If St. Louis is the center and New York City the height, Texas is the width. Is that a cliché? If so I stand in the middle of it and admire it, a little timid.
•
When toward evening outer space has covered us in its reconciling darkness, and we’re seated at the square table in the kitchen with our computers and papers, my dad says that a lot is happening in cosmology these days, so many things in the works, so many exciting new discoveries.
Along with an Armenian physicist, he’s pursuing a large project with neutron stars. All sorts of strange things happen inside them, he says. Their density is super compact, a billion million times more compact than water, which is pretty dense. I have to imagine something with the same mass as the sun (whose mass is a million times that of the Earth), squeezed together into something that corresponds to the size of a city like St. Louis or Copenhagen. There can’t be much room between atoms, I say.
No, he says. Gravity on the surface of such a star is a hundred billion times more powerful than on Earth. So if you are a creature there, you would be very flat.
Practically two-dimensional, I say.
And a mountain would be just a few millimeters, he says, holding a neutron star’s miniscule version of Mount Everest between two fingers.
We laugh. Two dimensional beings, and beings from other dimensions, have a way of slipping into our conversations.
And there may be free quarks in the center of the star, he continues, which are normally bound by neutrons or protons, but which are pressed so firmly together in the star’s core that they float around without them. A soup of quarks, he says. And that’s a very high-density state of matter. Physicists discuss the possibility that this is how the center of a neutron star acts. Astronomers can now determine the mass of these kinds of stars as well as their surroundings, both important factors if you want to learn more about the powers that, in addition to gravity, hold them together.
Do you mean the powers that hold the stars together? I ask, even though he just said so, because I like floating out there with him even if just for a moment.
Yeah, well, actually it’s mainly gravity, he says. But the material found in any given place in the star depends on which form of interaction there is between the existing particles. And that’s a many-body problem, he says, which is one of his areas of expertise. That’s where I come into the picture. It’s all quantum physics. The star is very quantum mechanical, a kind of laboratory for quantum physics.
We fall silent. I’ve scribbled words into my notebook, a bad habit, or a good one depending on your point of view, stabbing my notebook with a pen during conversations, especially when it’s my dad, and especially when he says something I don’t understand or that I want to remember. I don’t like wasting any part of our precious time together. Stars, laboratory, neutrinos, experiments, farther out in the universe. Bohr & Einstein. Giant leap, it reads.
But I talk shop, he says.
I like it when you talk about your work, I say.
Do you?
Yes, very much.
according to my dad, a memorial plaque is supposed to be hanging on Poppa’s shop. In any case, there was one the last time he was here with my brother, Eugene. Underneath one of the wooden overhangs on the town square, we find a box with a brochure that backs him up. Welcome to historic Lockhart, it reads on the cover next to a photo of fireworks exploding above the courthouse. Inside the brochure is a map of the town square where my great grandfather’s shop is called “the August Walter Building.” A brass plaque, with the same wording as in the brochure, is supposed to hang right beside the door. But there’s nothing there.
Window blinds cover the windows, a sticker on the door reads: Here to help life go right.
I used to wash those windows, my dad says, shielding his eyes to see if the office is open.
It is. We go in, my dad in the lead. The air is still, the hum of machines and a mood of sleepy office. A stout woman sits at a desk, concealed behind two enormous computer screens. My dad clears his throat and points toward the street.
My grandfather used to own this building, he says. Last time I was here, there was a plaque outside designating: “This is the August Walter Building.”
A few charged seconds pass. The metallic smell of the whirring computer. The woman stares up at him as if he’s caught her in the act of something terrible, and says that this is an insurance company. We’ve been here for a year and a half, sir.
My dad tries again. I wonder what happened to that plaque?
The woman points at a glass wall and says that we can ask Brenda.
Behind a glass wall to an office-within-the office we find two more women, also stout, one standing, the other sitting.
I am John Clark, my dad says to the standing woman, his head affably thrust forward, grandson of the man who had a saddle shop in this place for fifty years.
The standing woman nods, m-hm.
And his name was on a plaque outside.
Oh, really?
I wonder what happened to that plaque?
I’ve never seen a plaque. Out there.
The sitting woman interrupts. Everything she says sounds like a question. You might wanna talk to the owner of the building? Mike Lazano? She points into the backwall. He lives right in the back?
They live directly behind, the standing woman clarifies.
I bet the store looked really different back then, the sitting woman says.
Oh, you don’t know the half of it, my dad says, giving his little baffled laugh.
Out on the street we’re dying with laughter. The office ladies with their donuts and friendly short-term memories and my dad, the old man, with his dusty demand: Where is my grandfather’s plaque? As if the building, in some grand ghostly reality, still belonged to our dear old Poppa and they just sat in it, the ladies, like a brief glitch in the saddle shop’s glorious history.
the obligatory arrival ritual, the trip around the courthouse. I follow my dad’s turtlelike head, the hair that needs to be cut. The sidewalk is familiar to his feet, he glances in all the windows, shades his eyes to see the place of his childhood. Time settles over us in crinkling layers. I see through them as if through sheets of glassine.
