“She may want to marry him.”
“She’d be crazy if she didn’t, but he’d let you know, Mother.”
The girl watched her mother’s struggles with the lowland heat of the dog-days. Agnes could not sleep with the electric fans humming, but she could not breathe unless the air was circulated, and one Friday evening late in August she simply dropped her chin on her chest and her life was at its end.
Ernestine Lockwood sent her brother a telegram:
MOTHER DIED FUNERAL MONDAY LOVE
ERNESTINE
A week later a telegram came from her brother:
HAVE BEEN AWAY TELEGRAM RECEIVED TODAY
PLEASE WRITE LOVE
GEORGE
She wrote him at length, and in two weeks she had his reply.
Sept. 20, 1921
Dear Tina:
You have been very sweet to write and I also appreciate your sending the newspaper clippings concerning Mother’s death and funeral. It was expected but when it finally came I discovered that I was not prepared for it. It must have been a dreadful experience for you but we can console ourselves with the thought that she could not have suffered very much. Most of her suffering was in being an invalid, confined to her room and I sincerely believe that she preferred dying to another year of that.
I have some other news for you of a more pleasant nature. The reason I did not get your telegram sooner was that I was taking a few days off to go on a honeymoon. Yes, I was married on the 18th of August to Rita Collier. I mentioned her several times in letters to Mother so it would not have been a complete surprise to her (or to you either, I guess). She is a fine girl, one year younger than I am, graduated from Mills College cum laude (unlike her husband). Taught school near here. Her father and mother are Mr. and Mrs. David B. Collier, who live in Los Angeles. Mr. Collier is a chemist with the San Ysidro Petroleum Corporation. Originally came from Cleveland, Ohio, and is a graduate of Western Reserve University (Phi Beta Kappa). Mrs. Collier is also from Cleveland. Her maiden name was Ethel Van Meter. She was also a Phi Bete at Western Reserve. So you see I married into an intellectual family. I told them why I was kicked out of Princeton but they had already written to a friend of theirs on the Princeton faculty when they saw that Rita and I were getting serious. So they knew, but were willing to let us be engaged until I could support a wife.
That has now happened. I did not want Mother to worry but the work I am doing is not ranching. Mr. King is in the oil business. His ranch, which I gave as my address, is a hobby. The first two months I was here I drove a truck, carrying pipe, etc., then was promoted to stock clerk. I am on the payroll of the San Marcos Petroleum Company, Mr. King’s company. I have been living in a boarding-house in San Luis Obispo but we have rented a small house. Address above. I received a cash bonus for introducing a new system of checking on supplies so that anyone can find out immediately how many drills, etc., are on hand and where “out” tools are located. Mr. King was the only person here who knew I had any other income until I told Rita and her parents. My next promotion will probably take me out in the field to really learn something about the oil business. Mr. Collier has recommended several books on the subject, which I bought, but they are hard going. Rita helps me with my “home work” but I confess that I often fall asleep in the middle of a sentence. Don’t know when I will see you again unless you get out this way on a trip, but I hope you will meet Rita before long. I inclose several snapshots. Please write and let us know what you are doing.
Love,
George
Also inclose check. Please have the florist put flowers on Mother’s grave on her birthday, Oct. 22. No name. Perhaps she will know.
“Of course she’ll know,” said the girl.
