Progenitors

Harry drove his car around back, pulled it into the garage, hung his keys on the hook in the kitchen and died.

He was missed of course.

The garage shared an interior wall with the basement so Harry’s car stayed warm and dry during those years after his death. His wife Nellie didn’t drive but her son-in-law regularly started the Chevrolet to make sure it didn’t seize up.

Nellie dreaded the idea of selling the keepsake. She once started to write a classified but “sturdy bumpers” and “chrome push buttons” was as far as she got.

She and a neighbor across the street had both married railroad men and they liked to do their ironing together. The woman had a son back from the service, going to trade school. He carried his tools and supplies as he changed buses to get across town. It ate up hours every day.

The woman told Nellie she had bought him a car at a bargain price and hoped it would last a while.

“I wish you had told me.” Nellie said. “Harry’s car’s still sitting in the garage. There’s almost no miles on it. Your son can have it for whatever he can get for that other car.”

The kid referred to it as his “Chevy” which stood for Chevrolet which stood for everything good in postwar America.

He forgot to set the hand brake one night and it careened through a neighbor’s yard taking a row of shrubs with it. It was an embarrassing pimply-faced mistake Harry never would have made.

A hit-and-run driver slammed into its passenger side during the first winter after he moved away. When he came home to visit he parked a used sports car in the driveway.

He walked over to tell Nellie the insurance company had totaled Harry’s car because it was thirteen years old. He certainly liked driving it, he said.

“Did it ever burn oil on you?” Nellie asked. “Harry bragged that Chevy never burned oil.”

“No, ma’am, it never did.” he said. He was lying of course.

The photographs helped her make sense of the world she was born into — up to a point.Even when she was very young, the girl liked to spend time with the photos her mother kept. They were organized chronologically in albums.

It made the child feel safe knowing there were people in her life. Most of them smiled for the camera except for a few from the Midwest who hide their teeth. There were several pages showing people holding a newborn she didn’t recognize. You know who it was.

The girl could see that faces changed as people got older, a surprising number of them looked better. She came to realize that there was life before she was born but it hadn’t occurred to her that life would continue when she was gone. That would come later.

The albums were brought out when friends and relatives came to visit. The girl would listen to the who, what, when, where and how. She took exception if someone got something wrong.

The photographs helped the girl make sense of the world she was born into — up to a point.

One day when she and her father were sitting on the couch, going through a shoebox of black-and-white snapshots her grandmother had bequeathed them, the girl turned to him and asked what year it was when the world changed from black-and-white to color.

Were her grandparents were still alive when people stopped being gray? And was it a big deal? And did the kids get a day off from school to celebrate?

It was Eugene’s fate to become something he could not have imagined while he walked the earth. He became a roadside attraction. Dead men have few choices.

Dead men who are petrified have fewer still.

The unidentified dead men who happen to be descendant from slaves are entirely at the mercy of strangers (being alive during Jim Crow wasn’t much better).

The petrified man was given the name Eugene.

For one particular Ohio family, the small town of Sabina marked a halfway point on their vacations to see relatives. There were restrooms, a filling station, a country store and a funeral home.

On the grounds of the mortuary sat a small brick building. That’s where Eugene was displayed for the world to see. There wasn’t a rattlesnake pit or a fudge shop within hundreds of miles that could compete with Eugene.The family referred to him as “petrified” but he had actually been embalmed by a local undertaker. He helped build the Littleton Funeral Home brand.

As the family approached Sabina each year, acrimony would fill their Plymouth sedan. For reasons unknown, the parents refused to allow the youngest of their three boys to see the mummified man. They took turns staying with him while the others went in.

The child fumed as Greyhound buses discharged kids younger than him to marvel over the fascinating sight. Was he so fragile that he had to be protected in ways other children weren’t?

His parents never did quite explain it to him. But maybe it was this:

Wakes, funerals, tarhims and shivas fill a need. Medical students observe formal rituals of appreciation for their assigned cadavers for the same reason. Human go to great lengths to return the dearly departed from distant places. Respect for the dead is an eleventh commandment.

There’s no denying that Eugene was held in a public purgatory for three and a half decades. It’s possible that somewhere along Ohio Route 22 a cold wind left the boy’s parents shivering in the summer heat. Maybe they saw those postcards celebrating lynchings.

What we can know for sure is that Julia and Ambrose were protecting their youngest son from something. We also know that good people grow into their roles as parents.

Three decades later Ambrose and Julia were laid to rest within a year of each other. They were sent off with the most dignified of services their sons could muster, including a partial eclipse of the sun.

A wallet photo
was sometimes the only connection with friends and families they would carry with them.

Millions of young men would leave home to work the mineral deposits, man the mills, go to sea or drive the herds to Abilene. A few of them went off to college but most had more immediate needs.

Letters were slow and long distance phone calls, when they finally came on the scene, were prohibitively expensive. Before social media, it was nearly impossible to keep track of the hairstyles, romances and ailments of loved ones left behind.

For better or for worse generations of young men — especially working-class boys in times of war — were groomed for solitude and were admired as the “strong silent type.” They were taught that the lifeboats were for women and children and that they were expendable. For better or for worse, they developed the habit of privacy.

Maybe that’s why many older men keep a certain distance. Many of them shy away from social media in the same way their fathers and grandfathers shied away from the telephone. “I’ll put your mother on the line,” generations of American men have told their children.

It’s not the hassles of mastering a new technology that make these guys guard their space. It’s not that they don’t care about your gun collection or your mayonnaise recipe. And it’s definitely not that they don’t want you in their lives. It’s something more fundamental than that.