Parts 24-25

     Ed pulls a more recent map out from under several others on his desk. “Seems I need to sort out property lines about every day around here, no use in filing this map. Someone always needs to know just whose property that tree is on, so they can harass their neighbor about keeping it trimmed.” The map arranged, he pulls a folder out from a desk drawer, and flips through a few pages, comparing notes in the folder and on the map. “So the property still under Mason ownership...” He skims a finger over the map, and soon lands on the area near where the house stood. “This area here, which extends... not nearly so far anymore. Several different people own what were sections of the Mason land now. Looks like little pieces have been sold off over the years, since the family left town. Probably just selling when asked, or when the family needed some money. Hanging onto it the same way anyone else hangs onto property, as an investment, waiting for the right price to come along. As far as I know, none of them ever came back here after the fire.”
     “That's right, you said whoever owns it was somewhere out West.”
     “Mmhmm. It was... Jeremy Mason, that was it, out in Nevada.”
     I pull the sketchbook out of my bag. “I just want to jot down the general idea of where the property used to extend, and where it does now.”
     “I can always run you a copy of these, if you want.”
     “That's alright – a rough idea is really all I need. And I suspect Susan is still doing battle with the copier.”
     Ed chuckles at this. “Watch out – you'll probably have about five times as many copies as you need. She won't charge you for them, but she'll have hit a button here or there too many times, and rather than have Claire catch sight of the copies in the recycling bin, she'll just sneak them on to you.”
     I laugh. “I can definitely see that happening! But that's alright, it's copies of some of the old photos of the Masons and their house. I won't mind having a couple extra.”

     When I've made my way back to the front office, it's to find Claire straighting up the few papers on the front desk, and Susan slipping the old photos back into their file folders. Seeing me, Susan spins around and darts into the room with the copier, returning with a small stack she hands over to me.
     “Success! Your photos are all set. I figured you'd want them all to be color copies, even the black and white images – since they're never really black and white, and I suspect that being an art sort of person you'd notice that sort of thing.”
     I grin happily as I take the pile from her. “Definitely, thank you. What do I owe you?”
     Susan pauses, counts on her fingers. “Twelve color copies, so that's---” She looks helplessly over at Claire.
     Without looking up from what she's doing, Claire answers immediately. “Three dollars, assuming you have each photo on a separate sheet of paper. Four-twenty, if you used the good photo paper.”
     “Four-twenty, then,” Susan repeats. “Thank you, Ms. Calculation.”
     “Mmhmm.”
     I dig through my bag, and hand over the requested amount. “Thanks again – I really appreciate all the effort.”
     “No trouble! Oh, and it turns out, those Reese reprints I was thinking about are actually not here at the moment. There's a show coming up soon, I think next weekend, in the gallery over on West Main? It's focused on local photographers, and they offered to try and sell some of the prints for us there.”
     “That's actually pretty cool, I'll have to check it out.”
     “You want a folder or something to put those copies in?”
     I've already pulled out my sketchbook, and started slipping the copies inside. “Nope, I'm all set! For today, anyway, I'm sure I'll be back at some point.”
     “Glad to hear it! Mary says you're in at the library fairly often, I'll pass word along to her if I come across anything that might interest you in the meantime.”
     “Fantastic! Thanks again!”

