those that never sing_epilogue

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 EPILOGUE I met my cousin Maxine for the first time several months after her 80 th birthday. I contacted her to share the letters her mother Kathryn had sent to Bill and those he had mailed home from France. Maxine lived in a m odest two-bedroom home in Rawlins, Wyoming, a bleak oasis surrounded by barren prairies. Her house was newe r, but very much like the modest li ttle house in which my grandparents and Aunt Vesta had finished out t heir lives a thousand miles away. From the magnificence of the Tetons and the volcanic lakes of the Yellowstone high country, most of Wyoming gives way to t he inhospitable steppes where deformed trees stand forlorn and apologetic. Rawlins is a town scraped clean by the incessant wind. A sm all, unassuming community, larger than Langdon, but similar in temperament, it serves the few farmers and ranchers who remain in i ts environs. Now its primary industry is the State Penitentiary, a looming limestone presence on the northeast side of town. Rawlins is the County

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Seat, the hub of commerce and activity for miles around. It ties into the rest of the country

reluctantly through Interstate Highway 80, which runs monotonously through this desolate part

of the West, having charted the shortest distance between Omaha and Salt Lake City. Such is

Rawlins, a town that could not have survived apart from its highway, isolated by its secret desire

to be left alone, the town where Maxine¶s mother, Kathryn²Kitty, or Kit, as was more

commonly known²came finally to rest.

Maxine was a tall, robust woman, with a ruddy, wind-burned look to her complexion.

But in spite of her years, her skin made her appear far younger. It was smooth and supple as

fine suede. I immediately knew that she was my cousin, the only child of my father¶s oldest

 brother. She reminded me of all the other women cousins of my generation; something about her 

 body language and gestures gave her away. My parents, aunts, uncles, and cousins had

whispered among themselves that Maxine¶s birth-father was someone else, a married man or 

some other unknown paramour and that Bill had only married her mother Kitty ³to give the

child a name.´ But there was no doubt in my mind that she carried the genes of the Holmes clan.

Bill and his mother Josie had given her their same dark brown eyes, offered as if by way of an

apology for her uncertain beginning.

I asked her to tell me about her mother. And the first thing she said was, ³My mother had

a hard life.´ Surprised by her stark and unequivocal pronouncement, I soon understood the truth

of what she said. Maxine told me that Kitty first moved to Wyoming after the war, leaving

Maxine in the care of her parents in Turon since she had no means of supporting a baby by

herself. In Wyoming she managed a boarding house in what was then called the µoil patch¶

during the boom of the era. She supported herself as best she could. Married three more times.

Divorced twice and widowed again.

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³None of them was any good,´ Maxine said brusquely in a deep-throated Western twang,

³Except the one who died. I remember him. He was always good to me. And to my mother.

He was killed working in the oil fields.´

 Near the end of her life, Kitty took a lover. A married man. Maxine said he was a

 prominent business man in the Rawlins community. They might have married except the man

was Catholic. So he could not seek a divorce from his wife who preferred being ³Missus So-

and-so´ to becoming the  Ex-Missus So-and-so, even if it meant tolerating the knowledge that her 

husband kept a woman on the side. Kitty kept a scrapbook during this final chapter in the story

of her life. At my request, Maxine dug around for it in the back bedroom and brought it out for 

me to look through. It was filled with newspaper clippings and pictures of her last lover. She

was 63 years old when she died. Lung cancer took her, no doubt brought on by cigarettes and,

indirectly perhaps, by the eternal dust of the prairie. Maxine was her only child.

When asked what she knew of her father, she said, ³My mother would never allow Bill

Holmes¶ name to be mentioned in her home.´ All she knew of her father and mother came from

the letters I gave her. What little she knew beyond that came from growing up in Langdon and

Turon, playing with her cousins when she visited Grandma Holmes¶ house in Langdon.

