The Translator's Margins

Landfall

**28 July 1865. Golfo Nuevo.**

We are come to land.[1] The ship lay three days in the bay before the boats took us in, and on the third evening Ifan stood at the rail and said the shore looked like a slate somebody had wiped and not written on. It is true. There is the water, then a line of pale cliff, then nothing to the end of the eye.

I have kept my mother's ink dry in the oilskin and my pen whole.[2] This book was a gift from my mother on the quay at Liverpool, and I promised her a page for every week. I will owe her many weeks already.

The women are put in a cave in the cliff, and there are children asleep against my knees as I write. A man has made a fire of thorn bushes. It smokes and gives little.

Tomorrow they say we begin to make the place. I do not know yet what the place is.[3]

M. E.

---

**Translator's notes**

[1] *Daethom i dir.* "We have come to land" would be smoother, and an American reader would not stumble on it. I have kept the older shape because she wrote the older shape. Marged Ellis was nineteen when she wrote this, eight weeks married, and she had been taught to write by a schoolmistress in Bala who believed a sentence should stand up straight like a fence post. Her letters lean forward a little, all of them, as if she were walking into a headwind on the page. I want the English to lean the same way. So: *We are come to land.*

[2] Her mother's ink was almost certainly iron gall, the kind you mixed from a powder or bought in a stoppered bottle, and the kind that goes brown with time. On the first page it is still nearly black. By the middle of the book it is the color of strong tea, and on the later pages, where she was writing with whatever she could make or trade for, it fades in places to a rust that you can only read with the scan turned up bright. I mention this because the reader of an English translation sees only clean print. The reader of the diary sees a woman's ink running low over thirty-one years.

[3] A note about me, since my cousin Jenna asked that I put one somewhere, and the first margin seems like the honest place.

My name is Lowri Pugh. I was born in Gaiman, in the Chubut valley of Argentina, in 1980, a hundred and fifteen years after this page. I grew up speaking Welsh at my grandmother's table, Spanish at school and in the street, and English from cartoons and later from a teacher in Trelew who made us conjugate irregular verbs while she drank mate from a gourd the size of a grapefruit. I now work as a court interpreter, Spanish and English, in Utica, New York, where the Welsh came in the 1800s to farm the hills north of town and work in the mills along the canal, and where a Welsh newspaper was printed for about a hundred years. People here are surprised when I tell them I am Argentine and Welsh at once. In Gaiman nobody would be surprised. In Gaiman it would be stranger to be one thing.

In April, my cousin Jenna Ellis Tackett, who lives near Oak Hill in southern Ohio, wrote to say that her grandmother Delphine had finally let the family open the steamer trunk in the back bedroom. Under a folded quilt and a bundle of tax receipts from 1931 they found this book, bound in brown leather gone soft as a glove, with a brass clasp that had been mended with wire. Inside, page after page of a language nobody in the family has read in a hundred years. There is a reunion of the Ohio Ellises every July. Delphine will be eighty-nine in August. Jenna asked whether I could translate the book in time for the reunion, so that the family could hear it read aloud.

I said yes before I had seen a single page, which is a habit my grandmother has warned me about since I was six.

Jenna photographed the diary on her kitchen table one evening in May, page by page, with a cereal box propped behind it to keep the light even, and put the photographs up in the private space the family keeps online, where only the relatives who have been invited can see. Beside each image there is now a column where I type the Welsh exactly as Marged wrote it, misspellings and all, and another column beside that where the English goes. Three columns, side by side. When I scroll down, the photograph and the two transcriptions move together, and I can follow one of her lines across the screen into its Welsh letters and then into my English, the way you follow a road on a map with your finger. It is the closest I have come to watching a translation happen from outside my own head.

I should say what I know about the voyage, so the Ohio side of the family has the frame.

The *Mimosa* was a tea clipper, built for speed, not for families. She sailed from Liverpool at the end of May in 1865 with about a hundred and fifty-three people on board, most of them Welsh, many from the mining valleys of the south and some, like Marged and Ifan, from the north. They had been promised a valley with good soil and water. What they found, when they landed in the Golfo Nuevo at the end of July, was the Patagonian coast in winter: no trees, no fresh water close by, and a long walk overland to the river they had been told about. The winter there is real, but the cold is not the main thing. What astonished them, if you read the letters that survive, was the size of the empty land. People who had grown up in valleys where you could see the next farm from every window were set down on a coast where you could see forty miles and nothing on it.

Ifan's line about the slate: I laughed out loud when I read it, alone in my apartment on Genesee Street, at ten at night in May with the window open and someone's lawnmower still going two houses down. *Fel llechen wedi ei sychu.* Like a slate wiped dry. Ifan was a quarryman's son from near Blaenau, and of course that is what the empty shore looked like to him. A surface prepared for writing. I have been thinking about it ever since, because I think Marged took him at his word. She was given a blank coast and she wrote on it, one page a week when she could manage it, for most of her life.

The cave is real. The women and children of the first landing sheltered in caves cut into the soft cliffs near the beach while the men built rough huts. I have stood near them. As a girl I was taken on a school trip to Puerto Madryn, which is the town that grew up there, and we looked at the cliffs and ate empanadas from paper bags and I remember none of the history, only that a boy named Matías dropped his empanada in the sand and ate it anyway. I wish I had paid attention. I am trying to pay attention now.

