What They Were

What will survive of us is love, or so Philip Larkin famously asserted—and believed no doubt since he'd never been to Boonville and, of course, never made the acquaintance of Rose and Edwin. Everybody in Boonville knew they hated each other, but there's always a chance love conquered in the end. Who knows? Of course Faith Dawn, who was only ten at the time of her visit, knew very little about hate in general and none at all about hate in Boonville. Her mother had effectively left town when she was twenty—a decade before Faith Dawn's birth—so Faith Dawn was able to ignore all sorts of facts because she'd never learned them in the first place. She did understand her mother had, first of all, moved over to Evansville, where she'd met and married Faith Dawn's father and given birth to William, and then after the war up to Indianapolis, where she'd given birth to Faith Dawn, and then over to Terre Haute in the western part of the state, up to Gary, an awful place where they lived for only a few months, down to Crawfordsville, over to Muncie, where Faith Dawn went to kindergarten and first grade, and at last to Kokomo, where they'd stayed and prospered. At least for the time being. Something always made Faith Dawn's parents feel it was wise to move on.

Still, they took an ambitious view of the future, of which Faith Dawn's name was evidence, as in its own way was William's nickname, Lank—which predicted his future as a basketball star—and despite the wisdom of moving on, they came back to Boonville from time to time, just for the day, never sleeping over. For example, a few years before Faith Dawn's visit they'd dropped in on Grandmother, Edith, and Edwin when the fox got into Cousin Tollie Sawhill's henhouse and Faith Dawn's parents drove down to pluck chickens for an afternoon. And Grandmother came up to Kokomo for a visit twice a year, bringing with her evidence of an abandoned way of life as she fried chicken, cooked greens in bacon fat, canned fruit (even the cherries on the tree in the backyard), and rewarded Faith Dawn's acceptable behavior with slices of white bread soaked in grease gravy, things they still did in southern Indiana, a place firmly rooted in a time long past and about which Faith Dawn knew nothing, especially nothing about the way people in Boonville hated each other.

Faith Dawn did understand that her mother wanted nothing to do with Boonville, Grandmother's family, the whole package. She understood this although she certainly didn't understand why. Over the years she'd learned a little bit about Grandmother's brothers and sisters, their names at least, and how they'd all grown up on a farm out near Tennyson, several hundred acres of corn where their mother, whose maiden name was Chase, had in turn grown up before the Civil War, in which her husband, Faith Dawn's great-grandfather Rickard, had fought, something he was not proud of and which entered Faith Dawn's knowledge through Grandmother's oft-repeated story about how he'd wait until one of his daughters was hosting the monthly Daughters of the American Revolution meeting and then seat himself on the front steps and carefully remind the ladies about the inconveniences, not to say evils, of marching through Georgia with Sherman, sometimes, but not always, adding the fact that his brother Alfred had died in Andersonville Prison—his reminder gaining force because Great-grandfather Rickard was minister of the First Methodist Church.

None of this made a lot of sense to Faith Dawn, who nevertheless considered herself a careful listener to whatever meager facts about Boonville emerged from her parents' conversations—from which she had learned that a number of the brothers and sisters had moved on to other towns and cities and sometimes out of state, that Edith taught Latin at...