But I couldn’t help it. The whole thing felt odd to me.
Leo King was an old musician. Meaning he was from that school of honky-tonk from the fifties and sixties that had brought us the likes of Patsy Cline and Hank Williams. Even though nowadays he chose to play a more mountain style of country picking, rather than the slower crying-in-your-beer music. That didn’t take away the fact that he’d been one of the great crying-in-your-beer music musicians. So had my dad. So they hit it off quite well. In fact, I just stood back for a good ten minutes while they discussed music. Finally, Leo remembered why I was there.
He was in his seventies, with a huge belly and hairy ears. Don’t let that fool you. When he picked up a guitar, the man was magic. “Torie, I’ve got to say that these are some awesome recordings. Absolutely awesome.”
“Yes, but have they been doctored?”
“Not at all.” He handed me a stack of CDs. “I’ve put them on these CDs for you, and whenever they identified a song on the recording, I wrote it down on the liner notes. Quite a few of the songs, I just knew and recognized on my own. This is the Morgan Family Players, isn’t it?”
“Most of it. With the help of my grandpa,” I said.
“I knew it,” he said, and rubbed his hands together. Then he turned to my father. “Hey, Dwight, you want me to burn you some copies?”
“I’d love it,” my dad said.
“Actually, if you could burn another set for my sister, I’d be totally indebted,” I added.
“Sure thing,” he said. “It’s not often I get to work with original recordings of such a noted and talented family. So, what’s your connection?”
“Apparently, my grandpa—his dad—” I said, pointing to my father—“wrote quite a few of their songs and jammed with them. Scott taught my grandpa to play the fiddle.”
“Wow. It’s amazing to have that rich a musical history,” Leo said. “Wish I had that in my family. I’d be so proud.”
“Well, it seems we haven’t had a chance to really be all that proud, since we just discovered it. Scott wasn’t on the up-and-up, and my grandpa didn’t get credit or money for any of the songs he contributed.”
“Oh, wow. Yee-haw,” he said. “Sounds like you’re getting ready for a court battle.”
“No, not really,” I said. I glanced over at my father, who didn’t seem to dismiss it so quickly. “Well, at least my generation isn’t. His might.”
“Well, if you need an expert witness,” Leo said to my father. “I’d be happy to go to bat for you guys, saying these are authentic tapes.”
“I appreciate that,” Dad said.
“I’ll give these copies to Torie,” Leo told him. “When I get them done. Will that be all right?”
“Sure,” Dad said.
“So, do you have any more?” Leo inquired.
“Any more what?” I asked.
“Recordings. I’d be happy to put whatever you’ve got on CD for you.”
I thought about the CD of “The Blood Ballad,” my name for the recording of the confession of Belle’s murder. I couldn’t help but wonder who had the original tape. And I wondered if I’d get back the one I’d given the police as evidence. Not that it mattered, since I’d made a dub onto tape before I’d handed the CD over to the sheriff. Still, the CD that I’d received would be better quality than the tape I’d made from it.
“Not right now, but I’ll let you know if I do,” I said. “Well, I hate to cut this short, but I’ve got a date with the libraries tomorrow, so I need to get home.”
“Libraries?” Leo asked. “What for?”
“I’ve got to find out everything I can about the Morgan family.”
“And when she says ‘everything,’” my father added, “she means everything.”
It was true, so I just laughed along with them.
* * *
The next day, Mary’s picture as Santa Lucia was on the cover of The New Kassel Gazette. I bought ten copies and set them aside to distribute to all of her grandparents and to put in her scrapbook. She seemed pleased about the whole situation, and I thought her stint as Santa Lucia even garnered her some attention from that boy Tony, whom she was always mooning over.
As I dropped the kids off at school, Rachel couldn’t possibly let the morning go down as one of the most pleasant ones in the history of our family. As she got out of the van, she turned to Mary and said, “I guess because you got your picture in the paper, you think you can keep my earrings. But you can’t!”
Oh, for the love of God.
“Mom, tell her I want my earrings back,” Rachel said.
“Rachel, I’ve told her.”
“Then do something. Chain her to a wall and torture her until she confesses or returns my earrings!”
“Get out of my car,” I said and rubbed my now-throbbing head.
Mary grabbed her book bag, slammed the car door, and yelled at her sister across the parking lot. “Loser!”
I drove the quarter of a mile until I came to the elementary school building. “Your turn, big guy,” I said to Matthew.
He rolled his eyes. “I can’t wait until all of this is over.”
“What’s over? Rachel and her earrings?” Because I had news for him: Rachel was as stubborn as a rock, and she would not let this whole earring thing rest until Mary either returned the earrings or Rachel got to draw blood. I’d been through this before. Last time, it had been Rachel’s bath sponge. It went missing and then turned up in the garbage disposal three days later.
“No, I mean school. When do I not have to go anymore?” he asked.
I hated to tell him that he had at least a decade to go. “A long time, buddy.”
