Rachel"s mother says that there was only one descendant of the family living in the township today. He lives in Scone.
"Next door to the house my brother"s in," she says. "You know how there"s just the three houses in Scone? That"s all there is. There"s the yellow brick house and that"s my brother"s, then the one in the middle, that"s Mannerows". So maybe they might tell you something more, if you went there and asked them."
While I was talking to Rachel"s mother and looking at the history book, my husband sat at the table and talked to her husband. That is the proper way for conversations to go in our part of the country. The husband asked where we came from, and on hearing that we came from Huron County, he said that he knew it very well. He went there straight off the boat, he said, when he came out from Holland not long after the war. In 1948, yes. (He is a man considerably older than his wife.) He lived for a while near Blyth and he worked on a turkey farm.
I overhear him saying this and when my own conversation has drawn to a close I ask him if it was the Wallace Turkey Farm that he worked on.
Yes, he says, that was the one. And his sister married Alvin Wallace.
"Corrie Wallace," I say.
"That"s right. That"s her."
I ask him if he knew any Laidlaws from around that area, and he says no.
I say that if he worked at Wallaces" (another rule in our part of the country is that you never say the so-and-so"s, just the name), then he must have known Bob Laidlaw.
"He raised turkeys too," I tell him. "And he knew Wallaces from when they"d gone to school together. Sometimes he worked with them."
"Bob Laidlaw?" he says, on a rising note. "Oh, sure, I knew him. But I thought you meant around Blyth. He had a place up by Wingham. West of Wingham. Bob Laidlaw."
I say that Bob Laidlaw grew up near Blyth, on the Eighth Line of Morris Township, and that was how he knew the Wallace brothers, Alvin"s father and uncle. They had all gone to school at S.S. No. 1, Morris, right beside the Wallace farm.
He takes a closer look at me, and laughs.
"You"re not telling me he was your dad, are you? You"re not Sheila?"
"Sheila"s my sister. I"m the older one."
"I didn"t know there was an older one," he says. "I didn"t know that. But Bill and Sheila. I knew them. They used to be down working at the turkeys with us, before Christmas. You never were there?"
"I was away from home by then."
"Bob Laidlaw. Bob Laidlaw was your dad. Well. I should have thought of that right away. But when you said from around Blyth I didn"t catch on. I was thinking, Bob Laidlaw was from up at Wingham. I never knew he was from Blyth in the first place."
He laughs and reaches across the table to shake my hand.
"Well now. I can see it in you. Bob Laidlaw"s girl. "Round the eyes. That"s a long time ago. A long time ago."
I am not sure whether he means it"s a long time ago that my father and the Wallace boys went to school in Morris Township, or a long time since he himself was a young man fresh from Holland, and worked with my father and my brother and sister preparing the Christmas turkeys. But I agree with him, and then we both say that it is a small world. We say this, as people usually do, with a sense of wonder and refreshment. (People who are not going to be comforted by this discovery usually avoid making it.) We explore the connection as far as it will go, and soon find that there is not much more to be got out of it. But we are both happy. He is happy to be reminded of himself as a young man, fresh in the country and able to turn himself to any work that was offered, with confidence in what lay ahead of him. And by the looks of this well-built house with its wide view, and his lively wife, his pretty Rachel, his own still alert and useful body, it does look as if things have turned out pretty well for him.
And I am happy to find somebody who can see me still as part of my family, who can remember my father and the place where my parents worked and lived for all of their married lives, first in hope and then in honorable persistence. A place that I seldom drive past and can hardly relate to the life I live now, though it is not much more than twenty miles away.
It has changed, of course, it has changed utterly, becoming a car-wrecking operation. The front yard and the side yard and the vegetable garden and the flower borders, the hayfield, the mock-orange bush, the lilac trees, the chestnut stump, the pasture and the ground once covered by the fox pens, are all swept under a tide of car parts, gutted car bodies, smashed headlights, grilles, and fenders, overturned car seats with rotten bloated stuffing-heaps of painted, rusted, blackened, glittering, whole or twisted, defiant and surviving metal.
But that is not the only thing that deprives it of meaning for me. No. It is the fact that it is only twenty miles away, that I could see it every day if I wanted to. The past needs to be approached from a distance.
Rachel"s mother asks us if we would like to look at the inside of the church, before we head off to Scone, and we say that we would. We walk down the hill and she takes us hospitably into the red-carpeted interior. It smells a little damp or musty as stone buildings often do, even when they are kept quite clean.
She talks to us about how things have been going with this building and its congregation.
