You can listen to some of Nancy Duncan's stories from her CDs HERE
This 117 page PDF tells the story of Harry and Nancy's Marriage and early years in West Branch. It has letters between them and excepts from Nancy's diary.
Some of Nancy's stories
GETTYSBURG by Nancy Duncan
Craig Dorsey told me that he and his father had always been friends. Craig was an only child, and grew up in Hanover, PA. - in the very same house where he was born. His father was the high school history teacher; his mother taught social studies. As long as Craig can remember, his father would zing him with a quote from history. He’d say something like, “OK, Craig, who said this and where did he say it – “My country is the world. My religion is to do good”? He wouldn’t tell Craig the answers; he’d leave it up to Craig to do the research and make the discoveries on his own. Craig knew his father was trying to turn him into a history nut, but Craig’s dream was someday to be CEO of a major corporation.
Craig’s mother died of cancer when he was a junior in high school, and he and his father became even closer. Craig won a fellowship to the U. of PA at Harrisburg, and the summer before he left for college, he and his Dad spent three whole months rebuilding an ancient Volvo, restoring it to its original pristine nature.
Three years later, Craig was in a management class, just about to take a pop quiz the day before Thanksgiving break, when the head of the department stuck his head into the room and gestured Craig into the hall. “Craig,” he said, “we’ve just had a call from the park. When your father didn’t show up for work this morning, one of his friends went over to check on him. Your Dad died in his sleep last night. Now, you go on, you can catch up on everything later. If there’s anything we can do to help, let us know.”
Immediately one of his Dad’s quotations popped into his mind. He knew who’d said it: Patrick Henry in a letter to Thomas Jefferson. It was “You and I ought not to die before we have explained ourselves to each other.” The first thing Craig remembered after that was standing in front of his closet, sifting through his clothes, trying to find something, a suit, he could possibly wear to a funeral. He threw everything he thought he’d need into a suitcase and began the drive down Hwy. 15 to Gettysburg. He hadn’t even reached the first rest stop when he realized he couldn’t see the highway through his tears; he pulled to the side of the road. He was remembering the last conversation he’d had with his father a week ago. Over the past six months, whenever they’d talk, his father’s voice had an excited lilt to it, and Craig had asked, “Dad, Dad, what’s going on? Let me guess. You’ve met someone. You’re in love, right?”
His father laughed, “Speak for yourself, son. How’s Amanda?” And so, of course, Craig had to bring his Dad up to date with all his news about Amanda – the love of his life. When he’d heard all he was going to hear, his father said, “Well, son, I have actually met someone, well, in a way met someone, but it isn’t anything romantic. I’ve stumbled into some kind of a mystery and…. well, this might be something we’ll have to figure out together.” When Craig had pressed him for details, he’s said, “Maybe over Thanksgiving break – we can work on this puzzle I’m, I’m fiddling with. I’d really like your help on it.”
Craig sat there in his car. Why hadn’t he gone home last weekend? There wasn’t a single reason he couldn’t have. He’d spent all his free time with Amanda; there wasn’t any reason he couldn’t have taken her to Gettysburg with him. He got back on the highway, and pulled off again just north of York Springs, but by the time he reached Gettysburg he was pretty well cried out.
He headed straight towards his Dad’s small, two-room apartment on the second floor of the Dobbin House Tavern. The owner stopped him just as he was about to climb the stairs. “Craig, take all the time you need, two weeks, two months. I’m in no hurry to rent that apartment. Your Dad was a good friend. I never met anyone as hot for history! Did ya’ know this tavern did duty as a hospital during the Civil War? And the floorboards in this room are Pennsylvania Long Pine and those trees were extinct in…oh, son, I’m sorry. You go on, we can talk about all this another time.”
When Craig opened the door of his father’s apartment, the afternoon sun had just broken through the west windows and shot a shaft of light across the bed, spotlighting a pile of books on the bedside table. Each of the books had blue paper bookmarks sticking out of their pages, and the paper looked hand torn. Craig sat down on his father’s bed and picked up the top one. It was A Brief History of Company E, 18th Georgia Infantry, Confederate State of America. He opened the book to the marker and noticed a lightly penciled question mark in front of the name Joseph Ballard, Gordon County, GA. Prisoner of War, July 3, 1863. Gettysburg. He flipped through the book but there were no other marks or references to Joseph Ballard.
The second book was a Volvo repair manual, and the marker opened to a page on…mufflers, with no penciled notations. But written on the blue paper itself was this message, in his father’s handwriting: “Craig – Joe McIntosh. Waynesboro.” There was a phone number.
