The Blood Ballad (16 page)

“How are the girls?” Mom asked.

“Fighting.”

“Typical,” she said.

“How would you know? They're always well behaved around you.”

She sighed and said, “Colin hates his job.”

“I know.”

“Is there anything to be done about it?” she asked.

“I talked with him a little bit about it the other day.”

“You did?” she asked, surprise tugging at the corners of her eyes.

“Yeah.”

“Like, a real conversation? No snide remarks?”

“Yeah, like a real conversation.”

“Wow,” she said.

We were both quiet a moment, and then I added, “I don't know if there's anything to be done about it or not. I guess it's really up to him.”

“I guess so,” she said. “He's driving me crazy.”

“I know.”

“And
you,
” she said. “I can't believe you were outside at dusk during hunting season!”

“It doesn't matter, Mom. Turns out it wasn't hunters after all,” I said.

A grave expression crossed her face, as if she were still somehow right, but I just let it go.

After breakfast, I headed to the library. The Wisteria library was much closer to me than the St. Louis library, and I didn't think I'd need the St. Louis library, for this research anyway. Most of the information I was in search of had to do with Progress, and, believe it or not, the Wisteria library boasted more records on Progress than the library in Progress. That might be because when I inherited all of the money from Sylvia, I donated a good chunk of money to the Wisteria library specifically for the genealogy department. Now there was a whole wall of books and records with a plaque that read:
MADE POSSIBLE BY SYLVIA AND WILMA PERSHING, NEW KASSEL, MO.

First, I checked for the census records. I knew I could find most census records on-line at most of the major genealogy dot-coms, but aside from the fact that I was a dinosaur and preferred the library, I didn't always trust the information on the Web sites. Call me paranoid—many already have—but I wanted to look at the original microfilm, handle it myself, and see it with my own eyes. Completely ridiculous, I know. Besides, it's always much more interesting to go to the library than just to sit at home on the computer all day. Since there were other records to look for, why not just do it all at one place?

I found Scott Morgan and his wife, Louise, living four households away from my great-grandpa, Nate Keith, and his family. The children were listed: Cletis, Eddie, George, Miriam, Emma, and Roscoe. What I really needed was the name of the woman my great-grandmother had referred to in her letter as Peggy. Peggy was not an uncommon name, although it wasn't as common as Doris, Louise, or Sarah in the first half of the twentieth century. It became much more popular in the fifties. Prior to 1900, Peggy was actually short for Margaret, and every now and then, I'd still find it used like that these days. Patsy was the nickname for Martha, back in the day. I'd never been able to figure how either one of those nicknames derived from the actual name. But if you know all of that when you start tracing your family tree, you're less likely to spend months looking for two daughters, Patsy and Martha, when the names belong to one and the same person.

I had no idea where to begin. My cell phone buzzed, and I answered it with a whisper. “Hello.”

“I think we should challenge the results of the birding Olympics,” Eleanore stated.

I glanced at the clock on the wall; it was just past nine 9:00
A.M.
Had Eleanore gotten up and decided she needed to start trouble? “Eleanore,” I began.

“No, I'm serious,” she said. “Getting shot at should mean something.”

“It did mean something, Eleanore. We got shot at.”

“But … Elmer gets all the glory. We got shot at!”

“Well, we got to live! You should be happy about that,” I said, trying to keep my voice down.

“But it's not fair. We would have seen more birds than he did if we hadn't been interrupted by flying bullets.”

“How do you know we would have? What's your guarantee that we would have seen more birds?” I asked.

It suddenly occurred to me that my side of the conversation would sound very strange to people passing by.

“Because I'm a better birder than Elmer, that's why.” The venom in her voice was almost palpable. Damn, when she got ticked, she got
ticked.

“How can you be so sure? I mean, isn't it just luck? A bird happens to land in the tree, you spot it, and then you write it down. It all depends on where that bird decided to land at that moment. How does that make you better at it?”

“Because it's all about the essence you emit and what you bring to it. The birds can sense that, you know?”

“What, have you read
Zen Birding
or something?”

“Oh, is that a book?” she asked. I could hear paper rustling. She was writing it down.

