unabashed.4
I began to understand his two passions, that for his profession and that for his wife, Caro, as twin vows. David introduced me to the idea of a second marriage while married to the same person—an insurance policy for the safekeeping of a marriage covenant.
I did not share my fantasies with Kenneth, for his scientific mind would have thrown the light of reason upon my emotional response to his heritage. Having had to face practical and critical issues all his life, Kenneth sensibly outlined steps for the restoration of the Laboratory.5
“The damn roof leaks, and every room needs replastering and fresh paint. Auntie’s invasive memorabilia need some weeding out. Not that we’ll begin right now.”
“Oh, of course not now,” I replied. “Only don’t forget your plans for a new fossil fish!”
There had not been even a suggestion of a breeze during our tour, but suddenly a wind began to spin the fish westward, toward the route we would take across the Wabash to Texas. Of all my impressions of New Harmony and its imperatives, the parting image of the bruised but indestructible fish remains vivid, a symbol of the continuing challenge ahead.
The restored fossil fish. Photograph by Darryl D. Jones, 2009.
This particular fish, high above a circular tower, is an apt emblem for New Harmony’s two utopian experiments. The pious Harmonists would have valued it for its importance to the early Christian church, for the five initial letters of each word in the Greek phrase “Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior” form the acronym ICHTHUS, meaning “fish.” The Owenites would have seen in the fish identified by Charles-Alexandre Lesueur an appropriate symbol of their belief in the redemption of the world through scientific discovery and education. Was the wind that spun the fish telling us that, back to back, science and religion could together accomplish the unrealized hopes of Harmonists and Owenites?
The Laboratory in its present condition was unsuitable for overnight lodging, so we stayed the night at the McCurdy Hotel in Evansville, returning the next day for our farewells to Auntie. We didn’t linger this time because Kenneth had planned our journey to Texas to include a visit to his cousin Natalie Wilson of Wilson, Arkansas. He wished for me to meet a few Owen descendants who were wealthy, urbane, and industrious. But rich or poor, well- or ill-educated, atheist or devout, most of them were kind and generous beyond their means: givers, not takers. Of the hundreds of Owen descendants I have met, some were very creative, none were mentally deficient, and only two, alas, were mean. Not a bad average.
My first visit to New Harmony ended with humor and a new acquaintance I made at the tollgate of the bridge that would launch us across the Wabash on our long drive to Houston (see area map). Horace, the bridge’s defender, and Kenneth had received their early schooling in New Harmony and were delighted to see one another.
“By the way, Horace,” Kenneth asked, “does anyone swim in the river these days, as we used to?”
Horace kept us waiting for a moment of reflection, while my husband looked anxiously in my direction.
“No, not no more, Kenny. Since the gravel diggers caused suction holes, it just ain’t safe for swimming. But come to think of it, there was a lady in there yesterday afternoon. Sure was a lady because she undressed behind that bluff over there, and I couldn’t see a thing.”
Kenneth gave me a sly wink, for the day before I had begged him for a baptismal dunking in that turgid, silt-heavy stream; he had grudgingly consented and followed me into its waters.
The Wabash was no ordinary baptismal font but a river fraught with history. Willows still line both banks, vigorous descendants of those the Indians used for their baskets. La Salle might have grasped the topmost branches of cottonwoods and sycamores when the river’s current swept his canoe too swiftly four centuries ago.6 A devout Roman Catholic, La Salle would have rejoiced that French apostles of religious education followed in the wake of his canoe a century and a half later. Mother Theodore Guerin traveled past New Harmony and up the Wabash to Terre Haute in 1840 to found the Sisters of Providence of Saint Mary-of-the-Woods. Two years later, six brothers of the Holy Cross took the same water route on the final stage of their journey to South Bend, where they laid the foundation for the University of Notre Dame. According to Carl Sandburg’s Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years, a young Abe ferried passengers from Illinois to New Harmony. And George Rogers Clark waded up to his shoulders along its swollen banks, keeping his musket dry and his ragged army poised to raise the siege of Vincennes. Lesueur swam in its summer waters and felt for Unios (freshwater mussels) and other shells with his feet. Men and women of courage and imagination had traveled that waterway long before the advent of Harmonists and Owenites and long before my own total immersion. Heroic men and women had become my touchstone, as Kenneth’s signet ring had been his at a crossroads of his life.
Fields of tall corn on either side of the highway fueled Kenneth’s plans. “Just look at that healthy corn, Jane. We’re going to grow our corn on the Indiana side of the river. Great-grandfather Richard was also a farmer and as precise about farming as he had been about geology.”
Kenneth’s blue eyes softened. “We once owned thousands of acres south of town. The highest part of it was called Indian Mound because prehistoric Indians had mounded their spent mussel shells. I intend to buy most of that land back and call on Purdue’s agricultural expertise to revitalize the soil. We’ll need to grow our own hay.”
“Do you mean to raise cattle?”
“Yes, of course there’ll be cattle. White-faced Herefords and golden Guernseys.”
I was warming to his dream.
“I’ll be a farmer’s wife and yell out the window when you come home, ‘Leave your muddy boots on the front porch!’ ”
The closer we came to Texas, the more our thoughts turned back to New Harmony. “Richard and his brother had a horse farm, as almost every landowner did in those days.” Kenneth’s voice quickened and his eyes sparkled. “Some of their horses competed in harness races around the county. I’ll show you the old fairground when we return (see area map on front endpaper). I haunted it as a boy with a savvy old horse trader called Truman.”
I sensed that Kenneth was adding Standardbred colts and fillies to his wish list and shuddered at the thought of a racing stable in our family and an absentee husband. Where would he be when the children we hoped to have needed us both? Off to the races! What would happen to the covenant we had formed with the derelict fish above the Laboratory’s tower? Perhaps his oil and gas interests in his Houston office and a young family would divert him from harness horses. Perhaps not.
Whatever the future might hold for us, there was more joy than fear in my heart as we headed southwest to the Gulf Coast. On the outskirts of Houston, however, we became bewildered by its size. The contours of this gung-ho metropolis had expanded during our three-month absence. Houstonians of vision and generosity were proving equal to their city’s physical growth and worthy of their inheritance from “wildcatter” ancestors, bold men before whom I still stand in awe. They birthed a giant industry that in the short course of forty years brought Houston into the pantheon of urban gods. Revenues from that industry would create a world-renowned medical center, universities, museums, theaters, parks, operas, a ballet, and a symphony. Inheritors of oil wealth also built places of worship and eventually the Jung Center to answer the spiritual and psychological needs of Houstonians.7
How could anyone of sound mind leave a city teeming with such energy and promise? How could I, a descendant