Was (45 page)

Time to move on.

Jonathan got lost. There were interchanges, small cloverleafs, and signs giving highway numbers and town names that meant nothing to him. Jonathan did not have a map. He found himself driving on a wide, sweeping dirt road, between balding hills. They were dotted with small evergreen shrubs. He stopped the car, and got out.

Crickets were singing. At first he thought they were birds, a flock of them, the sounds they made were so loud, so sweet. But the sound was too mechanical, too regular. He looked down on a valley full of trees and white modern houses. In the far distance was a rounded white water tower, stranded alone, it seemed, in a forest. Where was the town? Why hadn’t he asked for a map at the airport?

There was a rumbling sound, like thunder, as if thunder had giant hollow wheels and were driving over the hills.

“Rain,” said Jonathan. He wanted an umbrella, and he turned and looked at the empty prairies. No rain. Only sunlight.

He got in and drove down the hill. MANHATTAN, said a sign, and as if someone had switched on a light, the road was paved. At the first cross street, Jonathan turned right, and down.

He was very tired. He forgot where he was again. Confused, he thought he was lost in some suburb of Los Angeles. He passed one crossroad, scowled and stopped.

He got out. There was a low modern house, with a long sloping sunroof, and some kind of wooden jungle gym for kids to play on. Jonathan heard the rumbling again, perhaps a bit different in sound.

It was definitely Los Angeles, somewhere out in the Valley. The sound was coming from a wooden ramp built in a driveway. A kid in a bicycle crash helmet was practicing on his skateboard. He rumbled up and down the ramp. The houses had no fences, but stood isolated amid stretches of immaculate, featureless lawn. There was a low hill behind, with many trees, and some rooftops with satellite dishes.

“Where am I?” Jonathan asked.

A little girl answered him. At least, it was a little girl’s voice. “Look at the sign,” the voice told him.

Attached to the telephone pole were the words LITTLE KITTEN AV. At right angles to it, another sign said OZ CIRCLE.

“Oh,” said Jonathan. It made perfect sense. A sign, if you like. He felt quite contented. For a moment he thought that he had somehow managed to drive from Santa Monica to Manhattan, Kansas. Then he remembered the airplane trip.

I have to get to a bank, he thought. He had no money. I have to find a place to stay. He was happy again.

The rumbling went on. It was from the Drop Zones, the Artillery and Mortar Impact Area. The crickets sang, like metal warbling on metal.

Manhattan seemed to writhe its way under his fingers, in sunlight. He drove in and out of shade, turning left, turning right. He passed shopping malls and Texaco gas stations. He was sure that he had dreamed the medieval amphitheater of white limestone. In had crenellations and huge overhead lights. The sky rumbled. Was this Los Angeles having its earthquake? He was elated.

Then the car seemed to plunge into permanent shade. Huge trees sheltered the roofs. Who had had the wonderful idea of building a town in a forest?

And he was there, Back Then. The white frame houses had French-looking, sloping tile roofs and front porches with pillars shaped like Greek columns. There were white trellises and window frames that were not quite square and painted dark blue or khaki. How old? How old? Jonathan’s internal clock answered. 1896. 1910. 1880. 1876. He kept stopping the car and fumbling with the camera. Other cars growled behind him, drove around him, beeped their horns. Jonathan thought they were Santa Monica friends, saying hi. He beamed and waved.

30 30 30, said his camera. Too dark. Too dark.

A beautiful girl sat on a porch eating ice cream.

“Whatcha doin’?” she called.

“I’m in love with your house!” Jonathan cried back.

“Well you can’t have it!” she answered.

“I can’t even photograph it!” said Jonathan, holding up the camera helplessly.

“Oh yeah? Lemme look.”

Seventeen and fearless, never having had to be afraid. She wore white trousers and a fawn sweater. She took hold of the camera and looked through the viewfinder.

“The flashing numbers mean something’s wrong,” said Jonathan.

“Well, s’okay now,” she said, mystified. She took a picture. “Here you go. Hope you find a house. This one’s not for sale.” She strode off. Jonathan looked through the viewfinder. This time a lightning bolt flashed inside it. That meant the flashlight was attached. It wasn’t. Jonathan turned to ask her where there was a good place to stay. He saw the screen door swinging shut.

