The Kingdom of Ohio

by Matthew Flaming

  A moment later I notice the carved cross that was described in the placard for the first time. It’s etched into the wood above the word itself, an asymmetric symbol inside a faint circle. In fact—this occurs to me—it looks like the pendant you once wore: a letter T, enclosed by a ring of twining cornstalks.

  I open my mouth and then close it, blinking. Looking at the blurred lines, I feel suddenly dizzy. I feel as if a bridge has unfolded out of the air in front of me, a pathway into the impossible past; as if I’ve just glimpsed your ghost. A tingling chill that makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up. I shiver and turn around, convinced that someone is watching.

  There is a wooden door in the wall behind me.

  It is roughly made, out of place against the blank white plaster of the museum. Carved into the door, halfway up, is the same word from the photograph of the tree. Something seizes inside me, my heart seeming to turn over in a somersault. The sharp pains in my chest that have been with me for these last years seem to recede, along with my awareness of the gallery around me, these things fading into unimportance as I stand motionless, staring.

  My first thought is that the doorway was there all along, part of the exhibit that I didn’t notice when I first entered. I close my eyes, trying to remember, but I can’t be certain. It’s possible the door wasn’t there the last time I glanced at the wall. Instead—this suspicion slowly grows in me—maybe it appeared the instant before I turned, through some hidden mechanics of time and fate.

  In a daze, I cross to the door and reach out toward it. The handle turns easily beneath my hand, the old wood swinging silently away from the wall. Peering through the crack I see a wash of white light, a blinding brightness.

  Some part of me is thinking that all of this is impossible, a fantasy from which I’ll wake up at any moment. But these doubts—along with my surroundings, and all the uncertainties and longing that have been with me for so long that I’ve almost come to think of them as myself—all these things are suddenly unimportant.

  Hesitating in the brightness of the doorway, I think of what I might find on the other side. It could be the empty forest where the Roanoke settlement began, a wilderness at the beginning of a world where everything was different. It could be a portal to the city of Toledo, in a version of history where your kingdom and family survived and thrived, where we would be reunited. It could be anything.

  For a moment then, I feel a pinch of doubt. But really, I tell myself, maybe this is how the stories that we live finally end: with the blankness of a new beginning, beyond the maps of memory and history.

  I take a breath and think of your face. Then I step through, and begin again.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I’m grateful for the friendship and support of everyone who read this novel in its nascent state. In particular, I would like to acknowledge the patience and insight of my wonderful agent, Stephanie Cabot; Amy Einhorn, editor extraordinaire; Joel Elmore, Lindsay McClelland, E. A. Dur den, Ethan Bernard, and Daniel Meneley, aka The Cabal; and most of all the incredible faith, understanding, and undeserved blessing of my bashert, Jessica; my sister; and my parents.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Matthew Flaming was born in Los Angeles and studied philosophy at Hampshire College. He currently lives in Brooklyn.

  1 “Panic in the Underground Railroad,” New York Tribune, October 28, 1904.

  2 Hart Crane, The Bridge (Paris: Black Sun Press, 1930).

  3 Library of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority Subway Museum, New York, catalogue #IMG-1900-3994, captioned “Subway Workers at Canal Street, December 1900.”

  4 Birth certificate registered with the South-West Territory Settlement Trust Office in Santa Fe; in fact, the birth certificate was filed nearly a year after the fact (June 1878) but delays of this nature were not unusual at the time. ‡ Red Mountain Gazette (Colorado), September 30, 1883, obituary column. § James Force is listed as an employee of the Hercules Mining Company of Wardner, Idaho, on August 13, 1884; however, there is some uncertainty as to the accuracy of these accounting records.

  5 In fact, no record of Peter’s journey to New York exists (that I know of). However, on November 14, 1900, the following entry appears in the County Registrar’s Log of Kellogg County:Death of James Force, Surveyor, reported by his Son. Thrown by a Horse that spooked from an Explosion. Left no Estate & no widow.

