Reunion: A Search for Ancestors

by Littrell, Ryan

  She understood, of course, what was at stake in letting herself be seen in this light: Once you’re defined via another, your once-independent territories aren’t just yours, but also, partly, theirs.

  So it’s no accident that two people who’ve been together for years might say, “We belong together,” just as it’s no accident that a person might say of her lifelong home, “I belong here.” Belonging is always belonging to, a little surrender to the person we belong with, or a little surrender to the place where we belong. Belonging isn’t the same as possession, because belonging always involves surrender, while possession never does. Possession is one-sided: The possessor doesn’t give up even an ounce of himself to the thing that he possesses.

  That’s why we don’t belong in a place just by possessing it. If we belong there, it’s not only because we can lay a claim on the place, but also because the place can lay a claim on us. The place we call home isn’t so much the place that’s given itself up to us; it’s the place we’ve given ourselves up to. And the same is true for two people: They belong together only because each has given up to the other, so much that it can no longer be taken back. It’s only through loss that we belong.

  On the day Elizabeth was buried, when her death was still young, memories of her belonging weren’t yet remote. Here was her son Hiram, and Hiram’s wife Nancy, my great-grandpa Lee’s great-grandparents. Standing near Hiram were his brothers and sisters, and Elizabeth’s brothers and sisters, and her in-laws and her grandchildren and her nieces and nephews. Even from here, I can make out the creases in their skin that must have come from years working in the fields, and the calluses and the black dresses and the strong hands and some downward eyes that said, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. And as Hiram walked away from the burial, he must have known that his mother and father were in him, and that they would stay in him, and that they would always belong there.

  Down the road, and about 150 years later, I was at my hotel, finishing my coffee and looking again at my map. It was approaching check-out time, and I figured I’d be back on the road to Chatham, to central Illinois, by lunchtime. I’d be in New York the day after tomorrow, and then I’d begin my Warren County, Kentucky search. But today, here, there was one more thing I needed to see.

  I got in the car and headed out of Troy. It was clearer today, a little warmer, and the air already felt humid. Wooden stands on the side of the road were selling fruit and fireworks. I came to the state highway, like yesterday, but this time I kept driving, and soon I was in Pike County, where my great-great-great-grandpa William Duncan lived, where Great-grandpa Lee was born. New housing developments were being built next to cornfields, and ranch houses had long driveways. Barns were off in the horizon, on both sides, and just after the town of Bowling Green, I turned left onto Highway 54. I was on my way to Vandalia, where Great-grandpa Lee lived before moving to my hometown Chatham when he was a teenager.

  This stretch was like the country roads around Chatham—flatter than the places around Troy, with more farmers’ fields and more heat, and always that sky. And when I came into Vandalia, I could see how Great-grandpa Lee might have convinced himself that he could be at home in that new place in Illinois. Because the houses here were almost the same as in Chatham, and so was the layout of the town and the grass in the lawns and the signs and the front porches, and how some of the trees on opposite sides of the street would come dangerously close to meeting one another, up above me as I drove, but never quite met halfway.

  I got onto Main Street and followed it north out of town for a few moments, until I could see the cemetery to my right, surrounded by fields. Pulling in and stopping the car on the side of the road, I had that dismal what-have-I-gotten-myself-into feeling. The cemetery was a lot bigger than expected. The gravestones took up several football fields, lined up in long, neat rows on green grass.

  Well, I hadn’t come all the way from central Illinois to quit now. Before getting out of the car, I pulled out a picture I’d brought along.

  Mom and Aunt Donna had found it in the same old box that contained the anonymous letter. The picture is of my great-great-great-grandpa William Duncan, standing alone in front of a house, right before the front porch. He looks like he’s in his 70s, after his wife Anna died. The house is probably his, here in Vandalia, the house he and Anna lived in together. His shoulders are narrow, his hair is bright white, he has a drooping bushy mustache, as white as his hair. The shirt’s buttoned all the way up under his wool overcoat, and you can see the wrinkles and veins on his hands.

