Walter the Butcher

My great grandfather Walter survived smallpox. When he registered for the draft during World War I the physician noted the scars and found them pronounced enough to distinguish him. He listed them on the draft registration card.

The fingerprints in his VA file, though, don't include any explanation. "What did HE do for a living?" my husband asked when I showed him the prints from Walter's right hand with an empty circle drawn where the tip of his middle finger should have been. 

"Oh duh!" was the brightest thing I could say. "He was a butcher."

My great grandfather's paper trail fills a yawning void in oral history. "My grandfather," Mom told me, "came from Lithuania on a pickle boat." That and the name Ladislas Liegus (or was it Leigus?) constituted the sum total of what I knew about Granny's father. I decided to dig deeper.

The unlabeled photos in the furnace closet intrigued me. Mom said the man in the army uniform holding the cigarette was her mother's father. He had been in World War I and was buried at Arlington Cemetery -- beneath his estranged wife.

My mother worked in suburban Virginia, next to a corner of Arlington Cemetery's vast expanse. She had worked there the better part of twenty years when I asked if she'd take me to Arlington Cemetery to see if we could find her grandparents' grave. I didn't even begin to comprehend the scale of that place, yet I pictured us wandering for hours scanning row upon row of white stones. Instead we went to the office and asked. We asked for Ladislaus Liegus. The only Liegus in the records was a Walter. Mom had never heard anyone call him that and wondered if it was the same person, but I had seen the name as I rolled through microfilms at the Family History Library in Salt Lake and at the National Archives in Washington, D.C. We drove toward the spot on the map then walked. The memorials of my mother's fallen peers, killed in Vietnam, drew her somber attention.  We walked until we reached the low stone wall.

We had a great view of the backside of Mom's office at the Bureau of Naval Personnel because we stood close enough to hit it with a rock. Mom worked all those years closer to her grandparents than to her parking place.