He grabbed his Yu-Gi-Oh book bag and his Darth Vader lunch box—he believes in having broad interests—and climbed out of the van. “So there’s no way at all I can hurry this up?”
“Afraid not, honey,” I said.
Then he turned, very dejected, and walked into his building as the bell rang. Poor kid. I hated school, too, when I was younger. Well, I loved to learn and I still love to, but that’s not the same thing as liking school. Matthew was just like me. I probably would have liked school much better if I could have taken all the other children out of it—too many judging eyes for my unconventional self—and I suspected that was Matthew’s issue, too.
When we lived in town, the kids used to walk to school unless the weather was bad. Now that we were out in the country, several miles from town and the school, they either rode the bus or I’d drop them off on my way to do something. Just as I was doing now.
I drove over to Wisteria and stopped by my mother and Colin’s for breakfast as I waited for the library to open. It was a spur-of-the-moment thing, because that’s the way I always was. My best friend, Collette, says I’m too tame and not spontaneous enough, but I think I do all right.
Colin was at the office, but my mother was waiting with a butterscotch/brown sugar breakfast roll type of thing, as if she knew I would be coming. I kept thinking that this built-in sense of knowing when people were about to arrive at my house would kick in any day, since my mother seemed to have had it her whole life, but so far, no luck. People showed up at my door and they got a bowl of cereal or Fritos, depending on the time of day that they arrived.
My mom, for the record, is very pretty. Not in that “Oh, gee, I hate you” sort of way, but in that “Wow, I’m enthralled” way. She really does have that effect on people. Which can be a bit annoying when you’re standing next to her, looking like your father. That’s okay, because one thing I can say about my mom is that she’s not arrogant about it in the least. She’s always very humble and very polite when people gush about her beautiful doe eyes and her creamy skin. It never goes to her head, and most of the time, she actually still blushes. Part of her allure is the way she holds herself. She comes across as somebody who’s gone to finishing school, when in actuality she never graduated from high school—due to an unfortunate encounter with polio—and grew up
barefoot and wild as a polecat in the hills of West Virginia. I’m not sure where the magical metamorphosis occurred, but it did. I’m still waiting for my metamorphosis.
“How are the girls?” Mom asked.
“Fighting.”
“Typical,” she said.
“How would you know? They’re always well behaved around you.”
She sighed and said, “Colin hates his job.”
“I know.”
“Is there anything to be done about it?” she asked.
“I talked with him a little bit about it the other day.”
“You did?” she asked, surprise tugging at the corners of her eyes.
“Yeah.”
“Like, a real conversation? No snide remarks?”
“Yeah, like a real conversation.”
“Wow,” she said.
We were both quiet a moment, and then I added, “I don’t know if there’s anything to be done about it or not. I guess it’s really up to him.”
“I guess so,” she said. “He’s driving me crazy.”
“I know.”
“And you,” she said. “I can’t believe you were outside at dusk during hunting season!”
“It doesn’t matter, Mom. Turns out it wasn’t hunters after all,” I said.
A grave expression crossed her face, as if she were still somehow right, but I just let it go.
After breakfast, I headed to the library. The Wisteria library was much closer to me than the St. Louis library, and I didn’t think I’d need the St. Louis library, for this research anyway. Most of the information I was in search of had to do with Progress, and, believe it or not, the Wisteria library boasted more records on Progress than the library in Progress. That might be because when I inherited all of the money from Sylvia, I donated a good chunk of money to the Wisteria library specifically for the genealogy department. Now there was a whole wall of books and records with a plaque that read: MADE POSSIBLE BY SYLVIA AND WILMA PERSHING, NEW KASSEL, MO.
First, I checked for the census records. I knew I could find most census records on-line at most of the major genealogy dot-coms, but aside from the fact that I was a dinosaur and preferred the library, I didn’t always trust the information on the Web sites. Call me paranoid—many already have—but I wanted to look at the original microfilm, handle it myself, and see it with my own eyes. Completely ridiculous, I know. Besides, it’s always much more interesting to go to the library than just to sit at home on the computer all day. Since there were other records to look for, why not just do it all at one place?
I found Scott Morgan and his wife, Louise, living four households away from my great-grandpa, Nate Keith, and his family. The children were listed: Cletis, Eddie, George, Miriam, Emma, and Roscoe. What I really needed was the name of the woman my great-grandmother had referred to in her letter as Peggy. Peggy was not an uncommon name, although it wasn’t as common as Doris, Louise, or Sarah in the first half of the twentieth century. It became much more popular in the fifties. Prior to 1900, Peggy was actually short for Margaret, and every now and then, I’d still find it used like that these days. Patsy was the nickname for Martha, back in the day. I’d never been able to figure how either one of those nicknames derived from the actual name. But if you know all of that when you start tracing your family tree, you’re less likely to spend months looking for two daughters, Patsy and Martha, when the names belong to one and the same person.
I had no idea where to begin. My cell phone buzzed, and I answered it with a whisper. “Hello.”