  I brought the picture up close. Words can’t catch what’s happening in a picture, but his eyes seemed to be saying: I know who I am, and I’ll take care of myself, and it doesn’t matter to me whether you like it or not.

  This picture of William Duncan made me think of one other thing. In that mystery box, Mom and Aunt Donna had discovered an envelope from him, addressed to Great-grandpa Lee and Great-grandma Mary. This was in 1927, seven years after William Duncan’s wife Anna had passed away. Inside was a card congratulating them on the birth of their first child, and on the back of the card, William Duncan had written just one word: “Grandpa.”

  I put away the picture and got out of the car. I started in one corner of the cemetery, scanning the names on the stones as I walked down one row of graves, then the next row, and then the next. The names kept coming as I walked down the rows, and they instantly passed away, the way a face in a city is forgotten the moment you walk by it. Reading all the names like this felt disrespectful, to be registering them so fast and moving on. Flowers had been placed on some of the graves, fresh or wilted or plastic. Many of the newer graves had them, but the older graves had few, and the oldest had none.

  After about five minutes of walking along and scanning names, no luck. And after about ten minutes, still no luck. The sun was beating down harder now. As I walked along, I came across some names I recognized. Linnie’s maiden name, Hagan. Anna’s mom’s maiden name, Houston. Thomas J. Buchanan, born 1861, probably Nancy’s nephew. And a lot of McDonalds—Arch B. and J. Mae, Lillian, Leslie and Velma. I took pictures of these maybe-cousins as I came across them, but the battery on the camera was running low, and I didn’t have a charger.

  Then, after a few more minutes of looking, I found it. Even though people called her Anna or Annie, her full name was Georgianna, and the gravestone read:

  McDONALD

  W.D.

  AUG. 13, 1855-JUNE 18, 1935

  GEORGE ANNIE his wife

  NOV. 12, 1854-AUG. 4. 1920

  The camera came on. I rushed to get one last shot, and got it, and then the power went off for good.

  I looked around. Flat land to the horizon, acres of graves, a car driving by in the distance every once in a while. Nobody else was around, the wind wasn’t blowing. Should have brought some flowers along.

  I bent down and ran my hands over the blades of grass. I reached over and touched their stone, and kept my hand there for a few seconds. Hello, my name is Ryan, and I’m your great-great-great-grandson.

  I stood back up and looked down at those two end dates: August 4, 1920 for her, and June 18, 1935 for him. He had almost fifteen years of living alone in their house, fifteen years of posing for pictures on his own. Fifteen years of signing cards that just said, “Grandpa.” Maybe he’d already caught glimpses of aloneness before he was ever alone, because he’d seen his mom Nancy live for twenty-eight years after his dad Hiram passed away.

  But he and Anna never had me in their thoughts. They never knew that one day, some mystery great-great-great-grandson would be told about an old letter and then go on a road trip to Missouri. They never knew that this distant grandson would fall for someone, and get married far away. And so they never knew that I could imagine what it might be like to be the one who someday writes:

  Since you left, I’ll be at home and I’ll drive the car and I’ll watch TV
and I’ll try to fall asleep, but half the time I have to keep saying to myself: It’s natural, let it be, this is the way it goes, should have seen it coming, this is the way it is, this is the way it is. This is the way it is.

  But everybody else, out there, they don’t see any of that. Here’s what they see: Old guy, alone, wrinkles, slow walk, clothes a little out of fashion but he doesn’t care, and he says something funny every once in a while. That’s when their smile comes on, the practiced one, the dismissive, nice one. It always happens in that restaurant I’ve been going to. I walk in, and the lady does her nice hello, and calls me honey, just like she says hello and gives her honey-greeting to all the other folks coming in early for dinner. And the next day, she says exactly the same thing, and smiles exactly the same way. Like I’m some little kid. Like I can’t tell what’s going on around me.

