names and stones of New York State
THOMAS DAVENPORT
1682 1759
PIONEER SETTLER, BUILT HIS LOG HOUSE AND REARED HIS TWELVE CHILDREN HERE ABOUT 1729
Here, citizen: waymark the centuries. Here was Thomas Davenport. Here is “THOMAS DAVENPORT.” Here you are. Here was a log house. Here is… a lawn mower. These plaques make the present preposterous.
The name is almost irrelevant. Not that a Thomas Davenport didn’t live here and multiply; his name must match some ledger. But the difference between Thomas Davenport and “THOMAS DAVENPORT,” between what happened and what this commemorates, feels large. The imagination dwindles in that expanse. Was he some feller of trees and natives? Some family man? Some maniac? And who was moved to set this stone here, and when? One would need an archive to make meaning of it.
Such markers are the dubious headstones of history, meager facts marshaled into continuity by descendants of blood or spirit. This bronze-lettered boulder marks a “shared” history that actually delimits. “THOMAS DAVENPORT” no less a boundary-stone than the man himself. The woman—or women—omitted, of course. Omitted and implied. Unnamed and subsumed. The history of America a history of property.
I turn off Cold Spring’s Main Street and into an old graveyard. Golden whirl of leaves. Sugar maples. Bluebirds so blue against the orange. And on the weathered headstones: names, names, the old damned names. Hamilton and Adams. Garrison, Groundwater. Many Davenports. Here they all mean the same nothing. I think of the old men who visit cemeteries, guessing after their ancestry, rubbing names onto wax paper. Faded flyleaves for blank family books.
At least there is texture to rub here. Masonic symbols. Broken stones bolted back together. A quaint poem written for John, dead at 22. “MY HUSBAND” stamped on the back of a headstone. Memento mori, metaphor, crumbled hopes for Rapture and reward. The mysteries of this yard far surpass its facts. The plaque on Main Street, on the other hand, has too little texture and too few facts. It is merely a criterion for inheritance.
This badly cairned country. Why names and not concepts? Because the Name is the concept. BUILT and REARED. Fruitful and Multiply. And Enoch walked with God and begat sons and daughters. Mark it, citizen. Here were twelve children, howling their nameless way into the rough world of a wood hut. Here was some American lodesman, hewing his path unto dust.
Here am I. Cars pass by endlessly. It is Halloween. Down the sidewalk from “THOMAS DAVENPORT,” a woman walks with her son, dressed up as a British soldier.
ben tapeworm