The Granny, the Grocer and the Cobbler

by Eileen M. Cunniffe

The phone roused me near midnight, and I pulled back the covers and stumbled toward it. I’d hardly managed a hoarse hello when my mother’s voice rushed at me from the other side of the Atlantic, wide awake and seemingly oblivious to the five-hour time difference.  

I could tell from her voice everything was fine. More than fine, it seemed.

“How’s the trip?” I asked as I climbed back into bed and propped a pillow between my back and the knobby brass headboard.

“Great,” she yelled. “We’re having a grand time. We’re in a pub.” 

Mom was shouting, no doubt because of the noise around her, but also because she was unaccustomed to speaking to me from so far away. Mostly, I think she was yelling because she was—uncharacteristically—a bit tipsy. I pictured her always-pink cheeks flushed a shade deeper. I imagined the comical scene in a dark, smoky pub as she and Dad had figured out how to place an international call.

My parents had been gone for more than a week. I’d been tracing their itinerary on a map on my dining-room table: Shannon to Galway, Mayo to Sligo, and now Derry, in Northern Ireland. They’d been planning this trip for months, dreaming it for years. All their parents were born in Ireland and emigrated to America. Each couple had met in Philadelphia, made their lives in that city, and never once went back to where they were from.

Now in their mid-50s, their parents long gone, my parents had finally made the journey “home.” Almost no one from my grandparents’ generation was left—just two of Mom’s aunts, Ciss and Aggie, and one uncle. But both my parents had cousins scattered across Ireland. Before the trip, they’d swapped countless letters with these cousins, most of whom they’d never met. Each exchange uncovered another connection, another invitation, another branch of the family that couldn’t wait to welcome them. 

“How was Aunt Ciss?” I asked, knowing they’d seen her in Sligo. Ciss and her sister Ena had visited when I was eight.

“Oh, she was fine,” Mom replied. “I’ll tell you about her when we get back. But guess what? The most amazing thing happened today. I met my granny!” 

“Your granny?” I asked.  

“My granny,” she repeated, giggling.  

“We went to Magherafelt, and we found Pop-Pop’s house,” she continued. 

She said the name of the town just as her father had, with an audible sigh where the silent g and the h brush against each other. As a child I’d been fascinated with that strange-sounding word, which my grandfather loved to say.

“Then we met my granny.”   

Mom’s voice wavered on the word “granny,” and even from 3,000 miles away I could tell there was an urgency to this call. I knew something about her discovery didn’t quite add up. My grandfather left Ireland after his mother died—that much I knew, and little more about his early life. How could my mother have a grandmother who was still alive, a grandmother none of the Irish relatives had mentioned before?  

“My cousin Pauline gave me her address. A tiny old lady opened the door. Before I finished introducing myself she said, ‘Yes, of course, Rose Marie. Michael’s daughter.’ So we went in and she made a pot of tea and we just sat and talked. Imagine—I have a granny,” Mom said giddily, for the fourth time.

“But, Mom, how can you have a granny you didn’t know about?”

“I guess I skipped that part.” 

Mom explained that her grandfather, a shoemaker, had remarried after my great-grandmother died, and his second wife was much younger than him. Which explained how the ninety-year-old granny could still be alive, but did not explain why every relative except Pauline had seen fit to keep her a secret. But our phone call was up, I’d have to wait for the rest of this story. 

I am the oldest of seven brothers and sisters, and the most sentimental when it comes to our Irish ancestry. So Mom had made the right call: if anyone was going to share the excitement about her long-lost granny, it was me. I should have wept for joy to learn I had a “new” great-granny.

But I didn’t.

Because the little old lady who’d shared a pot of tea with my parents was technically just a step-granny to Mom, and a step-great-granny to me. And this particular “step” seemed contrived: only in theory had Mom’s step-granny ever been my grandfather’s step-mother; he’d left Ireland long before she’d stepped into the picture.

“Granny” wasn’t even a word we used, which made Mom’s repetition of it as strange as the news itself. We’d called both of my grandmothers “Nanny.” Mom was now a grandmother herself, and she’d chosen the hip moniker “Grandma Rosie.”  

          My parents took only one picture of the granny because the flash bothered her eyes. In the photo, her straight grey hair is parted down the middle. She has a long, thin noseand thick glasses with large, plastic frames. She’s squinting up from an armchair, Mom crouched beside her, grinning.

          When my parents got home, I heard more about Mrs. Annie Henry. Aunt Aggie hadn’t mentioned her step-mother, even though she’d been so excited to meet my parents that she’d dragged them upstairs to see her son, who was laid up with a back injury, and she’d phoned her daughter in England and handed the phone to Mom to say hello.

Aunt Ciss hadn’t volunteered information about her step-mother either. But once she learned Pauline had, she felt compelled to add some color commentary. She implied the granny had been pregnant before she married the cobbler and that her father hadn’t fathered that child. And she gave Mom the distinct impression that the cobbler’s children had not taken kindly to their step-mother.

