On The Little House Under the Maples

The typewritten font makes the revelation of an ancestor cursed with chronic diarrhea a deeper surprise than it might have been on its own. It’s a little before midnight when you read it and your laughter bursts out before it can be stopped. This is the first page, and it only took two-hundred words for the narrative of your family history to get to uncontrollable bowel movements that resulted in a discharge from the Union Army. It’s later noted to be lucky, as he’d been promised for Gettysburg.

The author of this piece, your great-uncle, little though you knew him, certainly had a flair for the dramatic and a keen nose for research. He reports how he’d sent a letter to the Bureau of Military Service Records in Washington, D.C., and they’d been kind enough to provide a full, albeit sterile, account. Neither he nor you would exist without Great-Great-Great-Grandfather Simeon landing himself, quite literally, in deep shit.

This was not the last time a member of the Tyler family does this metaphorically, as it turns out. Three pages in, there is another tale about a special rum barrel gone sour and your great-great-grandfather almost coming to blows with his father-in-law, but luckily, the Tyler line is strong enough to survive a few stubborn and easily riled old men.

Or maybe it’s that your great-great-grandmother was smart enough to replace the rum in the barrel before her father remembered the next morning. Stubborn men and clever women– it’s not the worst lineage and it comes with more twists and turns than you bargained for. You’d predicted the reading to be a slog due to the nature of family histories and your incorrect preconceived notions of your great-uncle, but it isn’t.

Reminded of his own mortality in 1996, your great-uncle started the manuscript you hold now. No one today can remember why, but the preface to the piece (named “The Little House Under the Maples” with plenty of title repetition) speaks to a fear that family history will be forgotten. No one can remember the medical reason behind the manuscript’s conception; it’s another irony.

In the foreword, Great-Uncle Edwin mentions all family documents will be handed down to whoever is the most involved in family genealogy to then pass on to anyone equally interested. This is how you got it. Your Aunt Bessie, keeper of schedules and documents and the one who taught you how to cook cinnamon pinwheels, hands you the manuscript in a manila envelope during an impromptu visit.

It sits unread for longer than it should, the dread of having to pretend to like it stronger than your interest. In the end, you read it out of a sense of obligation. You don’t get much farther than the foreword before it has to be read again and a third time. It’s a shout across a hallway when you least expect it– it’s startling to have someone speak to you when you thought they couldn’t. His foreword states:

[S]kimpy and unprofessional as it may be, I hope it will serve some useful purpose to descendants of Ralph and myself who might have reason to know about their roots, to answer some question that they might have, to settle a family argument, or simply to refresh their memory of the little house under the maples and its occupants. If it accomplishes any of these things, or even gives some family member a few minutes of nostalgic pleasure, then it has served its purpose. - E. H. Tyler.

After the rum anecdote, the document goes on in a similar way, the rum incident being the first of many. It hardly drags. Sometimes it gets confused in itself, but it’s not at all what you thought, although it leaves you silent. It’s a reality check more than a narrative, and you can’t help but feel for an uncle you were never close to, but would’ve been, had circumstances allowed.

It took twenty-four years for the document to fulfill its whole purpose, and he’s been dead for three of them. It’s odd to feel a kinship to a piece of paper and a faded memory of a man more similar to you in interests than any family member still alive. A better title for this piece, my piece, the one I write currently, would've been Serendipity.