The car nearly lost its oil pan driving over an intersection. The cross streets had high humps and dips for drainage. BLUE MONT, said a drive. Jonathan turned right, and beyond a confusing series of traffic lights and franchise restaurants, there was another sign.

BEST WESTERN.

It was the name that drew him. Jonathan was chorused with car horns as he drove straight through two sets of lights into what he thought was its parking lot. He showed his credit cards at the desk and signed.

Was it the same girl behind the desk? She chewed gum and gave him a map.

“I can’t read it.”

“I know,” she sighed. “Nobody can. The whole town’s run out of maps. Everybody just keeps photocopying the old ones, till you can’t read them. Anyway they were so old none of them show the new town center or any of the new shopping malls.”

She tried to tell him about the shopping malls and the cinema complexes.

He asked her where the Registry Office was. He asked about historical museums.

“You go up Blue Mont, only you can’t read it, and turn right on Denison onto Clafin, only you can’t read it.”

“What time is it?” Jonathan asked.

“Three-fifteen.”

“What’s your name?”

“Angel,” she said, smiling. “Dumb name, huh?”

It’s the right name, he thought and replied. Only he didn’t speak. Outside there was the rumbling in the sky. Gosh, that skateboarding is loud, thought Jonathan. He went hunting.

The Registry Office was in the new county offices. Like everything else in Manhattan, Kansas, they were lost in trees. An old limestone tower rose above the new civic space. 1900, said Jonathan’s inner clock, of the tower. 1976, it said of the offices, because the building was still square and flat. There were no postmodern gewgaws, no turrets, triangles or circles. There was a three-story-high portico outside it with three-story graceful pillars. The pillars were rectangles too.

The offices were air-conditioned. There was a mural over the reception desk, but it looked to Jonathan’s fevered eyes like a video screen seen too close: the image dissolved into lines.

The Registry Office itself was up one flight of stairs. It was full of desks, slightly outdated equipment and enthusiasm.

Jonathan kept himself standing straight behind the counter. “I’m trying to find someone in the past,” he said. He was maintaining, in the way someone on drugs maintains, by conscious focus.

“Okay, we’ll do what we can for ya,” said one of the women at the desks. She was about Jonathan’s age, well groomed, bronzed hair cut short and swept up. Her name was Sally, and she invited Jonathan into the tiny back rooms where records were kept. The first small room was lined with shelves on which thick volumes lay flat.

“How long ago ya talking about?” Sally asked him.

“Eighteen seventies.”

That did not surprise her. “Uh-huh. Do you know what section or range the people lived in? Township would help.”

Jonathan didn’t. He gave her the names, spelled them for her. G . . . A . . . E . . . L . . . Branscomb. Sally wrote on the sloping surface of a kind of house for records that stood in the middle of the room. Jonathan looked at the walls, at the books.
Mortgage Record, Riley County, 217
. Record of Military Discharge
3
.

More huge books lay suspended under the roof of the little house. On the walls were maps, in colored sections.

“Now,” said Sally. “Let me show you what the problem is.” She led him to one of the maps and pointed with perfect, frosted fingernails. There was the Kansas River. There was the land, divided into squares which were divided into further squares.

“If you knew the township, we could then start to look for what sector they lived on. You see, when the land was settled, each township and range was divided up into these sectors. And each sector was divided up into quarters, Northwest quarter, Northeast quarter. Sometimes they were divided up even further.”

Sally turned and reached under the roof, and with a grunt pulled out one of the huge books. Laid open, it consisted of a page to each half sector. Names and dates were written in lines.

“This tells us who had what sector when and how it changed hands,” she said.

Jonathan read:

41-1-72 / Webster J.M. to Louise R.B. Rowe / Book B /

  page 308

“That tells us where to find the deed on microfilm. And that can tell us all kinds of stuff.”

Jonathan scanned the page. “But I’ve got to know where I’m looking first.”

“Yup,” she said with a sigh.

The dates were out of order. The land seemed to change hands every two years.

“You can see how tough things were for them,” said Sally. “They mortgaged the land, then sold some of it off, then bought it back, then mortgaged it again. It sure gets confusing. The deeds are great; you find out that someone couldn’t pay his taxes, or someone else has been jailed.”