         

Three years after their first trip, my parents went back to Ireland, and this time I went along. We visited every relative they’d met the first time, and they showed me each of the four homes where my grandparents were from. Three of these homes were still in our families, although one had been reduced to a crumbling outbuilding behind a newer house. The fourth—the one we reached last—was the house in Magherafelt; my parents had seen it from the outside on their first trip, but the people inside were strangers. 

On our way to Magherafelt, we made one other stop. Mom couldn’t wait to see her granny again, and she was determined I should meet her, as if this would close some ancestral circle. But the granny’s health was failing and she was in a hospital. Although this visit was important to Mom, I wondered if we had the right to intrude on the old woman’s privacy and ask her to entertain her American “relatives” from her sickbed. 

When we stepped into her room, I knew I needn’t have worried. The lively old lady my parents remembered was now a frail little bird who barely made a bump under the bedclothes. Mom set the flowers she’d brought on a table and pulled a chair close to the bed. When she reached for the blanket that covered the sleeping granny’s legs, I excused myself and went to the lobby. 

The tears that had failed to fall when I’d first learned about the granny finally arrived. Not because my step-great-granny was dying, but because it never occurred to me until I saw them together that maybe she and Mom had both been missing something until they’d met. Mom had let Annie Henry step into the void where her real grandparents never had been, and I knew she knew this was a stretch, even if she didn’t say so. And the granny had her own child and her own grandchildren, so she too must have understood the difference. 

After I left the room, the little bird woke up and squeezed Mom’s hand. Both my parents felt she remembered them and understood they’d come to see her again.  

Because my grandfather lived with us while I was growing up, his was the family home I thought I knew best. I’d always pictured a farmhouse, with enough room for thirteen people, and a big yard. Not that he’d ever described it that way, I suppose. But long ago I’d seen a pastel-tinted photograph of him with his parents and ten brothers and sisters all posed on a lawn, and my mind must have conjured the kind of house I thought belonged with that family.

I held onto my image of the Henry home right up until the day I stood outside it. I’d seen pictures my parents took on their first visit, but my mind had simply refused to reconcile the real house on Church Street with my idea of it until I stood there in front of a grey, pebbledash row home on a narrow street in a busy market town.

It had been fifteen years since Pop-Pop died, and still it was hard to forget how sullen he’d been in his last years, how hard he’d been on Mom. But he’d come alive anew for us on this trip, especially when we’d visited Aunt Ciss, who still called her brother “Sonny” more than sixty years after he left home. I’d only ever heard him called Michael or Mickey. I’d laughed with her over how he used to tell us he’d once been a little girl, because he wore whatever hand-me-downs fit, even dresses. 

Dad stood on the sidewalk opposite the house, camera in hand. Just as he snapped a picture of Mom and me, the wide wooden door swung open and a middle-aged man stepped out. We quickly explained why we were photographing his house.

“Please come in,” he said warmly. “My father and sister live here, I know they’d love to meet you.” 

He ushered us past the brass “46” on the chocolate-brown door, through a narrow hall and into a tiny living room, where the elderly father and his daughter sat. We explained our connection to the house, and the old gentleman recognized the Henry surname right away. “Of course, I knew the Henrys,” he said. “They were a fine family. Your grandfather,” he offered, looking directly at Mom, “was a cobbler, and this room we’re in was his workshop.”

At first I thought he was just being polite. But then he began to remember names—Jack and Barney were the ones he mentioned first. He was ninety-three, his daughter told us, so my grandfather and his siblings would have been his contemporaries. 

“I remember Mickey, he worked at the food co-op,” the old man said. Mom was pleased to report Mickey had found similar work in Philadelphia and eventually owned a grocery store. She’d grown up working in that store, and living upstairs. The old man seemed pleased to know this. He asked his daughter to show us through the house, which she gladly did. Upstairs were four tiny bedrooms. How had thirteen people lived there? From a back window I saw a patch of grass, far too small to have been the setting for the photograph I half-remembered. Downstairs was a modest kitchen and the small living area that had doubled as a workshop.

“Show them the hallway,” the old man instructed. His son led us back to the passage where we’d come in. “Stand here,” he said, then waited as we took turns stepping into a well-worn dip in the floor. “Right here,” he said, pressing his hand against the wall, “was a window. Customers would pass shoes back and forth through it. Over time there was so much traffic it bowed the floor. We closed up the wall, but there’s your proof of the cobbler’s shop.”   

          The elderly man seemed to have exhausted his memories of the Henrys. Mom hung on every word, hoping for new information that might shed a little light on the scant facts she’d collected on her first visit to Ireland, but none was forthcoming. Our two families parted with warm handshakes all around.

A quarter-century has passed since Mom called to tell me about her great discovery. All that time I’ve carried around in my head what little bits I’d heard of the cobbler’s story. I’ve turned them over so often—like a snow globe—that what I knew for certain eventually blurred. Unconsciously I’d invented new scenes and extra twists in the plot. I’d forgotten who’d first told Mom Annie was still alive, and who’d implied the rest.

