That old-time religion.

My grandfather was not an intellectual, but he liked to read. He was not a writer, but he liked to put things down. Though he died almost sixty years ago, he still speaks to me through the notebooks he left behind. They are like letters from a close relative in a distant land.

On Saturday, November 18, 1889, he sat in his one-room log schoolhouse in Hardin County, Kentucky, where planks served as desks while the blackboard was made of "old roughly dressed lumber," and wrote the words I read now: "Owing to unfavorable weather, have only attendance of three pupils. First snow of the season fell at about half-past eleven o' clock."

His full enrollment was fourteen-seven girls and seven boys--ranging in age from seven to eighteen. Their names are in his notebooks, together with samples of their penmanship. He was especially proud of seven-year-old Bertha Fowler who wrote in a large, firm hand: "The man has a hat. Bertha is my name."

His notebooks also register the frustrations of a teacher in those rural hills. A few years later he wrote at the beginning of a term: "There are but few persons in the district which take any interest at all in school affairs. A majority of the pupils can neither read nor write, while a large percent have never been at school. Indifference, indigent circumstances, and sickness all together are the reason for such a small enrollment at this time."

As his family grew, grandfather left teaching in 1895 and moved to Louisville where he took a job cleaning coaches for the Southern Railway. "Worked three months without missing a day," he tells me, " and was discharged by John Shelton, foreman, because of my Catholicity, Shelton being a member of the American Protective Association." This despite the fact that in all respects except for the "p," grandfather met the traditional requirements of a WASP.

He went on from cleaning coaches to selling encyclopedias, working in a shoe factory, keeping books for a general store, and repairing railroad cars. He then turned to carpentry and home building and finally became the proprietor of a small lumber company. Though economics drove him into the world of business, there was a part of him that remained in the schoolhouse. I can remember as a small child sitting on his lap in his old Morris chair, turning the pages of his unabridged Webster's and sounding out the words that went with the illustrations.

He was, I think, a kind of grassroots humanist, a man who combined his Catholicism with his interests in making things, reading, writing things down, raising a family, and actively following politics, although he never ran for office. His house was not distinguished by a gallery of religious pictures or statuary. His brand of Catholicism was better symbolized by the thick Douay Bible in the living room and the Fourth Degree Knights of Columbus sword in the bedroom. His notebooks attest to a militant pride in his faith in an environment that was predominately Protestant fundamentalist.

Let a Catholic student win a spelling or oratorial contest and the clipping was pasted in his book. He clipped an item that claimed parochial schools had saved the nation $290 million in 1931. "It makes no difference what the subject is," he wrote, "the Catholic boys and girls are always in the lead."

He was outraged by those who questioned the Americanism of Catholics. "With 41 percent of the navy and 35 percent of the army of the United States being of the Catholic belief," he wrote, "and 25 million Catholics loyal to their God and country, defending the Constitution and laws of their country, how can anyone accuse them of disloyalty?"

He collected items noting that eleven of the thirty presidents of the United States up to that time had been sworn in by Catholics, that the city of Washington had been laid out by a Catholic, and that a Catholic architect designed both the White House and the Capitol building.

Such concerns no doubt strike many Catholics today as provincial, but they are indicative of the defensive posture of Catholics in a time and place where they were still trying to prove they were good Americans. My parochial school history text made much of the fact that "the father of the American navy," one of Washington's leading generals, and a signer of the Declaration of Independence were all Catholics. Perhaps because of that I have never had a quarrel with the presentation of black history.

In 1928 the question of Catholic loyalties became a bitter issue with the nomination of Governor Alfred E. Smith as the Democratic presidential candidate. Grandfather's notebooks leave no doubt about his partisanship in the fray, beginning with his triumphant recording of Smith's first-ballot nomination in Houston. He refuted the attacks on Smith's affiliation with Tammany Hall. "If Smith is elected," he wrote, "this country is in no more danger from Tammany than it will be from any of the various Republican machines throughout the country."