     As I fumble for my keys at the apartment door, I realize I never even put my headphones back in for the walk home, I was so lost in thought over everything I've seen today. That Latin phrase over the entryway... something about love eternal is my guess, but I want to check the translation. Once inside, I hit the power button on my computer, and pull out my sketchbook while it's booting up. I carefully remove the photos, and look around for somewhere I can put them that I'll be able to see them easily, but where they'll also be safe from me stepping on them in the middle of the night. There aren't exactly a lot of clear spaces around here anymore, with all the drawings and supplies strewn about. I dig around in a junk drawer for a few, and succeed in finding a glob of poster-tack. I break off a few bits, and begin sticking the photos up in a row along a wall near my drawing-nest. I spend a few moments looking closely again at each one as I put it on the wall. Susan was right, it's definitely a really nice copier – as good as I could hope for, actually, short of an actual photographic process. Some of the crispness in the shadows has gone, but it's not noticeable from any distance.
     Looking over, I see that my computer seems happy enough, so I plop down in the chair and pull up a web browser. Then I get back up to double-check the spelling on the photo. Fortunately for me, online translators have gotten worlds better since my friends and I first messed around with them in junior high. I run the lines through a few different sites anyway, just for comparison's sake. Definitely Latin.
     “Life is long, love is eternal.”
     Or “long is the life, love eternal is”, or some other grammatical variant. The gist seems the same across all the sites, and, taking another look at the words, I feel like a bit of an idiot for not having figured it out on my own.
     “Longa est vita, amor aeternus est.” I check the pronunciation, now that I have it pulled up on a few sites, then say the phrase over a few times, trying to burn it into memory a little better. I jot down the line, and the translation, on the next page of my Mason-centric sketchbook. Frowning, I pick my pencil back up, and write the Latin out more slowly, in as elegant a script as I can manage. (I've kept to my resolution, and been practicing it a little here and there.) When done, I nod, satisfied at how much better that looks. While I'm pretty darn sure Latin wasn't originally written in such a script, it just feels better to me to give it that formality.
     The gate was put in by Meres and Celestine, there's no doubt in my mind. "Life is long, love eternal..."
     I sit back for a long moment, looking across to the photographs. It feels so strange, to be able to look over, in this time, this place, and see their faces...

     A little later on, I make myself a bit of dinner – and by making dinner, I mean re-heating a bowl of tomato soup I made a few days ago, and throwing together a lazy grilled-cheese sandwich. Bread goes in the toaster, then quickly put some cheese between the bread while still a bit warm, then throwing that in the microwave alongside the soup. Not exactly world-class, but a slight step up from the de rigueur college meal of microwaved Easy Mac. Grabbing the bowl of soup and paper towel-with-sandwich from the microwave, I set them down over on my computer desk. Too depressing to sit at a kitchen table all by yourself to eat – and anyway, mine is completely buried in the pile of mostly-finished pastel drawings. (As opposed to the pile of half-done drawings on the floor, and the just-started drawings on the couch, and...) After adding a glass of water to the meal (milk would be better, but I'm all out again), I sit down, and pull up a web browser again. How to search for this? But I guess I'll start with the obvious: “Genealogy Mason Forestville NC.”
     Three hours later, I scrub at my eyeballs, and force myself to get up and put my dishes away. I really need to train myself into better computer habits, alongside the better drawings habits, or I'm going to be totally blind in about five years. I get another glass of water, and stretch a little before sitting back down to the ten different windows I have open.
     Unfortunately for me, Mason is an absurdly common last name – about five minutes in, I started searching more specifically for Cora, Avery, Evelyn (though I'm sure she would have lost the last name when married), even Meres. If I knew Mr. Mason's first name, I feel like things would have been easier – but maybe not, I've stumbled across plenty of Arthurs, Asas, Aarons, Adams, Abrahams, and I don't even remember what others. There are a freaking lot of Masons. The most popular family tree sites cost money to use, so I've had to skip most of those for now. It's also tough, having so little information to start with. Some sites would search for you, once you'd put in your name and birthday, and the same for your parents. But I don't know any of their birthdays (even the years, I can only guess at), or Cora's maiden name, or the names of grandparents or anything... All I know is their names, and not even their middle or married/maiden names, and that there's a Jeremy Mason descended from one of them. But which one, I don't know...
     What I have found, and it's still giving me shivers – I haven't been able to bring myself to close the web page yet – is Calvin's gravestone. I hadn't expected the very small, very old, cemetery in town to have such a thorough website. The larger, current cemetery only has information about buying plots and cemetery etiquette and things. But while the site for Oak Leaf Cemetery was clearly developed years ago, there's a ton of plain-text information on it, and more pictures than I'd expected. I was surprised to find any results for “Mason”, since someone at the historical society meeting had mentioned none of the family were buried here. At first I chalked it up to it being such a common surname – clearly, it wouldn't be surprising to have had more than one unrelated family with that name in the town over the years. But while I had that page open, another one I'd opened finished loading, and on it were photographs – mostly old family photos, but also some newer images of old gravestones, followed by a listing of information from other gravestones the family historian must have investigated. I skimmed through the list quickly, but then my heart stopped: “Calvin Marcus Mason, died 1901, age four. Parents unknown. NC.”
     On seeing that, I jumped back to the local cemetery's page, and took a closer look at the giant grid of names and dates. Calvin! He's there! The site has very blunt, simple information: “Calvin Marcus Mason, 1897 – 1901, 4 yo,” and then some abbreviated gibberish that I eventually figure out is location information. Calvin is buried at Oak Leaf, which I pass every day on my way to work. I've walked through it once or twice... but if I'd seen his stone, his name would have sounded familiar to me when he told it to me. God that's a creepy thought – to have a child tell you his name, and to have remembered seeing it on a gravestone! I shudder, so relieved that it didn't work out that way. Poor kid... and I can't imagine anyone's done more than given his grave a passing glance in all the time since his family moved away.
     I made note of the location information in my sketchbook, and decided that the next day off I have, that's where I'm headed. I know it won't give me any new information, but... but there's no way I can not visit poor Cal.

