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Atlantic, Iowa
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Published in Whale Road Review
1
On April 14, 1890, the First Assistant Postmaster General in Washington D.C. approves “the application of a post office” in a rural location called “Trulls.” The name is a possessive, belonging to the home of Mr. James R. Trull, buried deep in the woods of North Carolina. Trull has completed the Post Office Request, measuring the distances to the nearest rivers, cities, and routes, drawing a map and signing on the line, but where he proposes the name “Cold Mountain,” the 1st Asst. PMG strikes it through. “If we cannot get the above proposed name,” Mr. Trull has scrawled at the bottom of the paper, “we will suggest Gerly. Pless. Ivester. Cruso.” The Asst. Postmaster makes a choice. As recorded in 1941: “CRUSO, 2,900 alt., 15* pop.; Haywood Co.; est. 1885; named by the first postmaster, who had just read Robinson Crusoe.” “Haywood County is not ashamed of this little place in the least,” ‘Poor Dick’ writes in The Mountaineer-Courier in 1923, “the almost forgotten little place that makes everybody think of the difficulties of Robinson Crusoe.”
2
As winter begins to gather in the West, and the Donner Party to gather around the Humboldt River, preparing for a final, desperate exertion against the snow, a lone Paiute joins their depleted wagon train. Remembering the story of Robinson Crusoe and his man, “Friday,” the weary emigrants give him the name of the day. ‘Thursday’ helps them set camp, rescuing their wagons from a grass fire that evening, but in the morning the group rises to learn he has stolen off with a yoke of their oxen. “Had 2 oxen taken by 2 Indians that Cam with us all day,” James Reed writes in his journal. The cattle are a trouble something like his name: one more errant detail in the grave miscalculation that will turn the group to legend, as the snow deepens on Donner Pass, and the nation prepares for them a place among its historical dead. The date was not Thursday, October 1st, but September 29th: a Tuesday.
3
“Xury, if you will be faithful to me, I’ll make you a great man, but if you will not stroak your face to be true to me, that is, swear by Mahomet and his father’s beard, I must throw you into the sea too.” In such manner Robinson Crusoe warns the Moorish child with whom he is enslaved among pirates on his second expedition. Of his name, “Xury,” there is no precedent in the English record. Perhaps it is a variant spelling of “Khoury,” borrowed from the Levantine Christians, or perhaps it is an exoticism original to Defoe’s imagination. Regardless, it washes up on foreign shores. In Wisconsin, a “Xury Williams” marks his cattle with “a square crop off the right ear.” In Ohio, a “Xury Gingery” lives a “clean, wholesome, upright” life. In 1796, a child is born in Greenville, South Carolina, and named “Xury West.” When the boy comes of age, he follows the compass of his surname to southeastern Iowa, where, like a memory, he plats a town named Greenville. To his hearth flock the emigrant wagons of the Mormon Trace, “with their white canvas, drawn in a circle around the cabin and the horses picking the prairie grasses.” As his name drifts, as on a westering tide, his son, “Xury A. West,” dies on the border in the Mexican-American War. His nephew, “Xury E. West,” will die by his own hand in Indiana. “Committed suicide yesterday at his home in New Winchester by hanging. Three months since he made the attempt by taking poison,” the Indiana State Sentinel reports. “His mind was unbalanced on account of financial embarrassment.”
1
Obsessed, bewildered
By the shipwreck
Of the singular,
George Oppen wrote.