By G. M. Donley
I remember looking down one afternoon, then gazing back to the west. I was toward the end of my apprenticeship in Ottawa, and I was high up on the edge of the new Parliament building, thinking about the days to come. I looked across the low forest through which I had walked years before, crossed it just that one time. Return to Lake Simcoe? I looked down: stay in Ottawa? I looked to the south: venture to parts unknown? It was not truly a choice. The reason I had left to apprentice in the masonry trade was that there was nothing for me in Simcoe. I was not made of farmer stuff, and even had I been so made, the land was already overtaxed with the families of my father’s generation and my grandfather’s, all sharing the same tired patch of soil like too many rabbits on a small island. As for Ottawa, with the construction of the Parliament building done but the population of a nation’s new capital yet to arrive, anyone could see even without perching up so high as this that, while opportunities for a bricklayer might be on the horizon, a fledgling tradesman would be at the back of the queue, behind men with more experience. Toronto perhaps might offer prospects, but, as my grandfather often would remind me, an Irish name in the English Queen’s realm would always hold a man down . . . even if the man were an Anglican.
America called. There had been plenty of Americans around since their civil war had begun: some were avoiding the draft, and some men from the southern states were in Canada plotting for their side from the safety of another country. The fighting was now finished, but the men working alongside me had heard that industries that had grown up to supply that war now needed more hands, especially since the Americans had killed or crippled so many of their own. I was grateful to have a trade, confident that I would not end up digging a canal and being paid in whiskey. I had never been to America—never been anywhere but Ottawa and Lake Simcoe and the sparse path between them—but then sometimes a young man just had to set out.
So, not yet twenty years old, I headed for Buffalo. With some help in writing from my foreman, I sent a letter to my grandfather, knowing he could not read at all. My mother would read it to him. She had taught me a little, before I left. Born in England, she had been a governess and had learned to read and write. I knew my grandfather did not expect me back, just as his own family had not expected him back fifty years before when he had left home at age seventeen. He had heard that a man could serve a tour in the English army and in exchange be granted land in Canada. So he left Ireland—somewhere in the north, the town never specified—and came to this new continent sometime in the years before 1820 to serve in the army, perhaps to fight against the Americans. Some years later, that war lost and finished, he petitioned the crown’s agent in Upper Canada, who disputed the land claim for three years (my grandfather was convinced the man was not disposed to see an Irishman begin a farm in his district), but in the end, the authorities relented because the colony wanted to increase the population, but too few soldiers were accepting their promised land claims. Most preferred to go back home rather than battle the unyielding wilderness north of Lake Ontario. Why lose twice?
My grandfather began slowly, by himself. The land was not bountiful, the growing season not long. Soon he calculated that he had reached the limit of what one man alone could do, and sent word back across the sea for other family members to join. He found a wife, too, somehow. They were a family of gun-makers, and farming was not their first choice. But over time, carving out clear space from the flat forests around Lake Simcoe, they survived, with exceptions. My uncle was one of the exceptions, taken young by an ailment of the kidneys, it was said. He drank too much is what that meant.
The border with America was a wilderness, and no records were kept of who crossed or where. Few people knew. I was told where to be careful of bandits, and also where I could easily get over. A certain fee could hire a raft across the river just where it emptied into Lake Ontario. Better than upstream of the big waterfall, I remember thinking when we walked past it some days later. In Buffalo, I attended a dance. It was the first dance I had ever been to and I had not the first idea how to do it, but I was eternally glad to have gone to it, because it was there that I encountered my Adelaide. Some of the names are slipping away, but not hers. I have never been good with names. I remember other things: what they were like, how they were related, whether the skin was warm or cold, wet or dry. And of course I cannot see the names from here, on account of all the dirt. It is not because of my reading. I can read well enough to make out a name on a tombstone. I got better at the reading over the years, even as I acquired an ailment of the kidneys. Fresh from London the previous year, Adelaide was small and round and strong of voice. I was tall and lean and cultivated a mustache that had not yet filled in (but later would bountifully). Her family was planning to set off for Ohio, where some Londoners of their acquaintance had recently removed. This became my destination. We announced our matrimonial intentions and I accompanied their party by steamer to Cleveland.
South of Cleveland was the village of Newburgh. Upon our approach along a difficult muddy track, I felt as if I were once again in the wilds of Simcoe. Little was there but a few farms, a short main street, and a small cemetery. But the town was near the canal and the new railroad, factors which promised opportunities for it to grow into something more. It had a paved road, Broadway, which angled to the southeast and was covered in wooden planks eight feet wide. The road’s maintenance was supported by fees charged for each horse or wagon.
Soon we married. The rumors of employment opportunities in Ohio proved to be overstated, so at first we farmed. We had a son, James. When oil was discovered not far away in Pennsylvania, we removed to that place and there had two more children. The work was equal parts mud and fire. All the new construction was of wood—not a brick to be laid. It was no life for me, nor for any man, nor any woman, nor certainly for a child. Whiskey could dull only so much of it. In 1870, we returned to Newburgh. When the census man came around, I said I was born in New York. He spelled my name incorrectly but I did not argue. American now.
