Fate

 by Leighton Gage
Author of the Inspector Mario Silva novels

We all have our family stories, don’t we?

Here’s one of mine, one that always reminds me how close I came never to writing any books. In fact, how close I came to never having lived at all.
 
My grandfather was the youngest of seven children.
 
When he was four, his mother succumbed to diphtheria.
 
Before he was ten, four of his siblings died of other diseases.
 
When he was fourteen, his father, a master mariner, who’d spent most of his working life on the sea, tripped on some corn stubble, fell face-down into a puddle and drowned in his own back yard.
 
My grandfather’s brother, twenty-two years older, became his legal guardian. But they didn’t get along. So granddad soon followed the family tradition and went to sea.

He taught himself geometry, taught himself navigation, took and passed his master’s papers for both sail and steam.
 
 

In June of 1903, aboard the Andrew Nebbinger, a five-masted schooner bound from Valparaiso to New York by way of Cape Horn, the captain’s appendix burst – and he died of septicemia. My grandfather, then serving as his first mate, took over the ship. It was his first command. He was twenty-one years old.
 

 
In the course of the next fifteen years, he had many adventures, survived two shipwrecks and also being blown-up by high explosive when a German submarine fired on his vessel.
 
But he never married.
 
One day, in early January of 1918, with the First World War still raging in Europe, he and his best friend, Billy Butler, arranged to meet for a drink at a bar in Boston.
 
Captain Butler was scheduled to set sail for Cape Town in the morning, and my grandfather, for Bermuda, three days later.
 
Both ran into heavy weather. My grandfather’s survival was touch and go. By the time the storm abated, he’d lost two of his masts and been blown halfway to Africa. And then his ship was becalmed.
 
Captain Butler, driven to another part of the North Atlantic by the same storm, put into Bermuda for repairs, went ashore and checked into the New Windsor Hotel, then a favorite of seafaring men. And each morning, when he’d come down for breakfast, he’d ask the girl behind the desk, an eighteen-year-old who’d just begun working there, if there was news of my grandfather’s ship.

Most sailing vessels, in those days, didn’t carry radios. Three weeks went by without a word. 

Captain Butler left Bermuda convinced that he’d lost a friend. But he hadn’t. The very next day, my grandfather sailed into Hamilton Harbor and checked into the same hotel.
 
The following morning, the girl saw his name on the register, screwed up her courage and knocked on granddad’s door to tell him how concerned his friend had been.
 
I have before me a yellowed clipping from Bermuda’s Royal Gazette, the only daily newspaper on the island, published continuously since 1828.
 
It’s dated Tuesday, February 26, 1918.
 
The headline reads: ROMANCE OF THE SEA.
 
The sub-head reads Wedding followed by Honeymoon on Husband's Vessel.

In the body of the article, readers are informed that a wedding took place at St. John’s Church, Pembroke, on February the 22nd, 1918, at 7:30 PM with “the Ven. the Archdeacon officiating” and that it was followed by a supper at the Royal Windsor Hotel, “provided by Mr. A. M. Moore”.
 
The hotel is long gone.
 
The church is not.

These days it looks like this. 



 
The eighteen-year old was my grandmother. I can’t get at any of my photos of her at the moment, but she was quite beautiful.
 
The vessel was my grandfather’s. They continued to live aboard ship until their first two children were born. Some of my mother’s earliest memories were of the sounds of a tall ship – the creaks of wood and rope, the wash of water against the deck and hull.
 
And Billy Butler?

After sailing out of Hamilton Harbor, his ship was lost at sea.

No trace of him, or his vessel, was ever found.

How’s that for fate?

***********************
 



Leighton Gage writes the highly-acclaimed Chief Inspector Mario Silva series, crime novels set in Brazil. His latest is A Vine in the Blood. 




You can visit him on the web at: http://www.leightongage.com and read his blog at http://murderiseverywhere.blogspot.com/.

What Aunt Ruby said happened that day was like this . . .

By Lonnie Cruse

Back in the day, my husband's grandparents, Dave and Mattie Cruse, lived and worked on a farm, along with their seven children. One night the family was startled to hear someone banging on their front door, yelling for help. They discovered Dave's step-brother, Jim, standing on the porch, gripping his overalls tightly and holding them away from his body as far as he could manage. Dave had walked home across the fields, crossing a fence or two, and somewhere along the way he picked up an unwanted hitchhiker . . . a snake. The snake was quickly disposed of, and Jim survived.

