Dear Miss Holmes,
I hope the enclosed information will be helpful to you. It took me some time and a trip to our city hall, but I did find records of a Canady family near Olathe, although there are no living members here today.
There were two men born in Olathe named Harold Canady. The first was born on February 13, 1892. He was married on May 1, 1912, to Greta Burns, also born in Olathe in 1892. Their first child, Susan Canady, was born on July 15, 1913, but died in 1929 at the age of 15 (no mention of cause of death). Harold Canady was a minister at the Second Presbyterian Church here. He died in Olathe in 1968, and his wife Greta died in 1974, also in Olathe.
Their second child, Harold Canady, Jr., was born on January 2, 1918. I could find no death record for him in Olathe.
However—and this is purely anecdotal—I mentioned the interesting task you’ve given me to a colleague here at the library, and she knew the Canady family. In fact, she went to the church where Harold Canady, Sr., used to preach. And she told me that after attending college, Harold Jr. went on to work for the Civil Service in Washington, D.C., and wasn’t seen nor heard from again—that is, until the town received word of his death. She believes it was a car accident. This would have been sometime between 1947 and 1952, she thinks. It was just after the war, anyway. You might do well to look in the Washington Times Herald or the Post.
She remembers this, my colleague here, because she recalls Reverend Canady praying about it at church. Terrible thing to lose two children.
I hope this is helpful. Please let me know if I can be of further assistance.
Sincerely,
Fred Coburn
Olathe Public Library
1920s–1930s
Kansas
“What’s wrong, Susan?” said Harold Canady, trying to be brave, though truly he didn’t want to know. He was ten years old. He was standing in a sort of shed, a hastily constructed little room with the sharp shadowy smell of rust. He was shivering: it was early March, and very cold. The year was 1929.
His sister, Susan Canady, was crying. She was wearing her winter coat, which this year was too small for her. She was sitting on the dirt floor and leaning against a wall, despite the splinters she was sure to pick up from the rough unfinished wood. Her head was on her arms, which were folded over her knees. And she was weeping: Harold had heard her from outside. That’s how he’d known to come in. This shed was where they came, the two of them, to sort things out, and sometimes to avoid their father. Susan was his favorite person: she was five years older than he was, raucously funny when she wanted to be, pretty in a round unstartling way. She had only two dresses (her father thought that more would encourage vanity) but she took very good care of them, sewed well, arranged her hair in flattering mysterious styles.
“Tell me what’s wrong,” said Harold again. He was on shaky territory. He tried to guess. Not their father: there had been no incident with him, not that Harold knew about. He would have heard it. Their house was small, and he was always in it (something Susan sometimes pointed out when she was feeling unkind—“Go outside, Harold, for once in your life,” she instructed him).
It was something with a boy, then, he guessed. There had been several recently, hanging around: he had seen Susan with them at school and once on the main road, too. But when he proposed this—“Is it a boy?” he asked, embarrassed—Susan only shook her head violently, overtaken by her own sobs, drowning in them.
It was not quite like seeing an adult cry—not quite—but it was almost as bad. For as long as he could remember, Susan had seemed untouchable, wise, well versed in everything Harold wished to know. She was, generally, composed, wry, knowing. She laughed loudly, her mouth open. She rarely cried. She protected him when it was important. She was popular at school and made him—if not liked—then tolerated, adopted as a sort of odd mascot. She rolled her eyes impeccably; she gestured with her hands in a way that fascinated Harold, who tried to imitate her until, one day, his father slapped his hands, told him he looked like a girl when he did that.
Harold looked around the shed. There were six empty cans of whitewash on a high-up shelf. There were twelve bags of Diamond chicken feed below them. There were twenty-four small wooden posts, the start of a set of chairs, on the floor. The pattern distracted him.
“I’m going to have a baby,” said Susan.
He didn’t understand.
“I’m expecting,” said Susan. She still had her head against her arms. Her voice was muffled. “Don’t you know what expecting is?”
Harold bristled, as he did whenever he felt his intelligence was underestimated. Of course he knew what expecting meant. What he didn’t know, exactly, was how a person got a baby inside her. But he knew that it was not a thing that should happen to a girl of fifteen, an unmarried girl. He had heard whispers about other girls it had happened to in the past: the youngest parents of his friends, for example. People who got married at Susan’s age.
“Aren’t you going to say anything?” Susan asked, finally looking up. Her face was frightening: red and wretched, wet with tears. Her hair was matted into a sort of single mass, as if she had been sweating—though it was cold enough in the dim shed to make Harold shiver.
“Have you told Daddy?” said Harold.
“I’ll never tell him,” said Susan, so quickly and viciously that Harold flinched. “He’ll kill me. Do you understand? He’ll actually kill me. You can’t tell him, either.”
Their mother did not enter the conversation. She did what their father said. She rarely made eye contact with either of them: out of shame, Harold thought sometimes, for being unable to protect her children. She had turned off some switch inside herself long before Harold was born. He wondered sometimes what she had been like as a child.
“Promise,” said Susan, wild-eyed.
“I promise,” said Harold.
“Swear it,” said Susan.
“I swear it,” said Harold.
He wanted to ask her what she was going to do, but he had pressed his luck enough, he decided. He felt a vague sense of awe that Susan had told him as much as she had.
The next day was Sunday, and on Sundays they spent the whole day in church. Susan looked woozy and faint. Harold studied her: Was she bigger? Was her stomach bigger? He couldn’t say. She had never been a small girl, and if she looked rounder now it wasn’t enough to draw attention.