In 1931, when Maxine graduated from eighth grade, her grandparents sent word to Kitty

that it was high time for her to assume the responsibilities for the raising of her own child. Kitty

 brooded about this for several days, and then at last acquiesced. But in truth, what else could she

do? A young adolescent girl was speeding across the prairie in a sleek passenger train. When

she got off she would smell of cheap five-and-dime face powder and look like a wide-eyed owl

standing on the station platform with her cardboard suitcase and leather-tooled purse slung over 

her shoulder. Her grandparents put her on the westbound train to Denver, where she was picked

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up at the depot by her newly re-enfranchised mother, whose child-raising skills, one must have

admitted, left a good deal wanting. But she succeeded nonetheless, as parents have for 

numberless generations, by dint of trial and error and, most importantly, through her genuine

love for her daughter. As for the bus ride from Denver to Rawlins, Maxine remembered few

details, but she did recall the thrill just sitting next to her mother and gazing out the window at

the countryside slipping by as if in a moving picture show.

³I went to high school here, in Rawlins,´ she said as she finished this brief account of her 

own life. ³Married a man before the war who became a prison guard afterwards. He died when

he was 50 years old from injuries he received from inmates during the prison riot back in ¶68.´

SeattleSeptember 14

th , 1924

 Mrs. H olmes Langdon 

 Dear Mad ame A little more than a year a go I very f oolishly

married the widow o f your d ead son. It d id  not take me l ong  t o find  out my mistake and  thing  s have been  going fr om bad t o worse until I at last coul d stand it no l ong er so 

br oug ht thing  s t o a crisis and  we separated .

 N ow I do not k now what reputation she bore previou s t o this but do k now that t od ay she is a woman t otally lacking in morals and  d ecency. I n fact, a want on o f the

worst type since our marria g e. I have evid ence which is t o me concl u sive that she hasbeen criminally intimate with at least f our men. Her last paramour she picked  u p at an 

oil camp last May and she has been out there with him since then. A  good part o f thetime al one, that is until the first o f J uly when a  g irl friend  o f hers came t o visit her and  

 she is also out there.

The present man o f her choice is a d r unken d issipated cur who has a wife and 2chil d ren ar ound Rawlin s whom he has d eserted . S o you see he is a pretty fit mate f or her 

but it woul d be a crying shame t o see a chil d in such an envir onment. If it were u p t o me, I woul d keep an y chil d  out o f there if I had  t o kill the whole r otten bunch t o do it.

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  I am nearly sure that her mother and sister k new o f this bef ore I d id and they have

and are still aid ing and abetting her. They are, as I su ppo se you are aware, living at  Rawlin s, Wyo and my wife¶s last escapad e t ook place at a camp north o f Wamsutta about 

60 miles fr om Rawlin s. I left there in or d er t o avoid  doing something  d esperate and have

washed my hand  s o f the whole affair, but shoul d there be an y chance o f d epriving her o f the cu st od  y o f the chil d  , woul d be willing t o rend er an y assistance whatever.

There seems t o be a criminal streak in this family as the br other who is now in  Rawlin s is ju st out o f the Oklahoma Ref ormat ory where he served a 10-month sentence

 f or issuing bad checks. And my wife t ol d me quite boastf ully when he was arrested that it was t o  g ratify his l u st f or lewd  women he committed  these crimes! And I k now that she

woul d st oo p t o an y crime f or the same purpo se as she has threatened my life on several occasion s when I presumed t o interfere with her l ove affairs.

 N ow if you shoul d  wish f or an y reason t o communicate with me, write at once.

 Respectf ully

W. A. McRae Box 125

 Jer ome, I d aho 

Y our letters if an y will be f or war d ed t o me.

After reading McRae¶s letter again, Josie sat down into the chair at the oak secretary, a

 piece of furniture she had ordered from the Sears Catalog that summer. She opened the writing

table and took her pen to ink on lined stationary stored in one of the drawers.

