A Comedy of Heirs

by Rett MacPherson

  Uncle Jed took the pen and signed his name. The signatures were as different as night and day. Uncle Jed’s was barely readable and shaky, Uncle Isaac’s was by no means fancy but he exaggerated the first letter of his first and last names.

  “Thank you very much,” I said. “We are caroling tonight. You guys gonna be there?”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Uncle Isaac said. “Big as our family is, you’re going to have an entire choir.”

  I giggled. “I doubt seriously if everybody shows up to carol. And it’s been my experience that the men tend to skip out on this one, so you guys better be there.”

  They both smiled and agreed that they would be there and then they went back to staring at each other. It was obvious that they were waiting for me to leave the room so they could resume their conversation. Which made me not want to leave the room.

  I went back up the steps to my office anyway. My mother would be so proud of me.

  I found the other box that Aunt Sissy had brought to me. The one that had a bunch of junk in it. I put it up on my desk and began pulling stuff out of it. Aunt Sissy was correct. It looked like somebody had just dumped Grandma’s junk drawer in this box. Except every now and then there would be an item that was a little too personal to be put in junk drawer. I found a grocery list from about 1974. She’d made a note to herself to bring cheese for Jalena, my mother, because she didn’t like hot dogs. We must have been having a barbecue or something.

  Buttons, scissors, shoe dye that must have been fifty years old. I found a box of cards that had not been used. It was just a box of assorted cards for all different occasions. I flipped through them and could tell almost immediately that they were ancient. These things must have been from around the 1930s or so. And in the very back of the box was a carefully folded piece of paper. I, of course, opened it.

  In it was a handwritten letter, the handwriting an uncontrolled scrawl, but still readable. It was a letter to my great-grandmother, not my grandmother. I began to wonder how my grandmother had managed to come into possession of this letter, but once I saw the contents of the letter, I didn’t care how she had acquired it. It said:

  Feb ’32

  Della Ruth,

  I’ve got to know that you are happy. You made a decision thirty years ago that I don’t think was all that fair. I’ve been patient. I’ve been silent. And I’ve loved you from a distance, while you’ve ignored me and pretended I was dead. I need to hear it with my ears and see your mouth speak the words. We were in it together. You should find it in your heart to grant me this much.

  Bradley

  My great-grandmother, and Nathaniel Keith’s wife, would have been fifty-two years old when she received this letter. Who was Bradley? And what decision was he referring to of thirty years earlier? That would have been 1902. Della Ruth and Nathaniel Keith were married in 1898, when my great-grandmother was eighteen years old and my great-grandfather was twenty-two. Maybe Bradley had meant to say “about thirty years ago” and he was referring to Della Ruth choosing Nate Keith over him.

  How did my grandmother end up with this letter? Or maybe she was not aware of the fact the letter had been put in the back of the box for safekeeping.

  Then I noticed that the paper lining on the card box was a little lumpy. I pulled the paper up and stood with goosebumps dancing down my arms at what the brown paper revealed. There was another letter, but more important, two photographs. One was of my great grandmother, Della Ruth, with a young man. I flipped the photo over and it said; Me and Bradley F. The other photograph was a small square about one inch by one inch of just the young man’s face. Again, it had the name Bradley inscribed on the back.

  I didn’t get it. Why would Della Ruth think it necessary to hide these photographs of this man? Did she make the wrong decision in men? Or was she forced to marry Nate Keith and really wanted to marry Bradley? I imagined my great-grandmother leaving this handsome young man standing at the altar, or something equally romantic.

  I opened the other letter, which had deep creases in it, as if somebody had folded it and unfolded it many times. It read:

  Earth and sky, moon and sun.

  You and I have joined as one.

  All that’s come before, and all to come after

  Will never touch our love and laughter.

  —Marry me, Della.

  I felt like a really cheap Peeping Tom. I know I’m nosy as heck, but this was way too personal for me to have read. Then I thought, Maybe that’s why Della Ruth put them there. So somebody, someday, would read it and know.

  Hubert McCarthy’s words came flooding back to me. I always thought Della Ruth had an agenda of her own. It was hard for me to believe, though, that my great-grandmother would have waited to kill Nate Keith until she was in her late sixties for a lover or a former lover. It seems like that was something she would have done at a much younger age.

  I put the two letters and the two photographs in an envelope and slid it into my purse. I was going down to Pine Branch and Partut County. I absolutely had to know who Bradley F. was.

  THE NEW KASSEL GAZETTE

  THE NEWS YOU MIGHT MISS

  by Eleanore Murdoch

  People of New Kassel, I am here to ask you to reach down into the deep recesses of your heart, and give of yourself. There are four kittens at the rectory and they need homes. Wouldn’t one of our elderly residents like a companion? Or how about a kitten for your children on Christmas morning? Father Bingham says he can only keep them until New Year’s.

  Rumor has it that Sylvia and Helen are not speaking to each other. Helen is still giving the tours at the Gaheimer House in place of Torie O’Shea, whose family is on vacation. Oh, and Chuck Velasco’s pet iguana has escaped the confines of his cage. Chuck says there is a reward if anybody finds Teddy and returns it to him. Aren’t iguanas coldblooded? Just curious.

