Once I started Robinson’s Housekeeping, I quickly found that I’d not left the mystical genre. Central to Housekeeping is, as with any mystical writing, death and the ways in which death itself fails at permanence. In this latter sense, Housekeeping is a ghost story—a ghost etiology, specifically—where both life and death are equally haunted by one another.

Ruth’s orphan mysticism is an inner life chastened like those of the ascetics but residing in the common world. Ruth’s flesh and desires and intellect are all mortified in ways that comport with John of the Cross’s mystical path, though her mortification is born out of grief and formed through her aunt Sylvie’s mystical direction. Turned out of any reliable sense of home, Ruth is content with Sylvie’s outside-in form of housekeeping, despite, if not because of, the lights off at dinner and the open air and the leaves gathered in the corners. Sylvie’s house is enlivened to what’s lost and hoped for. Ruth tells us, “It seemed to me that what perished need not also be lost. At Sylvie’s house, my grandmother’s house, so much of what I remembered I could hold in my hand—like a china cup, or a windfall apple, sour and cold from its affinity with deep earth, with only a trace of the perfume of its blossoming. Sylvie, I knew, felt the life of perished things.”

As Ruth learns to feel the life of perished things, she lives through both nights that John of the Cross outlines, the night of the flesh and the night of the soul. When she’s playfully hiding from Sylvie in the orchard, Ruth learns “that if you do not resist the cold, but simply relax and accept it, you no longer feel the cold as discomfort . . . I was hungry enough to begin to learn that hunger has its pleasures, and I was happily at ease in the dark, and in general, I could feel that I was breaking the tethers of need one by one.” Ruth comes to terms with fundamental human loneliness (cold) and ignorance (dark) and need (hunger)—and just as she does so, the sheriff arrives as swiftly and placatingly as Judas in Gethsemane, inviting Ruth back to his home.

The sheriff’s attempt to take Ruth from Sylvie offers a glimpse into what’s at stake for a mystical life in the world rather than removed to a monastic distance. The issue, it turns out, is not just whether the mystic can live faithfully in the world, but whether the world will allow the mystical life to invert its sacred touchstones: the nuclear family, the house with warm lights and closed doors, the garden whose wildness is always trimmed and tamed. Sylvie’s outside-in housekeeping constitutes a threat to the safe household. The dead wandering the streets can be locked out. The dead wandering a house, even their own house, mean any house can just as soon be inverted into a temple too wild—too alive with perished things—for the appearances of safety and order to withstand.

Housekeeping warns us that though the mystic might not need a monastery to live her life, she will be turned out of house and home, cast out to haunt the world that must decide whether to treat her as a ghost or a prophet. Ruth explains that Fingerbone viewed transients as “ghosts, terrifying as ghosts are because they were not very different from us.” In this sense my grandparents, too, were ghosts, along with the men they took in. Their homeless ministry didn’t begin in New Mexico. They’d originally lived in an affluent neighborhood in Santa Barbara, California, where they had dinners and prayer meetings on the beach. Eventually, my grandparent’s neighbors applied increasing pressure for them to leave because they invited unwelcome men to stay in their house, a house identical to the others in the HOA. My grandparents invited hauntings of another world to their table, and their neighbors cast them out to the desert for it.