“Eleanore! I'm not contesting anything,” I said.

“It's not fair,” she persisted.

“Okay, and neither is training your whole life for the real Olympics, flying thousands of miles away from your country, only to pull a hamstring or fall in the first ten feet of the race. It totally stinks, but there's nothing you can do about it! We got shot at. Simple as that!” I screamed.

The librarians didn't bother to stare at me. They understood that, well, I could be a difficult patron sometimes. But the other librarygoers
were
staring. One woman grabbed her little blond-headed toddler and slinked behind a Dr. Seuss display.

“Oh, I forgot to give you those pictures from the horse show,” she said. “When can I bring them by?”

“Eleanore, how did you get my cell phone number?” I asked suddenly, ignoring her question. “Never mind. Don't answer. I'm hanging up now.”

“Fine, but you owe me new binoculars!” she screamed into the phone.

I hung up, and instead of leaving the phone on vibrate, I turned it off completely.

I went through the census, scouring the statistics for each family within the township that Scott Morgan had lived in. It would most likely be a futile effort, I knew. The Peggy I was looking for could have been from anywhere in the county, but I got the feeling from my great-grandmother's letters that she was a woman who'd lived close by. Somebody in the valley, maybe, or somebody at their church. Back then, people didn't go to the end of the county to socialize. My grandpa would travel several counties to perform, but when it came to socializing, most people did it in their own backyard, so to speak. If I was going to find this Peggy, it would be within a five-mile radius.

After four hours, my head throbbed and my eyes felt stuck in one position, but the census records gave me a total of two Margarets and three Peggys. One was seventy years old at the time, so I figured she was out, and another was about ten years old. That left me with one Margaret Brown, a Peggy McKee, and a Peggy Kiefer. My great-grandmother had indicated that the Peggy in question was unmarried, because the boy was starving, and she had nobody to help her feed him.

If she were an unwed mother, it was possible that she'd lived with her parents for a while after the baby was born. So I followed the Margaret and Peggys in question to the census for 1930. One Peggy and the Margaret had disappeared, meaning they'd probably gotten married and were living under their married names with their husbands, but one Peggy remained: Peggy Kiefer. Peggy Kiefer lived with her parents, Al and Joanne, one sister, and a little boy named Rufus. Rufus was listed as the grandson of Al, the head of the household.

Rufus was listed as Rufus Kiefer. So he was either Al's grandson by a son who'd died before 1930 or he was a grandson by one of Al's two unwed daughters. I will say that it's not unusual to find grandchildren in a census who bear the name of the head of household. I'd seen where this happened numerous times in my own family. It happened sometimes because the census taker just put down the last name of the head of household and assumed everybody else had the same last name. There was any number of reasons why this might happen, but the point is, it usually didn't happen.

I went back and checked the 1920 census, and Al and Joanne Kiefer had two boys to go with their two girls. I jotted down their names and then went forward to 1930. Both were alive and well, married and living with their own families.

So little Rufus Kiefer had to be the son of either Peggy or her sister, Ann. Or it might have been an error on the part of a sexist census taker. Since Ann would have been about thirteen when Rufus was born, and my great-grandma's letter mentioned Peggy specifically, I was going to go with Peggy.

Grabbing my notebook, I went outside and made a phone call to the library in Progress. One thing they had there that I couldn't look at in Wisteria was the baptismal records of the churches. Based on the township that they were living in, I deduced which churches would have been closest. It helps when you've studied a county your whole life. The fact that I knew all of the churches in that township was actually pretty scary. I could also name all the creeks and rivers in that township. When the librarian answered, I told her what I was looking for and for which churches, and an approximate year. She said she'd call me back in half an hour.

I went back inside and checked the marriage records for all of Scott Morgan's kids. Cletis married Rosa Cook, Roscoe married Hattie Jones, Miriam married Clifton Adam Weaver, George married Ava Moony—who was indeed my grandmother's first cousin—and Eddie married Belle Mercer. I then checked for cousin Toot, Charlie Morgan; he'd married Nancy Yates. There was no marriage record for Emma. I remembered what Glen Morgan had said about his Aunt Em being “touched.” I supposed if that were true, she most likely wouldn't have married. Depending on how “touched” she was.