The whole church was raised up some years ago, to add on the Sunday School and the kitchen underneath.
The bell still rings out to announce the death of every church member. One ring for every year of life. Everybody within hearing distance can listen and count the times it rings and try to figure out who it must be for. Sometimes it"s easy-a person who was expected to die. Sometimes it"s a surprise.
She mentions that the front porch of the church is modern, as we must have noticed. There was a big argument when it was put on, between those who thought it was necessary and even liked it, and those who disagreed. Finally there was a split. The ones who didn"t like it went off to Williamsford and formed their own church there, though with the same minister.
The minister is a woman. The last time a minister had to be hired, five out of the seven candidates were women. This one is married to a veterinarian, and used to be a veterinarian herself. Everybody likes her fine. Though there was a man from Faith Lutheran in Desboro who got up and walked out of a funeral when he found she was preaching at it. He could not stand the idea of a woman preaching.
Faith Lutheran is part of the Missouri Synod, and that is the way they are.
There was a great fire in the church some time ago. It gutted much of the inside but left the sh.e.l.l intact. When the surviving inside walls were scrubbed down afterwards, layers of paint came off with the smoke and there was a surprise underneath. A faint text in German, in the Gothic German lettering, which did not entirely wash off. It had been hidden under the paint.
And there it is. They touched up the paint, and there it is.
Ich hebe meine Augen auf zu den Bergen, von welchen mir Hilfe Kommt. That is on one side wall. And on the opposite wall: Dein Wort ist meines Fusses Leuchte und ein Licht auf meinem Wege.
I will lift up my eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help.
Thy word is a lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path.
n.o.body had known, n.o.body had remembered that the German words were there, until the fire and the cleaning revealed them. They must have been painted over at some time, and afterwards n.o.body spoke of them, and so the memory that they were there had entirely died out.
At what time? Very likely it happened at the beginning of the First World War, the 1914-18 war. Not a time to show German lettering, even spelling out holy texts. And not a thing to be mentioned for many years afterwards.
Being in the church with this woman as guide gives me a slightly lost feeling, or a feeling of bewilderment, of having got things the wrong way round. The words on the wall strike me to the heart, but I am not a believer and they do not make me a believer. She seems to think of her church, including those words, as if she were its vigilant housekeeper. In fact she mentions critically that a bit of the paint-in the ornate "L" of Licht-has faded or flaked off, and should be replaced. But she is the believer. It seems as if you must always take care of what"s on the surface, and what is behind, so immense and disturbing, will take care of itself.
In separate panes of the stained-gla.s.s windows are displayed these symbols: The Dove (over the altar).
The letters Alpha and Omega (in the rear wall).
The Holy Grail.
The Sheaf of Wheat.
The Cross in the Crown.
The Ship at Anchor.
The Lamb of G.o.d bearing the Cross.
The Mythical Pelican, with golden feathers, believed to feed its young on the blood of its own torn breast, as Christ the Church. (The Mythical Pelican as represented here resembles the real pelican only by way of being a bird.) Just a few days before I am to have my biopsy I get a call from the city hospital to say that the operation has been cancelled.
I am to keep the appointment anyway, to have a talk with the radiologist, but I do not need to fast in preparation for surgery.
Cancelled.
Why? Information on the other two mammograms?
I once knew a man who went into the hospital to have a little lump cut out of his neck. He put my hand on it, on that silly little lump, and we laughed about how we could exaggerate its seriousness and get him a couple of weeks off work, to go on a holiday together. The lump was examined, but further surgery was cancelled because there were so many, many other lumps that were discovered. The verdict was that any operation would be useless. All of a sudden, he was a marked man. No more laughing. When I went to see him he stared at me in nearly witless anger, he could not hide it. It was all through him, they said.
I used to hear that same thing said when I was a child, always said in a hushed voice that seemed to throw the door open, half-willingly, to calamity. Half-willingly, even with an obscene hint of invitation.
We do stop at the middle house in Scone, not after visiting the church but on the day after the hospital phoned. We are looking for some diversion. Already something has changed-we notice how familiar the landscape of Sullivan Township and the church and the cemeteries and the villages of Desboro and Scone and the town of Chesley are beginning to seem to us, how the distances between places have shortened. Perhaps we had found out all we are going to find out. There might be a bit more explanation-the idea of the vault might have come from somebody"s reluctance to put a three-year-old child under the ground-but what has been so compelling is drawn now into a pattern of things we know about.
n.o.body answers the outside door. The house and yard are tidily kept. I look around at the bright beds of annuals and a rose of Sharon bush and a little black boy sitting on a stump with a Canadian flag in his hand. There are not so many little black boys in people"s yards as there used to be. Grown children, city dwellers, may have cautioned against them-though I don"t believe that a racial insult was ever a conscious intention. It was more as if people felt that a little black boy added a touch of sportiness, and charm.