This event took place long before hubby or I were born. It's one of the family stories handed down to us through his Aunt Ruby. Aunt Ruby married one of Dave and Mattie's sons. The cousins, her nieces and nephews, gather at least a couple of times a year for a pot-luck chat session, and one of our favorite activities is to listen to her stories about the family and ask questions.

My father-in-law, may he rest in peace, could talk the ears off a donkey, repeating over and over stories about the family that took place usually before I was born. Like many older folks, he couldn't remember where he'd put down his last cigarette or what he'd had for breakfast, but he could quote in great detail things he did or his children did decades before. My lovely mother-in-law once asked me if I didn't get tired of hearing the same stories over and over. I assured her I enjoyed hearing them and was even jotting them down in a journal for my sons. My oldest son loves to read that journal.

Is there a family historian you enjoy hearing tell about the past? If so, I hope you are jotting down the stories now . . . while you still have time and opportunity. Once the family historians are gone, you'll wish you had done that. And your children will thank you for preserving whatever stories you can about grandparents or great-grandparents they didn't have a chance to meet. Dave and Mattie Cruse and their seven children, along with spouses of those who married, are all long gone. Aunt Ruby is the last survivor of that generation. Our last link to the family's past.

One more tip. Don't forget to write on the back of your pictures and get older relatives to help you do the same to pictures that might be left to you one day. This is one of my hubby's biggest complaints, un-labled pictures. Years ago I received a couple of albums that belonged to my mother, and many of them include people important to her, but I have no clue who they are. My oldest sister was able to fill in some of the gaps, and I'm thankful for that.

Wouldn't it be wonderful if we could invent a machine that would allow us to step into an old photograph and become part of the scene for a short time? I've always thought that would make a great science fiction short story or novel. Haven't gotten around to writting it, so feel free to steal my idea.

You may not be a writer, but writing down your family history is something the rest of your famiy will appreciate and you will be thankful you did when you had the chance. While the historians born before you are still around to fill in the gaps.

When the Ferry Is a Time Machine

Elizabeth Zelvin

I recently took a short ferry ride from the Battery, at the tip of Manhattan, through New York Harbor past the Statue of Liberty to Ellis Island, a trip that cost $9.50 and traveled 100 years into my family’s past.
The gateway to America for 12 million immigrants from all over the world in search of a better life between 1892 and 1954, Ellis Island has been completely restored and is now managed by the National Park Service as a monument to the melting pot that shaped American culture.

A French friend visiting from Paris suggested we go, but this was no mere museum trip or history lesson for me. Both my parents came to America through Ellis Island: my father from Ekaterinaslav in the Ukraine in 1905 at the age of six, and my mother from Papa in Hungary in 1906 at the age of four. I’ve always regretted that I never visited Ellis Island with them.
They went with a cousin shortly after the restoration in the 1980s, and both said that they remembered the Registry Room with its vaulted ceilings and high arched windows.
My mother’s most vivid memory was of her own mother, my grandmother, crying as she said goodbye to her mother, whom she knew she would never see again. My father remembered being given a banana as he waited to board the ship, and how, puzzled by this strange fruit, he bit into it skin and all.

The night before our excursion, I looked up Ellis Island on the Internet. The site www.ellisisland.com offers information about the Immigration Museum, while www.ellisisland.org allows users to search for passengers on the ships that brought the immigrants past the Statue of Liberty to Ellis Island. At the click of a mouse, I found both my father, on the ship’s manifest of the Caronia out of Liverpool and my mother, listed as a passenger on the Deutschland, departing from Hamburg. I discovered that my Aunt Anna and my Aunt Sophie, younger than my father, were actually named Chane and Schifre. I already knew that my mother, named Judith (and called Judy her whole life, till she died at 96), got an inadvertent name change at Ellis Island, when an immigration official heard the Hungarian pronunciation Yoo-deet and wrote down “Edith”—which is how she was listed on the records I found. (Her official signature was always “Edith Judith” or “Edith J.”—though the only people who called her Edith were telemarketers.)

The cousin who visited the museum with my parents enrolled my mother’s mother, our beloved Gran, on the American Immigrant Wall of Honor outside the Great Hall, overlooking the harbor and the Lower Manhattan skyline.
When I emailed him, he reminded me that at the time, none of the cousins wanted to pay the hundred bucks to list our grandfather, who died long before we were born. Now I think I might go back to www.wallofhonor.com and do it. I was moved to find my grandmother’s name among the 700,000 remembered in this beautiful and historic spot.