The initials at the bottom are hers, and she signs nearly every entry with them, *M. E.*, two strokes of the pen apiece. Sometimes the E has a little flourish at the bottom, a tail, and sometimes it doesn't. I have started to notice that the tail appears when she is in good spirits and disappears when she isn't. That may be my imagination. I will keep watching.

I am writing these notes at the kitchen table, which is a table I bought at an estate sale in New Hartford from the daughter of a woman named Gwendolyn Roberts, who died at ninety-four. The daughter told me her mother had spoken Welsh until she was nine and then never again. She did not know any of it. She said this cheerfully, folding the tablecloth to give to me, as though she were telling me the table had a short leg. I have thought about that a great deal since, too.

When I first opened the scans I meant to translate quickly, in the evenings, finish by the end of June and email Jenna a clean file. It took me most of an hour to do the first page, which you have just read in about a minute. Part of the slowness is the handwriting. She makes her *u* and her *n* almost the same, and in Welsh that matters. Part of it is the spelling, which is older than mine and freer. And part of it is that every few words she uses an expression I know I have heard, at my grandmother's elbow, and can't quite place, and I find myself saying the phrase aloud to the empty kitchen to see if my mouth remembers it better than my head does.

That last thing is why I bought the ticket.

My grandmother, whom I call Nain as every grandchild in the valley does, is eighty-eight and lives in the same brick house in Gaiman where I was raised. She speaks the Welsh of the valley, which has drifted from the Welsh of Wales the way the accents of English drifted in Ohio, gently and in its own direction. She knows words Marged would have known that a modern dictionary has stopped carrying. When I called her in May and read her the first page over the phone, she was quiet for a moment and then said, "That's how my own nain talked." And then, after another pause, "You'll get it wrong if you do it there."

She meant in Utica. She meant without her.

So I have arranged to spend July in Gaiman, which is midwinter there and every day of the leave I have saved for two years here. My sister will meet me at the airport in Trelew. Jenna has said the reunion can include me on a video link from Nain's front room, and that if I can finish the translation by the third Saturday in July, her uncle Thurman will read some of it aloud under the shelter at the county park, where they eat and play horseshoes and someone always brings a cooler of sweet corn.

I said yes to that too.

One more thing about this page, and then I'll stop. Under the entry, in the lower corner, there is a small drawing in pen: a horizontal line, perfectly straight, ruled with the edge of something, and above it a smaller line that curves like a hill. Nothing else. I have looked at it many times. I think it is the horizon from the cave mouth, the flat line of the sea or the land, and the hump of the cliff on one side. Or I think she was testing her pen. I'm going to leave it in the translation as a little picture and not explain it, because she didn't.

Camwy

**14 September 1865. By the river.**

We have walked. Some went round by the boat and some on foot, and Ifan and I were with the walkers because he would not trust a boat again so soon.[1] Four days, with the water carried and measured out by the cup. The ground is gravel and low thorn and it goes on in one level plain like a table that has no end.

Then on the fourth day the land fell away under us and there was the valley, and in it a river the color of milky tea, turning on itself like a ribbon dropped.[2] Ifan said the Welsh name for it, Camwy, the crooked one, and I have not stopped saying it since.

We have a hut now of mud and willow, with a door of canvas. My mother's book is kept in the dry box under the bed.

The willows by the water are the only trees. I cut one slip and set it in the ground by the door. Ifan laughed. It is still standing.[3]

M. E.

---

**Translator's notes**

[1] The overland walk from the bay to the river is about forty miles, depending on where you start counting. Some of the settlers went by the small boat along the coast, and the rest walked across the plateau, which in Patagonia is called the meseta: a flat, high tableland of gravel, low gray shrubs, and enormous sky. Ifan's refusal to get back into a boat after eight weeks at sea is the first time he becomes a person to me, rather than a name in a list. I like him. I like that his wife laughed at him for it in a later entry and he let her.

[2] *Lliw te llaethog.* The color of milky tea. Anyone who has driven along the lower Chubut knows this is exact. The river carries silt down from the plateau and runs pale brown and opaque, so that you can never see the bottom, even in the shallows. As a child I believed there were enormous fish down there, because nothing that colored could be empty. My father told me there were trout, and there were, and later he told me that was a lie and there were only small fish, and then he laughed and said both were true. He was like that.

[3] I flew into Trelew on the second of July.

The airport is small and low, with the wind sock out on the field standing straight as a flag on a pole, and from the plane the whole of the lower valley lies open beneath you. You come in over the plateau, which is the same gray-brown it has always been, a surface so flat that the roads across it look ruled with a pen, and then the land steps down and there is the valley floor: a long green strip cut into rectangles by the lines of the poplars. From above, the poplars are the thing. They stand in rows along every field boundary and every ditch, planted close and straight to break the wind, so the valley looks like a page of graph paper someone has filled in with patient pencil. In winter the trees are bare, and the lines show even more clearly, gray strokes on the brown of the fields.

My sister Florencia was waiting with her car outside the terminal. She is three years younger than me and a dentist in Trelew, and she kissed me on both cheeks and said I looked American, which I have decided means tired. We drove the twenty minutes west to Gaiman on the road along the river with the heater going and a playlist of her favorite cumbia, and I watched the valley go by: chacras with brick farmhouses set back behind their poplars, a horse standing in a field of stubble, a pickup truck with a dog in the back, the lines of the irrigation ditches running parallel to the road and then turning off at right angles into the fields. *Chacra* is the word we use for the farm plots, all of them laid out long and narrow back from the river, so every family could have a piece of the water. I have been calling them that in my head all my life without thinking it might need explaining to anyone. Jenna wrote in the margin of the shared file, beside the column where I'd typed it, *what's a chacra?* That is the kind of thing a translation teaches you about yourself.