Jonathan looked up. “That must be great.”

“Oh, listen, the stuff you find out,” she agreed.

Jonathan paused for thought. “How about school records?” he asked.

“Hundreds. Thousands. But same problem again, we got ’em for the whole county. I can show you.”

She led him into a second room, even smaller. Jonathan suddenly saw it had a metal door. It was a safe.

Another grunt and a groan and another huge, beautiful book in leather with marbled endpapers was laid open. A sticker said: Grant and Burgess, Blank Book Manufacturers, Topeka, Kansas.

There were hundreds of schools, recorded by number, and lists of schoolteachers for each year and how much they were paid, fifty dollars a month. Jonathan looked at the tidy, scratchy handwriting done in nibbed pen. The ink had turned orange with age.

“And up there,” said Sally, pointing. Along the top of the shelves ran a line of blue-bound papers. “We have everybody’s school reports. I even found some of mine up there. And my mother’s. But we do not have much before 1903. You see, before the levee was built, we used to have real bad floods, and almost everything was lost in the 1903 flood.” She shrugged and held up her hands. “We might have some older records down in the basement.”

“I’ve got to know where she was,” said Jonathan.

“Unless you want to look through everything for the whole county. Got a month or two?”

Jonathan stood, eyes closed, thinking. “Do you keep the census records too?”

“Good,” said Sally and pointed at him. She had a hunter’s look as well. “But we don’t have those. Hold on a sec.” She leaned into the outer office. “Betty? Sorry, excuse me. Where would census records be for the 1870’s?”

“Oh,” said her boss, coming in, a hand lightly across her forehead. Her boss wore a suit, blue jacket, blue skirt, blue ruffled shirt. “Let me think.” She looked concerned, helpful. “I think that would be the historical museum.”

She even gave Jonathan a slightly better map.

Just inside the door of the Riley County Historical Museum, there was an old ship’s bell on a plinth. There were some publications for sale, about the Old West. A pale young man in a nylon shirt with pens in the pocket was stapling papers together by a reception window.

“We’ll be closing soon. Can I help you?” he asked.

“I,” began Jonathan and found his mind had gone blank for a moment. “I’m doing some research. I’m trying to find a family who lived in this area.”

The pale young man sighed. “You’ve only got half an hour.”

“I don’t have much time anyway,” said Jonathan, hunter’s urgency upon him. “Can I start?”

“Okay,” nodded the pale young man. “Look, things are a bit of a mess. What do you need?”

Jonathan’s mouth hung open. Come on, Jonathan. You have a degree in history. You know how this works.

“I need the census. Do you have a census?”

A wisp of a smile on the pale face. “I’m afraid you’ll need to be a bit more specific.”

No place like home
, Jonathan remembered,
Millie Branscomb, aged 8,
1856.

“Eighteen sixties. Eighteen seventies.”

“Sure. You might as well come in,” said the young man.

There were rooms to the right and left, darkened, full of displays of furniture and clothing and blown-up photographs. Jonathan and the librarian passed beyond those into a large room lined with old bookshelves of varying heights. There were tables littered with books and files. On the walls were giant maps of the county and aerial photographs of the airport. There were filing cabinets, giant staplers and a statue of a Paul Bunyan figure with a scythe instead of an ax.

“Jeannie and I have been trying to file all this stuff,” said the young man.

“All what stuff?”

“Oh. Everything,” said the young man. “We got all these memoirs to file, old photographs, things like that. Have a seat, I’ll find you a copy of the 1875 census. It isn’t all that long.”

Jonathan sat down, shaking. There was a smell. A smell of pancakes. Very hot, slightly charred. Was that wind stirring his hair?

I am losing my mind, he thought.

Very gently, in the distance, he heard cattle lowing. He wanted to weep, but not from dismay. He wanted to weep from yearning. For grass and huge buttercups and the sound of air moving across distances.

“It was, uh, it was retyped,” said the young man.

I’ll just look her up. Here. I’ll find her. Jonathan held a sheet.

EXPLANATION

In 1875 the townships of Riley County were Ashland, Bala, Grant