Religious bigotry played a major part in the 1928 campaign in Kentucky, as it did in other parts of the South. It is not surprising that he wrote a short essay on "Prejudice," dated November 4, 1928. "The greatest example of prejudice is found on the religious question and particularly between Catholics and Protestants," he observed. "This is so general that it is a menace to the freedom of the country. It is almost unbelievable how great this prejudice is."

After the 1928 election, grandfather consoled himself by noting that Herbert Hoover, Calvin Coolidge, and Warren Harding were the only three presidential candidates in history to win more votes than Smith received in 1928.

Four years later he was amused by echoes from Hoover's losing campaign against Franklin D. Roosevelt: "Mr. Hoover said many things, such as times might have been much worse. Also, if I am not elected grass will grow in the streets. And if it had not been for me the U.S. would have given up the gold standard in two weeks.'"

After Roosevelt's election grandfather backed the New Deal. In his notebooks is the text of a speech he gave to a Holy Name Society hailing FDR's National Recovery Act as "the greatest law for the relief of unemployment and distress that has ever been passed in the United States." Grandfather urged his audience to patronize businesses that displayed the Blue Eagle, the NRA's symbol, but warned of dishonest use of the emblem. "The Blue Eagle will be displayed in many windows," he said, "where a black vulture lurks within the walls."

In that speech grandfather said people should buy American-made goods rather than cheap foreign products. He accused Japan of flooding the U.S. "with cheap, inferior electric lamp globes that sold for less than they could be made in this country, with the result that several American factories had to close, which threw many people out of work."

Grandfather died before Roosevelt completed his first term. His last notebook entry is dated November 1935, less than a month before his death. It was a prayer of thanksgiving "to a merciful God who has bestowed so many favors and blessings upon us."

When he filled his notebooks, did he realize he was writing to descendants like me to give us some idea of where we came from? Or was it simply a way to gather his thoughts in the midst of a busy life that had been diverted by economic necessity from the schoolhouse to the workaday world of the lumberyard?

In either case, I'm thankful that a common man of common sense took the time to build a bridge across the generations. Our lives are worlds apart, yet his past lives in my present, and his notes give me a better understanding of that part of me.

I only wish I could write back. I'd like to ask grandfather what he thinks of today's political scene where Catholics can vie for a presidential nomination without raising a religious storm. If an election ever came down to choosing between a Pat Buchanan and a Jerry Brown, which way would he vote?

Did he envision a day when Catholics can feel so remote from job discrimination that some can attack a civil rights law as a "quota bill"? Or a day when other Catholics look upon abortion as the only defining political issue? I'd like to tell him: "Well, grandfather, we don't have many one-room schools any more, and we have herds of school buses, but there are still lots of kids, as well as adults, who can't write as well as Bertha Fowler.

"And the gold standard has been gone for a long time but no one seems to miss it. Our former president said things like read my lips.' In your day I guess that was something said only to the bearing-impaired. As for the Japanese, no one today calls their products inferior."

I can see him shaking his head when I tell him that nowadays most ordinary people I know, people like lumber dealers, think talking or writing about politics is something better left to the professionals.

Kit Thompson

For Jean MacDonald, b. 1910

Genealogy: they have word for the science of searching backwards for ourselves. I mark annotations with ruler and pencil lines lines capillaries spider loose across the page. Between generations, I water the plants. The leaves curl in, like tongues, darkened. I never see them fall, sweep them, later, palm into palm and dream past the window-grate: A house is being razed. The family gone, the views is hollow: painted squares to black have sucked away a year of sun. I think of falling leaves, here and there, mothers and sons, cousins and daughters, a few from the outer branches. The lines converge and disappear, unprofessional stains appear: wayward ashes ancestors blown like heather from the lowlands and moors to root again clasping their own distances as far from me as the haunt of their keenings.