 Mr. W. A. McRae Dear Friend  ,

 Received your letter thr oug h Mr. Ramsey. I am very sorry you are having  

the same kind  o f tr ouble my son d id²with this woman² that is ju st the way she d id hereand she woul d  not si gn his questionnaire so he was called t o war & was soon in France

& never ret ur ned² he had man y warm friend  s who re g retted his step in taking  u p withher  ² He tried t o make matters ri g ht, but t o no avail.

The chil d ¶s mother has no con science or she coul d  not do as she does. Her 

 parents have the chil d  with them ² it breaks my heart what I see & fear o f the f ut ure o f her life. I am g lad you are interested  in one soul  ² that d ear little chil d that has the f ut ure

bef ore her  ² it was said  o f Jesu s, µ what then shall this chil d be.¶ That question may be

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written over every crad le in the worl d and  this d epend  s on its parents, later on itself & itsassociates.

 And ³Kitty´ as we called her, I have prayed man y a prayer that her life mi g ht be

t ur ned t o ri g hteou sness ² Oh the sin o f this worl d is a repr oach t o an y nation. I am

ho ping she will some d ay l ook t o the l oving Father that calls the wand erer home. If not  she will be hel d as one o f Satan¶s captives, lead ing  others as she d id my bo y & yourself.

 ± I can only tell you t o leave her al one & go on in the worl d in the ri g ht paths.Y ou will have l ots o f friend  s l ooking t o Jesu s the one who lifts u s u p if we fall.

Y our friend  , Mrs. J. H olmes

Vesta lived in Langdon most of her life. She became the librarian and the assistant

 postmistress, working on weekends, putting up letters before church. She got the career and the

 pension her parents had hoped for her, and in her off hours, she wrote a column for the weekly

Langdon Lead er in which she reported the mundane events shared by members of the

community. For years she played piano every Sunday at the Langdon Christian Church. Among

her distinguished accomplishments, she traced the family genealogy back to the Revolutionary

War. For forty years no other family member has pierced the veil beyond the patriarchy she

discovered then through her dogged research of family records. Never one to throw anything

away, she saved every birthday card and Christmas card she ever received, along with newspaper 

articles about every family member and pasted them into scrapbooks with her favorite poems

clipped from magazines. On one of the yellowed scrapbook pages, I first read the poem by

Oliver Wendell Holmes, called ³The Voiceless.´

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We count the br oken lyres that rest Where the sweet wailing sing ers sl umber,

 But o' er their silent sister '  s breast The wil d -fl owers who will st oo p t o number?

 A few can t ouch the ma g ic string  ,

 And  noisy Fame is pr oud  t o win them:-- Alas f or tho se that never sing  , But d ie with all their mu sic in them!

 Nay,  g rieve not f or the d ead al one

Who se song has t ol d  their hearts¶ sad st ory. ± Weep f or the voiceless, who have k nown 

The cr o ss without the cr own o f  g l ory! N ot where Leucad ian breezes sweep

O¶er Sappho¶s memory-haunted bill ow , But where the  g listening  ni g ht-d ew s weep

On nameless sorr ow¶s churchyar d pill ow.

O hearts that break and   g ive no si gn Save whitening  lip and fad ing tresses,

Till Death pours out his l ong ed -f or wineSl ow-d r o pped fr om Misery¶s cr u shing presses, --

 If sing ing breath or echoing chor d  T o every hidd en pang  were  g iven ,

What end less mel od ies were poured   As sad as earth, as sweet as heaven!

In her garage she kept stacks of magazines, bundled and tied with twine. And the yoke

that held the oxen driven across the prairie by William Perry Holmes and Granny µLiza. That

too she preserved. She spirited it away from Uncle Sherman¶s shed²a block away, under cover 

of darkness, while Uncle Sherman and Aunt Stella were out of town. She claimed it belonged

³more to Jonas¶ line than it did Sherman¶s clan.´ So holding to the legal doctrine which says

that ³possession is nine tenths of the law,´ she wrapped the purloined yoke in brown butcher 

 paper and used it as a shelf until it was discovered some years later by a cousin who got the story

straight from her. The story of the yoke is worth far more than the old termite-riddled yoke. But

the yoke remains in the family as a singular icon of the pioneer spirit, representative of the

fortitude and brave hearts of those men and women who participated in the settling of the West.