Gaiman comes up on a slight rise above the river, and the first thing you see is the brick chapels and then the tea houses with their gardens and their painted signs in Welsh and Spanish both. It is a small town, a few thousand people. In the summer the tourist buses come out from Puerto Madryn and Trelew and the tea houses fill up with people from Buenos Aires and Brazil who want scones and black cake and photographs of the dragon on the flags. In July the buses mostly don't come. The streets are quiet, the poplars along the river are bare, and you can smell wood smoke from the chimneys.

Nain was on her front step when we pulled up, in her blue cardigan with the brass buttons, with a cane she holds like an umbrella and hardly leans on. "*Croeso adre*," she said, which is welcome home. Then she said in Spanish, to Florencia, "She's thin," and to me in Welsh, "Did you bring the book," and I said no, the book is in Ohio, I have the pictures, and she made a noise in her throat that has meant *I see you have done this the hard way* for as long as I've known her.

Her front room has not changed. The wallpaper with the pale green trellis. The clock from Wales that loses four minutes a day and is set right every Sunday by whoever is in the house. The photograph of my grandfather Taid in his choir suit. The photograph of my father at twelve in a borrowed suit for his cousin's wedding, which always made him groan. The armchair by the window, with the crocheted cover on its back. And the stove, which is the warmest place in the house and where Nain has her chair and her radio and her basket of knitting and, since last year, a small microphone on a stand that Florencia set up for her, so that Nain can record herself talking whenever she remembers something. The recordings go up into the same family space as the diary scans, each one with a typed transcript under it, which Florencia does on Sundays while the clock is being reset. Nain has recorded forty-one so far. Most of them are about her mother and her aunts. Several of them are about the price of things in 1958. One is twenty minutes long and entirely about a dog.

I set my laptop up at the kitchen table that first evening, where I used to do my homework. Nain sat across from me with her glasses down her nose and I turned the screen so she could see Marged's handwriting enlarged.

She read the entry about the walk to the valley under her breath. Her lips moved. She did not need my transcript column; she read the slanted letters straight off the photograph, faster than I can. At *Camwy* she stopped and tapped the screen with one fingernail.

"Every one of them said that," she said. "My nain said it. Camwy. They called the river by the Welsh name until the day they died, and the children called it the Chubut at school, and at home it was Camwy again. Two names for one river. Like you."

I asked her what she meant by that, and she said I knew exactly what she meant, and went to put the kettle on.

So I'll leave that in the note, since it's true.

The willow slip by the door: I'm going to guess, because I can't prove it, that it is the first tree Marged ever planted, and that she planted it partly in defiance of her husband's laughing. The willows that grow wild along the lower Chubut are the native kind, which grow quickly from a cut branch stuck in wet ground. Everyone in the early colony would have known that trick soon enough, because those willows were all the wood there was for posts, for roofs, for the frames of the huts. The poplars came later. The poplars are the settlers' trees, brought or grown from cuttings and planted in their lines. But the willow is the river's own.

Tonight I asked Nain if she knew where the first Ellis hut had been. She said no, but that her friend Señora Davies, who is ninety and has never thrown away a single piece of paper, might. Florencia, without looking up from her phone, said there was already a pin for it on the family map. Then she had to explain to Nain what a pin was, and Nain had to explain to Florencia that she knew perfectly well what a pin was, she had been sewing since 1946.

The family map is a thing Florencia and Jenna built together over the winter, without consulting me, which I found out about only last month. It is a satellite picture of the lower valley, with little markers dropped onto it: the chapel where our great-great-grandparents were married, the cemetery in Gaiman, the lot on the main street where Nain was born, and a red pin, out east of town near Trelew, labeled in Jenna's capital letters: ELLIS CHACRA (approx.) — PER SEÑORA DAVIES, 2019. Under it is a photograph of a field of alfalfa stubble with a line of poplars behind it and a concrete ditch in front.

I looked at that photograph for a long time. Then I closed the laptop, because the clock from Wales had struck ten, which means it was really almost a quarter past, and Nain was standing in the doorway with her cane like an umbrella, looking at me as though I were nine.

Marged's willow is still standing, she wrote, so I have to assume it took root. There's no way to know whether any willow by any ditch in the valley now is its descendant. But there is a very old willow on the riverbank below the Ellis pin, in the background of Jenna's photograph, hanging low over the brown water. I've decided to go and look at it. I am not going to claim anything.

The Gray Horse

**2 June 1867.**

The flour is near gone. We eat what we have and count the sacks with our eyes when the men are not looking.[1]

Today the riders came down off the plain again, a family with their horses and dogs, and made their camp across the river where they camped last winter.[2] They brought meat and skins. We have bread, a little, and Ifan took two loaves and his good knife and came back with meat for a week. I cannot tell you how it smelled in the pot.

There is a woman among them who rides a gray horse and sits it better than any man in Bala sat anything. She came to the door of the hut with her daughter and looked at my willow, which is up to my waist, and at me. I gave the child a piece of crust with sugar on it. The woman said a word I wrote down as she said it.[3] I said *diolch*. We laughed at each other.

