Tonight I trace words, following little threads; my mind drifts into barely visible prints on the patterns of family history. It is not the truth supposedly latent in the tree driving me onward. All those branches with little leaves of generation. The names of those now decayed in Smith County soil come out of the past like talismanic figures, just as mysterious, sullen, even, in the sense of foreclosure that accompanies their memory to my presence. There is the long life figured in my clan’s most recent progenitor, John Henry Bonner, born 1842 in Missouri; he died 1930 in Tyler, Texas. Served five terms as mayor of Tyler. And the names after him arrive, burbling up out of the peace of nonexistence: Mattie Bonner, Charles Wellborn Boon, Wellborn Bonner Boon, Margaret C. Sledge. Harmolean Bonner, James John Covington. I recall as a boy meeting on several occasions Martha Covington, born 1901, and Bascom B. Watson (we called him B. B.). To my knowledge, he is the only man I have ever known to serve in the First World War. And his memories trailed back through the South to veterans of the Confederacy. I possess still a buckeye top, purple, that he gave me before he died in 1977. Martha was Wellborn and Luther’s cousin. Her family history reaches toward the ghosts of other eras, and perhaps this is why her handwriting leans strongly to the left. As she aged it became almost impossible to decipher. I remember learning of cardinals and chickadees, flycatchers and dicksissles, through the parchments she would send. I wrote her, perhaps for the last time, in California. It is terrible that we disappear from one another. Her writing slowly vanished from me. The shape of her letters was gripped with what looked like Parkinson’s, squiggly and yet violently wagering some sense onto the impossible shapes that reached out into the white space of her elegant stationary. “This is a notation concerning Martha Ellen Wade,” she wrote, “who was the wife of William Neval Bonner—Her father was Micajah Wade—Born February 8th, 1777 in N. Carolina. His mother’s maiden name was Sarah McCormick. She was the daughter of Dorcas and James McCormick. James McCormick was a soldier of the American Revolution and fought gallantly for the liberties of the Colonies throughout the seven years struggle. This is where the name Micajah came into the family.” The facts of names and dates, and the accidents of relation to events, wedge into historical record. In time objects accumulate and are oriented to certain names or moods. The first bursts of autumn bring residual feelings of harvest. I have no memory of the fields. My immediate family embraced machines and technology, abandoning the farm. I often reflect, however, on the lists of names that come into my possession. For instance, I have dreamed into the textual surface identifying those descendants of the first parents. The book of Genesis is where the records of birth and death begin in the Protestant line I happened upon by birth. The first ones are there by name alone. I often have imagined into spaces between the words of those great lists leading throughout the Old Testament to the birth of Christ. For hours as a child I would gaze on a small bible with pictures of Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Abraham and Isaac. I do not know why that boy shares anything with me still. So much of the world seeks the failure of his vision and intimidates him into nonbeing. He is no more "me" than I am any of those others recorded by persistence in the family archives. It is only with great struggle that I come to see my image, or my name, among those others, not because I dread the company of the dead, but because I have not been often enough vigilant to what hovers just beyond reach of living habit.