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As further proof of Vesta¶s acquisitiveness, we found in the old chicken coop²long

since out of service²several old steamer trunks filled with family memorabilia. One held Uncle

Bill's greatcoat from the war and his uniform jacket, size 36R, too small for him at the time, his

kit box and straight edge razors, along with an engraved certificate, suitable for framing, signed

 by then President Woodrow Wilson regretting the fact of his death. And of course, these letters.

Would that Aunt Vesta could have known that her penchant for preserving the past would

finally manifest itself in this book. In a special way, this is the love-child that she never bore.

In the summer of 1915, my grandparents had a family portrait made. It was cloudless and

warm that day « the kind of day where the women of Langdon would make a pitcher of iced tea

or lemonade and sit on the front porch when the chores were done, fanning themselves and

gossiping. But Josie had other ideas. After scolding the men into slicking down their hair and

 picking off countless pieces of real and imagined lint from their clothes, they were all marched

out in front of the long-suffering photographer. Then, looking disdainfully at my father¶s

abundant face full of freckles that had been made ever more prominent by the summer sun, she

 pivoted and retrieved from the kitchen a bowl full of white flour and a powder puff which she

used to lighten his complexion and hide the offensive freckles. After that it took her a few more

minutes to get everyone to quiet down, and like the farm wife she most assuredly was, to chase

her fractious brood into some semblance of dignity. A moment later the photographer tripped

the shutter release. Only my grandfather seems to be smiling for the photographer. The older 

siblings in the back row posed straight-faced so as not to be moving when the shutter clicked.

Standing next to his papa, Badger seems to fail in stifling a smirk. Speck is ashen, his ghostly

demeanor belying his true nature. Josie seems determined, satisfied. In the photograph Bill¶s

dark hair and eyes accentuate his demeanor. Lean and muscular, slightly brooding, he appears

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much like one of the silent film stars of the period. Aunt Vesta¶s hair was lighter; it hung in

wisps and fly-away curls from the tie in the back.

An envelope among the letters that Aunt Vesta saved holds a single lock of hair, a

chestnut brown curl tied by a narrow baby-blue satin ribbon. The label reads, ³PFC Wm. G.

Holmes.´ In 1922 my grandparents had Bill¶s body disinterred in France and shipped back to the

United States, thence home, to be buried in Langdon. My grandfather had the coffin opened

 before he reburied his son. Just to be sure. An army sergeant stood by at parade rest, discretely

glancing away as Grandpa Jonas looked down at his boy of fleet foot and ready laugh. He stared

down at the body for some time. After a while, he reached out and patted his son¶s folded hands,

then closed the lid.

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Bill must have saved the love letters Kit sent to him during the summer of 1916, given

the numbers that survived despite her insistence that he burn them. The following year, 1917,

they married. The rest of the letters he wrote to his mother and Vesta and others from the time of 

his enlistment in the Signal Corps in January of 1918, until his death 11 months later. Vesta

saved them all. These letters²along with family photographs and other memorabilia, and

 perhaps most important, the oral history I learned from being the late-life child of my parents,

growing up surrounded by cousins old enough to be my parents themselves²were the primary

sources used to reconstruct the stories of the persons mentioned in this book.

Josie lived with whatever responsibility she felt for Bill¶s death, after causing him to

 break his engagement to Rosa Kelley. She probably never regretted the fact that he had not

married the Catholic, though her determination contributed to decisions Bill made later with

 baseball and booze, the Holland woman and ultimately, the army and France. One thing led to

another. He never extricated himself from his mother¶s influence.