On the east side, the heat feels as though you’re dragging yourself through an oven. They used to call this the cheap side, my dad says, turning toward me hustling at his heels. He points at the sun whose morbid heat on summer afternoons filters down at such an angle that even the covered sidewalk is defenseless.
Where does he get all his energy? I’ve got to trot to keep up. The air thickens with the smell of grilled meat from Smitty’s. I never managed to ask the question: Kreuz’s or Smitty’s? The name or the place? My dad’s nostrils have long since decided. He opens a creaky wooden door with a rusty screen. I knew it already, the place always wins over the name, just like the body wins over the words, hunger wins, thirst, the pull of entrenched habits and so on. It’s the reason I’ve traveled here at all, to make the place mine.
The walls are dark brown with soot; it’s like walking through an overturned chimney. The smell of open flame strikes us in waves. As we study a glass display case containing fading, sepia-tinted photographs, two potbellied visitors, who’ve been sitting on the bench eating and drinking bottled beer, start explaining to us how the place works, how you don’t use your fork, how you’re to sit out here in the old, sooty room to get the full effect, but my dad doesn’t hear them. He’s trying to identify some of the washed-out faces behind the glass. This was Mr. Kreuz’s assistant, Smitty, he tells me, tapping the glass with a fingernail. And to the men, who’re now on their feet and cleaning their teeth with toothpicks, their faces glistening, not quite finished explaining the protocol to my dad who has still heard nothing. My grandfather lived right across the alley from the Kreuzes. The fattest and most glistening of the two men says: Oh, really, wow, and pushes his toothpick around his mouth. The other man pulls out a white handkerchief and dries his
sweaty face, and my dad continues walking into the long shaft toward the central room, where an open flame glows on the floor in the corner.
Here it’s black, sooty, and hot as hell, and behind a counter, next to a large wooden block in the middle of the room, stands a black-bearded man wearing a white apron, his fork jammed in a piece of scorched meat the size of a tomcat, which he slices with a black-bladed knife, chop, chop, as if it were parsley.
My dad doesn’t hear the woman at the register call him forward in line. Sir? Sir? Maybe he hasn’t realized that he’s begun to elicit special consideration from his surroundings. People wait patiently as I guide him forward. I can tell from the looks on their faces that they think it’s his age, but he’s always been this absentminded. Looked at from another angle, he has a singular talent for focusing, zeroing in on the project at hand, which right now is to purchase meat at Smitty’s.
He places his order, and the woman gathers the meat from the block using two spatulas before weighing them on the old-fashioned enamel scale. The brown butcher’s paper becomes immediately transparent with the warm grease. We can choose between white sandwich bread or saltine crackers to go with the meat. We both choose the crackers.
I assume you don’t want any, my dad says to me, and means the meat.
Maybe I’ll eat some of the crackers.
on the table is cora Double-Clark’s book. Over the years, my dad has collected a folder on his computer with genealogical material. In the evenings after we’ve eaten, I try, as my dad speaks, to write the stories down on paper. He sits at his computer and googles dates, information, connections, and I draw a family tree. I have to concentrate: sons, daughters, they all have the same name. We haven’t even reached 1800, and the Clark family is already bunched up in the lower right corner in tiny, antlike script.
If you and I are going to be on this family tree, I need to draw on the dining room table, I say.
Right, my dad says. We are gonna need a piece of paper as big as this table.
The entire room, I say. At least.
In Cora Clark’s book there is a photo of William A. Clark and one of his wife, Nancy Copenhaver Clark. Through a pair of round metal glasses William stares directly into the photographer’s lens with an expression that’s at once dignified, erudite, and relaxed. He’s wearing a tailored jacket with a wide lapel, and underneath he’s wearing a buttoned jacket in a lighter-colored fabric. Black pageboy flip and long white beard trimmed in a neat square. His left arm rests on something you can’t see due to the close cropping, perhaps an armchair or the photographer’s prop. In the picture next to him Nancy is seated in exactly the same position, but with her right hand in her lap and her left arm reposed, relaxed. She’s wearing a black, buttoned-up dress with white dots and a narrow white collar, and her still black hair is parted severely down the middle. The same small round metal eyeglasses as her husband, and there’s something about her mouth that appears to require an effort holding in place or hiding, maybe an advanced case of periodontitis. Life left a harsher mark back then. I’d guess they are around fifty-five or sixty, so it must have been taken after the Civil War. The Ur-Clarks photographed at what appears to be the beginning of their old age.
The Ur-Clarks aren’t the earliest ancestors we’re aware of, the strand my dad holds between his fingers, the Clark strand, goes all the way back to England, the Clarks of Kent (he’s shown me the shield and castle). He calls them Ur because they’re the first in Lockhart, once again, the place trumps the name. They were the ones who planted their flag and said: Here.
