Ancestors (39 page)

No fair—or even rational—investigation of the murder was possible. The trial dragged on for eight years. With a change of administration, most of the defendants were set free. My grandmother’s cousin was one of the three men who were not. He was a stenographer in the State Auditor’s office, and closely associated with Caleb Powers, the Secretary of State, who was charged with being “accessory before the fact to the willful murder of William Goebel.” There was testimony to the effect that Henry Youtsey had a key to Powers’ office, from which the shot had been fired, and also that he had exhibited a box of cartridges and said they were for Goebel. He spent nineteen years in jail, and then was pardoned, after talking some more. One of my mother’s cousins met him shortly after he was freed, and said indelicately, “Now that it’s all over, tell me, Henry, did you do it?” and the answer (which I believe) was “No, I didn’t.”

Henry Youtsey held public office in Cold Spring after he was released from prison. Caleb Powers served a term in the United States Senate.

It is not true that the dead desert the living. They go away for a very short time, and then they come back and stay as long as they are needed. But sooner or later a time comes
when they are in the way; their presence is, for one reason or another, an embarrassment; there is no place for them in the lives of those they once meant everything to. Then they go away for good.

When I was in college I was wakened out of a sound sleep by my own voice, answering my mother, who had called to me from the stairs. With my heart pounding, I waited for more and there wasn’t any more. Nothing like it ever happened to me before, or since.

There is a Chinese proverb that says every piece of good luck is in the end a misfortune, and every misfortune is cause for congratulation if one could only read the future. One of the two business associates whose names figure in the unconfident letter from my father to my Grandmother Maxwell became his only enemy—Charlie Higley, who by the Twenties had become a millionaire, having made a fortune for himself and another for the insurance company by playing the stock market. Money made him overbearing. He was elected president of the company and moved on to the New York office. He managed to retain the title of head of the Western Department (which would otherwise have passed to my father) and the salary. My father put up with this patiently, but there was more. Mr. Higley began to show a pronounced preference for the opinions and the company of a younger man in the office, whom he could easily have advanced over my father—a humiliation my father was not ready to accept. For the first time, he began to look old. The thing he was afraid of didn’t happen. My father’s enemy died suddenly, and was replaced by someone who was well disposed toward my father. He was put in charge of the Chicago office and made a vice-president of the company.

Eventually the presidency was offered to him, and he decided not to take it. It would have meant moving East,
leaving all their friends, and dealing with all manner of situations and pressures that he was not experienced in, and he was happy where he was. He retired from business prematurely, in his early sixties, because of a detached retina, and he and my stepmother moved back to Lincoln to live.

The Lincoln
Evening Courier
ran a piece about him. My Grandmother Maxwell’s clock is mentioned. He must have pointed the clock out to the reporter who came to interview him. And also talked about his boyhood, for the article speaks of his posting bills for the theatrical engagements at the old Opera House, and of the fact that he played the violin with the High School Society orchestra. Here, for a few seconds, the whole house of cards I have so patiently been constructing threatens to collapse. All it takes is one slippery card. Have I misremembered? Was it the school orchestra he composed that schottische for? Was the Christian church in Lincoln opposed to instrumental music?

Perhaps it doesn’t much matter, except that it casts doubt on other things that I thought I had right. But what do I do about the unused cards—all those ancestors I have tried to steer clear of because it is just too much? And because so little is known of them, of the women particularly. Only their names:
Anna Harper
, who married Stephen England. And
Agnes Kirby
, my great-great-great-grandmother, who married James Turley and lies buried in Carlyle Cemetery, near Mt. Pulaski, Illinois. And
Elizabeth King
, Jemima Keepers’ mother. And
Rosannah Yocum
, whose mother died when she was a child and who was brought up by her sister and took her sister’s husband’s name and married William Higgins. And
Deborah Lee
, my great-great-great-great-great-grandmother, who was the daughter of John Lee. And
John Lee
, whose will begins, “In the name of God Amen, I John Lee, of the County of Goochland, being very sick and weak though thanks to God in perfect senses and memory do think
it proper to make and ordain this my last will and testament …”

And
David Cheatham
, my great-great-great-grandfather, who lived in Virginia, in the Blue Mountains, and in his will left his son John a Negro named Frank, his son Leonard a Negro named Joseph, his son James a Negro named Squire (but freed an old Negro woman named Patty), and left his wife, Barbary, “choice of furniture, her loom, her trunk, her side saddle, my cupboard and its contents, a farm of forty acres during her widowhood, and one choice milk cow with corn meet to support her for twelve months.”

And
William Keepers
, my great-great-grandfather, whose newly dug grave, in Mt. Hope Cemetery, filled with water from the “spouty ground,” and it was necessary to weigh his coffin down with stones to keep it from floating like a rowboat.

The drinking water in Lincoln comes from an underground river millions of years old. Until it was buried by glaciers it flowed in the light of day. Its source was near Blowing Rock, North Carolina, and it ran northwest across the middle of the continent, much of the time at right angles to the Ohio, which did not then exist. From a point just beyond Fort Wayne, Indiana, its course was due west, to Lincoln, where it was joined by the Mississippi. Their combined waters flowed south into a bay of the Gulf of Mexico, which at that time extended northward to within a few miles of St. Louis.

The thing about a house of cards is that it cannot be left standing. Even if it doesn’t collapse suddenly, you say to yourself
It’s finished
, and make it fall, and gather the cards in and put them away in a desk drawer.

The Christian church in Lincoln is, I believe, still very much as it used to be, and flourishing. Attached to it is a training school for preachers, also flourishing. Some time ago the congregation detached itself from the main body of the
Disciples of Christ, which had become too progressive for it. Mulish like my grandmother, the church in Lincoln preferred not to move with the times, and, instead, allied itself with half a dozen churches in Illinois and Missouri to form what is now known as the Uncooperative Branch.

Family history is like a kaleidoscope in that you can keep shifting the essential elements and coming up with new patterns and combinations, but it is never-ending, and so I will present the reader with one more turn and stop. When I was in my forties, and married, and living in Westchester County, my father and my stepmother came for a visit. It was October, and cool enough for a fire in the fireplace. Before dinner I made a round of drinks, and my father and I sat on either side of the fire, talking, with our glasses on the floor beside us, and suddenly a suspicion crossed my mind, for the first time. I don’t know why it took me so long to ask this question or why it never occurred to my father to tell me without my having to ask. I picked up the poker and rearranged the logs and then, leaning back, said, “Am I like your father?” and he said, rather crossly, “Of course.”

Toward the very end of his life, he suffered from shortness of breath and also, like many old people, from a tired mind. And, either because he didn’t realize what he was doing or because it saved time and trouble, he telescoped his narrative in such a way that it only took him a couple of minutes to run through the entire repertoire, getting everything quite wrong but having the satisfaction of telling once more the stories he loved to tell. He celebrated his eightieth birthday and then he began to fail rapidly and after a slight heart attack ended up in the hospital. He and the Episcopal minister had become friends at Rotary Club meetings and when the minister appeared in the door of my father’s room he threw up his hands in delight. By his own choice he had a Christian burial service and lies in consecrated ground.

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