The village had grown substantially with new people from Ireland and England and Scotland and Wales, and I found that the place now could support a bricklayer. Small factories were replacing the farm fields. My work increased. I became known as one of the best, maybe the best. The family grew further. I wrote to my father and mother, and as my grandfather by then had passed, they too departed Lake Simcoe and came with my grandmother to settle in Newburgh. All of them were gone within seven years, and interred in the old cemetery. By this time, expanding factories had overtaken that graveyard and it was little more than a small square of grass and stones smothered in smoke. Not only was it too small to accept more graves for the growing town and its increasing number of deceased, it was also in the path of progress. By now the small village had been incorporated into the large city of Cleveland, and the decision was made by the city to move the graves to a new and larger site away from the industrial activity. The new cemetery was christened Harvard Grove, and all the graves and headstones were moved from the old site to the new. They relocated five Revolutionary War soldiers, and one from the War of 1812, a captain born in Connecticut. Perhaps my grandfather fought against him. Maybe they shot at each other, non-fatally. I visited the graves before and after the displacement, and apologized for the disrespect. I purchased a family plot in Harvard Grove and erected a central headstone bearing the family name.
We built a large house on Aetna in 1895. Three years later, my youngest son Ernest enrolled in college in Cleveland—such a distance in a short time. From eking life out of dirt, and being treated like dirt, to attending college with the men whose family names labeled the streets of the city. He married a fine young lady whose family lived around the corner. When their young son died not yet seven months old, the boy was buried at Harvard Grove. That name I can still see, carved into the granite. Malcolm. My kidneys failed soon after. Ernest visited my grave after I began to stay here in 1910. He apologized for leaving. He could not bear the memories of the neighborhood, nor to visit this place, but for once a year. They left Newburgh. I told him I understood, to be at peace. He could not hear me. No one can hear me. But I apologize to them too, for the times I was cruel, for the times the drink blinded me. The last of the family to be buried here with me was Florence, my daughter. They tell me a new section was added for Russian and Jewish, after the Irish and the English and the Scottish and the Welsh had moved away. And now Czech and Hungarian and people from other places beyond the map of my memory. I cannot see anything, but I hear the voices when the people come and stand and speak to the dead. Sometimes I overhear languages I do not know, but I know what they are saying. They are sorry. They forgive. Both. Also, the news.
Not so long after me came our James. He had caught the slow consumption. My boys told me they bought some land along the interurban line to try to get him away from the smoke. He stayed out there and they told me it seemed to help, but then he joined me just a year or two later. My dear Adelaide lived past us both. The grandchildren loved to hear her speak. Never a letter H.
Only that one grandchild, Malcolm, is here, Ernest’s baby who died so young. Not any other grandchildren or great-grand children or great-great grandchildren. But sometimes people visit. They tell me what has happened. One grandson married a young lady who was the only child of a Welsh mother who had wed, late in life, a man from a family that had lived on Long Island since the 1600s and whose men fought in the Revolution and in the 1812 war. The man was raised with the silver spoon but had lost his wealth soon after the marriage. Not what the Welsh bride had envisioned, I wager. They had moved from New York to Massachusetts following textile mill work, and after a time came to Newburgh. They were old and alone and out of money, and their only child had married against their wishes and moved away, and there was nothing else to do but follow her here. They stayed in one of the family houses, I am not sure which. There was a great economic depression that took the entire nation. People lived in places made for animals or equipment. The mother from Wales was buried here at Harvard Grove, but they tell me the dates on the stone are wrong. The father is here too, probably, but no stone. There was no money. Their names—I am sorry, no. Maybe that man was the last of the family to move away from Newburgh, during the war that followed the depression.
The trees that were so young and grew so stately have become frail, and many have tilted or toppled, broken branches and upended roots of oaks and maples and London planes taking nearby stones with them. The ground itself seems to shift every year, I have heard many visitors say. Almost no stone stands straight anymore.
A visitor who is here just now tells me there is another pandemic, not so bad as the influenza at the end of the great war 103 years ago, but not so different. This one takes the older rather than the younger. He tried some years ago to visit the house on Aetna, but it was gone, an empty lot now—he found later that a decade past it had been sold at too high a price, then foreclosed and abandoned, then demolished. By his description of Newburgh, it seems slowly to be going back to the land it was when I first set eyes on it. Many of the factories that forced the graves to be moved from the original site to this place are now gone or abandoned. It is possible, he says, to pass by this place while driving on Harvard Avenue without noting a cemetery at all, a small wooded gap across the street from a plastics manufacturer and a stamping plant and a wig shop, framed in by a neighborhood of small, worn down but still inhabited houses. He apologizes for the disrespect. Sixty years old and living only a dozen miles away and this is the first time he has been here. I wish he would introduce himself, tell me what he is called. He tells me that my youngest son was his great-grandfather, and he knew Ernest and did gardening for him, that my youngest boy lived to age 98.
Ernest finished college, I knew. My visitor tells me that Ernest was but the first of five generations to graduate from that same institution—and the other four women, all masters degrees and doctorates! Already now five generations, when I myself was third from the man who first came to this continent. He tells me his daughter, who will be a doctor in the spring, has a new daughter. No names given. I can hear him smiling. My great-great-great-great, that little girl.
He describes how the low December sun warms the hillside. The angle of the light multiplies the tilts of the stones and branches to make a tangle of shadows, but our family headstone stands straight still, the flat stones around still laying flat. He pushes the sod back so the date can be read at James’s edge. I thank him but he can’t hear me. He lingers for a while more, saying nothing, and is gone.
This story appears in The Virtues of Alignment, a collection of short fiction available as a print paperback and ebook. See the Miscagon Publishing Project page for more information.
Contact: info@gmdonley.com