this word doll that had a name and a form and a little bit of history. The more the child played with it during work, the clearer it became till it had the same detail as dreams or memories. Word dolls all had a one-syllable name attached to whatever its profession was. So you had like, Captain Moss, Hunter Brot, Milker May, Teacher Poll. The woman who was given the Captain told me she’d never seen the ocean but had only heard about it from elders and travelers passing through the area. She said the Captain turned out to be a man of high adventure. She followed him on his voyages through her childhood into adulthood and then old age. Another interviewee said he’d been gifted Clerk Fick, but that as he followed the days of Clerk Fick while toiling in the fields, the doll slowly became a glamorous woman, Dancer Hence. He hadn’t thought of her in years, he said. ‘She’s still with me, but I put her away when I left the farm.’”
Beverly got her cane under her and slowly stood. She walked to the files, bent over, and opened the second drawer down on the left hand. Reaching in, she drew out an armful of stuff. I asked her if she needed help. “Please,” she said. I went to her side, and the first thing she handed me was the white False Face mask. After that she gave me a rusted sickle with a wooden handle. “OK,” she said, closed the drawer with her cane, and we started back.
“I can’t believe you’ve got the mask,” I said, laying it down. I put the sickle next to it.
She sat and shoved her pile onto the table. “The mask came easy. A lot of this stuff I really had to dig for.” Pulling an old book out of the pile, she opened it, turned a few pages, and took out a large rectangle of cardboard. She turned it over and laid it in front of me. It was the picture of a woman in a high-collar black dress. Her hair was parted in the middle and pulled severely back. Her glasses were circular. She wore a righteous expression.
“The Widow?” I asked.
Beverly nodded and said, “That’s a daguerreotype, not a photograph. From the 1850s. She looks like a pill, doesn’t she? I used to have it in plastic, but I’ve slacked off over the years as far as preserving all this. I resigned myself to its eventual demise when I did my own.”
“It’s a remarkable story and archive,” I said.
“My husband built me this place to house it. He was very supportive, and as long as he lived that kept me going with it. His family farmed all this acreage around here at one point.”
“You got a PhD in Anthropology at OSU and then married a farmer?”
“I know,” she said and laughed wistfully. “It was true love, but I still had it in my mind to be the next Margaret Meade. I knew I wasn’t going to make it to Samoa any time soon, so I looked closer to home and found this.” She moved her shaking hands over the things on the table.
We passed an hour with her reading me parts of her interviews, journal entries from dirty old leather-bound diaries, all of which attested to the strength of the image of the word doll, a doll that grew as you did, could speak to you in your mind, lead you to places you’d never been. The strangest particulars surfaced. One woman, thirty years old at the time, wrote in her diary that in all the years she’d played with Cook Gray, she’d never seen him naked, but she knew without looking that he only had one testicle. His best dish was roasted possum with cabbage, and she often used his recipes in cooking for her family. One interviewee said that her word doll was Deacon Tru, and that her husband’s had begun as Builder Cy but somehow transformed into Barkeep Jon and was subsequently the ruination of their love. Among the papers was a letter detailing a farmer’s thirty-year argument with his field friend. After he retired, he said he realized that fight had been the one thing that kept him going through thick and thin.
Eventually Beverly ran out of steam. She lit a cigarette and