Derivative
JAYNE WARREN

I.

 

When my Great Aunt Anne was alive she had a chrome and cherry-red dining room table and chairs in her kitchen. Every time my family visited North Carolina she made us breakfast – huge bowls of scrambled eggs, dishes crowded with toast, mountains of Jimmy Dean sausage patties and links.  She allowed me one Coca-Cola a day even in the blistering heat. Aunt Anne died when I was 12 and the table and chairs were left to my mother, though they now sit in my grandmother’s garage. Moths have eaten away at the lining, methodically un-stitching the red threads to the fabric upholstery. 

 

II.

 

Peter Pfaff, Sr., emigrated from Bavaria, Germany to York, Pennsylvania in 1750. In 1784 he bought a substantial amount of land in North Carolina and founded Pfafftown, a town that overlooks the Yadkin Valley west of the Muddy Creek. 2,043 people live there today, but the land has largely been divided and annexed between Winston-Salem and Lewisville.

 

In 1845 Peter’s granddaughter, Lavina Pfaff, married Robert Church. They had William H. Church. He married Francenia Adelaide York in 1895. Frederick Francis Church Sr., their son, born 1903, was my great-grandfather. 

 

III.

 

Frederick Francis Church Sr. married Mabel Augusta Sharp in 1964, just one year after the death of Lenore, his wife of 37 years. 

 

They had five children, one with severe developmental disabilities, but when Frederick and Mabel married they moved from North Carolina to Florida, far away from both their families.

 

I wonder who cleaned up afterwards. I imagine the walls behind him were avocado colored, this was the 60’s, after all. What I wonder most, though, was how he did it. 

 

Shotguns are not so easy to direct at oneself. 
 

IV.

 

Aunt Anne, who was really my grandmother’s sister, was once married to Robert Dickerson. They divorced in 1977, but not before having my cousins: Gail, Judy, and Bob. 

 

Years later my ex-great uncle sat in a running car with the hose from the exhaust pipe venting through the cracked window. He tried to take his dog, Duke, with him too. 

 

At the last minute he let go.
 

V.

 

Someone once told me that there’s a spirit to Yosemite. I believe there’s a spirit to most any place if you know what happened there and who did it. 

 

In North Carolina I feel the spirits of Frederick and Robert, of Aunt Anne and Great-Grandmother. My mother’s father was from there too, but he lived in Lakeland, Florida, at the time of his death. 

 

This is my heritage – the Pfaffs and Pfafftown. I feel the German blood flowing through my veins as much as I imagine it splattered on an avocado-colored wall. 

 

Some of the ghosts that haunt me I don’t fully know. 

 

Frederick Francis Church, Sr. died twenty years before I was born.

Robert Dickerson wasn’t even my blood relative. 

So why do they plague me so? 

 

Because you can never end your life without leaving a mess for somebody else to clean up afterwards, in the spiritual world or not. 

 

I feel what my past has done. 

 

And sometimes I understand it too – the madness, the need for a final escape. They might load the shotgun or adjust the vent, but I take the pills to make life worth living. 

 

VI.

 

As a teenager I went white-water rafting and the warning from the guide has stayed with me ever since: Never put your feet down if you fall out because the mud will act as a suction, keeping you immobile until the current pushes you under. 

 

Working with this past has a certain danger like this too. Suicide is always tempting to the severely mentally ill. And these dead are insatiable and plenty. 

 

VII.

 

Robert Dickinson was clinically depressed. 

Frederick Francis Church, Sr. had just been diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s. 

When I was eight my father’s parents committed suicide, too. Moy was diagnosed with terminal stomach cancer, and Papa, my grandfather, could not live without her.

 

This is where it starts for me – in the bathroom or the car, in the bedroom or the hotel. 

 

I stick the pins in so many places on the map. 

I stick them in so many places in my heart.

 

VIII.

 

Pfafftown now exists only as a technicality, its post office being the only thing that allows it to have an identity at all. It’s just a zip code, a set of numbers, just as my relatives, if they do not haunt me, become nothing more than names on a family tree. 

 

After Pfafftown was annexed, it lacked the capability to restore itself. It is now an “unincorporated” town. Even its website labels it as “permanently crippled.” When Pfafftown was awarded its own post office (after having relied on Bethania for years), this was the date it was saved, but it was also the date it was held on the brink of extinction. 

 

It’s the reverse of my own situation. I have tried for years to escape my past and myself, but here I meet it all head on. 

 

September 4, 1888, was when Pfafftown was awarded a post office.

 

March 31, 1969

August 31, 1995

March 16, 1998

 

These are the dates I was simultaneously saved and ruined.

 

There are others, of course. 

There will always be others. 

 

IX.

 

I’ve found that places, like people, can begin to un-exist. Pfafftown is not Pfafftown, but a number on a map. There’s no duality here and so, because they won’t give and neither will the government, they become less and less visible. 

 

Maybe it’s just that none of us know what we want, and change can be dangerous. 

 

Change is what these members of my family decided on, too. I count four suicides and multiple attempts. 

 

I imagine there are many more I will never find. 

 

These stories, after all, only exist when there is someone there to tell them.