Only lately have I started wondering in earnest about the cobbler and his family, trying to make the picture come clear. I began with what little I knew about my grandfather: He was twenty-three when he sailed for America in 1929 on the S.S. Albertic. Before he left he was a hardworking butter-and-egg man and a decorated Irish football player. In Philadelphia, he built a successful business. He mentioned Magherafelt often, but almost never the names of his people there. He took his family obligations seriously and was a good provider and a generous, though stern, father and grandfather. And I don’t remember him ever being happier or more charming than he was that summer and fall when Ciss and Ena came to visit. 

Around the same time I began wondering about his backstory, Mom decided to divvy up our family photographs. I asked if I could see—or even have—the Henry family portrait, which I hadn’t seen in decades. The one I mis-remembered as a smiling, relaxed clan in some bucolic setting.

I have that old photograph in my possession now—the original, tinted copy mounted on cardboard that my grandfather must have carried in his suitcase. How many times did he take it out and study those faces? The names are recorded on the back in Mom’s neat handwriting. It’s a formal pose, with a leafy green backdrop that’s clearly fake. Everyone is wearing his or her Sunday best. Two little girls sit on sheepskin rugs in front of two rows of older faces, all with similar features: thick, wavy helmets of unruly hair, some dark, some fair; deep-set eyes and thick brows that all slope downward at the same angle; and thin lips, only a few of which suggest any effort at smiling. The ones whose shoes are visible—including my great-grandfather, right leg crossed jauntily over left, one shiny black boot all but touching the hem of his wife’s long dress—seem to be well shod, as one might expect.

 There they all are, together: the Henrys of Magherafelt, County Derry, in the late 1920s, as best we can guess. Mom knows Martha was the oldest and Aggie was the youngest, but she doesn’t know where the rest of them—Michael (Sonny), Rose (Ciss), Barney, Jack, Mary, Ena, Patsy, Daisy and Kay—fell in terms of birth order. How could I not have known I had a great-aunt named Daisy?

Pauline told Mom their grandmother had all her teeth pulled shortly before the photograph was taken. Her false teeth weren’t ready, and she’d wanted to reschedule the portrait. Because the cobbler insisted on having the picture made as planned, my great-grandmother Rose’s mouth appears as the merest hint of a line above her chin. 

Mom and I recognize a stubborn streak that maybe kept the cobbler from rescheduling. But we might be wrong. Perhaps there was some urgency to having the portrait made, a sense that the little house on Church Street wouldn’t contain them all much longer. Martha looks to be wearing a wedding band. Maybe one of the brothers had just booked his passage out of Ireland—Barney to America, or Patsy to Australia. Patsy seems too young to be leaving, but the resolute look on his face and his crossed arms suggest he’s ready to bolt. If one of the boys was about to leave, it could explain the solemn faces. Or were they told not to smile? Is that why Aggie looks so cross, or did she not like being made to sit on the floor?

The edges of the image are soft and out of focus, like the bits of family lore the American relations have cobbled together. Ena and Daisy each have one arm that fades into the background. Kay and Aggie are in white, probably their First Communion dresses. Four little girls in all, maybe ranging from seven to twelve years old. My grandfather looks to be about twenty, so it won’t be long until he and Barney, Jack, Patsy, and their mother Rose are all gone from the picture, leaving the cobbler with a houseful of young daughters.

Nothing we’ve heard makes us think Annie helped the cobbler raise his other daughters after their mother died. It seems more likely they’d all left home before the cobbler remarried.

My grandfather would have learned about his father’s second marriage through the mail—the only way he ever got news from home, until late in his life, when he or Ciss occasionally splurged on a transatlantic call. Did his father write to him directly, or did one of his siblings tell him about their new step-mother and step-sister? I imagine he was relieved to be on the other side of the ocean. I remember him as proud and proper, mindful of appearances and what the neighbors might think.

His brother Bernard was also in Philadelphia, and I imagine them speaking about their family. But Barney died young, and that subsequent visit with Ciss and Ena when they were all in their late fifties or early sixties was the only other time my grandfather spent with any of his siblings after he left Ireland. Surely, they must have discussed their father.   

As a child Mom was vaguely aware that her grandfather had remarried, but she was so far removed from the experience of being anyone’s granddaughter that the news didn’t mean much. “They always said she was very good to him,” Mom remembers hearing (or more likely, overhearing), “but they said it kind of grudgingly.” She remembers her father receiving a letter telling him his father had died. After that she never heard another word about her step-granny for almost half a century.

In the nearly thirty years my mother’s parents were married, my grandmother always handled correspondence with the Irish relatives—including all those Henry in-laws she’d never even met. She sent photos, money, notes of congratulations and condolence, even a First Communion suit for one of my grandfather’s nephews, Mom recalls.

When my grandmother died, Mom inherited the task of corresponding with the Irish relations. Pop-Pop’s step-mother never made it onto his Christmas-card list. Yet somehow Annie managed to keep track of him, because even at ninety she’d known who my mother was and how they were connected.

My parents have told me everything they recall about their first meeting with the granny, which was all polite conversation, a visit that lasted as long as a pot of tea. If they talked at all about the cobbler, Mom doesn’t recall what was said; and if they had, she almost certainly would.