She knows more than I do about this country and I am not too proud to see it.

M. E.

---

**Translator's notes**

[1] The second and third years of the colony were very hard. Crops failed, the supply ships the settlers had been promised did not come when they should have, and the river flooded and then ran too low, in turns, so that what was planted either drowned or dried. People in the valley still talk about it as the thing that nearly ended the whole venture. Marged doesn't dramatize it. She says the flour is near gone and that the women count the sacks with their eyes, and then she goes on to the next sentence. I have learned already that this is how she is when things are worst. The worse it is, the shorter and plainer she gets.

[2] I want to go carefully here.

The people Marged calls *y marchogion*, the riders, were Tehuelche, the Indigenous people of the Patagonian plateau, who had lived on and traveled across this land for a very long time before any ship came into the Golfo Nuevo. The historical record of the colony is clear on one point that matters: in those first starving years, the settlers survived in large part because the Tehuelche traded with them. Meat, skins, and the knowledge of how to live on the plateau, in exchange for bread and other goods. In the valley this is told as a debt, and it is told that way in my family. I grew up hearing it.

I am not going to say more than Marged says. I do not know these people's own account of those years, and it is not mine to give. What I have is one Welsh woman's diary, written in a hut on the riverbank, describing her neighbors from the outside. Her outside view is all I can translate. The rest belongs to them.

[3] This is the first translation problem in the book that I have decided not to solve.

Marged wrote down the woman's word in Welsh spelling, the way it sounded to her ear, with Welsh letters. It is six letters long and has a double *l* in it, which in Welsh is a particular sound made with the tongue against the roof of the mouth and the air let out at the sides, and which I would bet anything was not the sound the woman actually made. It was the nearest sound Marged had.

I don't know what the word was. I don't know what language it was in, or what it meant, or whether Marged got even close. And I have decided not to print her spelling of it in the English. I have left a short gap in the line instead, marked off with brackets, and this note explaining the gap. Uncle Thurman will have to pause when he reads it aloud. I think a pause is the right thing.

Nain disagreed with me about this at first.

We were sitting at the kitchen table, the second morning I was home, with the gray light coming in and the gas heater ticking. She had her mate gourd, which she still drinks every morning though she says she prefers tea, and she read the line off the screen and said, "You've left something out."

I explained. She listened with her mouth pressed tight, the way she listens to the radio news.

"She wrote it down," Nain said, "because she wanted to keep it."

That stopped me, because it's true. Marged heard a word she didn't know, from a woman she admired, and she put it in the book. That's what you do with a word you want to keep. It's exactly what I am doing for her.

"I know," I said. "But if I print it, the family in Ohio will think it's a real word. They'll look it up. They'll put it on a T-shirt."

Nain looked at me over her glasses and asked me what a T-shirt had to do with it, and I had to tell her about Uncle Thurman.

Uncle Thurman is Delphine's eldest son. He is a retired high school chemistry teacher in Jackson, Ohio, and the family historian, and he is a kind, loud, enthusiastic man who has been tracing the Ellis line back through the census records and ship lists for twenty years, at a card table in his basement with a magnifying lamp. He has the whole Ohio tree going back to Tomos Ellis, who came up from Argentina in 1896 and worked at an iron furnace in Jackson County and married a Welsh girl from Oak Hill. And through Tomos he has the line going back to Marged and Ifan, on the *Mimosa*, 1865. It is the pride of his life. For this year's reunion he has had shirts printed, in royal blue with yellow letters: DESCENDANTS OF MARGED & IFAN ELLIS — CHUBUT 1865 — OHIO 1896. Jenna sent me a photo of the box of them on his porch. There are sixty.

Nain thought this was very funny. Then she stopped laughing and said, "Leave her word out, then. But keep the brackets. So they know there was something there."

So that is what I've done.

Later that morning Nain made bread, as she does every Friday, and which she let me help with as long as I didn't talk. I've watched her do it a thousand times. She works the dough on the floured board in long pushes away from her with the heel of her hand, folds it back, turns it a quarter, pushes again, so that if you could see the track of her hand it would be a set of parallel lines laid down over and over at right angles, like the strokes of a crossed letter. She has never weighed the flour in her life. When it was rising under a cloth by the stove, I asked her what two loaves would have been worth in the winter of 1867.

"Everything," she said. "And nothing, if there was no meat to go with it." She wiped her hands on her apron. "That's what a trade is, *cariad*. Two people who each have half a dinner."

I've put that in the margin too, because it seems to me the most exact thing anyone has said about this entry, and because she said it in the kitchen with flour to her elbows and would never in her life write it down.

I have one more thing to say about this entry, which is about the gray horse.

Marged's word is *llwyd*. In modern Welsh that's usually gray. But in older Welsh, and in the Welsh of this valley, *llwyd* can also be a sort of brownish-gray, the color of a field mouse or of dry winter grass, the color between colors. Nain says her own nain called the meseta itself *llwyd*. I asked Nain whether that was gray or brown, and she said, "*Llwyd*. It's *llwyd*," and looked at me as if I'd asked whether water was wet. I have kept "gray" in the English, because the reader needs a color, but I want it written somewhere that the horse was probably the color of the plateau. That the woman rode out of that flat brown-gray distance on a horse the same color as it, so that from far off you might not have seen the horse at all, only a figure moving very fast and straight across the land toward the river.