  The grandkids still come up and give me a hug, and the little one still gives me a kiss, the way you always liked. But the older ones look at me sometimes like they don’t exactly know how to deal with me anymore. I know they still feel the same way about me, obviously, but they always act like they just don’t want to offend.

  The kids try to help, and you know I love them for it, but they’re just so sure of themselves whenever they talk about us. They say I’m mourning your absence. They say I’m “searching for closure.” One of them mentioned a good doctor, and another one got me some book about chicken soup. But you and I know that it’s not about your absence at all. It’s about your closeness. And if they understood a single damn thing, it might be worth telling them that sometimes, when I’m sitting here, I ask you: Why won’t you let me be? But there’s no point in talking about it, since I already know why you won’t let me be: It’s because I don’t want you to let me be.

  Because I know you remember that day, when I was so nervous and you almost laughed for a second because my hands were so cold, and we said ‘til death do us part. It was easy enough to say those words, and then all the years afterwards, when things were tough sometimes, you know I always came around: ‘Til death do us part meant that I wouldn’t ever give up on this. And I didn’t. I understood it, I got it, I was on board, I wasn’t going to complain too much.

  So maybe I never said this, but there were times when I’d wake up at night, and I could tell that you were lying next to me, but I couldn’t hear your breath. I’d start wondering, then I’d start getting a little worried. Then I’d say to myself, Don’t be an idiot, she’s fine, you know she’s fine. And anyway, it’s not like I really thought something was wrong—I was just wondering, I was thinking it might be a possibility, in the back of my head. So I’d inch over, and then lean in, quiet as I could, and I’d listen in, and soon I’d hear that regular exhaling and inhaling, and then I’d feel the slight movement pressing up against the sheets.

  Now, though, there’s nothing when I wake up in the night. It’s just the walls, and the dark. OK, stop with the heart beating so fast. Just calm down. This is the way it is, this is the way it goes, it’s natural, this is the way it is.

  But maybe you didn’t know about how the water draped down your skin when you were in the shower. How I could tell your scent as soon as you came up to me. How my hands would get caught in your spider web hair, and I never really minded being helpless. How you kept all of us going. How we’d be at a party, and you’d laugh that one way, and everybody else just thought it was a regular laugh, but I knew exactly what it meant.

  And maybe some of this was already there when I was a kid, on that day when Great-grandpa Lee was standing alone in his dark suit and tie. I wanted to go up to him and help him, and tell him I thought he might be OK someday, but there was nothing I could do. He was standing next to her, surrounded by the flowers and her coffin and the condolence cards, as the last of the mourners walked out, saying they’d be at the funeral tomorrow.

  We were still here, though, his children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren. And now the funeral home was silent around us. The chairs, all lined up in rows, were empty. The employees were leaving the room. But he was still standing, the grandson of William Duncan and Anna, the great-grandson of Hiram and Nancy, the great-great-grandson of John and Elizabeth. He looked down at her for a few more seconds, and didn’t say anything. Then he leaned down, kissed her, and said, “Goodbye, buddy.”

  CHAPTER 14

  DÁL RIATA

  Leis gu bheil beagan eòlais agaibh oirnn a-nis, leigibh leam ar sgeul innse dhuibh.

  Now that you know something about us, let me tell you our story.

  It is a story, not a mere moment, because the scourges did not happen in the way that lightning strikes, or as a hawk swoops. They did not appear with a line of alien soldiers blocking the sun of a sudden. No, they came with the usurpers, whose advance needed centuries, not months or years. They came with the rise of the false clan, who served foreign masters again and again, decade after decade, mountain after new mountain. They came, as well, with the Englishmen’s hatred, which began small, but over generations grew.

  Perhaps the English hate us because they know that our ancestors were Irish. They know that our ancestors long ago brought the Irish tongue and Irish ways to Britain, to the island which they will always consider to be theirs alone. We are descended from Conn Cétchathach, Conn of the Hundred Battles, who was High King of Ireland 120 years after the birth of Christ. More than a millennium after Conn’s death, the warriors of Clan Donald would still hear these words: A Chlanna Cuinn cuimhnichibh / Cruas an am na h-iorghaile. (Children of Conn, remember hardihood in the time of battle.)