     Despite the several hours searching, I don't find much more than cursory information on the Masons I know. I did find Avery's name a few times – at least, I hope it's the right Avery, the years seem about right. Hopefully I'll get a chance to ask one of them if his middle name is Dorcey. Avery Dorcey Mason... Calvin Marcus Mason... they sound similar in style, anyway. And none of them have Biblical names at all, which still seems a little odd to me. But having been staring at the names of people from that era for a few hours, it's not quite as unusual as I would have guessed.
     Assuming my Avery is Avery Dorcey, it looks like he was married, and had a few kids. Married in 1905, so he would have been... let's see, four years older than Evelyn, who was probably fifteen in 1902 at the time of the fire, so... married at twenty-two, that sounds about right. He was married somewhere in New York to a Sarah Pemberton, and they had... well, five children, only three of whom lived past the age of a year or so. It's still crazy to me, how high childhood mortality rates were back then. I have to wonder if Calvin wasn't the only Mason child to not make it very long. Avery and Sarah's kids were Alice Viola (born 1906), Hazel Marie (1907), and Cecil Bernard (1910), with the two who died being Daniel (1905) and Lillie (1911). All three were married, and had children, but I could only follow Alice down to her kids, not her grandkids. She may not have had any, but that website didn't have much information on the branch I was interested in anyway, I don't think I found Cecil even listed on the tree that showed Alice's marriage. It's Cecil's descendant that owns the property now – makes sense, it went to the eldest son, and then down from there to Avery's... let's see, great-grandson, probably? I couldn't find a cohesive tree actually linking Avery down to Mr. Jeremy-in-Nevada, but despite missing a few steps here and there, I think that's the case.
     I suddenly have way more respect for my grandpa, who I've seen working on family trees on and off again for as long as I can remember. I understand now why he had so many stacks of paper all around his desk, this stuff gets complicated! I've been trying to sort out if any of the family came back to North Carolina at some point, but following the daughters down the line is difficult. And Hazel didn't have any sons, just daughters, only one of whom I was able to find a marriage notice for. If I can figure out even what states they all wound up living in, I might be able to find marriage records or something, even notices in newspapers – assuming that information is online, and not just stashed away in a neat binder in a dim corner of some library on the other side of the freaking country!
     Groaning aloud, I lean back from the computer, again rubbing my fists against closed eyelids. I need to go to bed, I have to work tomorrow, and my eyeballs are freaking shot for the night. I make sure I have everything bookmarked, and take another look at the tentative, sprawling family tree I've sketched out. There are a lot of arrows heading off in awkward directions – I'll have to draw it out more clearly, to get a better idea of what I know and don't know. My head is spinning from all the generations and maiden names and married names and...
     Computer off. No more. Time for bed.