As If a Bird Flew By Me: A Novel

Later Generations

37 LATER GENERATIONS Celia can’t help but notice how many Johns fill her family tree. I could draw a filial line back to 1692, but she starts with the closer relatives—my uncle, his son/my cousin, my cousin’s son, my grandfather , my great-grandfather, my great-great-grandfather, my great-great-great-grandfather. Add “great,” multiply the superlative , keep digging— Is the 300 year dot-to-dot of Johns a ridiculous loss of vision? Or is it stability steeped in the Puritan tradition of passing names down, “transcending death through progeny,” and thou shall honour your father? [and mother]? And yet she knows so little about her mother’s side of the family, except how her maternal grandparents died—grandfather : heart attack, grandmother: metastatic colon cancer. k On October 24, 1693, Ann Pudeator’s son John, a year after her death, is lost at sea while fishing off Salem. His wife Abigail remarries six days later. Celia starts to wonder, At what point did we not have to remarry in a week? And for some reason, she also wonders: At what point in evolution did animals get souls? k 38 Names are written on the back of the pictures in the shoebox, probably by her dead, paternal grandmother, after whom she named her newest cat. Her father only laughed and shrugged. The writing on the photos is in blue ink, formal, slanted to the right, a little wavering—does age unsteady a hand like this? k She cannot fathom this: the billions of people, all the living and the dead, each individual with loves and tics and gestures, no two alike— How to grasp the energies and desires and selfhood of so many? Maybe this utter deluge of heartbeats is what keeps her inside some days, the too-much-ness of the world, the gravity of the living mixed with the dead. I find it difficult to exhale completely, the air packed with the careening and intersecting spheres of sentience— k And then there is Revolutionary War John: his and his wife’s graves were lost over the years to prairie grass, unmarked and unknown until 1974 (the search, part of the bicentennial fervor ). k Tendrils far and wide: she finds in a New Yorker, from 1954: “…blood ties to a surgeon general of Colonial troops in the Revolutionary War, with a lieutenant under Miles Standish, a casualty at the Battle of Quebec in the French and Indian 39 War, and with an ensign who was a charter member of the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company of Massachusetts, the first military company in America.” What she thinks about as she reads this is, They still use the same font. In the article, one of the relatives even claims to even have found a signer of the Magna Carta. The Magna Carta? I mean, come on, people. ...