Still, I keep asking questions. Mom answers by digging up every scrap she can find—prayer cards confirming when my great-grandfather and step-great-granny died, a letter from Church Street saying we were welcome to visit again. She hands over each treasure as if it will answer my questions. I have the frayed white jacket my grandfather wore in his grocery store. I have his passport, and my grandmother’s, and their marriage license. I have the journals my parents kept on their trips to Ireland. On that first trip, Mom wrote that they were “completely enchanted” by the granny, and she described their meeting as “the most remarkable event of the trip.” She also noted that one of her cousins said their grandfather had been a great cobbler: “He could just about spit nails into the heel of a shoe.” 

Mom had received a letter from the granny’s daughter, Kathleen, after our hospital visit, and we knew my step-great-granny died six days after we saw her. But by the time I started asking questions, this letter had gone missing. Then one day Mom called to say she’d found it. “It’s yours, of course,” she told me.

          Kathleen was responding to a Christmas card from Mom. From the seven-page, hand-written letter we learn (all over again, because of course we both read it when it was new) that we just missed meeting Kathleen at the hospital that day. We re-learn that my step-great-granny had six grandchildren and eight great-grandchildren. We calculate that Kathleen was four years older than Mom, Kathleen’s oldest child four years older than me.

And thanks to that letter, we now know even less than we thought we did about the cobbler’s children, and his second marriage. 

 “I remember your father’s photo which was always on the sideboard of your grandfather’s house in Church St. where I lived from the age of 7 until 12 …,” Kathleen wrote. Which begs the question of where she lived before she was seven, and what it might mean that she referred to the cobbler as “your grandfather” and not “my father” (or “step-father”). 

And then there’s this: “… I want you to know something very specially. Would you please let Ciss know that Mammy didn’t have her address when she moved and that she asked for it or the phone number on many occasions but it was not forthcoming! Mary and Ciss never forgot her over all the years and she would so much have wanted me to write or call to say so. I do hope you can put that right.”

Mom would have done her best to convey this message to ornery Aunt Ciss, knowing, as Kathleen surely did, that it wasn’t always easy to put things right with a Henry, or even to know what was wrong in the first place.

All we can do now is read between the lines. From the warm tone of Kathleen’s letter, and the cool undertone of everything else Mom heard from other Henrys, it seems reasonable to conclude that the day my middle-aged mother turned up on Annie’s doorstep was the first time one of the cobbler’s grandchildren had jumped for joy at the chance to call her “granny.”  

The cobbler’s house in Magherafelt is gone now—my Uncle Mickey went looking for it and found it had been torn down. Ciss and Aggie died long ago, and our favorite Henry cousin, Pauline, died too. There’s no one left to ask about the people in the picture, the missing parts of their stories, or at least no one we know well enough. Public archives could fill in some blanks, but they wouldn’t tell us the stories we wish we knew; at best they’d help us cobble together a few more dates or add some branches to the family tree.

I ask Mom what she remembers knowing as a child about her father’s parents. “He never talked about them,” she says. And although neither one of us says so, we both know this is the real mystery we are still trying to solve.

I’ve revised the scenes in my snow globe that I’d fictionalized over time. I’ve written down only what I believe to be true, or can reasonably surmise, about the cobbler, his wives, their children and grandchildren.

With one exception: I have, quite consciously, allowed myself to invent a scene at the end of that long-ago day when my mother met her granny. I imagine that after she kissed my parents goodbye and closed the door behind them, she picked up the phone and dialed her only daughter’s number. 

“You’ll never guess what happened today,” she began, then blurted out the news before Kathleen could reply: “I met my granddaughter.”

Eileen Cunniffe’s nonfiction has appeared in many literary journals, including Superstition Review, Hofstra Windmill, Bluestem Magazine and The RavensPerch. Occasionally, her stories present themselves as prose poems. Three of her essays have been recognized with Travelers’ Tales Solas Awards and another received the Emrys Journal 2013 Linda Julian Creative Nonfiction Award. More about her work may be found at: www.eileencunniffe.com.

Hot Work

by Joyce H. Munro

Music to cook by: “My Funny Valentine,” the Vedran Ružić Trio

I’m pretty sure I know how the fire started, though I can’t be certain. Newspaper reporters weren’t certain either. You can read evasion all over their conclusion: “The origin is supposed to have been a defective flue in the basement of the Riverside Hotel.” Defective flue, my eye. Something more combustible happened down in the basement that night in 1875.

Eight o’clock—closing time at Nat’s Oyster Saloon. Knowing Nat, he probably told his kitchen help to go home early, business was slow anyway. Then he stayed on alone to close up the place. His pride and joy. Recently opened in downtown Milton, Pennsylvania, on the lower level of his father’s new hotel. The place of resort for gents and ladies. Good square meals at reasonable prices. Best desserts in town. Fresh bivalves served in any style desired. Raw. Baked. Stewed. Scalloped. Fried.

If you’re like me, you eat your oysters on the half shell or fried. Forget chopped-up or soupy. My husband likes them fried, he, being from the south where frying is de rigueur. Ever since we moved to the Philly area, he’s been on the lookout for restaurants serving decent fried oysters, but there’s only one that meets the desires of his taste buds—the Oyster House in Center City. So on occasion, we have resorted to frying them up ourselves.