The outside door opens into a narrow porch. I step inside and sound the house doorbell. There is just room to move past an armchair with an afghan on it and a couple of wicker tables with potted plants.
Still n.o.body comes. But I can hear loud religious singing inside the house. A choir, singing "Onward, Christian Soldiers." Through the window in the door I see the singers on television in an inner room. Blue robes, many bobbing faces against a sunset sky. The Mormon Tabernacle Choir?
I listen to the words, all of which I used to know. As far as I can tell these singers are about at the end of the first verse.
I let the bell alone till they finish.
I try again, and Mrs. Mannerow comes. A short, competent-looking woman with tight grayish-brown curls, wearing a flowered blue top to match her blue slacks.
She says that her husband is very hard of hearing, so it wouldn"t do much good to talk to him. And he has just come home from the hospital a few days ago, so he isn"t really feeling like talking. She doesn"t have much time to talk herself, because she is getting ready to go out. Her daughter is coming from Chesley to pick her up. They are going to a family picnic to celebrate her daughter"s husband"s parents" fiftieth wedding anniversary.
But she wouldn"t mind telling me as much as she knows.
Though being only married into the family she never knew too much.
And even they didn"t know too much.
I notice something new in the readiness of both this older woman and the energetic younger woman in the log house. They do not seem to find it strange that anybody should wish to know about things that are of no particular benefit or practical importance. They do not suggest that they have better things to think about. Real things, that is. Real work. When I was growing up an appet.i.te for impractical knowledge of any kind did not get encouragement. It was all right to know which field would suit certain crops, but not all right to know anything about the glacial geography that I have mentioned. It was necessary to learn to read but not in the least desirable to end up with your nose in a book. If you had to learn history and foreign languages to pa.s.s out of school it was only natural to forget that sort of thing as quickly as you could. Otherwise you would stand out. And that was not a good idea. And wondering about olden days-what used to be here, what happened there, why, why?-was as sure a way to make yourself stand out as any.
Of course some of this kind of thing would be expected in outsiders, city people, who have time on their hands. Maybe this woman thinks that"s what I am. But the younger woman found out differently, and still seemed to think my curiosity understandable.
Mrs. Mannerow says that she did use to wonder. When she was first married she used to wonder. Why did they put their people in there like that, where did they get the idea? Her husband didn"t know why. The Mannerows all took it for granted. They didn"t know why. They took it for granted because that was the way they had always done it. That was their way and they never thought to ask why or where their family got the idea.
Did I know the vault was all concrete on the inside?
The smaller one on the outside too. Yes. She hadn"t been in the cemetery for a while and she had forgotten about that one.
She did remember the last funeral they had when they put the last person in the big vault. The last time they had opened it up. It was for Mrs. Lempke, who had been born a Mannerow. There was just room for one more and she was the one. Then there was no room for anybody else.
They dug down at the end and opened up the bricks and then you could see some of the inside, before they got her coffin in. You could see there were coffins in there before her, along either side. Put in n.o.body knows how long a time ago.
"It gave me a strange feeling," she says. "It did so. Because you get used to seeing the coffins when they"re new, but not so much when they"re old."
And the one little table sitting straight ahead of the entranceway, a little table at the far end. A table with a Bible opened up on it.
And beside the Bible, a lamp.
It was just an ordinary old-fashioned lamp, the kind they used to burn coal oil in.
Sitting there the same today, all sealed up and n.o.body going to see it ever again.
"n.o.body knows why they did it. They just did."
She smiles at me with a sociable sort of perplexity, her almost colorless eyes enlarged, made owlish, by her gla.s.ses. She gives a couple of tremulous nods. As if to say, it"s beyond us, isn"t it? A mult.i.tude of things, beyond us. Yes.
The radiologist says that when she looked at the mammograms that had come in from the country hospital, she could see that the lump had been there in 1990 and in 1991. It had not changed. Still in the same place, still the same size. She says that you can never be absolutely one hundred percent certain that such a lump is safe, unless you do a biopsy. But you can be sure enough. A biopsy in itself is an intrusive procedure and if she were in my place she would not have it. She would have a mammogram in another six months, instead. If it were her breast she would keep an eye on it, but for the time being she would let it alone.