“I think we should challenge the results of the birding Olympics,” Eleanore stated.
I glanced at the clock on the wall; it was just past nine 9:00 A.M. Had Eleanore gotten up and decided she needed to start trouble? “Eleanore,” I began.
“No, I’m serious,” she said. “Getting shot at should mean something.”
“It did mean something, Eleanore. We got shot at.”
“But … Elmer gets all the glory. We got shot at!”
“Well, we got to live! You should be happy about that,” I said, trying to keep my voice down.
“But it’s not fair. We would have seen more birds than he did if we hadn’t been interrupted by flying bullets.”
“How do you know we would have? What’s your guarantee that we would have seen more birds?” I asked.
It suddenly occurred to me that my side of the conversation would sound very strange to people passing by.
“Because I’m a better birder than Elmer, that’s why.” The venom in her voice was almost palpable. Damn, when she got ticked, she got ticked.
“How can you be so sure? I mean, isn’t it just luck? A bird happens to land in the tree, you spot it, and then you write it down. It all depends on where that bird decided to land at that moment. How does that make you better at it?”
“Because it’s all about the essence you emit and what you bring to it. The birds can sense that, you know?”
“What, have you read Zen Birding or something?”
“Oh, is that a book?” she asked. I could hear paper rustling. She was writing it down.
“Eleanore! I’m not contesting anything,” I said.
“It’s not fair,” she persisted.
“Okay, and neither is training your whole life for the real Olympics, flying thousands of miles away from your country, only to pull a hamstring or fall in the first ten feet of the race. It totally stinks, but there’s nothing you can do about it! We got shot at. Simple as that!” I screamed.
The librarians didn’t bother to stare at me. They understood that, well, I could be a difficult patron sometimes. But the other librarygoers were staring. One woman grabbed her little blond-headed toddler and slinked behind a Dr. Seuss display.
“Oh, I forgot to give you those pictures from the horse show,” she said. “When can I bring them by?”
“Eleanore, how did you get my cell phone number?” I asked suddenly, ignoring her question. “Never mind. Don’t answer. I’m hanging up now.”
“Fine, but you owe me new binoculars!” she screamed into the phone.
I hung up, and instead of leaving the phone on vibrate, I turned it off completely.
I went through the census, scouring the statistics for each family within the township that Scott Morgan had lived in. It would most likely be a futile effort, I knew. The Peggy I was looking for could have been from anywhere in the county, but I got the feeling from my great-grandmother’s letters that she was a woman who’d lived close by. Somebody in the valley, maybe, or somebody at their church. Back then, people didn’t go to the end of the county to socialize. My grandpa would travel several counties to perform, but when it came to socializing, most people did it in their own backyard, so to speak. If I was going to find this Peggy, it would be within a five-mile radius.
After four hours, my head throbbed and my eyes felt stuck in one position, but the census records gave me a total of two Margarets and three Peggys. One was seventy years old at the time, so I figured she was out, and another was about ten years old. That left me with one Margaret Brown, a Peggy McKee, and a Peggy Kiefer. My great-grandmother had indicated that the Peggy in question was unmarried, because the boy was starving, and she had nobody to help her feed him.
If she were an unwed mother, it was possible that she’d lived with her parents for a while after the baby was born. So I followed the Margaret and Peggys in question to the census for 1930. One Peggy and the Margaret had disappeared, meaning they’d probably gotten married and were living under their married names with their husbands, but one Peggy remained: Peggy Kiefer. Peggy Kiefer lived with her parents, Al and Joanne, one sister, and a little boy named Rufus. Rufus was listed as the grandson of Al, the head of the household.
Rufus was listed as Rufus Kiefer. So he was either Al’s grandson by a son who’d died before 1930 or he was a grandson by one of Al’s two unwed daughters. I will say that it’s not unusual to find grandchildren in a census who bear the name of the head of h
ousehold. I’d seen where this happened numerous times in my own family. It happened sometimes because the census taker just put down the last name of the head of household and assumed everybody else had the same last name. There was any number of reasons why this might happen, but the point is, it usually didn’t happen.
I went back and checked the 1920 census, and Al and Joanne Kiefer had two boys to go with their two girls. I jotted down their names and then went forward to 1930. Both were alive and well, married and living with their own families.
So little Rufus Kiefer had to be the son of either Peggy or her sister, Ann. Or it might have been an error on the part of a sexist census taker. Since Ann would have been about thirteen when Rufus was born, and my great-grandma’s letter mentioned Peggy specifically, I was going to go with Peggy.
Grabbing my notebook, I went outside and made a phone call to the library in Progress. One thing they had there that I couldn’t look at in Wisteria was the baptismal records of the churches. Based on the township that they were living in, I deduced which churches would have been closest. It helps when you’ve studied a county your whole life. The fact that I knew all of the churches in that township was actually pretty scary. I could also name all the creeks and rivers in that township. When the librarian answered, I told her what I was looking for and for which churches, and an approximate year. She said she’d call me back in half an hour.
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