NONFICTION

The Remnants: Author Note and Review

By W.P. Osborn     VOLUME 56 No. 1

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Barring contrary evidence, old acquaintances might be led to believe I’m the W.P. Osborn listed in the Final Environmental Impact Study on the damming of Glen Canyon.1 They could refer to my fondness for deserts: that in the fifties the family camped in the Anza-Borrego and bought property there; that I’ll speak for the condors over the Mojave, the tufa towers of Mono Lake, the Panamints and Death Valley, the derelict outposts along the Salton Sea; that I plan to repeat visits to Abiquiu and the Dakota Badlands; that along with my father and brother-in-law, I tourist-rafted from Phantom Ranch to Lake Mead; and that I’ve set fiction in the Southwest. More directly to the matter of Glen Canyon, they could cite my enthrallment with Desert Solitaire and The Monkey Wrench Gang. The trouble is, I’m not from those environs and my grasp of the relevant eco issues is a layman’s. So though regarding the impact of that infernal construct I’d be proud to have been consulted, my associates would be incorrect to assume I was. That W.P. Osborn, I’m sad to report, isn’t me.

Nor, more happily, am I the W.P. Osborn of Gibson City, Illinois, who died on a Sunday evening in February as reported in Bloomington’s Pantagraph2 on President Lincoln’s 125th birthday and the eleventh of Palmer Osborn, the boy who would require twelve years’ maturation to become my father. Palmer’s birthday was celebrated in the town of his birth, Hastings, Michigan. In the traditions of the family, those present booted up that afternoon to tramp around Sweezy’s Pond, a site with multiple footpaths surrounding the water lending the place its name. In warmer months, its marshes and woods revealed walking sticks, mantises, heron, bats, bullfrogs, small fish, snakes, opossum, skunk, and other fascinations; but this was midwinter, and with only ground squirrels and whitetail and perhaps the tapping of a woodpecker in the background, they’d have had a more austere experience. Even so, it was a respite for a bright lad growing up in a household under the agonies of a tenuous parental marriage. The namesake son of Palmer’s father had been born and died in Palmer’s third year, and the emotion surrounding that short life may have sprouted the seed of my grandfather Wallace’s conjugal resentment of my grandmother Catharine. Over the years, that emotion expanded until directly after her funeral, when he could finally thrust onto a church charity all she’d been worldly possessed of.

She was let down in only a winding-sheet. This was tutted around town as a sanitation issue, but as burial is a solution rather than a problem, the complaint’s origin probably lay with funeral directors concerned with the practice catching on and the detriment that would become to mortuary revenues. By the moment of Wallace’s death five years later, the rules had been tightened, and even though in this one regard his wish was identical to my grandmother’s, the traditional furniture was compelled. Thus it was that his descendants took it upon themselves to remove some of the planking, padding, and satin and to lower the now bottomless structure down over him, technically satisfying the revised regulation while at the same time allowing flesh to meld with the area’s Brookston clay loam.

My grandparents’ remains lie under adjacent markers on the northside rise of Riverside Cemetery. Scout around on the southside bluff and you’ll come across a headstone reading S/Sgt William C. DeCou. William C. DeCou, present for that eleventh birthday fest, was Palmer’s partner in adventure. Their last exploit came just after high school when they pooled assets to hobo the rails out west together—soon after which they were separated by higher education and the War. But they were in touch until a squall over the San Bernardino Mountains took down the B-24 Bill was training on. This was March of 1944, and Bill had just turned twenty. If not for that useless loss of life and comrade, my first name would be Palmer and I’d have no reason to be constructing this account. Instead it’s William, after Bill DeCou.

: Yes, I’ve been meaning to ask you why you’re :

Take off from Bill’s shaded gravesite above the Thornapple River and fly south over Fish Hatchery Park. When you see a green space, drop to the intersection of West Clinton and South Cass. You’re several houses now from where Palmer was then growing up. Follow the driveway at the Cass Street dead end and you’ve found the head of a footpath down into Sweezy’s. All these years later it’s still there, just as it was.

The W.P. Osborn of the Pantagraph squib was admitted to the Mennonite Hospital in Bloomington on the first of February, 1934. On Sunday the eleventh he died and his body was carried home to Gibson City pending funeral arrangements. Monday the twelfth his death was announced at the same moment my forebears were marking Palmer’s birthday. The day after—Tuesday the thirteenth—W.P. Osborn, born in Falmouth, Kentucky, in the high summer of 1880, was interred alongside his first wife, Ida Mae, under a granite headpiece in a proper coffin in the cold but more friable silt-loam of the Drummer Township Cemetery in Ford County, Illinois. All of this should lay to rest any speculation that that W.P. Osborn could be this one either. For that to work, you’d have to grant me the ability to project language onto the present page from my own deposition some four score and seven years ago. That’s a stretch. For one thing, I remain above ground. For another, I’m a lot younger than four score and seven.

: Not that much younger, I wouldn’t think. :


2.

Nineteen years to the day before the death of the Gibson City Osborn, a Radnor Ohioan named Penry sponsored a sale of Duroc swine. It was a fiasco, an auction badly failed.3 Failed because the presence of cholera was rumored. Failed because the auctioneer had no catalog to refer to as he sold his stock.4 At this auction a swine breeder from Marion, Ohio, named W.P. Osborn purchased three sows out of the sires Cherry King, Orion Chief, and Fancy Superba. Though he gave $150 for sow number 1, prices plummeted and the average for the entire sale came in at only $33.25.