  And Sister Lucy says that the boys’ choir, including the girls, all sang beautifully on Tuesday night. She thought she heard God himself applauding the children’s efforts on “Joy to the World.”

  Until next time,

  Eleanore

  Fourteen

  The inside of the library in Progress smelled like the inside of a grade school. I can’t exactly say what that is, mind you, but it is its own distinct smell. The library is quite humble. It’s very small and looked like somebody took a tin can, cut it in half, stuck it in the ground and painted it.

  I didn’t have time to order the census records that I wanted to be mailed to my library in New Kassel. It was much faster and easier for me to just drive the forty minutes down here to Progress and look it up myself. I was looking for all the families in Partut County that started with the letter F, in the year 1900. My grandmother was twenty then, so I could bet that Bradley was about that age as well. The 1890 census was burned and only remnants of it existed. One of the few things that remained was the records for the Civil War veterans. This is really frustrating because it always seems like 1890 was the year I needed to connect some ancestors with their parents or something.

  Luckily, the 1900 census was in the form of what they call soundex. Meaning that it was listed with the first letter of the last name of the head of household, followed by three numbers, based on a code system that somebody came up with. So, all I had to do was just scroll through all the Fs for Partut County and find one that had somebody named Bradley. This could be a much bigger task as he could have been named John or Charles. Bradley is fairly uncommon first name.

  I sat in a corner going through the census on the only microfilm reader in the blasted place. I had to look at every single page of this thing. I’d been at it about an hour, my neck was stiff and I had a horrible pain in my shoulderblade. A slow pace is the only way to do this, because I couldn’t take a chance on blinking and missing a name.

  Finally, I came on a Ferguson family living in the county in the township right next to Pine Branch. William Ferguson, age forty-three, and wife Rose, with a slew of children. Bradley age
twenty-one, was one of them. There were twelve kids listed in increments of two years. This wasn’t in the least unusual for the time and place, but it always amazed me every time I saw it. I have one ancestor who had twenty-three children by the same wife, and only two sets of twins. That means that woman was pregnant twenty-one times! If that had been me I would have made my husband sleep with the pigs. Or he would have met with a terrible accident.

  I jotted down all of the information on this family. The problem was that there could be another Bradley F. in the census, so I had to go through the whole thing. Two hours crawled by and I found a Brad Franklin, but he was about forty and judging by the picture I had of Bradley, he was close to the same age as my great-grandmother, so this couldn’t have been him.

  I was finished. There had only been one Bradley with a last name that started with an F. I checked the 1910 census and the 1920 census for this same man. In 1910 he was still in Partut County, age thirty-one, living by himself, but his occupation was listed as the general store. Did he own the general store or did he work at one? I jotted that down, too. By 1920 the soundex showed him living in a large estate within Progress city limits and it still listed the general store as his occupation. If he owned a large estate he most likely owned the store. And that was as far as I could track him in the census, because the 1930 census was not available to the public yet.

  The thing I noticed was that he had not married.

  What was Della Ruth’s father thinking? Nathaniel Keith was a drunk and a very poor farmer. He only farmed what the family needed, so he didn’t even sell his crop. The only extra money that ever came into that household was from his son John Robert, who played his fiddle at weddings and things like that. And Della Ruth would quilt the wealthier women’s quilt tops for them for either cash or for specific items like sugar or salt.

  Della Ruth’s father forbade her to marry Bradley Ferguson because he thought Nathaniel Keith would make a better husband? Unless Nathaniel Keith boasted of higher goals, I couldn’t see how this could be. If she had married Bradley Ferguson she would have been one of the women paying a poor farmer’s wife to quilt her tops. Then again, we wouldn’t be here. None of us. Me, my father, my cousins, my grandfather, my children.

  I rewound the census, relieved to be finished with that tedious job. I put it back in the box and went over to the librarian. She was a woman of about fifty-five years, tall and thin. Face powder caked in the crevices of her face and I noticed that her eyeliner was severely crooked.

  “I need the census for 1880, please.”

  She handed me a book. Even though this was the first year for the soundex the historical society had gone through it and taken out all the families in Partut County and arranged them according to household. Sometimes it helps to know exactly where your ancestor lived in respect to a church, poorhouse, or another family. I found Nathaniel Keith’s family in 1880, when he was three and half years old. I looked at the surrounding families to see who they were. Hubert McCarthy’s story of the swimming accident had my interest piqued, too. Might as well get everything while I was down here.

  The families in his township, who would have gone to the same church and same one-room school he went to, were about thirty in number. And of those thirty, about half of them had boys within three or four years of age. If you got any younger or any older than that, they probably wouldn’t have played together.

  Was I surprised to see that one of them was the Ferguson household? Sometime between 1880 and 1900 William Bradley moved from Pine Branch to a different township within Partut County. Bradley was a year old in 1880, and his older brother was three. I remembered what Mr. McCarthy said about the friends and neighbors being the one and the same with my family. So I wasn’t the least bit surprised to find that the families living close to Nate Keith as a boy were the Claytons and the Elsters. Both married into the Keith family by way of cousins of Nate Keith’s. As a matter of fact, there were probably only about five families in the whole township that I couldn’t pin some sort of distant relation on, even if it was just by marriage.