THREE
AN American family history customarily has two beginnings: the one, not always so easily determinable as the other, has to do with the earliest progenitor and his arrival on this soil; the other, about which there are no doubts, has to do with the first member of the clan to distinguish himself. So many family records were destroyed by fire or the plow that guesswork has been a considerable factor in most family histories that go back beyond the War of the Revolution. Few family Bibles, tax rolls, church records of pre-Revolutionary times survived the numerous fires. An overturned candle, a glowing ember from the hearth would start a fire, and there was nothing to stop it; nearly everything in a household or a church was highly flammable, and only the lucky citizens got out alive, with their lives and nothing else. They, and their neighbors if they had any, could stand outside and watch the burning of their possessions. The farmer with his plow and the surveyor with his transit were unsentimental about disturbing buried bones and their identifying headstones; furrows had to be straight, roads had to be built where they had to be built and the road-builder would make a curve around solid rock but not around a long-dead citizen’s remains. The materials used in building and furnishing jails were more effectively fire-resistant than those thought suitable for the private residence, but prison records were often inaccurate and in any event not sought after by the descendants of the men and women recorded. Thus it was that flame and cast iron obliterated the provable line between many an early ancestor and his living, proudly curious namesake.
George Bingham Lockwood and his brother Penrose were agreed that while the Robert Lockwood who emigrated to Watertown, Massachusetts, in 1630 and later settled in Fairfield, Connecticut, was in all probability their first American ancestor, their claim could be disputed by numerous other bearers of the name whose connection was, in a manner of speaking, fireproof. They had better reason to believe that their Eighteenth Century ancestor worked on the Conestoga wagon and was slain by Indians or other hostile persons. They had evidence to show that a Lockwood worked on the Conestoga wagon, lost his life in violent fashion in Central Pennsylvania, and was survived by several sons. Presumably, and almost logically, at least one of those sons settled in Nesquehela County, and when George Bingham Lockwood and his brother Penrose claimed descent from the Nesquehela County Lockwoods, they were on safe ground. Their father, Abraham Lockwood, was the son of Moses Lockwood, who was born in Nesquehela County, and there were many family Bibles, church records, and gravestones to support that claim.
Actually there were, in the brothers’ childhood, many living residents of Swedish Haven who had known Moses Lockwood when he arrived from Nesquehela County, and Moses Lockwood was almost surely the grandson of John Lockwood, who was born in 1761 and miraculously escaped death at the hands of the Indians who killed his father. George and Penrose Lockwood readily conceded that the 1630-Watertown Lockwood might not be their kin; and they privately admitted that the 1761-Indian-murder John Lockwood was not incontrovertibly proven to have been their grandfather’s grandfather. But Moses Lockwood was certainly their grandfather— unfortunately born in 1811 rather than in the previous century—and the first to gain distinction, which he did by making a great deal of money. When he died he left a fortune of more than $200,000 in Swedish Haven real estate, coal-dredging operations, farm mortgages, a distillery, and bank stock. He left every penny to his son Abraham, who was already well on the way to a considerable fortune of his own. Thus in two successive generations the richest man in Swedish Haven was a Lockwood, and the validity of the next generation’s claim on New England origins was a topic of family conversation only. In Swedish Haven thrift was a word that was pronounced as reverently as the name Jesus, and the ability to accumulate so much money conferred its own distinction. And not without reason, especially when the second moneyed generation had inherited the ability. The citizens of Swedish Haven, who had made Moses Lockwood rich, took pride in the fact that he lived in their town; and their pride was in no small measure due to the fact that Moses had intended to settle in Gibbsville, the county seat and metropolis, which they hated. Moses, according to the legend, was on his way from Fort Penn to Gibbsville on horseback, and was only four miles away from his destination when a cloudburst fell and he was compelled to take refuge in the Five Points Tavern, the only inn in Swedish Haven. During the night he awoke to hear someone moving about in his room, and when he challenged the intruder, a man rushed at him with a dagger. But Moses Lockwood had drawn his pistol from beneath his pillow, and he shot the man dead. The man was a known ne’er-do-well, a brawler, frequenter of taverns, card-player and native of Gibbsville. The would-be thief was in his stocking feet, the dagger was recognized as belonging to him, and he had no right to be in Moses Lockwood’s room at three o’clock in the morning. There was no need for a trial; the chief burgess made a notation in his journal— “blotter”—and so many citizens congratulated Moses Lockwood on his narrow escape and his brave dispatching of the criminal that he decided to remain in Swedish Haven an extra day.