The Penry sale can be profitably compared with another six days later that was put on by a man called Ira Jackson in Tippecanoe.5 There, everyone got a catalog. They were treated to a noon feast accompanied by old-time fiddle playing that “put ginger in your feet.” The sows were what the breeders were looking for. The demand was strongest for the thirty-one bred to the 1913 Ohio State Fair Grand Champion, Orion Cherry King, bringing $148 on average. As Tippecanoe is over a hundred miles east of Marion and W.P. Osborn wasn’t among the purchasers, it’s unlikely he was witness to this healthier sale.

: :

Conjure a man waiting for specters to emerge on the photosensitive paper sunk in a darkroom developing tray. Imagine him mounting the now dried and trimmed photo on a backing calligraphed at the edge with his name and locale. It’s the plein-air rendering of a couple he’s been hired to make a picture of, the young man in a three-piece suit and tie, seated, the young woman to his left in a full-length day dress, standing, resting her arm on a symbolic erection of turned statuary between them. The current possessor of this image scanned it to the website6 where I later came across it. He believed the subjects might be Edward A. Elder and his wife Carolyn (Carrie Miller) Elder. His problem was that he had no picture to compare his photo to. He indicated that the couple were married in Portsmouth, Iowa, in 1907 and that Edward A. Elder was the son of Anslem and Emma Jane (Miller) Elder. With Millers on both sides, it’s conceivable the pair were cousins. It’s demonstrable that the photographer of the early twentieth century was partly responsible for the contributor’s perplexity in the early twenty-first—for lacking this photo, he wouldn’t have had his two ghosts to ponder. The curio has a satisfactory ending, a recent posting confirming the couple to be the Elders indeed.7 But again the details indicate I’m not the photographer, even though his name happened also to be W.P. Osborn. That W.P. Osborn was not the son of Palmer Osborn of Hastings, Michigan, but of A.G. Osborn of Shelby, Iowa.8

: :

Six years earlier9 in a barn in that same community of Shelby, Iowa, Stall Pitts King IV was brought to service on Majestic Lady III.10 The results of their congress were farrowed on April 14 the year following. On November 20, the breeder, George Higgins, transferred ownership of two boars from this litter to a farmer sixty miles to the north in Danbury: W.P. Osborn.11

Danbury, Iowa, is 760 Miles west of Marion, Ohio,12 and the Danbury Osborn bought Berkshires, while the Marion one bought Durocs. The transactions belonged to different men of equivalent occupation with identical IDs living three states apart. The photographer Osborn lived in the same small town as the swine breeder Higgins, so might have been familiar with him, but it is not likely he knew either of his hog-farmer namesakes. The hog-farmer namesakes may have known of each other, however, their names appearing in the journals and registers of a shared occupation. Maybe they found amusement in this. Maybe they were wary too—of the potential for confusion that could entangle their operations.

: Could you explain the relevance of this ex :

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TO READ MORE FROM THIS ESSAY, PICK UP A COPY OF VOL 56 No. 1





1Environmental Impact Study: Operation of Glen Canyon Dam: Colorado River Storage Project: Final Environmental Impact Statement: Comments and Responses. US Department of the Interior, March 1995. 120.

2“W.P. Osborn Dies.” The Daily Pantagraph. Bloomington, Illinois, 12 February 1934. 10.

3“W.P. Penry’s Duroc Sale,” Swine Breeders’ Journal. Indianapolis, Indiana, 1 March 1915. Vol. XXXV, No. V. 113.

4Ostensibly, no more than three catalogs were available for a crowd of three hundred.

5Swine Breeders’ Journal. 115.

6Osborn, W.P. Unknown Shelby Couple. Shelby County IAGenWeb. IAWebGenProject, January 2013.
https://iagenweb.org/shelby/photo/Unknown/unkshelbycouple.htm.

7Osborn, W. P. Edward Elder Family. Shelby County IAGenWeb. IAGenWeb Project, May 2016.
http://iagenweb.org/shelby/photo/familyphotos/elder/elderedward.htm.

8W.P. Osborn’s images form a patchwork impression of what living was like in the Midwest farm country around the turn of the twentieth century. For a view of Shelby’s Main Street, go to pinterest.com/pin/343469909064270650/.

9Just before Christmas, 1901.

10The two were registered Berkshire pigs.

11Springer, Frank S, ed. American Berkshire Record. The American Berkshire Association, Springfield, IL 1903. Vol. XXI. 21106.

12During this era, the Lincoln Highway was designed but mostly unpaved, and motor vehicles weren’t all that dependable. A trip of 760 miles would have been an undertaking along that route.





W.P. OSBORN's Seven Tales and Seven Stories won the 2013 Unboxed Books Fiction Prize, selected by Francine Prose. He has short fiction in After Coetzee: an Anthology of Animal Fictions, and in journals such as Clockhouse, Fiction International, Gettysburg Review, Hotel Amerika, and Mississippi Review. His poems appear in Poems in the Aftermath: an Anthology from the 2016 Presidential Transition Period, Hotel Amerika, Hamilton Stone Review, and San Pedro River Review. Recent nonfiction in MQR Online. Find out more at wposborn.com.


VOLUME 56 No. 1