The Legend of Garison Fitch (Book 1): First Time (40 page)

But, and this really serves to make things more complicated rather than easier, if there ever was a woman to rival Sarah in inner beauty, it is this Heather. She has such an inner peace about her that one cannot help but be effected by it when around her. And the mere fact that she has stood by me during what has to have sounded like the ravings of a lunatic says volumes about her. Had I known her in my time, I believe I would have wanted to marry her there, too. It might be easier on me now if she were a witch or someone I could dislike and drive away, but she's not. She loves her Garison and I have become the recipient of that love.

Heather seems to know me better than I know myself—at least, she knows my alter ego better than I do. She knows me pretty well, too, I'm learning. She knows when to leave me alone, and when to stay close by me. She knows me so well, in fact, I wonder if I am an open book that everyone can read. I don't think this is true, but it certainly seems a possibility when around Heather. Then, I remember how easily Sarah could read me and I really feel open.

Excerpt from
A Fitch Family History by Maureen Fitch Carnes

Harry Jr. had a son named Calvin who, from an early age, is said to have shown a marked ability at the sport of baseball. He received a scholarship to play baseball for the University of Texas, one of the first schools to offer scholarships in baseball. He played one season for the Longhorns before he and his roommate, catcher Henry King, dropped out of school to go fight in the war Harry's father so vehemently opposed. Harry came back to the University of Texas four years later—having made the rank of captain by age twenty-one—and resumed his baseball career. Henry King was one of the first non-Frenchmen to be awarded the Croix De Guerre, then returned home to be a cowboy and never went back to college or baseball.

While becoming an outstanding baseball player, Calvin occasionally attended class. When the spring semester ended, Calvin ignored his father's protests and dropped out of college again, this time to accept a contract with the Chicago White Sox. Still reeling from having eight players banned for life the previous season, Calvin was able to start in left field as a rookie. He was often kidded about having to fill the shoes of Shoeless Joe, and—in some ways—the joke may have stuck with him, to his detriment. The White Sox, even with the loss of five starting fielders, two starting pitchers and a key benchman went on to the American League championship that year with Calvin batting a respectable .274.

For the next nineteen seasons, Calvin Fitch roamed the outfield for eleven different teams, serving in both leagues. He did two terms each with both the Braves and White Sox, giving him an aggregate of thirteen trades in nineteen years. Whenever he heard a trade was brewing in either league, he would often contact his wife and tell her to be ready to move, just in case. Once, when he knew he was about to be traded, his wife Caroline asked him where. Calvin replied, "Read the papers, they usually know before I do." He even started a game for the hometown Yankees and played the seventh through the ninth innings for the visiting (and hated) Red Sox.

Chapter Twenty-three

After the cemetery, their next stop was to find a clean but inexpensive motel closer to Mount Vernon than the one in Manassa had been. They found one in Alexandria and Heather said she wanted to take a nap. Garison gathered that the long flight the day before and her pregnancy had conspired together to make her more tired than she normally would have been. As she laid down on the bed and went quickly to sleep, Garison pulled out the lap-top computer they had brought along and tried to, as silently as possible, type in a journal entry about his feelings regarding finding Sarah's grave. Heather was so tired, she was soon asleep despite the rat-a-tat-tat of the computer keyboard. When he had finished typing, he set the computer aside and lay back, quickly falling asleep himself.

They awoke in the middle of the afternoon and Heather, stretching, asked, "What now, Chief?"

He stretched himself, then looked at his watch and said, "I must've slept longer than I thought. Well, I'm hungry and you're eating for two, so I say we find a diner and get a bite."

"Good idea, I'm starving."

"Do you get morning sickness?"

"Not really," Heather replied. "Mainly, I'm just kind of nauseous all day long—even when I'm hungry. I've never been nauseous and hungry at the same time. It's kind of strange. And I think it's still a little early for morning sickness, but I'm not sure. Soon as we get home, I need to start checking the baby books."

"Any kind of food sound especially good, or bad?"

She touched her abdomen and replied quickly, "No sausage."

"Sarah didn't like anything with cucumbers when she was pregnant. That wasn't much of a problem as their weren't many cucumbers to be had in Mount Vernon."

Heather put her hand to her mouth and said, with feeling, "Now that you mention it, nothing with cucumbers either."

The next stop for Garison and Heather after eating greasy hamburgers that, surprisingly, made Heather feel better, was at the county records building. When they asked for the years they were interested in, a clerk told them they had to go to another address. Records from that far back, she had explained with a surprisingly southern accent, were stored in a warehouse on the far side of town from the river—to avoid as much moisture as possible—and were only beginning to be transferred to computer, she said. It was a long, arduous process and Garison agreed that it must take a special temperament to work at such a task. The clerk allowed that she didn't have that temperament and hinted that her current job was just taken until she found something better.

The building they had been sent to was an old building that looked as if it had probably begun its life as an office building of some sort. Now, it was a four story building with all but its load-bearing walls removed, full of nothing but records, most of them old, dusty, and smelly. Whenever the employees became disgruntled, one could be assured of hearing someone jokingly suggest arson as the building would go up like the proverbial roman candle.

An overworked team of a handful of people came to work in this building every day to catalogue what was there and get rid of what files could be gotten rid of. Birth records, marriage licenses and obituaries were kept and filed alphabetically, but there were many things in the way of plans for long-gone buildings and permits and old statements about the raising of the taxes that could be done away with in most people's minds. Unfortunately, there always seemed to be some preservation society showing up and telling them not to throw away even the old garbage reports, yet these societies often didn't want responsibility for the documents, either. So it was the job of the on-sight manager—a rotating position so that no one would shoulder all the blame—to decide whether to keep or toss much of what they came across. The preservation societies were notified on the days the trash was taken out so that they could come and fish out of the dumpster anything they wanted to keep. If they failed to preserve anything tossed into the trash, the city told them, then they had no right to whine about it later.