The recipe from Nat’s day calls for dipping oysters three times. First in cracker dust, then in beaten egg, then cracker dust again. Dipping is done with the fingers—piercing oysters with a fork destroys the flavor (so said cooks in those days). Then they’re laid in a wire basket and fried in a pot of lard so hot blue smoke rises from the center. It’s not a good idea for lard to boil unattended. But, knowing Nat, he was probably multitasking. And voila, the perfect ingredients for a block-buster fire.

I need to point out that Nat’s was not the only place where the fire of ’75 could have started. There were several oyster saloons in town where blue smoke rose over kettles of boiling lard. Oysters, once considered fancy food for fancy people, were all the rage, east to west, north to south. Good eating was the reward for hauling gobs of crude oil out of the depths of Pennsylvania. And newspapers, like the Sunbury American, carried recipes for good eats. They also reported tales of overeating. Like the one about an old lady who downed “two dozen fried oysters, a pound of crackers, three slices of fruit cake, half a mince pie and some apples, after which she was threatened with a spasm, and in the effort to prevent it, she sacrificed all the wine there was in the house.”

Oysters sped their way from the Chesapeake Bay to towns like Milton by railway. Bedded down in straw and moistened with salt water, oysters made the trip in only sixteen hours. An hour or so later, as fast as shuckers could shuck, they’d be sliding down the throats of gents sitting at counters all over town. Followed by a pint of cold lager beer. Knowing Nat, he probably kept his place open later than other establishments and wore himself out. Feet so sore, fingers so achy. So weary, he didn’t realize the fryer was still boiling away, crumbs from the last oysters popping into the air. Flash point—and poof!

The blaze that night was hungry enough to eat up a whole block of businesses. Nat wasn’t hurt, at least not bad enough to make the newspapers. But four years later, Nat did make the papers. Another fire. This one blew him out a window head first when flames licked at gas pipes. The papers dispassionately reported that he suffered a broken arm and contusions.

Here’s what happened. Nat was working at his restaurant and heard people yelling, Fire! He ran down the street and dashed into Brown’s building to help Gus Lochman save his confectionery shop. But while he was grabbing goodies off the shelves, he got tossed out unceremoniously. Brown’s, a frame structure on Front Street, was reduced to glowing embers. And the cause of the fire? The usual suspect—a defective flue.

Then in 1880, on a warm and windy day in May, fire erupted yet again, this time at Milton’s largest industry at the edge of town—the Car Works. And yet again, Nat’s restaurant burned to the ground, as did his father’s newly rebuilt hotel, his brother’s bakery, and his sister-in-law’s confectionery.

This was the fire of all fires, landing Milton on the list of largest conflagrations in North America. Residents saw their town burn from one end to the other. Their houses, businesses, schools, churches reduced to a blanket of ash six inches deep. Their just-planted vegetable gardens, shade trees where they carved their initials, canaries perched in gilded cages in their parlors. Tintypes of Granny and Pa-Pa. Letters from the battlefield back in the ‘60s. Marriage certificates. Lockets holding strands of their stillborn baby’s hair. Ashes of all that was sacred, blown about the streets, into the west branch of the Susquehanna River, floating down to the Chesapeake Bay, metamorphosing into food for oysters.

Nothing left to hold onto. Other things people held dear—like their emotions, their brains, muscles, immune systems—charred as well. As psychologists have told us, the trauma of massive destruction can lead to depression or long-term anxiety disorders or debilitating physical ailments. Some individuals never regain hold.

What happened to Miltonians that May day is similar to what happens to soldiers. It happened to Nat during the Civil War. Back in the spring of ’62, Nat’s regiment of the Pennsylvania Reserves, the Thirty-Fourth, was charged with protecting the nation’s capital at Fort Pennsylvania, on the outskirts of Washington, D.C. It was there that Nat saw—as up close and personal as a fort full of soldiers can get—President Lincoln and General McClellan, who came out to review the troops. McClellan was the bigger draw. He was a Pennsylvanian and how those soldiers loved him.

Nat’s regiment was ordered to Manassas, Virginia, then deeper south to Fredericksburg and on to Richmond, where they engaged in the Seven Days’ Battles and lost to the Confederates. Then up to Bull Run, then up farther to South Mountain, then over to Antietam. Then back down ... then up ... then over ... then down ... Along the way, the Reserves were picking up a reputation for their “magnificent and stubborn valor,” as McClellan put it. They were also picking up diarrhea, rheumatism, frostbite, typhoid fever.

At some point on the war path, after the battle of Antietam, when the regiment turned south again, Nathaniel Huth bolted. Emotionally or physically or both, he abandoned the cause and for that offense, he was dishonorably discharged by the General Courts-Martial in November of 1862. His motive for bolting will never be known, but it certainly didn’t help that McClellan, his beloved General-in-Chief, had just been ousted by Lincoln for not pursuing the enemy aggressively enough. The Reserves were fuming mad when they got word—they had sworn they would stand by him. Some of those reservists, no doubt, acted out that fall.