That's what I see when I read it. It's not in the diary. It's in the margin, where it belongs.

Later the same day Florencia drove me out east of town toward Trelew, to the red pin on the family map. We parked on the gravel shoulder by a concrete irrigation ditch, a straight channel about the width of a car, with a slow brown current in it and a thin skin of ice along the edges where the water was still. On the far side was the field from Jenna's photograph: alfalfa stubble, cut short and frosted at the tips, running back in a long narrow strip toward a farmhouse that has nothing to do with us. Along both edges of the field were the poplars, bare, perfectly spaced, a gray picket fence of trunks going back to the vanishing point.

Beyond the field, where the valley floor ends, the land rises abruptly to the meseta, and the top of it is a single flat line from one side of the sky to the other. Not a hill anywhere. The line was so level that I found myself turning my head to check whether I was holding it straight.

Marged would have looked at that line every day of her life. Every time she came out of her hut, there it was, the edge of the plain the riders came down from. I stood on the ditch bank with my hands in my coat pockets and my breath going white, and tried to imagine a gray horse appearing on that line, very small, and growing.

The old willow is there. It stands on the bank of the river beyond the far end of the field, where the ditch runs out, with its long bare switches hanging down to the water. The trunk is split in three and leans out over the current. Florencia took a picture of me standing next to it, because she said Jenna would want one, and she put it on the family map under the red pin with the caption *Lowri and the willow (not proven)*. I didn't ask her to write *not proven*. That's just my sister.

The woman's daughter got a crust with sugar on it, Marged says. I've translated that as plainly as I can, because I think it was not a small thing. Sugar in the starving winter of 1867 was close to the most precious thing in the hut. She gave it to a stranger's child. She doesn't say why, and she doesn't need to.

Willow Box

**11 October 1869.**

Mari was born on the eighth, in the morning, and she died in the night of the tenth.[1]

Ifan made the box himself from the willow by our door. He would not take any other. He cut it down to the stump and split it and planed it all the afternoon and did not speak.

We put her in the ground at the burying place on the rise, with the sea wind on it.[2] Mrs. Huws came and sat with me after and brought broth and did not try to say anything, and I will love her for that until I die.

The willow stump has put out green already. Ifan stood at the door this morning and looked at it a long time.[3]

M. E.

---

**Translator's notes**

[1] I have translated this entry four times.

The Welsh is very simple. *Ganwyd Mari ar yr wythfed, yn y bore, a bu farw yn y nos ar y degfed.* There is nothing in it that a second-year student couldn't put into English. The problem is not the words. The problem is that the sentence is written in her ordinary hand, at her ordinary slant, with the same pressure on the pen as the sentence about the flour, and I didn't know how to make English do that. My first version had a dash in it. My second had "our daughter" instead of her name, because I thought the reader in Ohio might not realize at first who Mari was. My third had "passed" instead of "died," which is what the lawyers say in the courthouse corridors, and which I hate.

The fourth one is the one above. It is the plainest. I took everything out that she didn't put in.

I want to note what the handwriting does, since the translation can't. The entry fills less than half a page. Below it the paper is empty to the bottom, and the next entry, on the facing page, is dated nearly five weeks later. That's the longest gap in the book so far. She had promised her mother a page a week.

[2] The early settlers buried their dead on high ground above the valley floor, out of reach of the floods. Several of those first burying places are known, and some are marked; the one Marged means is probably near where the town of Rawson stands now, close to the river mouth, but I can't be certain, and neither can Señora Davies, whom Nain telephoned about it last night and who talked for thirty-five minutes on the subject without arriving at a single fact. Nain listened to all of it with the receiver held a little away from her ear and said *ie, ie, ie* at intervals, which means yes, and at one point *wel wir*, which means well really, and then she hung up and said, "She doesn't know," and went to bed.

I do know where my father is buried, because I was there.

The cemetery in Gaiman is on the slope above the town, with a view down over the roofs and the line of the river and the poplars. It's laid out in rows on the hillside, with the old Welsh stones in their own section, gray slate and pale sandstone carved with names and dates and verses I won't copy here, leaning a little in the soft ground. The newer graves are below them. Some have photographs set into the stone. Some have plastic flowers in jars that have faded in the sun to pink and blue so pale they look like chalk. My father's grave is near the bottom row by the path, with a plain black stone that Nain chose and that says *Héctor Emrys Pugh* and two dates, and under the dates, in smaller letters, *Tad, mab, brawd*, which is father, son, brother.

He died in March of 2017, of a heart attack, in the garage of this house, fixing a bicycle for a neighbor's boy. He was fifty-nine. I was thirty-seven and already halfway through the certification exams for the New York courts, which he had helped me study for, because his English was better than mine. In August I left. I told everyone it was because the court in Utica wouldn't hold the post for me, and that was true. But I also left because I could not stand to be in a town where every street had him on it.

I've been back twice in nine years. Christmas, both times, in the summer heat, with tourists in all the tea houses.