  Our ancestors left Ireland and came to the Highlands and Isles of Scotland in the fifth century, founding the kingdom of Dál Riata, which spanned the northwest of Scotland and part of northern Ireland. Perhaps this union, across so many shores, seems odd to many of you, whose eyes are accustomed to viewing Ireland and Scotland as different countries. Yet our ancestors’ maps were centred upon the waters between the two lands, upon the isles lying there. They could sail from one isle to the next in merely a few hours, and could go from an Irish port to a Scottish mooring in less than a day, for the two lands are less than twenty miles from one another at their shortest remove.

  Across these different soils, across horizons of waves, the Gaels made a home, and from them comes each of our ways. From them comes each carved curve in us.

  We Gaels unified with the Picts, our fellow Celts who had long inhabited all of the northern places, and together formed the kingdom of Alba. By the middle of the eleventh century, the kings of Alba had conquered the Anglo-Saxons to our south, so that the Highlands and Isles in the north and the Lowlands in the south were now one kingdom. Here Gaelic was spoken, not only in the Highlands and Isles, but also at the royal court and in much of the Lowlands. The Romans had always referred to the Irish as the Scoti, and so this kingdom of the Gaels came to be called Scotland.

  For all that, most of the Lowlanders in the south of our country continued to speak their variant of English, and our Gaelic ways did not become theirs. Ensconced down in the south, the Scottish kings began to retreat from the language and character of their ancestors, speaking English with greater and more accomplished fluency and marrying English royalty. They gained lands in England and spent more and more of their time there. Soon, the whole of the southern half of Scotland was being Anglicised, with feudal lords in the place of clan chiefs, and with tenants in the place of clansmen and clanswomen.

  But in the twelfth century, a man called Somhairle rose up in the Highlands and the Isles to challenge the Lowland, Scottish king. In your language he is known as Somerled, and like the king, he came from the line of the sovereigns of Dál Riata. He came of age at a time when many of our lands were ruled, not by the king, but by Vikings, who had invaded and remained.

  Although of royal blood, Somerled was not born a king’s son; he was chosen to lead by the local clans, and presentl
y vindicated their trust with a victory over the Norse king. So complete was Somerled’s conquest that the Vikings never again would rule our lands. The Lowland king knew better than to advance upon united Highlanders, and in the year 1160, he signed a treaty accepting Somerled’s lordship over most of the Isles and much of the Highlands.

  Now the descendants of Dál Riata had their own land, ruled by their own people, in their own ways. This is the land where peaks stand high, misted, just above the pulling away of the waves, and the hills slope up, green, from the still of the lochs. Here the beaches rise quickly to become meadows, and the meadows rise quickly into mountains. Like so many, I speak of Somerled, and remain in remembrance of him, because he was the founder of this Gaelic kingdom, independent from both Scotland and England, which would live for centuries.

  Yet we speak of Somerled not only because he did so much to form our Gaelic moat. We speak of him, too, because he was the founder of the Clan Donald. His descendants were the MacDonald chiefs, and they succeeded him as sovereigns of the kingdom. His son Ranald was esteemed for his piety, and built up the church and monasteries upon the Isle of Iona, while his grandson Donald, who gave the clan its name, was a commanding warrior, resisting the Lowland king at every turn.

  In the early 14th century, however, when Donald’s grandson Angus Og was Lord of the Isles, the MacDonalds united with Lowlanders, who had produced a king worthy of following into battle. His name was Robert the Bruce, and though his father came from a line of Normans and Englishmen, his mother was Celtic, from the west, and he was raised speaking the Gaelic language. When Robert was still a young man, the English king, Edward I, claimed lordship over Scotland, planting English soldiers, nobles and sheriffs upon Scottish soil, and torturing and executing the hero William Wallace.