Nat was nineteen, stood five and a half feet, and, judging by his photo taken later in life, weighed a hundred pounds. Judging by that same photo, his slack-jawed, shell-shocked expression probably infuriated the court; they wanted to see loyalty and energy in that face. The charge against Nat was an action considered egregious, like falling asleep on post, vulgarity in the presence of a lady, gross intoxication, or insubordination.

Nat did not come home unscathed. He did not come home, period. After his discharge, he went west, just shy of the Ohio border, where he met and married Martha Jones of Portersville. But his heart and his livelihood were in Milton, so he hauled Martha, pregnant with the first of eleven children, back home where he could make the tasty morsels of his dreams.

One after another, when they were old enough to hoist themselves up and grip the cold marble slab with their fat fingers, and their eyes followed the rolling pin back and forth on the pastry table, that’s when Nat would have commenced his children’s education in cookery. Those round, rosy faces intent on kitchen work. Sieving, mixing, kneading. Their non-stop baby chatter. Rolling, greasing, grating. Could children have more fun than this? Mashing, spooning, tasting.

And one after another, Nat and Martha’s children took to cookery. All but four. Willie who died of scarlet fever. Ralph who died of spinal meningitis. Mattie, of diphtheria. Marian, cholera. And with each child’s death, the kitchen mourned. Lamentation falling in the stew pot, scooped into dishes served to customers who, unless they saw tears in Nat’s eyes when he served them, ate unknowing.

Father Huth and Mother Huth they were called after they moved to Brookville, Pennsylvania at the turn of the century. But what about Henry the earlier father and Catherine the earlier mother? All it took was migration up the Schuylkill River in the 1850s, then a couple of block-buster fires to lose track of begetters. Maybe Nat’s children asked him where great-granddad came from and all he knew was some place in Germany. Maybe they asked what their original name was and he said Hutt, Hoot, or Hott. Maybe they asked him to say something in German and all he knew was Sie lustigen kleinen dummen Kopf. Thus, the current elders became the only elders.

The skimpiest family tree I’ve ever heard of, penned on a scrap of paper and tucked in a Bible, reads in part: “Mother Huth’s father’s mother was ... Father Huth’s father’s name was ... Your great grandmother Huth’s name was ...”

No dates, no places, no stories. This is the whole of Father and Mother Huth’s family tree, a paper version of Charlie Brown’s Christmas tree with six bedraggled branches. I learn about this scrap of paper during Christmastide, the season of gift-giving and feasting. Some gift, this sparse tree with its flimsy information.

Henry Huth’s descendents may not have talked much about their past, but they molded it out of spun sugar and fondant and marzipan. Huths were, and still are, bakers and confectioners. A family-wide, generations-long love affair with sweets. You can follow the scent of rum-laced fruitcake as Huths moved across Pennsylvania into Ohio, over to New Jersey, down to Washington, D.C., opening bakeries with trendy names like Vienna, Globe, Bon-Ton. And who knows how many Huths have baked in the privacy of their own kitchens, gluey-doughed fingers leaving prints all over cabinets in the search for nutmeg.

The recipe for Nat’s fruitcake, handwritten on a card, is tucked away in my recipe box. Every year around Christmas time, I get it out and I remember when my Dad baked hundreds of pounds of fruitcake each year. Yes, hundreds. Then came a deal to bake the cakes for Woodward & Lothrop Department Stores in Washington, D.C., until they learned Dad didn’t have a commercial kitchen license. Over the Christmas holidays, Dad and I emailed about fruitcake, not that I planned to bake any. But he reminded me of a few things anyway: “This is important—put a pan of water on the bottom of the oven, otherwise cake will be too dry. Use brown kraft paper for pan liner, but grease the pan too.”

And where did Dad learn these insider tips? From his Father Fred who learned from Father George who learned from Father Nathaniel who learned from Father Henry who learned from Father name unknown. It is rude to tell fruitcake jokes in my hearing—I have blood kinship with the stuff.

Nat’s fruitcake is the type that improves with time, though not as much time as fine wine. The recipe brought by memory from somewhere in Germany to Reading, Pennsylvania around 1819 and adapted through the generations, thanks to ever-more-convenient ingredients. Three types of raisins, plus currants and dates and figs and prunes. Pounds and pounds of candied fruit, walnuts, eggs, a minimal amount of flour. Nat must have used a wash basin, not a bowl. And it was a hands-on situation. Elbow-deep in batter. Then he’d plop it in pans and let it slow-bake for half a day. Along about fruitcake-mixing time each autumn, Nat’s growing children likely soured on kitchen work. But he wouldn’t let them bolt. Nat had rules for cooking and rules for children, which none dared break. Customers craved fruitcake—the baking must be done.

