“In the Attic” by Yenigün Batu; “Broken Bough” by Barbara Anne Kearney

“In the Attic” by Yenigün Batu

I always will be there, the cat in the attic.

My pointed ears are here to listen, the things you

won ́t say, but I do understand the beauty

And the dimness of your silence pulling me like a black hole.

Was I always like that?

I don ́t know.

I ́d love to listen, you know.

So you tell me a story, a piece of sycamore you are made of.

Sit down, child, you utter …

When was the last time you spoke?

Ages ago, there was life in you …

Every attic is mad in the eyes of them, yet they are the ones who build it.

Was it yours or mine?

Inherited, stereotyped, forced.

Yet, you are the one, the tamed lioness who saved me

From my shackles of shadows.

I hear what you say –

no one can help me but myself.

And now, I want to go back and say everything that

I didn ‘t in time. Isn ‘t it too late to wander on

The dusty cracking floor and come close to your

floor-to-ceiling window where you watch others?

If only I had opened it and pulled you out from the attic.

As an English major graduate who grew up in Turkey, I was surrounded by men telling women how to live and act, which resulted in changing the way I look at the world, seeing the injustice against women and my own female family members; thus I refuse to be silenced.

“Broken Bough” by Barbara Anne Kearney

The maternal family tree—splintered, truncated. A withered specimen.

There are no lush branches and there is a lot of decay. It’s a tree of

stifled silence, standing in spite of itself, luminous on the horizon. For

more than 40 years I have sat on the most fragile of limbs— mostly

pruning (all that terribly garbled information!). But I have also done a

fair amount of grafting. Painstakingly, Unflinchingly. Lovingly. If I have

to, I am willing to try resuscitation.

~

It was at the Formica kitchen table with its chipped edges at 1430

North Rebecca Avenue in Scranton, Pennsylvania, when the first

strained and muted sounds of elegy reached my ears. I had asked for

a piece of paper and a pencil from my grandmother. I was about

twelve years old, and I wanted to draw the family tree.

We begin. My mother grows pensive as she moves deftly and matter-

of-factly through the information about her parents, and her mother’s

parents. But she blooms and lightens when she gets to her

Grandfather, Patrick, who was born, she thinks, in County Mayo,

around 1860, as best she can figure. “Shortly before Grandpa died, I

thought they said he made a trip back to Ireland. I always wondered

why.” This statement is meant as a query to her elder sister Mildred,

known as MoMo. Mildred is hunting around for her cigarettes, which

she keeps hidden behind one of the cookie tins. “I don’t remember

that,” her sister responds. “I just remember he always talked about

Connemara.”

Mildred has furtively and successfully tucked the pack of cigarettes

and a book of matches in the elastic waistband of her powder blue

slacks, and now has her eyes locked onto the porch screen door.

My mother considers this, then persists: “ If he went back to Ireland in

the 1930s, he must have gone to visit somewhere still there, someone

still alive.” She turns wistful, and seems to momentarily float beyond

my reach. “ I don’t know,” she says. “I just don’t know. I wish I did. I

really wish I knew more. He died when I too young, I was 14… a stroke

“, she trails off. “I really loved him. I remember walking home from

school and some of the neighborhood children were staring at me,

looking at me funny.” Pause. “He had passed away.”

I set the pencil down as I feel something rise and swell in me. In the

wake of my mother’s pained attempt to reconstruct the fractured

family narrative, I know now that I was being ushered into that vast

echo chamber of Lament. The tens of thousands of souls of that

tumultuous era of the late 18th and early 19th century, the mass

migration of Europe’s peasantry, still sounding, still resounding. Exile.

Destitution. Exploitation. Desperation.

I am the inheritor of my mother’s curiosity, regret and longing; it has

given me a peasant heart, nostalgic bearings, and this compulsion.

~

From my earliest years I experienced a strange kind of quickening at

any mention of the family dead. Perhaps every child does? It seemed

there were so many: a half-brother, three grandparents, eight great

grandparents, sixteen great greats. They all seemed to be lodged in

some ancient crevice of my heart, even those I could only begin to

fathom my way back to. Perhaps I felt this way because of something

in the matrilineal bloodline, something that lent us a more acute or

intuitive understanding of the dead’s grip and grasp upon the living?

After all, there’s my second cousin, Tom. His PhD was in geography

with a specialty in the social archaeology of cemeteries. In a local

newspaper interview once he attempted to wrest the moniker “Dr.

Death” from its ignoble origination with Dr. Kevorkian, the “mercy

killing” doctor. Shortly before he died, in the only conversation I had

with him, he was still pitching the title, still hoping it would stick. He

also told me that in the front lawn of his suburban home near

Pittsburgh were two headstones that he transported three hundred

miles from the family plot in Scranton, Pennsylvania. “I rescued them”,

he said. I wasn’t exactly sure what he meant, but I understood. I

remember him saying one grave marker belonged to the infant Molly,

died 1897, from his branch of the family tree. I also remember how

Tom chuckled at his own cleverness in having penned his epitaph,

”He’s not here yet.”