How they arrived here, the trip west, is so distinctly American that it’s impossible to conceptualize America without imagining this westward trip. It’s how America understands itself. Restless searching for what’s new, making a clean break, starting afresh, colonizing territory, the idea of individual freedom and what one is capable of achieving with one’s own two hands. My grandmother with her cookies in her kitchen, the stocks, the three hundred thousand dollars. With her own two hands.
Most who chose to travel westward were the youngest sons who had no hope of inheriting the family land, or so goes the myth, but it’s clear from Cora’s book that William A. Clark, the third son, already owned land on which he cultivated cotton.
So why did William and his family travel west? My dad doesn’t know, and Cora’s book doesn’t provide any clue. But he believes the money for the land possibly came from his grandfather, the war hero Samuel Clark, the one with the silver plate in his skull. William’s own father (also named William) had disappeared. In Cora’s book it reads simply, “he had gone south.” His family never heard from him again. Maybe he ran away, my dad says, maybe he went out for a beer and then got attacked by Indians.
He went out for cigarettes …
Mhm. My dad nods. He’s culling the internet for information. It’s hard to fill in all the blank fields here. The courthouse nearby got burned down by the Yankees during the Civil War. Anyway, the gravestones have the dates …
William was born in Virginia, moved to Tennessee where he married Nancy Copenhaver and bought three hundred acres next to her brother. It sounds to me like a decent life. And yet they continued on to Alabama where a large number of his family was buried, his mother, two older sisters, a little brother, and his firstborn, a boy of fourteen who was named Carruthers.
Maybe they left Alabama after they buried the boy in 1853. Started out in one of those clanking wagon trains you see in old Westerns. A column of prairie wagons with huge, creaky wooden wheels and white tarpaulins affixed on handsomely curved wagon bows. Because it was easier to manage the unknown when in a group, illness, wagon repairs, unpredictable weather, they traveled with other families, Nancy’s brother, Copenhaver, the Barriers, Blanks, and Capertons. In towns, these wagons were pulled by horses, but on long journeys like the one undertaken by William and Nancy, they were pulled by two oxen. The trip was incredibly slow. I’ve always assumed that the settlers sat in their wagons, but the prairie wagons were almost exclusively used for goods. Only very small children sat in the wagons. The lack of suspension or rubber made them so uncomfortable that most preferred to walk beside them with their animals.
There was always a great risk of being attacked by Natives, and there were no stores along the way to replenish stocks. Cora describes how they needed to stop along their route in order to grow and harvest crops before they could go on.
The only thing we know with absolute certainty is that, in 1854, William A. Clark stood with a deed in his hand on a piece of land in Plum Creek, which had belonged to someone from the DeWitt settlement. William was a cotton farmer, and the land was a fertile hunk of rich black prairie topsoil, well-suited for cotton.
the sky is the color of sorbet, the sun is a white ball, and my dad has put on Celia’s yellow hat to protect his crown. He eats a banana as we walk back and forth beyond the fence searching for another entrance. A lot of tramping around in dry brush. It’s been several days since I’ve given so much as a thought to my leg, as I do now, and the folding cane that’s lying back at the house in my suitcase. I think especially of the physiotherapist’s admonishing words not to do anything crazy, like climbing, and my calm assurance that I’d just be visiting cemeteries with my nearly eighty-year-old dad. We return to the broad gate that’s still locked.
A sign states that Clark’s Chapel Cemetery got its name because the church was founded by William and Nancy. In the beginning, there was no church building, services were held at various family dwellings, and the church that was later built burned to the ground and no longer exists. Only this is this poorly maintained, dry burial plot with its scorched grass. We can see the graves through the wire fence.
My dad throws the banana peel into the bushes and looks at the fence.
Do you think you can climb this fence? He looks at my thin leg in its brace.
I don’t know. Can you?
I don’t know …
I hold his camera as he climbs over to our
ancestors’ cemetery. I go next, my leg feeling alien and weak and untrustworthy, but somehow I manage to make it over.
•
In Cora’s book, William’s eldest grandchild tells us that he was an industrious man who was the first to clear the earth in Plum Creek of trees and construct a cotton plantation. Over time, as the settlements grew and people demanded trees for building homes, he built the first sawmill in Caldwell County. Later he became the first to construct a horse-powered cotton mill that separated the cotton fibers from the seeds, a so-called cotton gin, something we never had in Denmark. He ran the business in Lockhart, Clark & Luce, that bought and sold cotton, wood, leather, and various equipment.
Nancy died first, at the age of seventy. William buried her in Clark’s Chapel Cemetery under the Mexican juniper he’d planted himself. What moves my dad every time is the sight of the six tiny graves belonging to the nameless children in Cora’s book. The only ones who count are the ones who reached adulthood, which means five in addition to the fourteen-year-old who was buried in Alabama, twelve children in all, five living, seven dead.
Nine years after Nancy died, William passed away in 1895 at the age of seventy-seven. He was interred beside his wife underneath the juniper.
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