The ritziest Christmas gift I ever received was a “Little Lady” stove. A real electric stove for cooking real food. There it gleamed on Christmas morning, under the tree, surrounded by a pile of mini-sized accoutrements. Mixes for pie crust, gingerbread, pancakes, cookies. Pots and pans, cookie cutters, rolling pin. I cooked all the mixes in short order, one after the other, then scoured the kitchen for something else to make. Mom gave me dollops of left-overs to cook in my mini sauce pot, biscuits to reheat in the oven. My culinary education was well on the way when my brother decided to sauté something made of plastic directly on the stovetop. Then he satisfied his urge to bake using a model airplane. The oven didn’t actually catch fire, it just smoldered for the longest time after the babysitter yanked out the plug.

Nat got a new oven after he moved to Brookville, Pennsylvania and opened a bakery on Main Street. A modern oven that could hold a constant heat, perfect for crusty breads and delicate sweets. But when Nat hung out his shingle, he was dealing with stuff other than the sweet stuff. Three children and a daughter-in-law lived with him in the apartment above the bakery. Within a year, the daughter-in-law died in childbirth. That same year, a granddaughter was born blind. Two more granddaughters and a grandson died the following year. Knowing Nat, he bristled at small things, grumbled at kitchen help, punished the dough with his fists, ramming his wordless homage into yeast rolls, sold to customers who spread them with jam and ate unknowing.

Then his youngest daughter, Helen, and her husband moved in. Who knows what Nat thought when Helen married John Frazier, a newcomer, come to Brookville to establish a new industry—horse racing. I’m guessing Nat took John’s ambitions in stride, maybe went out to see that plot of level ground John wanted to buy and build horse stables, a race track, start a racing association. Nat didn’t invest in John’s schemes, but eventually the tables turned. John became business partner with Nat. They registered the corporate name, Huth & Frazier, and modernized baking operations, streamlined delivery of bread around town, won prizes for their baked goods at country fairs.

Maybe John’s horses stopped winning races or maybe Helen begged him to quit traveling so much, stay home now that they were expecting a child. Maybe it was the lure of a well-stocked bakery, begging to be expanded into a retail chain. Apricot tarts, pfeffernüsse, raisin biscuits, shortbread, laid out in precise rows. Trays of butter küchen and almond crusted French bread. Layer cakes, custard pies. Stacks of light and dark breads and rolls. Oh, that tantalizing yeasty aroma. Oh, the lusciousness of it all. Oh, the sales potential.

I own all sorts of baking pans. Square, round, sheet, bundt, loaf, mini-muffin, muffin-top, brioche, spring-form, tart. But I have never owned a lady-lock pan. I didn’t know such a thing existed and it didn’t, until Nat Huth invented it in 1914. And with this invention, I realized I didn’t know Nat as well as I thought. But this I know: lady-locks were all the rage, like oysters, at the turn of the century. Fulhorns in German. Puff paste horns filled with sweet buttercream or pie dough horns filled with savory cheeses. This delicacy could be filled with almost anything, if it was finely minced and sauced. I’ll bet Nat would cook up a dozen lady-locks filled with creamed oysters if you asked him.

There was such a demand for lady-locks, he had to invent a new devise to bake them faster. Instead of rolling out rich pastry dough late at night, I figure he was over at the machine works, cutting tin sheets into exact forms, bending them with a forcer, applying solder, the bead of molten metal like thin royal icing flowing over his arthritic fingers, stinging. Tiny bits of sparking metal showering the lard-soaked apron he forgot to take off, so weary, dropping the arc welder, slapping at his apron before it could combust and burnish his wrinkled skin. But someone was there to keep fire watch because soldering is “hot work,” the risk of fire ever-present. Burns, heat stress, heat stroke.

Decades later, folks in Brookville would wander into Uzi’s Pastries on Main Street and ask for buttercream lady-locks, but they were out of luck. Nat was the last baker in town who made them, just across the street at Vienna Bakery. It’s a pizza parlor now. Still standing after all these years. Amazing it never burned down. Baking is hot work. Ovens, stoves, gridirons, broilers. Fired up ten hours a day, spilling out temptation. In those days the walls glistened with butter, the air was cinnamony and Nat’s skinny wrists, protruding from rumpled shirt sleeves, quivered.

Father Huth they called him. When he asked his children and grandchildren to come over, they left their homes straightaway and gathered round the pastry table, eager to taste the latest concoction in his search for culinary goodness. When he won blue ribbons for lofty loaves of bread, I’m sure his wife displayed them in the sales room. When he created a four-tier wedding cake festooned with doves and blossoms, they took his photograph, in batter-smeared apron, next to the cake. And on the day of his funeral, businesses in Brookville closed. In honor of the slumped and inelegant bakerman who made them the staff of life and indulgent confections.

There are a couple of things, not-so-sweet things, Nat didn’t know about. That his son-in-law never did turn Vienna Bakery into a retail chain. That his daughter and a daughter-in-law were hospitalized at the same state hospital for psychosis of an indeterminate nature. That his grandson was a prisoner of war in World War II. That his great, great granddaughter gazed at his photo and laughed at the sight of him. Then she cried as she came to understand what his eyes, droopy and dispirited, had seen. What his mouth, loll and parched, had tasted. His fingers, bent and swollen, had touched.