Perhaps the unnamed force field I felt myself being drawn into as a

child was because the resting places of some of the ancestors were far

from being places of repose. The remains of my great aunt Bridget’s

youthful, nimble leg lie some two hundred miles away from her frame.

Due to a doctor’s misdiagnosis, Bridget’s leg had to be amputated

after gangrene set in. As mandated by Catholic ritual, the limb is

buried in consecrated ground in Cathedral Cemetery in Scranton.

Bridget herself moved shortly afterwards to upstate New York, where

she died- but not until well into her eighth decade. Such a long life of

making do with truncated carriage and a crutch.

Bridget was one of the ones who left. One of the ones who stayed –

Bridget’s brother, Owen – was also missing a leg, though he was a

“cripple since birth.” My cousin Rose said her Grandmother told her

how the people in the village rigged an ass cart for Owen so that he

could play with the other children. I unearthed only one other story

about his life: “If you stopped in to see the bachelor Owen, you might

be noticing that he propped his wooden leg in the corner near the

stove when it was unstrapped”, the neighbors’ tongues wagged. On

that same trip to Ireland, I also learned that maybe, just maybe, there

is a reference to my Owen in a folksong lyric describing some locals at

the bar. “And over in the corner, there’s Ol’ Micky resting on his stick”.

I eventually traced Owen’s remains to an unmarked grave shared with

other unclaimed, indigent elderly of the “county home” in Sligo,

Ireland. And so, I wonder, could it be Owen and Bridget’s restiveness

that accounts for my own?

Is it any wonder my ancestral kin who emigrated couldn’t outrun that

other Irish scourge, eviction? There is the story of my great

grandfather’s brother. John Hannon was a recent widower with three

children, gravely ill at age forty-nine, facing eviction proceedings. He

was served the notice in a hospital bed. He died the next day- while a

lawyer moved by his plight was in court attempting to get a stay. His

girls, ages eleven and thirteen, were working in the silk mill in an

attempt to stave off the family’s complete collapse. His death invoked

this headline in the local newspaper: “Death Angel is Hannon’s Best

Friend in Need.”

Did we all have this watchful, wakeful companion at our side, the

Death Angel? No one seems quite sure of what happened to another

Tom in the family. Not many years into his new life in America, he met

his demise in a cement chute accident in New Jersey. My mother often

wondered whether this was the same Thomas that went out West, got

into some trouble, and spent time in jail? Or a different Thomas? And

there is Charlie, first generation American, who left home on a gasless

day to enlist in WWI and was never heard from or seen again. Was it

perhaps these mournful unanswered questions that created this potent

undercurrent of my yearning for ancestors and answers?

My great grandfather Patrick Hannon at least once narrowly escaped

death in the anthracite coalmines, where he spent nearly four decades

as a laborer in “King Coal’s” army. His accident was a common

occurrence- a dynamite blast gone wrong. His fellow miners – Polish.

Lithuanian, Italian, as well as Irish immigrants – were the

unaccountable, innumerable casualties of earth cave-ins and snapped

hoist cables. Their last intake of breath, ebony dust. Their last exhale,

hope. Trapped, sacrificed and dying with the American Dream stifled in

their craw.

I sometimes felt them as well, these not fully transfigured dead of the

mines, these ‘spirit kin’ to the caged canaries that were also brought

down into the mines to detect poisonous gas. Even after burial, these

men – and so many boys, like the ten-year-old breaker boy flattened to

death by a roller – had no surety. “Graves of the Dead Rocked by Mine

Caves” proclaims a Scranton newspaper headline from 1921. As a

miner came across another casket that had dropped down into a

mineshaft from a cemetery grave, I imagine him pausing briefly,

offering up a prayer, his headlamp flickering in a poor imitation of an

eternal flame. I know Patrick was one of these grim witnesses.

And my own Source? I was born to my parents in the autumn of the

year, late in a day in late September, late in my mother’s childbearing

years, twenty months after the death of my twenty-year-old half

brother in a car accident. I was conceived not so much out of the

longing of two people for each other, as from the woman’s need for

forgetfulness from her grieving. My birth was both a make-up and a

miracle after a tragedy, sort of a pre-ordained relief and rescue

mission.

Yes, from the beginning I loved my dead in a strangled, strangely

impassioned way. I felt a great responsibility. To give the vanquished

and forsaken ordinary lives the heft of significance, to transform the

dark weightlessness of these fractured shards, into something more

enduring, something that can be held and maybe handed to another—

like a pleasingly shaped, polished and lustrous stone. Or like coal

become diamond.

My inheritance, it appears, is to write elegy. My dead’s grasp on me is

firm, my birthright nothing less than the wasteful and useless effort of

restoring patina.