I ask why n.o.body had told me about the lump when it first appeared.
Oh, she says, they must not have seen it.
So this is the first time.
Such frights will come and go.
Then there"ll be one that won"t. One that won"t go.
But for now, the corn in ta.s.sel, the height of summer pa.s.sing, time opening out with room again for tiffs and trivialities. No more hard edges on the days, no sense of fate buzzing around in your veins like a swarm of tiny and relentless insects.
Back to where no great change seems to be promised beyond the change of seasons. Some raggedness, carelessness, even a casual possibility of boredom again in the reaches of earth and sky.
On our way home from the city hospital I say to my husband, "Do you think they put any oil in that lamp?"
He knows at once what I am talking about. He says that he has wondered the same thing.
Epilogue.
Messenger.
My father wrote that the countryside created by the efforts of the pioneers had changed very little in his time. The farms were still the size that had been manageable in that time and the woodlots were in the same places and the fences, though repaired many times, were still where they used to be. So were the great bank barns-not the first barns but buildings created around the end of the nineteenth century, chiefly for the storage of hay and the shelter of livestock through the winters. And many of the houses-brick houses succeeding the first log structures-had been there since sometime in the eighteen-seventies or eighties. Cousins of ours had in fact retained the log house built by the first Laidlaw boys in Morris Township, simply building additions to it at different times. The inside of this house was baffling and delightful, with so many turns and odd little sets of steps.
Now that house is gone, the barns have been pulled down (also the original cow byre built of logs). The same thing has happened to the house my father was born in, and to the house my grandmother lived in as a child, to all the barns and sheds. The land the buildings stood on can be identified perhaps by a slight rise in the ground, or by a clump of lilacs-otherwise it has become just a patch of field.
In the early days in Huron County there was a great trade in apples-hundreds of thousands of bushels shipped out, so I"ve been told, or sold to the evaporator in Clinton. That trade died off many years ago when the orchards in British Columbia went into operation, with their advantage of a longer growing season. Now there might be one or two trees left, with their scabby little apples. And those everlasting lilac bushes. These the only survivors of the lost farmstead, with not another sign that people have ever lived here. Fences have been pulled down wherever there are crops instead of livestock. And of course just in the recent decade the low barns as long as city blocks, as forbidding and secretive as penitentiaries, have appeared, with the livestock housed inside of them, never to be seen-chickens and turkeys and hogs raised in the efficient and profitable modern way.
The removal of so many of the fences, and of orchards and houses and barns seems to me to have had the effect of making the countryside look smaller, instead of larger-the way the s.p.a.ce once occupied by a house looks astonishingly small, once you see only the foundation. All those posts and wires and hedges and windbreaks, those rows of shade trees, those varied uses of plots of land, those particular colonies of occupied houses and barns and useful outbuildings every quarter of a mile or so-all that arrangement and shelter for lives that were known and secret. It made every fence corner or twist of a creek seem remarkable.
As if you could see more then, though now you can see farther.
In the summer of 2004 I visited Joliet, looking for some trace of the life of William Laidlaw, my great-great-grandfather, who died there. We drove from Ontario through Michigan along what was once the Chicago Turnpike and before that the route of La Salle and many generations of First Nations travellers, and is now Highway 12, pa.s.sing through the old towns of Coldwater and Sturgis and White Pigeon. The oak trees were magnificent. White oak, red oak, burr oak, their limbs arching over the town streets and stretches of the country roads. Also great walnut trees, maples, of course, all the luxuriance of the Carolinian zone which is just slightly unfamiliar to me, being south of the region that I know. Poison ivy here grows three feet high instead of being a carpet on the forest floor, and vines seem to envelop every tree trunk, so that you can"t look into the roadside woods-everywhere are wreaths and curtains of green.
We listened to music on National Public Radio, and then when that signal faded we listened to a preacher answering questions about demons. Demons can possess animals and houses and features of the landscape as well as people. Sometimes whole congregations and denominations. The world is aswarm with them and the prophesies are proving true that they will proliferate during the Last Days. Which are come upon us now.
Flags everywhere. Signs. G.o.d Bless America.
Then the freeways south of Chicago, road repairs, unexpected tolls, the restaurant that was built on an overpa.s.s and that is now empty and dark, a wonder of former times. And Joliet rimmed with new suburban houses, as every city is these days, acres of houses, miles of houses, joined or separate, all alike. And even these are preferable, I think, to the grander sort of new houses which are here too-set apart, not quite the same but all related, with vast shelter for cars and windows high enough for a cathedral.