  (County Registrar’s Log of Kellogg County, 1889-1900, vol. XXIV, courtesy Coeur d’Alene Historical Society.) Less than two weeks later, on November 26, Peter’s name appears in the employment ledgers of the New York Drilling Company, beside the notation: “White Male, Aged 23 yrs., 2nd C[rew]” (from the 1900-1906 personnel roster of the New York Drilling Company, courtesy MTA Subway Museum, New York).

  6 Peletiah Webster of Philadelphia, as quoted by Payson Jackson, The National Land System, 1785-1820 (New York: E. B. Treat & Co., 1910), p. 16.

  7 Journals of the American Congress, 1774 to 1788, vol. 3, courtesy Smithsonian American Archives. The actual transaction was completed by Silas Deane, a blacksmith’s son from Groton, Connecticut, who was one of the Continental Congress’s secret agents in Europe and, later, the first foreign diplomat of the United States.

  8 Walter Havighurst, Wilderness for Sale: The Story of the First Western Land Rush (New York: Hastings House, 1956), pp. 53-54.

  9 This territory was granted to Spain by Pope Alexander VI, writing in a papal bull on May 4, 1493 (a decree commonly known as Inter Caetera). This document was issued in response to Columbus’s arrival in supposedly Asiatic lands in 1492, which threatened to destabilize relations between Portugal and Spain, the two great seafaring powers of the world, which had been competing for possession of African territories. The papal decree effectively granted possession of Africa to Portugal, and possession of the Americas to Spain; this document was the legal basis of Spanish claims to ownership of British Columbia and Alaska as late as 1819.

  10 The British copy of the proclamation survives in the Royal Archives; it is dated July 19, 1776, and reads in its entirety:I, Henri Georges-Fevrier Latoledan, do hereby Absolve my Allegiance to the laws of any Nation or Power excepting only those of God Almighty, and do Publish and Declare the Rightfully Purchasede Territory called Estate Latoledan in perpetuity shall be Governed only by Myself and my Heirs, unfettered by none other on Earth. Should You wish to receive Us in the Spirit of Friendship we will gladly Accept your Alliance. Should our Rule be challenged, we shall Defend our Land as is the Right of all True Nations.

  11 This past remains with us in the form of family names imprinted on the palimpsest of the American landscape: for example, those of Lord Baltimore (English), Kiliaen Van Rensselaer (Dutch), and Lord Detroit (French), among others.

  12 The sovereignty of the Kingdom went similarly unaddressed by the British government. On September 3, 1783, the signing of the Treaty of Paris brought the Revolution to an end. The treaty specifically set forth that all British territory south from the middle of the Great Lakes and their connecting waters, and east from the Mississippi, should belong to the United States. Although no specific language in this document addresses the issue of the Kingdom, it is important to note the careful terms in which the ceded territory is described: “all Territories and Lands subject to the [British] Crown,” it reads—a phrasing that left ambiguous the matter of whether the treaty applied to the Free Estate.

  13 Daniel Yoder, An Account of the Ohio Region Told by the Common People of That Area (Milwaukee: Barlow & Sons, 1908).

  14 This union, of course, represented a crossing of social boundaries that would have been unthinkable in European society at the time—providing a hint of how much life on the frontier must have transformed the Latoledan settlers.

  15 The Indiana, Ohio, Michigan, and Illinois territories.

  16 François de Salignac de la Mothe-Fénelon, archbishop of Cambray, writing in a letter titled “Fénelon to Louis XIV: Remonstrances to This Prince on Certain Aspects of His Administration
.” As a result of this impertinence, the archbishop was confined to his family estate for the remainder of his life.

  17 Havighurst, Wilderness for Sale, p. 152.

  18 Ibid., pp. 156-57; and yet, despite the skepticism of Havighurst, I can’t help but imagine that this arrival must have held some wonder for the French émigrés.

  I picture the dark banks of the river rising above the waters of the Maumee, stained orange and silver by the sunset. It is Ohio autumn, trees silhouetted

  against the sky, the flitting of fireflies and bats. The air is still warm and humid: it is a country of thunderstorms that make the sky turn purple and the trees thrash their branches like hysterical worshippers in the wind.

