The seed of our destruction will blossom in the desert, the alexin
of our cure grows by a mountain rock, and our lives are haunted
by a Georgia slattern, because a London cutpurse went unhung.
Each moment is the fruit of forty thousand years. The minute-
winning days, like flies, buzz home to death, and every moment
is a window on all time.

—Thomas Wolfe
________________

I suppose every family has them. Well, as tiny as the modern family is these days, maybe not so much. But still, they have to be sprinkled in there, somewhere. The tales handed down and told and retold, tales that grow more fantastic with each telling. And then, of course, there are the legends, the things that happened generations ago. The difference between a tale and a legend? A tale will shift and grow and change, almost at the whim of the teller. The details of a legend remain pretty much set in stone. The basic story is carefully guarded and passed along from one generation to the next.

And the one legend in my family that stood out above all the rest, well, that was a pride thing, one of those legends that got told to us from the time we were old enough to understand the basic concepts of what we were hearing. It was as natural as the passing of the seasons, the telling of the story. We heard the voices speaking, and we listened with innocent ears and wondering hearts. And to me, it was the same as gospel truth, the story, because it was so real, and so unquestioned. We Waglers are different, at least the ones in my immediate family are. We’re different, because we got special blood flowing through our veins. It’s Indian blood. American warrior blood. Sure, we come from the Amish. But we got us some native connections, too. Connections to this land, before it ever was the country it is today.

I can’t tell you how casually and how solemnly that story was passed down. I remember it from my earliest years. Not really as a special thing. I mean, any family story you hear as a child, you just absorb it. You accept it as the truth. And you don’t really consider it as anything other than what was. And what is. Later, as you grow the legend in your mind, that’s when you get a little proud of the blood in you. At least, that’s how it all came down for me.

The details of the legend were all a bit vague, but always told the same. Never much variation at all, in the telling. Way back whenever, a young unmarried woman boarded a ship from Germany with maybe her father and a sibling or two. I forget who else exactly came along from her immediate family. Anyway, this young woman had a young daughter. She was unmarried, the young woman. Maybe widowed. We don’t know. Those details never made it. And supposedly, the young woman hooked up with an Indian on the ship on the way over. It was whispered that she may have been of somewhat dubious moral fiber. I mean, how slatternly was that, hooking up with some dark stranger on a ship? Especially in those days. Anyway, some months after they landed, another little baby girl was born to Veronica Stuckey. Yep. That was her name. Veronica Stuckey. Such a surname has long disappeared from the rolls of any current Amish group anywhere.

The young daughter that was born here in this country was supposedly my maternal great-great-great grandmother, or some such thing. It goes way back. And she was dark-skinned, being half Indian. And that’s where we come from, my brand of Waglers. That was the legend. And it wasn’t just a loose story. Oh, no. It was always pointed out, in the telling. Look at us. Look at our high-boned faces. That’s Indian. American Indian. We got the blood flowing in us, through us.

And details like that made it all fit, when you look at my immediate family. You look at our faces. Mostly high-boned cheeks. Coal black hair, pretty much across the board. And we have dark complexions. That’s who my family is. I can sit in the sun for ten minutes a day, and have a deep and healthy tan in less than a week. And when I work in the sun, well, I get real dark. Back in the days of my youth when I worked construction, lean and shirtless under the summer skies, I very much resembled an Indian. Except for one thing. My curly hair. But that was from all the non-Indian blood in me, is what I always figured. Except for that unruly hair, I could have passed as a native son of this land, from way back.

A little aside here, about my curly hair. I hated those curls, as a child. Despised them with all the intensity any child is capable of. And I remember when I got particularly irritated, I remember going and dunking my head under the water tap in the sink. Get those curls wet. Plaster them back. Now, I got nice flat hair, just like everyone else. Of course, mere minutes later, after my hair had dried, the curls went completely haywire. There was no way to win, seemed like, looking back.

Well, maybe there was one small victory. I’ve always remembered this little incident, because it was just such an aberration. It was a summer evening, when I was probably four years old. I was playing out in the yard north of the house, beside the road, with my siblings. A car pulled up on the gravel road, and stopped by the mailbox. Stephen and Titus and my sister Rachel, I think, walked up to see what was going on. There were two couples in that car, out on a date. Young kids, teenagers. Maybe the boys were twenty. And they wanted to know how to get to somewhere. My siblings just stood around and they were all chatting amiably with each other. About that time I pushed myself through the crowd, up beside the car. A little curly-haired four-year-old Amish boy with large brown eyes. Galluses holding up my denim pants. Barefooted and dirt-stained. And dark as any Indian.

