All Ye Need to Know
[The Susquehanna Democrat, Wilkesbarre, Pennsylvania,
8 October, 1819. List of unclaimed letters
at the Post Office, one addressed to Walter Munson.]
John Eton Jones—himself a foster-child
of silence and slow time—as time went on,
surmounted incredulity and all
the turmoil and resentment he had felt
at realizing he’d been lost, then found.
He learned that Wil had sold the Trucksville farm
to Walter Munson, so he wrote to ask
his brother for Wil’s forwarding address.
Walter claimed the letter, sent it on
to Wil who, overcome with joy, replied.
[The Democratic Pioneer, Upper Sandusky, Ohio,
February 2, 1849. List of unclaimed letters
at the Post Office, one addressed to Wilmot Munson.]
As time went on, John Eton Jones and Wil,
though never having met again, kept up
infrequent correspondence. Wil had left
Chenango for Ohio when his wife,
Patience Cooper Munson, passed away.
John Eton Jones, now seventy years old,
in an instinctive moment of nostalgia,
had signed this latest letter as Benoni;
but Wil had died in eighteen-forty-five.
The unclaimed letter was at length returned.
There’s only so much one can know for sure
in an attempt to trace the dear unknown.
Uncertainty and ambiguity
must either be rejected or embraced,
leaving room for mystery and truths
more beautiful for having been imagined.
Those unclaimed letters did, in fact, exist.
But were they written by John Eton Jones?
And was it true the last one held a swatch
of white and sky-blue linsey-woolsey cloth?
THUS ENDS
ANNALS OF THE DEAR UNKNOWN
MAPS. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS, AND A SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY WILL FOLLOW IN THE UPCOMING DAYS
The chapter titled All Ye Need to Know refers to a line in “Ode on a Grecian Urn” by John Keats.
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