  On the clumsy wooden barges, the French say little to each other: all they can do is gaze around in bewilderment, in silent expectation. One of the settlers, a former baker who speaks a little English, has asked the captain of the boat when they will arrive: “Afore dark, I’d say,” the bewhiskered riverboat man in his stained jacket replies, spouting a stream of tobacco juice between his teeth into the passing water. “Il ne sera pas longtemps maintenant,” the baker relays to his fellow travelers. They watch the wilderness unfold.

  When they arrive at their destination, they do not even know it at first. A rough dock of hewn logs stands on the western bank of the river, so low to the water that it seems from a distance like nothing more than a collection of the fallen trees that float now and then downstream. The polesmen set their rods against the current and slowly the two barges turn toward the shore, edging finally against the dock with a rough grinding sound. The captain and two mates jump overboard, lashing the vessels to iron hooks in the dock pilings with ragged hemp ropes. Overhead, the sky is fading to deep purple, stars and a silvered crescent of moon visible in the arcing void. Somewhere in the wooded hills a wolf calls, and then another and another. The Frenchmen shiver.

  “Take the cargo ashore,” the captain tells his passengers. “They’ll come for you; or if not, you’ve but to walk west. You’ll see the fields either side.” The Parisians regard him blankly in shock or simple incomprehension. “Here.” The captain picks up one of the parcels of luggage sitting on the deck—a battered wooden suitcase tied with twine—and thrusts it into the arms of one of the men, gesturing toward the dock. The Frenchman, sporting extravagant Gaulish mustaches that extend nearly to his ears, looks at the parcel in his arms, at the captain, at his fellow settlers who are exchanging worried glances. “Go, damn you!” The captain shoves him and he stumbles back.

  Catching his balance, he understands and drops the package to the deck of the ship, where it splits open, spilling manteaux, tricots, cuteaux, and various meager petites objets across the planks and skidding into the river. “No!” The mustachioed Frenchman rolls his eyes in fear at the wilderness where the captain is pointing. “Is not possible—C’est pas possible! Il n’est pas rien ici, c’est pas correct! Vous-vous-ils ont nous dites que”—a complaint that is cut short by the click of two hammers being cocked back, the double-barreled short musket, river pirates’ weapon of choice, resting gently in the captain’s hand.

  The settlers go. They carry the few possessions that have survived the trip with them from the boats onto the shore, where they are stacked on the docks. When they are finished and assembled on dry land, the captain—musket still in hand—and his crew reboard the boats. “That way,” the captain points with the gun, west. And the polemen bend to their task, the barges drifting away from the shore and starting down the river. It is not until the boats are out of sight that the French begin to take stock of their surroundings. Before this they cannot look away from the receding shapes, each holding the silent hope that perhaps this is all a mistake, a jeste fantastique à la mode américaine. That any minute now the barges will turn back and transport them to the Eden that they were promised. When the boats are gone, the settlers calculate the shape of paradise. A rough wooden dock with pilings that are little more than raw-hewn tree trunks, a wooden shed (empty save for a few wood shavings), and a rutted dirt road leading away between the trees, the green and gold of autumn foliage shading into black beneath the pale moonlight. They wait and wait—and finally, when no one comes for them, load their meager possessions onto their backs and begin to walk. It is slow going: in the darkness they trip on cartwheel tracks and potholes, stumble over drifts of leaves. Some of the women begin to cry and some of the men as well. Another wolf calls in the distance. At this moment, they are the most isolated people in the world: in a wilderness four thousand miles from home, map-less, deceived. Finally, however, they round a bend in the path and see before them the trees opening onto mown fields. The sight of the first shabby barn along the road is more than God’s original miracle. Hysterical, ragged, they start to run, scattering dropped clothes, kitchen utensils, portraits behind them unheeded—and then they see the town and the sputtering yellow glow of a paraffin lamp in a window, most welcome of all things on this earth.

