Ancestors (38 page)

Before Max died, he completed the line of descent of the Fullers, going back to a Robert Fuller who came from Southampton and landed in Salem in 1638, in the ship
Bevis.
In writing to his cousin about genealogical matters, he says, “I suppose you think this is a lot of useless nonsense, but once worked out, it may be valuable to someone someday.”

One of the mysterious innuendoes that my Aunt Bert made in speaking to her granddaughter was that before Max’s father died she had gone home to her family, and one night he tried to kidnap Max, then a baby. From this Max’s daughter deduced that for a time at least her grandfather must have cared a great deal for his son—though I think, considering how little he had seen of that baby, it is also possible to regard it as the act of a heated imagination. I have even wondered if this could be the true story of the Dickensian burglar who was trying to get into the house on Kickapoo Street. My grandmother would certainly not have felt like going into my Aunt Bert’s marital difficulties with a child of four, and with that unbroken run of bad luck Louis Fuller would be bound to place the ladder under the wrong window.

Searching through books and papers for information that is usually not there, I often ask myself why I was so incurious about my forebears. Most of the things I would like to know, my father could have told me. If this kind of curiosity is one of the aspects of oncoming age, then my lack of it earlier was natural. But there is another possible explanation. My father had a number of stories that he liked to tell of an evening before dinner—the adventure of the copper-toed shoes, the adventure of the bellboy in the lobby of the hotel in Ohio, how he borrowed the money from Tim Hardin, how Professor Hieronymous met with his comeuppance, how my grandfather said to my father, “If you’ll just put aside a thousand dollars,” and so on. He did not like to be interrupted in the middle of his narrative, and by the time he got to the end I would have forgotten what it was I wanted to ask him. So I didn’t ask the questions I might have asked, and now there is no one to ask them of. Here and there, digging, I bring up some small piece of archaeological information.

The
History of Logan County
says that my great-great-grandfather’s brother, John England, who was bored by the whole idea of money, was fatally injured at Cornland in November, 1884, but not what happened. Apparently everybody knew, and so there was no need to record it.

Facing the Christian church in Lincoln, across that little park with a bandstand in the center of it, was the white clapboard mansion of the Honorable Robert B. Latham. I remember
it as a very beautiful old house with slender posts supporting the upstairs porches, shutters at all the windows, wooden balustrades here and there, and a cupola. Having laid out the town of Lincoln, he devoted the rest of his life to making it amount to something. The
Logan County History
does not even attempt to list the enterprises and institutions that were brought into being by his energy and influence, but lumps them all together in a formal expression of gratitude.

Speaking at a meeting of the Old Settlers’ Association, in 1876, he said that there was scarcely a forty-acre lot in Elkhart woods but what he had chased a wolf over. His father, James Latham, was the first white settler in Logan County, and the first Probate Court, in 1821, was presided over by him. From his photograph Robert Latham could be a religious prophet or, equally well, a gun-runner in a novel by Joseph Conrad.

The second generation of his descendants went through their inheritance so fast that gossip could hardly keep up with them, and in the early 1920’s his house was sold to a real estate developer, a golfing companion of my father’s, who tore it down and put up a row of semi-identical bungalows. A real estate developer, with rather different ideas and dealing with a different situation, is just what Old Man Latham was, and I don’t suppose he fell asleep when the conversation got around to money. And if one wanted to grieve, one could also regret that quarter-section of unbroken prairie the town was originally—trees skirting the streams, a sea of grass and wild flowers reaching out in every direction to the horizon, at night the howling of wolves, in the early mornings of spring the thrumming of prairie chickens, a country of foxes, raccoons, wildcats, and great herds of deer.

One can grieve over all the water that has ever flowed over the dam.