The third book was Civil War regalia. The first half was Union Army; the last half Confederate. The marker opened the book to two pages of photographs of belt buckles, all with that definitive CSA. There were no pencil marks. Written on the bookmark was this question, “Am I seeing what I’m seeing because I want to see it, or because I need to see it?”
“Damn it, Dad, why couldn’t you have waited for me? This mystery is too deep. I’m never going to be able to solve it by myself.” He went over to the National Park and met his father’s co-workers. After his mother’s death, his Dad had retired early from teaching to take up his life-long dream, interpreter at the Gettysburg National Park. He had needled his son, too, when Craig declared himself a business major. “Oh, business, hmmm, I didn’t realize that was a course of study. I thought it was just something you did. Here’s a quote for you, Craig, see if you can figure out who said this, ‘If A is success in life, then A = x+y+z, and x = work, y = play, and z = keep your mouth shut.’ OK, who said it?”
Craig found out; it was Albert Einstein. He’d done his research because he thought the quote might be useful to him in his journey to CEO. Craig had helped his Dad pack up the family home and move into this two-room apartment in the Dobbin House Tavern. He’d also helped build the bookshelves for the hundreds of volumes his Dad had been collecting.
His Dad’s best friend at the Park, the one who had found him in his apartment, put his arms around Craig’s shoulders and said, “You know, Craig, I found your Dad lying n his right side, his right hand on his left shoulder, knees bent, left arm along his thigh. He died in his sleep, son. He was never in any pain.” Craig recognized that posture – it was how his Dad slept. And so did he. He also realized how much everyone at the park admired and loved his Dad.
He spent the rest of the day calling his family and friends, making arrangements for the funeral on Saturday. Because it was Thanksgiving vacation, quite a few people weren’t able to come. On Thursday morning he called Joe McIntosh in Waynesboro. The call rang twice and was then forwarded to Joe’s home. Joe turned out to be an auto mechanic specializing in foreign cars. He invited Craig over for dinner, but Craig declined. Then Joe said, “Your Dad told me about that Volvo – it’s going to need quite a bit of work to get it ready for fine tuning. Why not bring it over tomorrow, Friday, and we’ll get all the wrinkles out of it.”
Craig protested, “But I didn’t have an appointment, you didn’t know that I….” Joe interrupted: “There’s nothing in the world I’d like to do better than spend the day with you, lad. I feel as though I know you from all the tales your father’s told me. “ And so Craig spent all of Friday under the hood or beneath his Volvo, with Joe. During the afternoon, Craig asked, “You know my father was puzzling over some kind of a mystery he was trying to solve. Did he happen to mention it to you?”
“Aye, he did,” said Joe. “He talked about it quite often, and he was intent to locate information on this young GA infantryman, I think his name was…Ballard, or something.”
“Joseph Ballard?”
“Aye, Joseph Ballard. He didn’t tell me why he was searching for him, of course, but he was hot on the trail of something, that’s for sure.”
Craig crawled into his father’s bed that night, exhausted, with a backache, but he also felt a strange undercurrent of anticipation. Somehow he felt as though he was closer to knowing what his father had been talking about. He fell asleep, and awoke in moonlight. The moon was full and it’s light mimicked the sun two days before, slanted across the bed in a bright spotlight, with sharp edges. He lay there, watching the dust motes dance in the moonlight, but suddenly felt the hairs on the back of his neck and on his arms stand up. He had a very strong feeling there was someone in the room with him. He couldn’t see beyond the light, so he turned his head to the right and stared at the books on the shelves, still in darkness. He stared until he could begin to make out the titles of some of the books and then turned his head back into the light, looking beyond it. And then he saw him. A young man standing right next to the bed, just beyond the moonlight. He couldn’t have been more than 17 or 18. He was so close to the bed that Craig could see moisture in his gray blue eyes, could see a two or three day’s stubble of whiskers, and could smell the stench of old sweat that rose from him. He was wearing an undershirt, filthy with blood and dirt, and his trousers, which might once have been light blue, were also so covered with dirt and blood that Craig was unable to make out their color. They were held up by a belt with its familiar buckle, CSA. Craig was about to sit up when he noticed the man was holding something pressed to his right thigh. “A knife!” he thought, but immediately the soldier raised his right hand, and pressing both hands together, gathered his strength to shove a bayonet into and through Craig’s chest. The blade went entirely through him, but Craig didn’t feel it. What he felt was the force of the young man’s hatred. It happened so fast, but Craig sat up and yelled as the soldier turned away, looking back over his right shoulder with an ironic smile of satisfaction. He took one step toward the door and disappeared.
