Foreign Affairs - Alison Lurie [90]
She explains.
“Yeh, that’s what I said. I didn’t know there was a word for it.” Clearly, he feels not much is gained by this knowledge. “Anyways, I was kind of browsing around in the library down there, y’know?”
“Mm.” Vinnie imagines Chuck as a large cow—no, a bull—roaming the stacks of a provincial library, munching on a page here and there.
“Y’know they have these parish records, who lived in a place, who was christened, and married, and buried there. If you go into the churchyard, you can see some of the names on stones. All those names, and every goddamn one of them was a person. They got born, and were babies; and then they were kids, they learned their lessons and played games. Then they grew up and plowed and milked and cut the hay and ate dinner and drank the local beer at the Cock and Hen; and they fell in love and got married and had children and were sick and well and lived and died. And while all that stuff was going on, Tulsa was just a piece of prairie with buffalo ranging over it, and maybe a few Indians. All these people living down there in South Leigh, and everywhere else in this country, for hundreds and hundreds of years, way back to prehistoric times, and now nobody remembers them any more. They’re as extinct as the buffalo. It kinda bowls me over.”
“Yes.” In Vinnie’s mind, too, shadowy generations rise up; it is what she often feels about England, that every acre of it, every street and building, is thronged with ghosts.
“Wal, so I got to thinking about my ancestor, that I was so ashamed of. I found out some more about him, not much. He was in the parish register for South Leigh, born 1731, died 1801 aged seventy: ‘Charles Mumpson, known as Old Mumpson.’ Kind of a honorary title. Seventy doesn’t sound real old to us, but back in those days most folks didn’t live so long. The doctors didn’t really know anything—Wal, they don’t know all that much now either, if you ask me.”
“No,” Vinnie agrees.
“Reaching three score and ten, it was a kind of achievement then, ‘specially for a working man.” Chuck takes another swig of beer. “He must of had a strong constitution.”
“That’s true,” Vinnie says, considering the muscular breadth and bulk of Old Mumpson’s descendant.
“Anyhow, what I figure, when Old Mumpson was about my age he probably got past farm work, nobody would hire him any more. His wife had died years back, and his two sons had moved away, maybe gone to America—anyways there isn’t any record of them marrying or dying in the county. Wal, there probably wasn’t much old Mumpson knew how to do besides farming. So he took this hermit job, instead of going on public assistance. The way I figure it, I oughta be proud of him, ‘stead of ashamed, y’know?”
“I see what you mean,” Vinnie says, unconvinced, but reluctant to damage Chuch’s reconstruction.
“And then this Oxford University professor I told you about, this guy that’s in charge of the dig—Mike Gilson his name is. Mike said to me, ‘Y’know, you don’t have to conclude that Old Mumpson was stupid just because he couldn’t read and write. It could be that he never had any education; a lot of country folk were illiterate back then.’ It could be he really was a kind of local wise man, Mike said, and that’s why they hired him. Maybe people did come from everywhere round to ask his advice.”
“Yes, of course that’s possible,” Vinnie says, wishing she had thought of this comforting argument herself weeks ago.
“There’s a hell of a lot of learning that isn’t in books.”
“You may be right.” In Vinnie’s opinion, the extent of this unpublished learning is less than is generally claimed.
“Anyways, what I wanted to tell you, it’s about Mike partly. I’ve been spending a lot of time out on the dig, like I told you, taking pictures for him. Then Mike has these aerial photos of the area, from the government. You can find out a lot from those things if you know what to look for: ground water and drainage channels, and old foundations and boundary lines and roads—stuff he hadn’t noticed, some of it. It helps if you know some geology. Wal, a couple of days ago Mike