In Utica, in my first autumn, I used to walk in Forest Hill Cemetery on the hill above the city, because it was the only place I'd found that was quiet and green and had a view. It's an old cemetery, a beautiful one, with winding lanes and big trees and stones going back to the early 1800s. One afternoon in October, with the maples gone red and gold all down the slope, I came around a bend and found a row of stones with Welsh on them. *Er cof am*, in loving memory. A Jones from Llanbrynmair. A Roberts from Bala. A child of four, with a short verse under her name that I could read and that the woman walking her dog past me could not. I stayed in that spot until she and the dog had gone round the bend. It was the first Welsh I'd seen written since I left home, and it was on gravestones in New York State, and it made me so homesick I went back to my apartment and called Florencia and talked about nothing for an hour. I didn't tell her about the stones. I didn't go back to that row. I think I was afraid of it.

On the third day home I walked up the hill to the cemetery on my own. It was a clear morning, sharp and bright, the sky that enormous pale blue you only get here, with no clouds at all over the meseta and the mountains of cloud piled up in the far east over the sea instead. I brought nothing, because I didn't know what to bring. Someone had been there recently: there was a jam jar with three dried hydrangea heads in it, gone the papery green-brown hydrangeas turn in winter. That would be Nain. She grows the hydrangeas by the back door. She has never told me she goes up.

I stood there for a while and then I did something I had not planned. I took out my phone and photographed the stone, straight on, the way Jenna photographed the diary pages, and I put the picture in the family space, on the page Florencia made for my father two years ago on his birthday, where people have been leaving notes. I hadn't looked at that page before. I'd known it was there and not opened it. There are twenty-three notes on it. One is from the boy whose bicycle it was, who is now a mechanic in Comodoro Rivadavia. One is from my high school English teacher with the mate gourd. One is from Delphine, in Ohio, who met my father only once, in 2015, at the hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of the landing, when she flew down with Thurman and stayed for a week. She wrote, *Your father carried my suitcase up three flights of stairs at the hotel in Trelew and would not let me tip him. Then he took me to see the river.*

I hadn't known that either. My father never mentioned it. He wasn't someone who told you the good things he'd done; you heard them later, from other people, at the bakery or the gas station, years afterwards.

I added the photograph to the page and wrote nothing under it. I'll write something later.

[3] Mrs. Huws: there were several Hughes families in the early colony, and *Huws* is the Welsh spelling. I can't tell which this is. It doesn't matter for the translation. What matters is that she sat with Marged and didn't try to say anything. I've kept Marged's phrase exactly: *ac ni cheisiodd ddweud dim*. And she did not try to say anything. You will notice that Marged doesn't say what she herself felt. She tells you what another woman did not say to her, and how much it meant, and you are left to measure the size of what she felt by that.

And the willow.

I have now read this entry many times and I keep returning to the stump. Ifan cut down the willow his wife planted on their first day in the valley, the one he'd laughed at, the one that was up to her waist two years before, and he made it into their daughter's coffin because he would not use anything else. And by the next week it had put out green shoots from the stump. Native willow does that. You can cut it to the ground and it comes back.

Ifan stood at the door and looked at it a long time, she says.

Nain has a recording about this, it turns out. Not about Marged; she didn't know this story before I read it to her. But she recorded something last year about the willows along the river when she was a girl, and when I read her this entry she asked Florencia to find it, and Florencia found it on the laptop in about thirty seconds, and the three of us sat at the kitchen table and listened to Nain's voice, a year younger, saying in Welsh:

*My father used to say you could never kill a willow. You could only make it start again. He said the old people used them for everything because there was nothing else, and they cut them and cut them and the willows just kept coming. He said that's why there are so many along the river now. They were all cut down once.*

Under the recording is Florencia's typed transcript, in Welsh, and under that her Spanish version, because Florencia's Welsh is not as good as she pretends. There was a spelling mistake in the Welsh transcript, and Nain pointed at it, and Florencia fixed it, and Nain said, "Now it's right," with great satisfaction, as though she had found a stitch dropped in someone else's knitting.

I asked Nain later, in the hall, whether she went up to the cemetery often.

"Wednesdays," she said. And then, "You can come on Wednesday if you want."

I said I would. Then I went back to the kitchen and read Ifan's line again, the last one in the entry, with its small number after it: *Ifan stood at the door this morning and looked at it a long time.*[3]

Letters from Bala

**3 March 1871.**

A letter from Mam at last, come by Buenos Aires. It was written in the November before last. Sixteen months on the way.[1]

She has written across and then crossed it the other way to save the paper, so it is a lattice and I have had to read it with my nose nearly on the page. Tada's leg is better. The chapel roof is mended. Mrs. Lloyd's cow has died. All of it news sixteen months old and I have read it six times.

At the bottom, small, in a round new hand, Gwenno has written: *Tell Marged I am taller than her now and that I can milk.*[2]

She was nine when I left. I will copy her line in here so I have it where I can find it.

I have watered the ink again. Ifan says he can hardly see what I write. I said that is the idea.[3]

M. E.

---

**Translator's notes**

[1] Letters between the colony and Wales in the early years went by whatever ship was going: from the valley up the coast to Buenos Aires, from Buenos Aires across to Liverpool, and then by post to wherever in Wales they were bound. A year or more each way was not unusual. Marged's mother wrote in November 1869, when, though she couldn't have known it, her first grandchild had been dead for a month. Marged doesn't mention this. I noticed it only because I put the two dates side by side.