  I shut the book and jotted down some notes and then gave it back to the librarian.

  “I was wondering if you could help me,” I said. I came down here fairly often to use this library, but I didn’t recognize this librarian with the crooked eyeliner and winning smile.

  “I can certainly try,” she said. Her accent sounded like she was from Arkansas or west Tennessee, which was only about two hours from Progress.

  “I found a man in the 1900 census whose occupation was the general store. Could you tell me where I might find some information on the businesses in Progress around the turn of the century?” I asked.

  “Well, I take it you don’t want to spend hours going through the newspapers,” she said. I shook my head. “Yes, I think there is a book … let me see.”

  I followed her over to a corner of the library. She fingered a few books and finally pulled out a history of the county. Then she walked across the room and pulled out a huge binder. I didn’t follow her this time, I let her come back to me. “This is the historical society’s newsletters in here,” she said. “They spotlight individuals in the area, along with business, churches, that sort of thing. Try those two first and if you don’t find what you need, let me know,” she said.

  “Thank you very much,” I said and smiled. Librarians are your very best friend. And don’t ever think otherwise.

  I sat down at the table and thumbed through the history book. It looked fairly detailed so I flipped to the back to see if there was an index. So often the older histories, printed before the 1930s, don’t have indexes. And you can’t check these books out, because they are considered reference books. So unless a historical society or somebody with a lot of time on their hands comes along and does an index for it, you have to read the whole book in the library.

  This one had an index. No listing for anybody with the last name Ferguson. I checked all the pages that had anything to do with the town of Progress or Pine Branch. It mentioned the great flood back in the forties, a flood even earlier, a warehouse district, the ferry that crosses the Mississippi and goes to Illinois and that was about it. The founding fathers of Progress were listed, one of which was an ancestor of mine. I’d found that out years ago.

  I shoved the book aside and opened the binder of newsletters. It occurred to me that I had some of these newsletters at home. I used to belong to the historical society down here, about ten years ago. I think I stopped subscribing when money started getting a little tight and I thought I was finished researching. That would be the early nineties when Mary was born. I always knew, eventually, I’d get back into it, but I didn’t know when.

  Some of the newsletters were yellowed and well read. They spanned the time of about 1980 to the present. I slowly began going through each one of them. I’d been here at least four hours. My family was going to wonder what happened to me. We had caroling tonight, and several of us were going in to St. Louis for dinner at Del Pietro’s.

  The librarian walked over to me and smiled. “Would you like a soda or something?” she asked.

  I looked around the library. I was her only patron at the moment. I guess she could tell by the look on my face that I was confused. I didn’t think you were allowed drinks and food in a public library.

  “Nobody’s here, just don’t tell anyone,” she said and winked. “I’m dying of thirst myself and you’ve been here forever.”

  “Sure,” I said. “I’d love something to drink. Dr Pepper if you’ve got it, otherwise a glass of water.”

  She smiled and left to fulfill her errand. I went back to the newsletters. There were six newsletters for every year. Finally, I found an article of interest around 1995. “The Place to Shop in 1912 Was Ferguson’s,” the headlines read. It went on to say that a man named Bradley Ferguson had opened a general store in 1908. His parents had both moved here from Virginia when they were very young and Bradley’s grandparents were from Scotlan
d. The article stated that he put every penny he had into the store and that by 1912 Bradley had earned back what he’d put into it. The article went on to list some of the things that could be bought at the store and what some of the prices were.

  “Thank you,” I said to the librarian as she handed me a cold can of Dr Pepper. Reinforcements. I took a long, long drink and set the can down.

  The article was a glowing review of Bradley’s life. He was a kind man, letting poor people buy things on an account and pay it off a little at a time. He had other investments going that he started with the profits of his store. Around 1940 he married a woman half his age but never had any children. They spent much time abroad and it says that he died in Africa while he was there on vacation in 1950.

  The article was written by Naomi Cordieu. I photocopied the article and returned the binder to the librarian. “I’m afraid I don’t have time to go through much more,” I said. “Do you know who Naomi Cordieu is?”

  I figured that if Ms. Cordieu wrote for the historical society she was most likely a member. And if she was a member she probably frequented the library fairly often.

  “Uh-huh, she’s the corresponding secretary and co-archivist for the historical society,” she said.

  “Where can I find her?” I asked.

  “Well, she’s about eighty years old, somewhere around there. And I don’t have her number, but she’s listed. Or you can go by the historical society when they’re open and they can get a message to her,” she said.

  “Well, thank you for everything,” I said. “You were a big help.”

  “My pleasure,” she said.

  “Oh, one thing, though … I would be willing to pay you good money if you could look something up and have an answer for me by noon tomorrow,” I said. I smiled a mischievous smile and hoped she was up for the challenge.

  She raised an eyebrow but didn’t say no.

  “Could you check the newspapers for the 1880s, probably between 1880 and 1885, and see if there is anything on a swimming accident involving some boys out in Pine Branch? I don’t have the time to do it and I need to know, like yesterday.”