I remember the two beautiful English girls in the car, and how they suddenly squealed in unison. “Oh! Isn’t he cute? Oh, couldn’t you just hold and hug him?” And they kept gushing. “Oh, isn’t he cute?” I wasn’t quite sure what was going on. And then I realized it was me they were fussing about. The two girls kept pestering their boyfriends. “Isn’t he cute?” And the boyfriends mumbled half-heartedly. “Yeah, yeah. He’s cute.” They probably wanted to throttle me. But I was blissfully unaware of any of that. We stepped back, then, from the road, my siblings and me. And the car crunched off to the east on the gravel.

And that was just a bunny trail about my curly hair. Despite those curls, though, I never, never doubted the original story. We have Indian blood in us, we Waglers of the David and Ida Mae lineage. We’re pretty unique. The ancient warrior strain, that stirs in us. And yes. We are proud.

And I always made sure to slide it in there, in a lot of conversations with people along the way over the years, although in later years not so much. A casual observation that just kind of came out on its own. I have Indian blood in me. I’m one/thirty-second Indian. That’s how closely they had calculated it all out, those ahead of me. And I told people wherever I went. I wouldn’t remember this specifically, but my sister-in-law, Wilma, Steve’s wife, told me recently. “That first summer, when a load of you came to Bloomfield to build your barn, I remember the first time you walked into our house. There was a picture on the wall, of an Indian on a horse. You pointed up to that picture and said, ‘There goes one of my relatives. I’m part Indian.’”

I have no memory at all, of that particular instance. But I’m sure it happened. Because I remember how proudly I carried it on me as a badge of honor back in those years, and beyond, my Indian blood. Like I said, not so much in later years, and never, since I started writing. But I still believed it. And I’m sure I bored many people to tears with it all, way too often, back then. To all such people, I apologize. I believed what I was telling you, and somehow, I just thought you’d be interested in hearing it. I wouldn’t be that presumptuous again.

And so it was all firmly settled in our minds for all these years, for me and my siblings. We have Indian blood in us. That makes us different. Special, somehow. Well, I think my brother Steve was the only one who didn’t really embrace the legend. “Nah,” he’d proclaim. “I don’t think we have any Indian blood at all.” But he dutifully passed the story on to his children. We all dutifully passed it on down to the next generation. Those who had children, to their children. Those who didn’t have children, like me and Nathan, well, we spoke it to our nieces and nephews. As dramatically as we could intone it, we spoke it. Walk tall. Walk proud. You have a very rich, mixed heritage. You have warrior blood.

And it probably would have receded into the mists of time as the truth we all believed, our Indian heritage. It would have happened. Except for two little factors that somehow just came rumbling right down the pike when no one like me was looking for them.

The first factor is that the younger generation tends to be a little skeptical about some things. Even family legends. My nieces and nephews somehow didn’t just buy into the Indian blood legend. Well, I’m sure they all believed the story when it was told to them as children. I’m sure they listened, all wide-eyed, and drank it all in. But somehow, they became skeptics, some few of them, later, as adults.

And the second factor is because they, those in the younger generation, they have a tool in hand that we never had. The internet. And if you know your way around, even just a little, in that world, you can research a lot of stuff, very thoroughly. And it all started out innocently enough last fall. My niece Dorothy (Abby’s Mom) decided she was going to check out Ancestry.com. A grief diversion for her, I think. Dorothy told us all about it on the family Facebook page. She was fixing to do a little family research, to see if she could find that young single lady who came over on that ship. And we all blessed her and cheered her on.

And within days, she was posting some pretty astounding stuff. At some point, there, my nephew Reuben Wagler joined her. Reuben actually subscribed to the service, and the two of them were off and running. And it didn’t take them long to dig up all kinds of fascinating facts and figures. They even posted a picture of young Veronica Stuckey. A rather buxom woman, with high cheek bones. Not looking any too happy, either, in my opinion. Or maybe that’s just how people posed for photographs back then. And she didn’t look Amish at all. I don’t know. Maybe she wasn’t. Anyway, Dorothy and Reuben dug and dug around to find the father or fathers of Veronica’s children, her two little daughters. And they dredged and dredged and sifted some more. They could find nothing. No mention at all, of any man anywhere in her life.