I'm going to describe the letter, because the reader can't see it. Before envelopes and cheap paper, people who had a lot to say and one sheet to say it on would write a full page in the usual way, then turn the sheet a quarter turn and write across the lines they'd already written, at right angles. Marged's word for it is *croesi*, to cross. The result looks like a woven thing, a fabric of fine lines in two directions, and you read it by letting your eye follow one direction and ignoring the other, the way you can hear one voice in a crowded room if you want to. Marged didn't copy her mother's letter into the diary, only described it. The letter itself is gone. But I keep imagining it: a square of paper that had traveled from Bala to Liverpool to Buenos Aires to a mud hut by the Camwy, covered in a grid of handwriting so dense it was almost a solid color.

That night I tried it myself, on a sheet of Nain's blue notepaper from the drawer in the hall. I wrote a page to Florencia in the ordinary way, about nothing, about the bread and the clock, and then I turned the sheet and wrote across it. It's harder than it looks. Your pen wants to follow the lines already there. You have to hold your hand stiff and trust it. When I'd finished I held the page at arm's length and it was beautiful, a fine woven gray, and I couldn't read a word of it. Florencia, when I gave it to her the next day, read it in about two minutes, frowning, turning it back and forth, and then handed it back and said, "You spelled *ymenyn* wrong."

[2] This is the first appearance of Gwenno in the diary, and I need to stop and explain the family, because Jenna wrote three question marks in the margin beside the name and then, an hour later, *Wait, is this OUR Gwenno??*

It is.

Gwenllian Rowlands, always called Gwenno, was Marged's youngest sister. Marged was born Marged Rowlands in 1846; Gwenno was born in 1856. Gwenno came out to the colony herself some years later, married here, and eventually moved west with her husband to the foot of the Andes, to the valley the Welsh call Cwm Hyfryd, the pleasant valley, around the town that became Trevelin. She is my great-great-great-grandmother. Nain is her great-granddaughter, through Gwenno's eldest daughter and that daughter's daughter, and then I come down through Nain's son, my father.

So here is the shape of it, as the families have always understood it. Two sisters from Bala, Marged and Gwenno, both came to Chubut. Marged's son Tomos went north to Ohio in 1896, and the Ohio Ellises are his descendants. Gwenno's children stayed in Argentina, and the Pughs of Gaiman are hers. That makes Jenna and me cousins in the large, loose way that families who've been apart for a century and a half are cousins: we are both the great-great-great-granddaughters of a pair of Rowlands girls from a farm outside Bala. Not close, but real.

The connection was nearly lost. It survived because, in 1965, at the centenary of the landing, Nain was twenty-seven and helping to host the visitors from Wales and the United States, and one of the American visitors was a young woman from Ohio named Delphine Ellis Mapes, who had come with a Welsh society tour group and a photograph of her great-grandmother Marged. Nain saw the photograph on a table in the community hall and said, "That's Gwenno's sister." The two of them have written to each other ever since. Sixty-one years of letters. They have met in person twice.

Florencia and Jenna have now put all of this into a family tree in the shared space, and I opened it tonight for the first time. It's an enormous thing. It starts with a farmhouse near Bala at the top, with the Rowlands parents, and then branches downward, and partway down it splits: one long branch goes left, through Gwenno and her daughters and the Andes and back to Gaiman, ending in Florencia and me. The other long branch goes right, through Marged and Tomos and across to Ohio, and spreads out at the bottom into dozens of Ellises and Tacketts and Mapeses, with Thurman and Jenna and her children, Owen and Hazel. Each person has a little box, some with photographs. The boxes are joined by thin gray lines. Jenna has been adding people one family at a time, as each relative accepts the invitation, so the right-hand side of the tree has grown all spring, like a hedge.

I followed the lines with my finger on the screen from my own box up to Gwenno's and then across and down to Jenna's. It's a long way round.

[3] I've translated *Rwyf wedi dyfrio'r inc eto* as "I have watered the ink again," and I want to keep the joke at the end, though I'm not entirely sure it's a joke.

The ink in this entry is visibly paler than in the entries of 1869. It's still readable on the scan, but it's gone the color of weak coffee, and in a few places the strokes are so thin that the letters look drawn in pencil. She was making her mother's ink last, I think, by adding water to the bottle. Ifan complained that he couldn't read it. She said that's the idea. I've read it over and over trying to hear her voice. I think she was laughing at him. I also think, a little, that she meant it. She was writing for herself and for her mother, who would never see a word of it, and not for her husband to read over her shoulder.

There's a related fact I can't stop thinking about, which is that the faded ink is the reason it took me so long to read this page in Utica, and the reason Nain read it faster. Nain doesn't read the letters. She reads the shapes of the words, the way you recognize a friend from a block away by how she walks. She's been reading this kind of slanted, looping, old-school copybook hand all her life, in her own grandmother's recipe notes and letters. When the ink fades out, Nain's eye just goes on along the line, filling in. Mine stops and waits.

This afternoon I went to see Ezequiel Roberts at his mother's tea house, Tŷ Te Erw Fach, on the street above the river.

Eze and I were in school together from the age of five. He is tall now and going gray already at the temples and has flour on his forearms every time I see him, and he and his mother run the tea house in a long low brick building with a deep porch and a garden of rose bushes, cut back hard for the winter and wrapped in sacking. In summer they serve forty tables a day. In July they open only on weekends, for locals and the odd wandering backpacker, and so on a Tuesday afternoon he let me sit at the kitchen counter while he worked.