  19 Arthur Lower, Colony to Nation (Toronto: Longmans, Green, 1946), pp. 66-68.

  20 In fact, this letter itself appears to be lost but is cited in a second letter, this one written to a third acquaintance by the original recipient of David Latoledan’s correspondence, Edgar St. Simone, of Boston (St. Simone-McLelland Family Archive at Boston University, correspondence file, 1820).

  21 Charles Porpington in a letter to the Prince of Wales, July 16, 1837 (courtesy British Royal Archives, London).

  22 Daniel Yoder, An Account of the Ohio Region (Milwaukee: Barlow & Sons, 1908).

  23 Surprisingly, considering the inexperience of their author, these endeavors were moderately successful. Although the Toledo Symphony closed its doors due to financial difficulties in 1895, the Toledo Museum of Art remains open and “is one of the most important and influential cultural institutions in the Midwest” (this from Toledo Rocks! A Visitor’s Guide to the Greater Toledo Metropolitan Area, published by the Toledo Board of Tourism, 1981—although the “importance” of this museum, consisting of four small rooms, should be measured alongside the source of its inspiration, the Louvre).

  24 An equally significant moment in the demise of the Kingdom occurred in 1885, when Claudius’s carriage overturned down an embankment, killing him instantly. Upon his death, Louis Toledo ascended to the throne, and his inexperience at gov ernance unquestionably contributed to the continued decline of the Free Estate.

  25 “M. Henri Latoledan,” by Giacometti Cipriotto, as reprinted in Portraiture in the Era of Louis XIV, Stefan Gaston, ed., George Mason University Library Series, 1966.

  26 “Assault at the Waldorf” in the New York News-Digest, January 16, 1901. A nearly identical article appeared in the New York Post-Times on the same day.

  27 Throughout his life, and with increasing severity, Tesla was prone to obsessive phobias, hallucinations, and fits of irrationality. As he would recall in his autobiography: In my boyhood I suffered from a peculiar affliction due to the appearance of images, often accompanied by strong flashes of light, which marred the sight of real objects and interfered with my thoughts and action . . . . When a word was spoken to me the image of the object it designated would present itself vividly to my vision and sometimes I was quite unable to distinguish whether what I saw was tangible or not. This caused me great discomfort and anxiety. (Nikola Tesla, My Inventions: The Autobiography of Nikola Tesla, Ben Johnson, ed., originally serialized in The Electrical Experimenter magazine, 1919.)

  28 Of course, in these days just after the millennium, it seems like almost everyone is feeling something similar: abruptly aged by the realization that rounding this chronological corner, which we’d all secretly hoped might make everything new again, changed nothing. That history’s teetering pile of days only kept growing, the mistakes of the past still as present and near as they’ve always been.

  29 The terse entry in the police logbooks simply reads:#19010115-84: Charges dropped by N. Tesla, suspect released into custody P. Force.

 
; (Courtesy New York Police Dept., 5th Precinct Blotter, January 18, 1901, approx. page 65, New York Police Department Historical Society, New York.) The case number (#19010115-84) refers principally to the date; case numbers were assigned chronologically so this case number reads: year (1901), month (01), day (15), the eighty-fourth case logged.

  30 Names that still have the power to terrify, and with good reason. In 1901, particularly in the United States, mental illness was the subject of superstitions dating back to the Middle Ages. Although at the time, across the Atlantic in Germany and Austria, a revolutionary new understanding of the psyche was beginning to develop in the works of Freud, Krafft-Ebing, and others, these theories had barely reached the academics of America, much less the judicial system. Lunatics were believed by police, legal authorities, and common folk alike to be criminals; insanity was seen as a kind of moral failing.

  Because of this, the mentally ill were objects of fear and loathing. They were locked up in either prisons or mental hospitals that were, if anything, worse than the prisons. The “treatment” that patients received at these hospitals was founded on the notion that, since madness was a moral lapse, the insane needed to be punished until they saw the error of their ways. They were doused with freezing water, confined in cages for the public to jeer at and scold (often in churchyards on Sundays, as examples to the faithful of the effects of sin), beaten, starved, electrocuted . . . .