Well, what do you expect, at least when it comes to the second child? We older ones asked, all confident and smug. It was that Indian on that ship, of course. And I think that would have settled the matter in everyone’s minds. Except the younger generation is very restless. And except the people at Ancestry.com offer more than just research services. For a fee, they will take your DNA test, and match it with everything in their vast data bank. And they’ll tell you where you come from. And they’ll tell you if you got any Indian blood in you or not.

And now, enter another nephew. Ira Lee Wagler. My namesake, Steve’s son. Married, with a little son named Desmond Ira. (Lancaster County now has three Ira Waglers, which is probably about as many as any county, anywhere, could be expected to put up with.) A month or so ago, this man, this nephew, my namesake, suddenly got a very bright idea. He’d get that DNA test done. So he sent off his hundred bucks for the kit. And duly spit into the little tube and sent in his sample of saliva. All this he did, without telling any of his aunts and uncles. And maybe no one else, for that matter. Whoever he told, it wasn’t many people. He kept it pretty quiet.

And one day, a few weeks later, which was just a few weeks back, the results were emailed to him. He read the stats eagerly. And a few evenings after that, we were all at Steve’s house for supper. And as we visited after the meal, Ira Lee brought it up. He told me what he’d done. The results were in. And a big old family legend was just about to be put to rest, once and for all. And boom, just like that it was flung at me, right out of the blue. I recoiled.

Oh my, I said, dismayed. Why in the world would you do such a thing as to take that DNA test? Is there no respect in you, for family legends? Especially for such a foundational legend as that. I mean, it’s part of the essence of who we are, as Waglers. We have Indian blood. That’s just how it’s always been told. Do you realize what you’re doing, when you set out to disprove something so entrenched as that? How could you? I really, really wish you wouldn’t have.

But he had. And we sat there, and he told me the results. Native Americans (Indians) have a very unique strand of DNA. And the test had shown not a shred of that specific, unique type. It’s impossible, that we have Indian blood in us. Boom. Again. We are mostly Caucasian, from France and Switzerland. But there is a thirteen percent slice of Greek/Italian. So that’s maybe where the dark features come from. The facial features, too, some.

There was nothing I could do but absorb what he was telling me. But I grumbled pretty savagely at my nephew. You’re just gonna believe what they tell you? I mean, I think that DNA test is just wrong. If it’s not, then maybe that was an Italian on the ship, and people just mistook him for an Indian. I’m trying to protect the legend, here. Ira Lee seemed a little apologetic, but still, not repentant. He was gonna do what he was gonna do. And he had done what he had done. He has since actually produced a very flashy little video, recording every step of his heretical journey.

But I’ve thought about it all a good bit, since then. I can’t be too mad at Ira Lee. If it wouldn’t have been him, it would have been someone else in the family lineage. It’s impossible, that the legend wouldn’t have been shattered as the myth it was, at some point. It would have happened, sometime, somewhere. It was all just a matter of time. And who can control the timing of such a thing?

Still, it would have been OK if the legend-busting bloodhounds had held off for a while. Like, maybe, another generation or so. Because it knocks you around a bit, when something you have firmly known all your life just gets yanked out from under you like that. It’s disconcerting. What else out there isn’t true, that we’ve always been told?

It all is what it is, I guess. But still, it makes me wonder, a little bit. Where does a formerly proud man of “warrior blood” go to turn in those false credentials he has claimed all his life?

**************************
And this past week, another milestone quietly came and went. February 3rd. Which would have been my parent’s seventy-third wedding anniversary. And I thought about it, on that day. Thought about that long, hard journey they traveled together through all those years of life.

In 1942, my parents got married in a simple Amish wedding ceremony in Daviess County, Indiana. Through all that came at them, for better or for worse, they held that marriage together for seventy-two years. Mom left us last April. Except for a few years early on when Dad was serving in a WWII work camp, this was the first time since their wedding day that they had been separated on February 3rd.

Still, I thought it. Happy Anniversary, Dad. I know you miss her. She never will come back to you here, but one day you will go to where she is. And then the two of you can celebrate this date together again.