Memory Sought

Prologue to any future memoir:

As a young woman my mother drove her own car.  This was the 1920's.  I never saw it myself, but she described it to me many years later as a yellow convertible. I imagine she cut quite a figure at the wheel.

In the incident I'm relating she was driving home from town.  The family homestead sat atop one of the highest points around the capitol, Concord, N.H.  The road leading up to the farm turned sharply before the final approach.  As you came around that sharp curve the farm appeared in view on the crest of the hill, a majestic sprawl of New England architecture--13-room farmhouse, long, attached breezeway, leading to a 100-foot barn, atop which perched a golden eagle weather vane.

On that day she was following behind another vehicle.  Just as the vehicle ahead approached the curve a bicyclist appeared on the wrong side of the road, heading straight to the car ahead of my mother's.  There was no way to avoid striking the cyclist and strike him it did, sending him airborne in a high arc that ended on the road before my mother in her convertible.  He died instantly when he hit the pavement.

This experience had a profound and formative impact on my childhood: During my middle years when my family lived on the farm I was not allowed to have a bicycle.  This was not unreasonable.  That corner was treacherous.  The cyclist was not the last casualty it claimed.  In the early 1950's a car of teenage boys failed to navigate the corner coming down the hill lickety larrup and hit a tree head on.  The driver died at the scene and two others were seriously injured.  I remember the tree and the ugly scar which lingered, probably to this day. Decades later the town took some of my family's land to straighten out the corner.

The absence of a bicycle stood between me and any park or playground where I might find playmates.  Kids in town had playgrounds, parks, ball fields, skating rinks.  But there were no public buses running past the farm.  Having no residential neighborhood I had no gathering place for kids, and no way to get to town under my own power where I might find such a place.  I spent hours tossing a baseball up on the barn roof and catching it when it rolled off.

Making matters worse, my school was not a neighborhood school, but rather a small, private, 2-room school founded by my aunt Marie Scully.  It specialized in helping children overcome reading problems.  Parents enrolled their kids there for half a year or a year, then sent them back to public school when their reading came up to grade level, a pattern not conducive to lasting friendships. 

The school day ended at noon and I went back up the hill to the farm.  Instead of a park or playground I had a rocky cow pasture and some antique firearms.  I took to acting out battle scenes, crouching behind bushes and rock piles, jumping up and firing imaginary rounds at imagined enemies, which ranged from Krauts and Jerries (German soldiers), to Japs, and, not to forget a vanquished foe, the Rebs (Confederate soldiers).  My weapon of choice was a civil war era rifle that opened at the breach to receive a paper pouch of gunpowder and a mini ball.  The barrel was bent and bore deep gouge marks (made, perhaps, by blows from a saber?). 

Sometimes I narrated my exploits aloud, other times silently, but always there was a narrative and it usually ended with a heroic charge.  Back and forth over that hilly, rocky pasture land I fought entire wars. By the time I entered public school in the 7th grade I had an over-developed imagination, an addiction to first-person narratives, an impressive repertoire of verbal effects to simulate the sound of gun fire, and an under-developed repertoire of social skills.  All because an unfortunate soul dashed his brains out before my mother's eyes.

These few incidents serve to announce a theme that runs through my life, namely the profound effect that accidents play in shaping our lives. In my case it's highway accidents, more than any other kind, that proved decisive.

Patriarch John Jordan: Irish Immigrant Establishes Dairy Farm, Founds Imploding Dynasty 

Sudden, violent death was already a leitmotif in my mother's story, and inevitably in mine, long before the poor cyclist failed to stay on his side of the road.  [Was he unable to brake?  Or was he just careless?  We'll never know.]  In 1911 my mother, age 7,  suffered a tragedy that more directly effected her life than the highway accident involving the cyclist.  Her father died in a granite quarry on his way home on an icy, rainy night.

James Scully was a stone cutter who immigrated to America from Skiberene, County Cork, Ireland.  He was already an experienced cutter before arriving here, which meant he had a skill that could provide ready employment in Concord, New Hampshire, home to the Perry Granite Company with several quarries on the north side of Rattlesnake Hill.  That's the hill at the top of the road where I fought the wars of the cow pasture.  On January 7, 1890, he married Catherine Jordan, daughter of John Jordan, founder of Jordan Farm; he was 24, she was 19.  James and Catherine Scully had four children: three girls, Marie, Kathleen and Germaine, and a boy, Daniel.  Germaine was my mother.  Complicated, already, but that's just the beginning.

John Jordan, himself an Irish immigrant, married Mary Fagan, and spawned two farms and seven offspring.  His offspring chose to live their lives, their entire lives, as a family unit.  Not one of them left the nest. Ever.  Actually, one did leave the homestead in a most unfortunate way, and not voluntarily, though the journey was short--about 1 mile to 105 Pleasant Street, location of the New Hampshire State Hospital.  Residents of Concord had a shorthand for going mad--it was the number 105.  More about the unfortunate Jordan later, but back now to Catherine Jordan Scully, my grandmother, and her stone cutter husband James.  James and Catherine Scully had planned their escape.  The destination and what waited for them there are lost in memory.  They never left because James slipped and fell into a quarry, on his way back home after work, trekking through the woods behind the farm.  It was December 10, 1911. Official record states  The standing water in the abandoned quarries that dot the hill was frozen over.  A freezing rain was falling, which, no doubt, contributed to his fatal slip.  They found him in the morning, dead, half on the ice, half under water.  Official record states "He fell from the ground surface of a quarry, distance 17’ to the ice below to the extent of allowing his left arm, left side of his body and a portion of his face to be submerged."  My mother, Germaine, was 7 1/2 years old.

It's hard for me to get my head around the fact that my grandfather, not my great grandfather or great-great grandfather, died more than 100 years ago. But that's the fact, and a crucial one because without it I would never have come to be.  To come to be, or not to come to be.  Had he not fallen into Perry's granite hole, he would have taken my mother away, never to meet my father, never to have born a son with him, never to have named him after his father.  These words would never have been written and my very existence would never even have been contemplated, before or after the fact.

So, Catherine remained on Jordan Farm and raised her four children in the company of her six Jordan siblings.

I am a junior. That is to say, I am named after my father, Charles Murray Sawyer. For much of my adult life I signed my name “Charles M. Sawyer, Jr.” Sometimes with the dot, sometimes not. From youngest childhood my father was called by his middle name, “Murray”. When he gave his full name it was always “C. Murray Sawyer”. No “Sr.” needed. No “Big Charlie” /“Little Charlie” distinction because my father was always “Murray”.  

I was the third child of the union of two great families. When it comes to family histories apparently simple facts, like the one just cited, always imply important qualifications. E.g., "union of two great families." It has to be said that the two families, one Irish-Catholic-agrarian, the other Anglo-Protestant-patrician, regarded each other with suspicion and some considerable antagonism, so that any union between them, like the marriage of my parents, must have been joined over tectonic fault lines. To further unpack the original genealogical claim the phrase "third child" should have read "second surviving child."  The complexities of the tale I'm preparing to tell, the narrative arc of my life, are manifest, and so an account of my father's clan, the Sawyer dynasty, will wait for the next installment.