Life is a page of paper white,

Whereon each one of us may write

His word or two and then comes night.

A pebble in the streamlet scant,

Has turned the course of many a river;

A dewdrop on the infant plant,

May warp the giant oak forever. 

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With the proceeds from Bill¶s government life insurance, my grandparents bought the

gasoline service station at the main intersection in Langdon. My grandfather operated it for 

nearly 20 years, until he was no longer able to work. He still owned the property when he died.

The balance of the life insurance money²$2000²went to Maxine. As the widow of a veteran,

Kathryn Holland Holmes collected a modest monthly stipend for the rest of her life. The couple

never divorced. But after his death, contact with the Holmes family was almost entirely cut off.

As an adult, Maxine's only connection with the family was through letters she received regularly

from Aunt Vesta.

Josie died in 1938, a few days shy of her Golden Wedding Anniversary, for which the

entire family had planned a celebration. Throughout her later years she kept a diary in which she

recorded the daily bustles of living in a small Kansas town, during the Depression and the Dust

Bowl years. The little house in Langdon had a screened-in porch which in those years was

further secured from the elements with a layer of netted Visqueen plastic. Josie used to relax in a

wicker chaise lounge absorbing the warmth on sunny winter afternoons through the plasti-shield

windows of the screened in porch. She read the Hutchinson News Herald and the impossibly

kind words of Bill¶s friend, Charlie Hopkins, in a letter he wrote to her before Mothers¶ Day in

1919, a portion of which contained these sentiments:

I have always said that meeting my friend Bill, here on earth, was likened unto atrip to a cool refreshing spring on a sultry summer¶s day and, my friends, as sure as I amwriting this letter I am that confident that I¶ll have a meeting with my friend Bill again: Inthat House not made with hands, Eternal in the Heavens, and to this end I shall alwayslabor.

In the next few days µtwill be Mothers¶ Day. God bless those dear loved oneswho supported us: all soul and body to win that Great War. Yes, these dear old Mothersare the ones who deserve the praise and all the glory the world affords. They are the oneswho taught us boys that right was right, µtwas worth fighting for and µtwas worth dyingfor. I am a poor writer and possibly it might read strange in some places, but I am

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chair across the room, smashing it against the wall. She was angry that Josie was ³doing´ for 

herself when Vesta was supposed to be taking care of her.

Two years before her death, Vesta had a will drawn up naming her two surviving

 brothers, Kelmet and Ferrell, the sole beneficiaries of her small estate. She wrote to her nephew,

Glenn, my brother, after the will had been written, in a panic about its location.

 Langdon -- 2-21-1979

 Dear Glenn:Where is my will? Y ou showed me and left a BLANK f orm and envel o pe.

There is not a name on it-- I surely want the will and Last Testament as si gned -- in my l ock boxat the

T ur on State Bank which contain s other thing  s o f val ue--among  them some E   Bond  s more than thirty years ol d --also abstract t o my little uncouth hou se.

Of course, I k now I woul d  not have a will without having had your help.There were so man y si gnat ures need ed and I said   go ahead . I was in pretty d eep

waters with respon sibilities culminating  in the stated paper. Seems everybod  y in t own was smiling  that I was  g etting an important paper filled  out--Man y don¶t 

have one, and yet k now all about why it¶s need ed . Or so they say-- Maybe I¶m not thinking ri g ht some way. But I do have a very appr oved place f or papers and  ,

thing  s. But, please, thank you , I want my will in my bank l ockbox , where it will be

when my st u ff need  s t o be checked  out. I can k now where it is and  who and  what it says. All t og ether.

With l ove and best wishes -- Aunt Vesta

 I¶m wond ering  what ne xt will keep me fr om doing thing  s I¶ve be gun and  un finished . 

Eventually Vesta could no longer live alone. The family moved her into a nursing home

in Kingman, which she despised. But in her own words, she had become ³forgettery.´ She

could neither remember which medications she had taken from hour to hour, nor walk 

unassisted.