The Latham house, which ought to have stood for generations, is gone. So is the Donalds’ house next door to where we lived on Ninth Street. It burned down in the night. But by that time they were both dead. During Dr. Donald’s last illness my father took my wife and me to call on him. We had only been married a few months, and had come home on a visit, and my wife was being introduced to all the old family friends. Dr. Donald was sitting up in bed, in what used to be his den and was now converted into a downstairs bedroom, and his first concern was for my wife—that she should be made comfortable and feel liked. As I look back, I realize that what he did was give our marriage his blessing. At the time I was only aware of the fact that he approved of the girl I had chosen to marry, and of me, and that there was something about his approval that had made us both suddenly very happy. Everything I said seemed to fit in with his conception of what I was likely to think or feel. It was as if, going about his business, he had kept an eye on me. Perhaps he had. It was the first time I had ever really talked to him. We moved away from Lincoln when I was fifteen, and during the latter part of his life he was in Chicago—carrying on his business affairs and I suppose keeping out of reach of Aunty’s tongue—much more than he was in Lincoln, so we didn’t often see him when we went there. I find it very strange indeed that, though we lived in Chicago too, he never once came to see us, and nobody expected him to. He must have passed through the Looking-Glass into some other world that at no point touched the one we were living in. Or perhaps some friendships are attached to the place they flourished in, and have no existence anywhere else. Anyway, I discovered, too late, that he was a marvelous storyteller and that I loved him. At one point he took my hand in his and held it, resting on the counterpane, and said, in that soft Scottish voice, “My boy, I remember so well the day you were born. It was a terribly hot day in August
and …” All the rest went out of my mind instantly, as if I were in the presence of something it was dangerous for me to know.

After my Grandfather Blinn died, my mother transferred her veneration to Dr. Donald, and so did Annette. But they weren’t the only ones. When people had something weighing on their heart, they went and talked to him. He told Annette once that my father had been to see him, and had talked about my mother.

The Dyers’ house is still there, at the foot of Ninth Street hill: a frame shoebox covered with green roofing paper. How on earth did they keep warm? A scraping sound in the cellar of our house meant that Old Dyer was shoveling coal into the furnace and fiddling with the drafts and the damper. Sometimes in the dusk he and I met in our driveway. He was a big man, in clothes so old that they had no shape but fell in folds. His daughter had worked in our kitchen and he must have known a good deal about all of us. All I knew about him was what I perceived in the fading light—that the voice that said “Evening,” was at least an octave lower than any other human voice I knew, and that his steps were heavy and slow. On hearing a quotation from the Bible he knew instantly where it came from. He was the son of a freed slave who came to Springfield from Richmond, Virginia, and drove his horse and wagon at night, taking runaway slaves from one station of the underground railroad to the next. Mrs. Dyer was born in slavery, the property of the wife of (so mixed up are the elements of history at the time it is happening) a general of the Union Army. Her father and mother ran away but were caught and returned, and the general sold her father somewhere down South and he was never heard from again. William Dyer, Old Dyer’s son, put himself through medical school and was practicing in Kansas City. This everybody knew about and considered remarkable.

For a decade and perhaps more, the lives of our two
families were closely entwined in mutual dependence. After we moved away from Lincoln, my father never failed to call on Mrs. Dyer once or twice a year, for as long as she lived. Usually my brothers and I went with him. They made—Mrs. Dyer and my father made polite conversation. At the back of their minds they both must have been thinking of my mother, but her name wasn’t mentioned. It wouldn’t have been tactful, since he had another wife, for Mrs. Dyer to speak for my mother, and for my father to do this would have been to run the risk of embarrassing Mrs. Dyer by being too intimate. When he got up to go, he would take out his wallet and present her with a new ten-dollar bill.

My Great-grandfather Youtsey’s house in Cold Spring, Kentucky, is also still standing. One of my mother’s cousins—that same Wright Youtsey that she used to say I looked like—drove me out from Cincinnati to see it, in the 1930’s, at which time it belonged to a farmer, who was off somewhere in the fields. It looked like any yellow brick farmhouse. While my Kentucky cousin talked to the farmer’s wife, I put my head in the door of two or three downstairs rooms, which seemed bare and unloved, and went outside again. I told myself that I was looking at my mother’s childhood, but there was nothing anywhere that supported this idea in any way. I said, “It must have been very different in my great-grandfather’s time,” and my mother’s cousin smiled and said, “Grandfather kept his wheat in the drawing room.”

