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My God.  Maybe I’ve had enough.  Let me go home to my own descendants.  Maybe my grandmother was right: why dwell on such tragic tales?

 

You’re in too deep. Sudden withdrawal will harm you, distorting all that you dream.

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What, like meth?

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I do not understand your meaning.

 

I do not understand my meaning, either.  How do I return?

 

Return is eternal.  There is nothing but return.

 

I’m not yet ready to believe that’s true.  Derrida says the real future is the one we have never seen.  I take that to mean our children may still have a few surprising options.

 

Who the f--- is Derrida?

 

Never mind.  Send me one last guide.  Someone to help me find my mother’s lost people.  Please.  I want to bring them to her while I can.  So many early deaths—no one to preserve the stories. Her mother’s whole family vanished, so young, so many consecutive generations.  So many well-meaning replacements insisting on their erasure.  How can you tell a four year-old to quit crying for the sudden disappearance of all she understands?  She sure did learn to stop the tears.  Taught us to do the same.  Do we even exist—did we ever exist—if the stories, even the imperfect ones, even the fragments, dissipate with the tellers?

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My leg hurts.

 

Mine too.  So I want a guide on this one.  Rational, undramatic, sympathetic.  Like my mother.

 

Woman, all you have to guide you through this last mystery is the internet.  You’ve run the well of revelation dry.  I’m very old, and I’m tired.  You purport to be a scholar, do you not?  Find her people within the Babel of that lighted box.  They do trace themselves in her; you will recognize them as they speak unto your mind.

 

Give me a head start.  How far back before we find something familiar?  An origin—not just a genealogy?

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Not so far, in my reckoning. A long time in yours. Begin in Providence, say, 1800. They are, already, five generations made by this perplexing and violent New World. You will be among fellow Americans.

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Okay.

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Two brothers, Silas and Festus Sprague, seven years apart.

 

Twin sisters, Barbara Ann and Millicent Lindenberger.

 

The brothers are first cousins to the sisters. 

 

Now a multi-family removal to the Ohio frontier.  A ricochet of marriages and a sensible family’s capitulation to a story of American angels.  A trek to a landscape alien as a moon.

 

My mother wants me to disentangle an administrative forgetting: “The record says that Barbara Ann is married to either Silas Sprague, or Festus Sprague.  Which is it?  We need to get it right.”  Her urgency is different from mine: she wants to put those old lives in order.  She wants to send correct information to Salt Lake City, so the Mormon Church can make the long-ago union eternally official.

I wish to deconstruct.

But we’re both leaning over the same diorama.  So I’ll do the homework, and then I’ll walk her in.  I will be my mother’s guide.

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