Several years ago the Langdon Christian Church, which had long since closed its doors,

was burned to the ground by the Volunteer Fire Department of Arlington, for practice. And the

last time I was in Langdon I drove by the old home place, where my grandparents had lived and

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died. Where Aunt Vesta lived until her final move to the Pennock Rest Home. A man I did not

know was taking the house apart, board by board, apparently intending to sell off the old lumber 

for scrap. The walls were transparent between the upright studs while I watched, the roof gone.

As I stood by, idly watching the man at his work, dismantling the house that day, the house that

had once birthed and then buried members of the Biblically fruitful Holmes clan, I was overtaken

 by a wave of emotion that flowed through me. I grieved as the roof flew off like the wings of 

some great bird. By the end of the day, only the floors remained intact. As I turned away it

occurred to me that if I listened closely, I could imagine Badger and Speck laughing over some

 boyish prank. And in my mind²who¶s to say I didn¶t²I distinctly heard their laughter as

though from far, far away.

Vesta¶s memory failed her such that a year before her death, she started keeping a

disjointed diary on scrap paper to help her remember mundane events. The papers were

scattered through her dresser drawers; we found them after she was gone. This one cited below,

written apparently at bedtime, was never dated. Who did she write it to? And whom did she

expect to visit her in the night? These questions can never be answered, perhaps these ramblings

only represent a soul struggling against dementia, but maybe, given the proximity to her passing,

she courted Death that night.

 I¶ve let myself  g et behind  in writing  t o an yone. But there¶s not much u se trying  ,

 f or letters won¶t  go out till M ond ay and there is ho pef ully a chance you mi g ht come-- I¶m sure I¶ll be surprised if you come, there is a  good cafe on the r oad  

east o f Main u p on the hill beyond  the st ore --IGA, I believe. I rid e in others¶ cars so don¶t pay attention. And you k now I¶ve liked t o d rive everywhere. I¶m sleepy

 sudd enly

 N ot remembering  who peo ple are and feel embarrassed   , terribly. K now faces and  not t o put a name t o it, or them. And all the time ho ping I won¶t have t o ask 

 pertinent question s -- or even speak. K nowing the face well but not the name. N ow eyes heavy--

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 And in my sleep I¶ve d estr o yed lists. This is act ually the case. Fannie doesn¶t 

k now and  woul dn¶t believe if I t ol d her. S o I do not.

 I don¶t want t o  go t o sleep now but will. And I want so much t o listen t o the ni g ht happening  s--

At any rate, she died in 1981, three days after Speck¶s funeral. These twin events

 provided the impetus for the last and most attended family reunion the children and

grandchildren of Jonas and Josie would ever know. Afterwards, it fell to my family to clean out

the old family home and get it ready to sell, since geographically, we were the closest.

In a box we found a slip of typing paper, neatly cut to the size of a 3 x 5 index card. On it

Vesta had copied an epitaph from some unknown source. Or perhaps, she composed it for 

herself.

 Here lie the bones o f Vesta Verr.

 I n her life she had  no terr ors!!!She lived and  d ied an ol d maid --

 N o hits, no r un s, no err ors!

It is fitting, in a strange way, that the epitaph refers to baseball, one of her brother Bill¶s

great passions. Given their closeness, it is possible that in a fit of pluck he had given it to her as

a joke. If so, it was hauntingly close to the truth.

And we found an old postcard with a picture of a World War I doughboy on the front.

On the back in Aunt Vesta's unmistakable handwriting was this simple caption:

" T ommy Smith, Vesta'  s friend ."  

He never returned to work the family farm after serving in the infantry in France.