My Grandmother Blinn’s first cousin, Henry Youtsey, was charged with the murder of the governor of Kentucky.
^*
Actually there were two governors. The Republican candidate,
William S. Taylor, had a plurality of the votes cast in the election of 1899, and was inaugurated, on the twelfth of December, but the Democrats controlled the state legislature, and the legislative committee on elections decided in favor of the Democratic candidate, William E. Goebel. In short it was a steal. On the other hand, there had not been one honest state election in Kentucky since the Civil War. The campaign of 1899 was an effort on the part of the Democrats to wrest the state from the grip of the Louisville and Nashville Railroad.

Behind this struggle was another, between the old families in the rural districts and the German immigrants who settled in the cities. With few roads or bridges connecting them, only the railroad, the various counties were politically independent of each other and of the state government through their isolation. This situation lasted well into the 20th century, until about 1930. Within the county boundaries, the men who controlled the county did as they pleased. It was no problem to buy a jury or get a man killed. And Goebel himself had been tried for murder. He is an interesting figure.
The Dictionary of National Biography
says that Goebel was four times in the Kentucky Senate, and that during this entire period of legislative service he encountered bitter opposition from within his own party. “This political animosity resulted, among other things, in his killing John Sandford, a prominent banker and politician in Covington, in April 1895. On his examining trial he pleaded self-defense and was released, the grand jury subsequently refusing to indict him. He identified himself with the reform element, and is generally credited with the passing of much of the reform legislation of the period, particularly that relating to taxation and the regulation of the railroads.… In 1899 he was a candidate for the Democratic nomination for governor, and secured the nomination … by a series of shrewd political maneuvers
which greatly increased the number of his enemies and divided his party.… Goebel was not an orator but had a talent for vituperation and biting speech. He was taciturn and reserved, and had practically no friends outside his own family. He owed his success to unusual skill as a politician and to a courage that seemed to have no limit.”

He was on his way to the Senate, at ten minutes past eleven on the morning of January 30, 1900, when he was shot by a man standing in the window of the third story of a brick building immediately east of the state capitol. Goebel was carried into the Capitol Hotel, and the brick building was surrounded. A man came rushing down the stairs—a farmer named Whittaker, from Taylor’s own county—and was found to have five revolvers on his person, two in each side pocket of his overcoat and one in a side pocket of his trousers. He was arrested and denied the charge. There were no empty chambers in any of the revolvers. The legislature was in session at the time, and someone rushed into the hall and shouted, “Goebel has been shot!”—producing confusion. The legislators poured out of the building, bareheaded, many of them with their hands on their revolver pockets. Hundreds of people rushed to the scene of the tragedy, carrying a revolver in
each
hand, and the state of Kentucky was on the verge of civil war. Goebel was sworn in on his deathbed, and died a few days later. Taylor fled the state to escape the charge of murder. He had his office in the building from which the shots came, and for a week before the assassination forty people had been sleeping in the upper part of the building. Nobody knew their names or where they came from.

My grandmother’s cousin was a fine-featured, slight man in his early thirties. My mother always said that he was convicted on circumstantial evidence, the evidence being that Goebel was shot from such a distance that there was only one man in the state of Kentucky who could have done it. And
separating the marksmanship from the use it was put to, the family took a certain pride in this accomplishment. But it is pure fiction. Dr. Wall says there were at least a hundred men in Kentucky at that time who could have shot Goebel from that window and who had an interest in doing it. Henry Youtsey got into trouble chiefly because he talked too much. For twenty-four hours, everybody talked; after that they shut up and never talked again. They had discovered that there were a dozen groups who were trying to kill Goebel and they didn’t know but what one of their men might have done it.