Present Day
In the years after Mary's death, I had cause, and plenty of time, to dwell on what happened to us. Maybe if William had survived, then we could have lived our life together, could have built something hidden away in the backwaters of this tiny state, obscured in tall trees and behind a bulwark of cornfields; surviving 'off grid' before ever there was a grid to be on. I have imagined us living, we three, together, in happy peace, protecting our identity, our longevity, in polite rural anonymity.
I have also spent long hours wondering where I could have changed things, taken us down a route that led elsewhere. Maybe I should never have stood against Richard Masterson, or left England, or married Mary, or learned to read. I don't know where the chain that leads up to now starts, where I could have snapped the link.
I do not believe it all pre-ordained. I see no dead hand of fate, lying immovable across the skein of life. Just innumerable actions, and their consequences, stretching on and on. I have no answers, just the regrets.
But where Mary did not, or could not, find things to live for, I did. It took time, and in truth it is only the power of the land that sustained me in the first months and years as I wandered, uncaring of myself in any form. My clothes becoming more torn and ragged. I wandered, insensitive to the winter’s depths, detached from my physical needs and requirements. Yet I lived. Indifferent I may have been, but I could never bring myself to consider the route that Mary took, to actively renounce life.
I have wondered often what she thought, on that ship, as she reached the boundary. Of how the end finally came for her. The captain spoke of his cousin’s ship sinking swiftly, and the stories that made their way around the town spoke of strange lights and noises. Though by the time I was recovered enough to try piece these together there were only poorly remembered secondhand accounts to collect. I suspect that the combination of time and drink had embellished whatever tales the sailors originally recounted to a point that they were as far removed from actual events as I was from my Lincolnshire birthplace.
It was my Lenape friends who, again, saved me. Wrapping me up and binding me to sanity. Forcing me back from the unbound plains of grief that I sojourned, re-attaching my mind and body together. For three years they refused to leave me alone, each winter forsaking the security of their winter havens to ensure I remained safe.
Over time I started to see beyond my own loss, to see things in the world around me and find things of interest.
There is the beauty of my country, and by country, I mean the land I am bound to. There is no way to understand how my limits came to be the same as those that would form Delaware; some strange cosmic irony, some as yet undiscerned purpose, I have no way of knowing.
There has been the ongoing discovery of other Eternals. My long-departed friend Kitakima told me of ones he knew in other tribes, but it wasn’t until some point in the eighteen-forties that I met one. A woman, Caroline, tied to the original thirteen colonies, who sought me out. She travelled throughout her realm collecting Eternals, writing them down in a little calf-skin bound notebook and encouraging them to be in contact with each other. From her I learnt of some in Rhode Island, the Carolinas and Georgia. She drifted back about thirty years later, after the civil war, and had tell of more, including rumour of a whole Amish community of Eternals in rural Pennsylvania.
I remember the first time I felt her presence. A feeling I had not known since Mary. In truth, for a few moments I thought it was Mary somehow returned, and the realisation that it could not be, that she was still dead, almost undid me. Nigh on a hundred and fifty years since her death and my sanity was near destroyed. Time is a great healer, but when the time you have is eternity the wounds take longer - well, the ones in your soul do.
In the months after Caroline and I first met she stayed with me in my cabin down by the Atlantic shore. I remember the raw moonshine we drank while baring our souls to each other, showing the scars, sharing the regrets and, for a while, sharing a human warmth that I had long forgotten.
Her story was different to mine in all but the loss. For me Mary, for her, well, the details are unimportant, but she knew the same kind of grief and had come close to making the same decision to end her life. We spent long hours speculating on how we survived, what power kept us and decided what and where our boundaries were. There was no real way to know. But we pieced together things we did know, and considered what help we could give to a new Eternal, some form or structure, so that they would not have to choose between death or the exquisite loneliness of eternity in a fleeting world.
For me it was not much more than time spent in idle speculation, but Caroline saw it as a program to follow, a quest she could pursue. I was still too raw.
We disagreed on the subject, then we argued, then we fought, then she left. The last time I saw her was back when telephones were making in-roads into the Delaware countryside. She wanted to know if I would be on the new tree of Eternals, an update of something she had done via letters previously.
I still didn't.
§
By chance I met a new Eternal from neighbouring Maryland a few months ago. He was out walking and testing the limits of his boundaries, and I could feel his presence from half a county away. We sat together at the blurred edge of our kingdoms and talked in the warmth of an early fall afternoon, the sun's heat leeching into my bones as it did into the rich loam beneath me.
“Y'know you'se called the ‘Old Man of Delaware' don't you?” His accent was pure New Jersey, where he had, allegedly, lived a subset of the gangster lifestyle. But it was the question and not the accent which rattled me.
“I don't understand.”
“When I was still recovering from my, err, injuries,” he had admitted to them being gunshot wounds, received while undertaking some nefarious activity in Ocean City. “This sweet dame comes by and explains everything to me, well, not everything. I still don't understand it really. However she tells me I ain't alone, d’at I need to test my boundaries and d’at I live next door to ‘The Original Eternal of these United States’, d'at was the exact phrase, ‘The Original Eternal of these United States', and says you is the ‘Old Man of Delaware' and that I should try to meet you.”
“When you say 'sweet dame' do you mean Caroline? And does she still want every Eternal she meets to be on her telephone tree or whatever, these days?” I could picture her sitting, instilling this new Eternal with a lore that did not exist, trying to root him in a mythology that wasn't codified, wasn't true, but that would give him something to hold on to as the slow shock of reality coalesced over the next sixty, seventy, eighty years. The very thing we had argued and parted over.
“Yeah, it was Caroline. You know since being immortal like…”
I interrupted. “Not immortal. Just, I don't know, long lived. You can still die you know”
He nodded, busily carrying on with his train of thought. “Yeah, sure, whatever, but you know I really been learning stuff. Maybe I should a' paid attention in kindergarten, but I didn't know what the thirteen colonies she said she was tied to were, or d’at most of the guys who fought for independence were like, Brits, or their kids or grandkids.”
I smiled, interrupting him again, “English, like me and Caroline.”
"Yeah, like I said. But you sounds American."
"I am American. I fought for the right to be American."
He looked at me. "Jeez!"
Coming at my history through the eyes of someone who hasn't experienced it, who barely understood it, made me wonder what changes we would yet see, what history remains to be experienced or created. Suddenly I had a desire to be part of the world again, instead of just existing in it. To learn once more the rites and rote, of meaningful interaction with the grand sweep of humanity, or at least with others like myself.
And I want to speak to Caroline again. It has been too long a time to not speak with such an old friend, and of course I want to find out why, with her being Eternal over a half century longer than myself, I was being called the ‘Old Man of Delaware'. What made me, Eternal for near a hundred years before independence, ‘The Original Eternal of these United States'?
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
Part Five
text and picture by stuartcturnbull. picture created via openart.ai