Heather walked up to the first person they saw in the records storage building and said, "Excuse me. We were just sent over here from the Hall of Records and were wondering if you could help us find something."

"I would be delighted," the man replied in a thick New England accent. "You cannot imagine how happy we are to occasionally leave our jobs of sorting to help someone actually find something." With a smile, he added, "I hope what you are looking for is a lengthy job requiring much of my day."

"Could be, I guess," Heather shrugged. Rarely did one find such cooperation from a city employee. Certainly, she thought to herself, the man wasn't union.

"What we are looking for," Garison told the man, "Are papers concerning my de—ancestors."

"Were they born or married here or anything?" the man asked.

"Oh yes," Garison replied. The man asked for a name to begin with and Garison replied, "Fitch. The first members of the family known to be in the colonies were Sarah and Garison Fitch. Should be circa 1740. That was the year they were married. On New Year's Day, in fact."

"Fitch?" the man asked. "That shouldn't be too hard. Not if they are related to the people Fitch Street and the Fitch building were named after."

"I believe they were," Garison replied.

"Follow me," the man said, motioning them down a corridor. They came to a stairwell and there was a hand lettered sign saying A through E was on the first floor, F through M was on the second, N through S on the third and T through Z on the top floor. The sign looked like it was scribbled by an eight year old, but it was legible. Obviously, whoever had moved the records to this building had not expected the general public to often consult them.

The building smelled like old papers and dust, for that was all it contained. Had it ever caught on fire, it truly would have been consumed in a matter of minutes. As they walked, however, the man told them that there was a team of computer operators who were going to come in the next month and begin scanning and putting everything on computer. In which case, it would no longer matter so much if the building burned. The man laughed and hinted that he might play the arson himself. Heather and Garison were fortunate to only have to talk to one man, otherwise the same hapless joke would have been repeated to them several times.

As Heather fought to stifle the sneezes brought on by the dust, the man brought them to the area which would contain files about the Fitch family. He opened a drawer in a filing cabinet (causing Heather to commence sneezing again, this time more violently) and showed them where to look. He added, "You might also try the newspaper office. They have microfilm copies of the town's newspaper going back as far as the mid-1700s, I believe. Quite an accomplishment for so many newspapers didn’t realize the value of their past issues until at least the mid-1800s. They are missing a few issues here and there, of course, but they have an astounding collection. One of the best in the country, I hear. It's especially interesting to see events we think of as history just being reported as everyday news. Continental Congress and all that. I was a bit of a history buff before," he motioned all around him, "Before this. Now I almost hate history."

"Thank you," they both replied as they pulled out the files marked Fitch (there were several) and took them to a table nearby.

Before leaving, the man pleaded, "Please think of ways I can assist you. Please, please, please." He smiled and went back downstairs, dreading the return to the task of sorting through another unorganized box of paper. Fortunately, the county supplied all the workers in the building with an inexhaustible supply of antihistamine.

There were many records about the Fitch family contained in the files they found and Garison wished he could spend hours studying each one. He vowed he would come back some day and do just that. A quick glance proved the records went all the way up to Heloise Fitch, who apparently married a man from Illinois in 1919 and went west with him. She seemed to have been the last of the Fitch's to live in Mount Vernon, Virginia. Garison wondered what her relationship was to Hiram Fitch, but found nothing in the cursory search that told him.

"Huh," Garison mumbled.

"What?"

He held up a piece of paper and said, "According to this, these files were checked out—I guess you could take them home like a library, back then—by a Maureen Carnes in 1954. That's the name of my aunt or cousin or whatever who wrote that book about my family tree. I wonder why she was looking in this file?"

Heather shrugged and offered, after blowing her nose, "Maybe she was just looking at any family named Fitch and seeing if they were somehow connected."

"Probably," he nodded.

They started at the beginning, the earliest date they could find anyway, looking over one another's shoulder as they began to sift through the dust-covered parchment. Much of the writing was done in a flowing script Heather had trouble with but Garison could read easily. After all, it had only been five days since he had last written something himself in a similar flowing script. Heather also had trouble just reading between the sneezes. A couple surprise sneezes manifested themselves before she could get the tissue up and stained a couple documents, but she doubted anyone would ever notice. She wondered what her sneezes would look like when scanned into the computer the next month.

They found first the marriage license of Garison and Sarah Fitch (apparently, this section had already been pretty thoroughly sorted). The signature was obviously Garison's and Heather marveled that all she was reading was true. She had believed Garison over the last few days, but each new proof still surprised her. It was Garison's turn for surprise when Heather put the marriage license in her purse. At his questioning look, she said, "I want this. We can show it to our children."

"Isn't that stealing?"

"Not really. It's your marriage license."

"But that's the county's copy."

"Do you really think anyone with more claim to it than you is going to come looking for it?" At his somewhat stern look, she rolled her eyes at him, but said, "All right. I do want to see if they can make a copy of it for me, though."

Heather went downstairs, leaving Garison with the files, and found the man who had showed them around. She held out the marriage certificate and asked, "Is there somewhere I could get a copy of this?"

The man looked at it and replied courteously, "Sure. Come with me." She followed him into a little office that apparently also served as the break room and popped the lid on the copier. He quickly ran off a copy, then handed Heather the original.

She looked from it to the copy he was holding and asked, "You mean I can have the original?"