                             Nathaniel Huth, Proprietor of Vienna Bakery, c. 1910                                Courtesy of Jefferson County History Center, Brookville, PA

Joyce H. Munro’s work can be found in Broad Street Review, NewsWorks, Hippocampus, Minding Nature, The Copperfield Review, Topology, and elsewhere. She writes about the people who kept a Philadelphia estate running during the Gilded Age in “Untold Stories of Compton” on the Morris Arboretum blogsite http://cms.business-services.upenn.edu/morrisarboretum-blog/.

Taylor's Drain

by Joy Weitzel

I look over the ridge and see green. I tell my husband to stop the car so I can take a picture; I want to remember what it looks like from up here. From this view, I see a few vultures floating on wind currents, looking more majestic than they should. I see tree tops and ridges that fall into valleys where patches of light green signal a farm or pasture. I can’t see within the green tree mass that guards the rhododendrons and their tangling pink flowers, the mossy stones that peer out of fallen leaves on the forest floor, or the little stream that trickles over stones but cuts a deep path, every drop running over sandstone to find the Tygart Valley.

I wait for a vision, a time machine to fall from the blue sky with its date set to 1847. If time machines were real and fell from the sky, I would hop in, and, as the lights and whistles spun around me, the mountains would reverse the seasons several times over. The trees would shrink back into the earth, leaving the ridge bare. Loggers would replace the timber with their axes, putting the poplars and birches back in place. Fields would open and close like fish rising, their lips breaking the surface to create ripples. When it all stopped, I would look out from the bald ridge I stand on, and I would search for a sign, something that says “I am here; this is my home. Come see me, and I’ll show you my life.” It would be above a cleared field that you might be plowing at this very moment, pushing the metal and the wood through the dirt. I would walk beside you, while you told me of the journey, the bear you killed last fall, how you know the earth—the technique for sowing and harvesting. You would teach me how to push the plow behind the mule, though I would slip in the dirt as the iron hit stone.

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A little hill rises on our left, where two deer graze in a green cemetery. They flee when they see us, lifting white tails. As I climb the little hill, I find names—Boehm, Mitchell, Hathaway, Weaver, Proudfoot. The wind and rain have worn the gray markers so some names cannot be read; they stand, lie, or lean bare and blank. By the number of stones with our name, I can tell you have frequented the familiar trail to this place. There is your thirteen-year old son, who died while older sons went to war. There is the daughter who never married. There is your wife of nearly forty years. There is your son who fought in the Civil War, came home, married twice, and died in December.

You are nearby, lying flat beneath the shade of surrounding trees. I brush away wet grass that has settled in your name as if I were brushing away hair from your face. I want to clean you up, remove the dirt that hugs a hand holding a Bible. Though it is just a stone, I sense an odd connection to the damp dirt in which you lie. Your presence dwells in the dates, in the carved hand, in the imprint of your name, in this gray stone lying on its back. The dirt is what I’m supposed talk to because this is what remains: bony fingers, hollow eye sockets, your best Sunday suit. You are earth now, dead and decomposed. But I don’t think about that.

I think about what to say.

I don’t go to cemeteries often. I’ve escorted grandparents, lying in coffins, to their earthly rest, but I never stayed long enough to know their stones. I rarely return. Now I come looking for history.

My fingers touch your marker, deciphering its Scripture. I came here to see you. To see how fast you ran, how you looked at creeks and saw fish hiding in shadowy depths, how you looked at your wife when she was young and when she was old, how your son, Ephraim, climbed up your lap and asked about the bear, how you read the Holy Bible or depended on the farm, on nature and wind.

You chose this place beside the Tygart Valley River for a reason. You looked up and saw timber spread over a half-million mountainous acres. You shook ancestral seeds and scattered them: corn, wheat, oats, barley, soybeans. You might have cleared a few acres for crops, a few for future pasture. Your axe swung to heave your home in place; muscles ripped as the impact of metal reverberated through handle, through narrow wrists and elbows, through a strained bicep and shoulder, through an aching neck that lately had been giving you trouble, and through the skull holding the brain that told you, “good will come.” Your patch of light-green broke the surface, rippled the dark and tangled, and finally grasped the mayfly.

We can’t go back in time to meet with a handshake or a hug. I can’t make your stone speak any more than I can the trees or the ground. All is silent. As my knees become wet with dew and earth, I wonder if I’ve matched you with who I think you are or if you are still a stranger. Then, a woodpecker taps the telephone poles and a grouse beats its wings like a motor. We both know these sounds.

This is what I say: I am your fourth great granddaughter. I have a heart for Great Lakes, and I’m good in a kayak and on skis. When I go, I like to go farther, to the very end, so I can see mountaintops colored with fall and winter’s blanket backed by Lake Superior. I’ve been taught these things like you’ve been taught by your father, and now I’ve completed the circle to see that part of me is here—in this cemetery called Taylor’s Drain.

Joy Weitzel teaches composition in Cadillac, Michigan. She received her MA in English from Northern Michigan University in 2014 and completed a creative non-fiction thesis that explored the history of her family. A wanna-be genealogist, Joy is currently working on finding her roots and expressing them lyrically. Her work has been previously published in the Rappahannock Review.