trauma — anorexia, overdose, pregnancy." Eventually, as adults, both she and her sister Kim end up working on the house, rebuilding the decrepit structure. Because Messer has managed to maneuver both ancient and contemporary crises into parallel dramatic peaks, these restoration efforts bring many of the book’s threads together and also help her come to terms with what the Red House has meant to her. "I realized that I had been using the house in various ways my whole life — to scare girlfriends, to impress teachers, seduce boyfriends. But now the house was half exploded and as jumbled as a junk store — the basement was just a basement; the attic, an attic." In the end, the Red House is just a house and the Hatches are just another family. The ghosts? Well, they seem to be real, but as generations had learned before her, you learn to live with them.