Craig leapt out of bed. He searched the apartment, but, of course, there was no one there. The door was locked, from the inside. He grabbed the book of Civil War regalia, and flipped through the pages till he found the bayonets. He scanned them all until he found what he thought he had seen in the soldier’s hands – a socket bayonet from an Enfield rifle.
When his heart stopped pounding, he lay down in his father’s bed, exhilarated. Now he knew what the mystery was. His father had seen this same ghost. His father thought he knew who the ghost was. He wondered how many times had his father seen the ghost. Often, he suspected, because of the quote: “Am I seeing what I’m seeing because I want to see it, or because I need to see it?” But was the ghost really Joseph Ballard, and if so, how did his father know? And, perhaps, even more important, who had been lying in that bed when Joseph Ballard had lowered his bayonet?
Early on Saturday Craig went back to the park and spent the rest of the morning sorting his father’s papers, separating his private research from his work. And as he searched, he was frustrated, because he couldn’t find anything about Joseph Ballard. He spent the rest of Saturday and most of Sunday with his family and friends at the funeral, He didn’t tell them anything about the ghost and the puzzle because he realized they all had their own stories and he needed to hear them. Sunday night, after everyone had left, he found himself sorting through his father’s books, looking for more slips of blue paper…and then he found it. A full sheet, 8 ½ X 11, blue, folded into a book about…Albert Einstein! On the paper his father had written: Mary Chesnut, responding to a letter from her friend Augusta Ballard, Gordon County, GA, 1864, says, “Oh, my darling, Augusta, how may I ease your grief? The loss of sweet Joseph. We shall never know what horror precipitated his action, but be assured. For your lovely son to have raised a weapon against a friend that night in hospital, a much worse crime was then revenged. Would that I could hold you in my arms.”
Over the next two weeks, Craig selected all the books on the Civil War and stored them away in boxes in the trunk of his car. Amanda came down from Harrisburg and helped him pack the other personal effects. Together, they shipped them off to family and friends.
Three days after he got back to Penn, he found himself standing in front of the secretary in the department of History. “Could you tell me, please, just exactly what do I have to do to change my major?”
“To History, I presume,” she said, and handed him a form. “Fill that out and talk to one of the advisors.” Craig sat down at the desk and filled in the form. As he handed it back to her, the door opened and a young professor entered the office. The secretary gleefully said, “Well, you’re in luck. Here’s the best of the lot. Dr. Gillespie, this will interest you.” And with that, she passed Craig’s form to the professor. He took it and scanned it. He smiled. “Dorsey? Dorsey? You wouldn’t, by any chance, be related to George Dorsey? Hanover High School? Best teacher I ever had!”
“Me, too.” said Craig. “He was my Dad.” It took Craig another full year to complete his requirements for a BA in History, but he graduated with honors. He went on to an MA and a Ph. D. He’s now a Professor of History at a small liberal arts college in Pennsylvania.
We’ve talked occasionally through the years and I always ask him the same questions: “Craig, was it really Joseph Ballard? Do you know the name of the person lying in the bed?” He always laughs. “No, Nancy, I’ve never found
anything more than Mary Chesnut’s letter – there’s no report that I can find of what happened in the hospital that night.”
“Have you ever seen him again, the ghost?”
“No,” he said, “I haven’t. I think he belongs to the Dobbin House Tavern. I'd have to be there to see him again. But, you know, Nancy, I think that if I do see him, the next morning, Mandy will find me lying on my right side, my right hand across my left shoulder, knees bent, my left hand along my thigh, and…. she will tell all my friends that I died, peacefully, in my sleep.”
(Completed with the coaching of Doug Lipman and Nebraska StoryArts workshop members, and the listening and questioning assistance of the drama class at Nebraska City High School during a week at the Kimmel-Harding-Nelson Center for the Arts, Nebraska City, NE, February 14, 2002.)
The Clearing of Uncle Leon
My first two memories come before the age of three. The first one is walking through large pair of heavily carved doors. I knew it was a hospital because of the smell. We walked up the marble steps to the waiting room, with its leather and chrome furniture.
The nurses floated by on their white padded shoes with agel wings in their hair. There were bells and whistles, but mostly it was quiet.