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Rosa lived with her parents in Langdon for several more years after the end of the Great

War. Margaret and Frank Kelley separated sometime before he died in 1920. He is buried at the

EastsideCemetery in Hutchinson. Margaret died three years later and lies apart from the rest of 

her family in an unmarked grave at the FairlawnCemetery. After their father¶s death, the girls

moved to Hutchinson and lived together until Agnes married a sign painter named Delmer Davis

and she moved out to set up housekeeping with her husband. Theresa and Rosa continued on as

roommates. Theresa never worked outside the little house they shared. Rosa got her job back at

Pegues-Wright, owing to the sympathy of the store manager, O. W. Wright. She worked there

until she died.

A helpful librarian in Hutchinson gave

me directions to the cemetery and a gentle-

spirited sexton helped me find Rosa¶s grave

the summer before I finished writing this

 book. The sexton handed me a map and a

copy of her obituary.

Rose Mary KelleyRose Mary Kelley, 54, 412½ North

Walnut, died at 8:55 a.m. Friday in St.Elizabeth¶s Hospital. She had been ill for six years.

Miss Kelley was born in FrankfortKans., Nov. 17, 1892, and moved to Hutchinson in1923 from Langdon, where she had livedmost of her life. She was employed by

Pegues-Wright Dry Goods Company. MissKelley was a member of St. Teresa¶sCatholic Church.

Survivors are two brothers, Tom Kelley,503 East 15th, and Jim Kelley, 721 EastFourth; and two sisters, Mrs. Agnes Davis,406½North Main, and Theresa Kelley, of the home. She was preceded in death by her 

 parents and her younger brother, Frank.

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  THOSE THAT NEVER SING Verl Holmes, (719) 635-0262 

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She rests in the family plot at Eastside with her father, her brother Jim and sisters Theresa

and Agnes and her brother-in-law. At dawn, the shadow cast by the Kansas State Industrial

Reformatory covers the Kelley family plot, which lies but a hundred yards or so to the west of its

menacing walls.

So I walked the cemetery grounds holding the map that the sexton had pressed into my

hand, peering around at the time-worn markers. Soon I found the one I was looking for. It was a

simple granite slab like so many others around it, but what the nameless stone-cutter had carved

on its surface was elegant in its simplicity.

At my feet, not far below the mantle of earth, my uncle¶s one true love lay in death, alone

as she had been in life. My grandparents¶ oldest son and their only daughter died alone. Aunt

Vesta never married. Marriage was too hard on a woman. Uncle Bill did not marry the woman

he loved, though he fathered a child and married her mother.

So here ends the Holmes family saga. But in truth, it has not ended at all, for we all of us

are joined together in a single, beautiful dance; in it we whirl faster and faster.

And, O «

 Alas f or tho se that never sing  , But d ie with all their mu sic in them! 

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Disclaimer

THOSE THAT NEVER SING is a work of creative nonfiction, a biographical novel. The author 

had the good fortune to grow to adulthood on a farm in Kansas surrounded by various and

sundry litters of extended families. Later he became the grateful beneficiary of letters that his

aunt saved for years in shoeboxes and bureau drawers as described in the work that follows.

Some of the names in this work are those of real people who may have had similar, and

different experiences from those related in the story. Where some truth ends, other truths begin.

Based on the archives and family lore passed on by elders, the author constructed a chronicle that

shows how good people make decisions that impact others in sometimes unintentional,

unfortunate ways. This is not necessarily a factual narrative about people long dead. The

letters²from Kitty Holland to Bill Holmes and Bill to his family, along with what little

genealogical documentation that could be had²contain the facts of the story.

A good friend and editor put it this way. ³A novelist ought to be a great detective of 

 personality as well as a mathematician; that is, he ought to plumb the depths of the human heart

and soul with a sense of probability. You may be right about the blending of facts with the

 book¶s perception of reality. In the end it doesn¶t really matter. Only the story matters, for weare all stories, if we are anything.´

Similarities to real people and events are coincidental and unintentional other than those

supported by actual documentation as seen throughout the story.

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RenoCountyKansas, c. 1900

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