Among the artifacts
Aunt Kitty, Autumn 1935
My Clifford is a patient man, as we tromp through old graveyards looking for my great-great grands, directed by pointed fingers from old farmhouses and the old woman down the road who goes way back, in this unfamiliar place where my ancestors settled. The dead don’t always want you to find them, or maybe it’s a game they play to pass the time.
Yesterday I was looking for Colonel Jacob Drake’s grave, but only found a marker for Charity, his first wife, before he became a colonel. I knelt before her and squinted to make out the melting letters chiseled at the bottom of her stone, disappearing slowly by the second, the white raised edges dappled with black spots. “She all those qualities possessed which renders matrimony blest.” She was only 32 when she passed in 1776. Think of that.
Today we are in a little museum near what was once Drakesville. The walls are lined with portraits of intimidating white men in beards, intricately framed. Their names are unfamiliar, not a Drake in the bunch. There is a little piano that was once in someone’s parlor, and a glass-enclosed case featuring artifacts of the past. The late-autumn air is chilly, and I’m glad for my wool coat. The proprietor of the museum keeps the tiny woodstove tamed, as if it might reach out and burn the place down, burn down all of what’s left of the memories.
I bow my head, scouring the case for some relic of my people. Colonel Drake’s pipe, perhaps, or Charity’s silver. There is an old watch on a chain. A set of silver with the initial S. Pottery pieces somehow intact. Beadwork. A teacup with saucer. These things were special to someone, but they strike me as ordinary. Still, I feel obliged to give them my due attention, if only out of respect for the man who runs the museum, who sits respectfully at a distance, behind a desk, like a minister who doesn’t want to intrude on my prayers, but will take my confession to his grave. Clifford sits in a chair behind me, fiddling with his camera, patiently waiting for me to take in the past to my heart’s content. I have found my heart’s content. I’m ready to return home, back to my pretty things, back to tell my family what little I have learned.