We were here to visit my grandmother who -- all I knew -- was dying. I had been warned that I had to be extra quiet because we were going to break the law. I, at the age of almost three, was going to visit my dying grandmother, which was against the law. If caught, perhaps, one of those monstrous hospital machines would be used on me.
But mostly, it was the horrific idea that my parents and I would be breaking a rule. Quietly I was snuck into my grandmother’s room, where I stood, and I assume I said absolutely nothing. And I assume my grandmother would have asked “How are you?” and I assume I would have answered “ok”.
I don’t remember anything else of that visit, except that we didn’t get caught.
My second memory happened about three days later, when my mother through my father, put her foot down. It was announced that she could no longer take care of three children and spend every night at the hospital watching my grandmother. So this evening it was decided that Uncle Leon would spend this evening with my grandmother.
We would have supper, probably some form of hot dish, and I remember him turning to me and saying “See you next summer when the grass is green.” That was our secret little goodbye message. It was our little code. Basically it said “I love you tons and tons.”
The next morning, Uncle Leon was dead.
My next memory is from kindergarten, but more important, is the non-memory of Uncle Leon’s death. Something was terribly, terribly wrong, and I didn’t know what it was. I always thought perhaps he had made a deal with God, that he had traded his life for my Grandma’s. Which seemed at the age of five, or six, or seven, to be totally unfair. To trade our wonderful relationship for his mother’s life.
But then I decided later on that God didn’t make such deals. My Grandmother died when I was thirteen, and it didn’t clear up anything. Something was still terribly, terribly wrong about Uncle Leon’s death.
As I grew older, I learned things about Uncle Leon’s death from my sisters. He had been talking to my Grandmother about dying, and how neither one of them was afraid of it. And then, he had had a heart attack. It was the third child my Grandmother lost, the first two before the age of two weeks. The worst thing was that he fell off the chair and my grandmother could not reach the call button. She had to lie in bed and listen to him die.
Perhaps the most crushing however, was the idea that he was loved by everyone, and he, in return, loved everyone else. He was the star of the family.
So I wasn’t the only one with a special code phrase, and I was not the only one who loved him passionately. And yet, there was still something terribly, terribly wrong about his dying, and I carried it with me.
One weekend, shortly after we were married, my parents came down for a visit. My wife and Dad were off running some errand, the buy some little widget, for something that my father felt desperately needed to be repaired, that we hadn’t even noticed.
My mother had baked her special cinnamon rolls. We were sitting by our chrome and glass dining room table, which I thought was very elegant. My mother however, secretly though it was a major annoyance. Crumbs, grease, fingerprints, would all show up on the glass. And she kept a large roll of paper towels and Windex close by the table.
I liked the fact that, being an introvert, I could sit and eat and watch my food and watch my shoes at the same time.
Sometimes, special gifts arrive quickly and out of the clear blue sky, like when somebody calls you and says “We have a child for you.” My mother, between half-licked bites of cinnamon rolls, looked up at me and said “I have only one regret in raising you.”
Well, such topics were never discussed in our family, so I proceeded slowly. “Really, what would that be?”
“When Uncle Leon died, I didn’t have you come to the funeral -- you stayed with the O’Briens. And from that day on you were a very different person. I took you to his grave site and explained that his body had been buried, but he was in heaven. Which seemed to help a little bit. “
My mother looked at me. She was a different person.
I looked at my empty plate, and my shoes, and the rug. I cleared up the dirty dishes and took them to the kitchen.
My mother grabbed the roll of paper towels, baptized the glass table top with Windex, and scrubbed and cleaned until the glass was crystal clear.
Nancy was renowned for both photographing and collecting roadkill This is a poem she wrote about it:
ROAD KILL RABBIT
I bought it on Hwy 20, just west of Natrona, WY, a little before sunset.
A pickup truck, red, WY license.
It took me a moment to realize what had happened and to realign my wits to the mess I was in.
I eyed the crows; they eyed me.
I imagined pieces of myself excreted into the Wind Rivers or the Owls;
I imagined my ears and paws drying there on the pavement
into paperthin wafers of what once was rabbit – what once was my unconscious – my body.
And then she came along in her Nissan Stanza, stood next to me, thinking.
She and I are alike.
Quick as a hare she leapt, grabbing me by one foot and dragging me down into the ditch,
Where no one could see what she was doing, snipping off my ears & paws & tail,
Where no one would see and call her “witch.”
The crows, coyote, beetles and sun have claimed what she left.
My heart is buried in this doll & I leap again in your eyes.
Keep me with you.
May you be so lucky when the day goes dark.
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