So, enough of all of this. I went to the biography section and pulled out a book on the Morgan family, written by somebody outside the family nearly thirty years ago, and a book called
Olde Tyme Music of the Mississippi.
I found a few CDs of the Morgan Family Players and photocopied the liner notes. I took all of my notes and the photocopies, checked the two books out of the library, and went to lunch.

Snuggled in a corner at a local buffet, I began to read while munching on a salad with a scrumptious buttermilk dressing. The first book on the music of the Mississippi literally covered everything from Missouri, southern Illinois, Arkansas, and western Tennessee to Louisiana and Mississippi. So there were a great many types of music represented. I flipped to the index to find the pages that mentioned the Morgan Family Players. I turned to the first of these pages and began to read.

The Morgan Family Players, made up of Papa Scott Morgan, his daughter Miriam, his sons Roscoe and Eddie, his daughter-in-law Belle, and cousin Toot, were one of the most influential music families of the twenties and thirties. Their music has been covered by some of the most famous country musicians in the world, and nobody could mistake the unique vocal qualities of Belle, Miriam, and Scott in the harmonies they created. Their songs usually had a lead fiddle and harmony fiddle, much like a lead guitar and a rhythm guitar in today's rock bands. In later years, Scott Morgan was quoted as saying, “No man was prouder of his daughter than I was of Miriam. She played that fiddle better than I could. She took what I taught her and ran with it.”

The Morgan Family Players burst onto the scene about the same time as the Carter Family, preceding them by a few years and representing the midwestern “everyman” influence, as opposed to the Appalachian influence of the Carters. The first hit for the Morgans was “Daughter, Don't You Cry,” and they followed it up with “Crawdad Dance” and “Appaloosa Love Triangle.” The sense of humor in their lyrics was always evident, and their influence on fiddle playing in the boot-heel region of Missouri was unmistakable.

In 1936, at the height of their popularity, the group was plagued with controversy. Scott Morgan's daughter-in-law Belle left with a lover and was never seen or heard from again. Besides breaking Eddie's heart, she left behind two children, Dora Kaye and Johnny. The Morgan Family Players were never able to rebound from this loss, and the band dispersed. Most musicologists agree that if the band had stayed together, they would have gone on to be the most famous musical family of the early twentieth century.

I went to the buffet table, loaded up on some
mostaccioli
and garlic bread, and returned to my seat. I read the liner notes next. Most of them gave only who wrote the songs and who was playing what instruments on what song. On the three liner notes that I had copied, there were at least five songs that were listed as “traditional,” meaning that the origins were unknown and the song was as old as dirt. At least three were songs I now realized had actually been written by my grandpa.

I was learning a lot, but I felt like I was getting nowhere.

I finished off lunch with a slice of carrot cake and then went back to the library. This time, I went straight to the source to read about Belle's disappearance: the newspapers. I thought it possible that a story like hers, the disappearance of a celebrated musician, would make even the St. Louis papers, but I started with the papers in Progress.

“It was a bright and shining autumn morning…” The lyrics of “The Blood Ballad” came back to me.

In a paper from October 1936, I found what I was looking for.

FAMOUS SINGER ABSCONDS WITH LOVER

 

Belle Morgan of the famous Morgan Family Players, sources say, has run off with her lover, abandoning her children, her husband, Eddie, and the band. It was the morning of the twelfth when Eddie Morgan says his wife, Belle, went to the mill and never returned. Authorities are convinced that there was no foul play. Eddie stated that his wife was scheduled to take a leave of absence to “clear her head,” but he didn't think she was leaving for another two weeks. Sources close to the family, however, think that Belle's lover convinced her to leave early. It is thought that they have gone west, where they can blend in and live in anonymity for the rest of their lives. Inquiries as to who Belle Morgan's lover is have gone unanswered. Some people around town speculate that Eddie Morgan was unaware of her lover's identity. When Eddie Morgan was asked about his wife's infidelity, he had no comment.