REMEMBRANCER

by Leigh Lundin

“Into the vat of water boiling with lye, he heaved the body…”

This week, I’ve been working on a story set in central Indiana and I’ll risk repeating personal background I’ve touched upon before. In Shelby County, I grew up on the last of the farms which had been in the family six generations, land deeded by Andrew Jackson before he became President. Bet you’re impressed, huh. My mother had several dozens, perhaps hundreds of ancestral stories, telling of the Indians whose arrowheads we found, the early pioneers, the Civil War era, and the opening of the 20th century.

My mother’s ancestors were teachers and we brothers played in our abandoned one-room brick school schoolhouse. We learned my grandfather had donated a tract for the “new” school in Morristown, a vastness of land which at the time was considered extravagant, since expansions, baseball diamonds and fields for marching bands were yet to come for half a century.

In a corner of one of the classrooms hung Old Pete, a skeleton. Little school kids amused themselves by “feeding” it bites of their sandwiches, just as their parents and their grandparents had done. The story they didn’t know was that Old Pete was a drifter who’d passed through the village and had the misfortune to die before making it out of town. In fact, no one actually knew Old Pete’s real name, only that his life had “petered out”.

One of my great-great-relatives concluded her one room schoolhouse needed a skeleton for physiology lessons, so in a hollow, where years later the railroad would pass, another ancestor built a fire under a cast iron kettle, dumped in lye and Old Pete, and boiled him until nothing was left but his skeleton. Any rumors that an over-eager educator with an open lesson plan might have helped Old Pete cross over have long ago died out.

After the first township school was built, Old Pete graced it as well, and he hung around for additional decades as newer and newer schools were constructed. I have no idea where Old Pete has ended up, but he had more impact and perhaps presence after death than he ever did in life.

Less than ten miles east lies the village of Arlington. Down here in Florida, citizens fear and despise the gypsies who amass in the warm climate during the winter defrauding businesses and tourists alike. In 32 Cadillacs, Joe Gores gives a brilliant account of gypsies who descended upon California. At some time in its past, Arlington at a time of need had been unusually kind to gypsies passing through and provided them a patch of ground in the town cemetery to bury their dead. The gypsies planted four posts, topped with the iron heads of horses facing outward, symbolic of fleeing into the four winds. Gypsies might target and torment other regions, but the areas surrounding Arlington remain untouched.

Near the back of the cemetery sits a dollhouse, a monument for a little girl buried there long ago. For decades, the antique dolls in the little house remained intact and cared for until an article appeared in a major newspaper. Within days, the dollhouse was broken into, its tiny antiques stolen. Aghast, the town replaced them, only to have the tiny house broken into again, days later. Now, the little structure holds only cornhusk dolls, simple offerings by the local women who would have donated their own antiques, if they could have been assured they would have remained untouched.

These are what I think of as little mysteries, little histories that can provide either background or a source for stories. My parents’ home not only had a secret room in it, but a secret cellar. Was it part of the Underground Railroad? Was it used for other smuggling?

No matter what part of the country we’re in, forgotten little mysteries like this abound if you dig deeply enough, be it among the hills of Virginia, in the villages of New England, in the gothic tales of the South, amongst the mesas and arroyos of New Mexico, or within the foggy mists of the Northwest. If you came across an old tale about a man struck by lightening, leaving only his outline burned into a stone wall and his shoes … and the stumps of his feet, how could you not resist weaving this into a story? James Whitcomb Riley, the Hoosier poet, was adept of weaving such little histories into his tales and poems. These little moments provide depth and texture to stories, and a touchstone to our past.

My preferred venues are villages and small towns, which, from our conversations, might bemuse, mystify, and perhaps terrify, say, big city girl Nicole Sia, Alfred Hitchcock‘s charming assistant editor, who professes not to fathom existence outside New York. My “little history” concept, however, can equally be applied to metropolitan areas. The thriller author, Jeffrey Deaver, writes brilliantly upon the grand canvas of New York, weaving in obscure history as an integral part of his novels. Other authors have tackled Chicago, a city where it’s impossible to escape the past, and even Mark Twain wove similar touches into his stories and essays from the Mississippi to San Francisco.

Nothing in these “little histories” I’ve mentioned compares on a scale to Plymouth Rock, the cruelty of Lord de la Warr (Delaware), the Boston tea party, the bravery of families crossing the vast plains in wooden wagons, the foolishness of Custer, the last fight at the Alamo, or even 9/11. But “little histories” are personal touches, the little events we can relate to, those of ordinary people who lived and died, and deserve to be remembered again.

A “remembrancer”, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is a chronicler, one who remembers and reminds. In using these little ancestral memories, we don’t merely recycle, we keep alive the legends and stories that might otherwise be forgotten in our bland, antiseptic television age.

What a great job, being a remembrancer.