Roger Mitchell

All around us forgotten knowledge stirs. My father almost never mentioned his, whom I discovered died of typhus in the great epidemic of 1918, a man who was mentioned only as he who died of cirrhosis of the liver, who wanted to be like his father, a doctor, who wouldn’t allow it. Too hard a life in the days of horses and buggies. Calls for help at any hour. Dead at forty and later buried where his father was the following year. Who may have given his son the disease that killed him, working to save a few of the tens of thousands bringing death back from France. Then died of it himself.

Or of grief at having killed his son’s wish, and then his son, the man whose jacket hangs in my closet, a white flannel sport coat, “1901” blazoned across it in red, who it was said became an engineer, and someone his son rarely mentioned. In the last census he answered he called himself a salesman. Of what

he didn’t say, perhaps wasn’t asked. Last fall, on a visit from my cousin,

she told me years ago her mother, his daughter, told her she heard, at eight, quarantined with him, his last choked breaths, heard the rattle, when the mouth can’t swallow its own saliva.

That would have been enough for me never to mention, never to want to, had I been there. As, for some reason, I want to imagine my father was. How full silence must be, that so little is remembered.