He was making bara brith, which is the speckled bread, a dark loaf full of dried fruit that's soaked overnight in tea. He was folding the fruit into the batter with a wooden spoon in long, even strokes, top to bottom and then across, and he was talking to me in the valley's mixture of Welsh and Spanish that we used as children, where you start a sentence in one and end it in the other and don't notice.

I told him about the crossed letter. He stopped folding and asked to see the scan, and I showed him, and he read Gwenno's line at the bottom and said, "*Bendita* Gwenno, she sounds like my sister." Then he went back to the bara brith.

I asked him whether he ever thought about leaving.

"I did leave," he said. "I went to Córdoba for four years. Studied architecture."

I'd forgotten that. Or I'd never known, because I left first.

"Why did you come back?"

He shrugged and scraped down the side of the bowl. "My mother was alone with this place. And I missed the way people talk." Then he looked at me and said, in Welsh, "You're talking differently, you know. You've got an American Welsh."

I asked him what that meant and he said I'd gone slow and careful, like someone walking on a frozen ditch. I didn't like that much. I think he's right.

He gave me a slice of yesterday's bara brith wrapped in a napkin, for Nain, and I walked home along the river path under the poplars, past the old railway tunnel, with the light going long and gold across the fields and the line of the meseta behind the town turning pink. I had Gwenno's line going round in my head. *Tell Marged I am taller than her now and that I can milk.*

She was thirteen when she wrote it. She'd been nine when her sister left, and four years later she wanted her to know two things: that she'd grown, and that she could do a useful job. I think every younger sister has written that letter. My own had texted me while I was walking, in exactly that spirit: *are you bringing bara brith or not.*

The Ditch

**20 May 1874.**

The men have finished the cut along our side as far as the Huws place. Today they opened it to the river and we all stood on the bank and watched the water come along it, brown and slow, feeling its way.[1]

I walked beside it the whole length, keeping pace. Six hundred and forty of my steps. When it reached the end it stood still a moment as if it were thinking, and then it went into the field.

Ifan says next year we will have wheat to sell. He says it every year. This year I think it may be true.[2]

I have been empty since the winter. I do not write it to complain. I write it because it is so, and this book is where I put what is so.[3]

M. E.

---

**Translator's notes**

[1] The valley lives by its ditches. I can't say that firmly enough to the Ohio side of the family, because Ohio is green without anyone's help and nobody there has to think about where the water comes from.

The lower Chubut gets very little rain. What made the colony possible, in the end, was irrigation: taking water from the river through channels cut across the valley floor and letting it out onto the fields. There is a story told in the valley, which may be true in its details or may have been polished by telling, that one of the settler women first noticed, in the dry years, that the land along the river grew green where the floodwater had soaked it, and said to her husband that they should bring the river to the wheat instead of waiting for the rain. Whoever said it first, by the 1870s and 1880s the families were digging channels together, by hand, with spades and wheelbarrows, mile after mile. Later the companies and cooperatives dug the big canals that still run the length of the valley now. What Marged is describing is earlier and smaller: a cut along the line of farms on one side, dug by the men of those farms, and opened on an autumn day with everybody watching.

*Teimlo ei ffordd.* Feeling its way. That's the water, coming along the new channel. I love that she gives it that much life.

Nain says that when she was a girl, every chacra along the ditches had its turn at the water, so many hours on a given day, and that the turns were written up in a book kept by the man in charge of that stretch, a list of names and hours ruled out in columns. When your family's turn came you opened your sluice and let the water in, and when it ended you shut it, even if it was three in the morning. Her father kept a lantern by the back door for it. She remembers lying in bed and hearing him go out in the dark, and the sound of the board sliding in the sluice, and then the water, a long whispering sound running away along the furrows between the rows. "Like someone reading under their breath," she said. She also remembers that the neighbors argued about the turns more than about anything else in the world, and that no one ever, in her hearing, missed one.

Her measure of the ditch is her own stride. Six hundred and forty steps. I've kept the number because she counted it. This morning I walked the concrete ditch along the Ellis pin, the one in Jenna's photograph, from the road to where it meets the river, and I counted mine. Six hundred and twelve. My steps are longer than hers would have been, and the modern ditch may not follow the old line at all. But the number was close enough that I stood at the end, by the split willow, and laughed, and a man on a tractor in the next field lifted his hand to me as he went past, because in the valley you lift your hand to anyone standing by a ditch.

[2] Ifan says next year they'll have wheat to sell, and he says it every year. I've translated that literally. I want to note that he was right, more or less. By the later 1870s and into the 1880s, the valley's wheat had become good enough that it was being shipped out and sold, and by the end of the 1880s some of it was winning prizes at international exhibitions. I'm not going to make too much of that. I just like knowing that Ifan's annual promise came true, in the end, and that his wife was the one who wrote down that this year she believed him.

[3] *Rydw i wedi bod yn wag ers y gaeaf.* I have been empty since the winter.

There was a second baby, it turns out. I missed it on my first read in Utica, because the entry for August of 1873 is mostly about a broken plow and a dispute with a neighbor over a strayed bullock, and in the middle of it, in two lines, she writes that a boy came too soon and did not breathe, and that they buried him by Mari. She doesn't give him a name. Then she goes back to the bullock.

Then this, nine months later: empty since the winter.

She writes it, she says, not to complain but because it is so, and this book is where she puts what is so. I think that's the most important sentence in the diary so far, and I've been turning it over all day. It's a kind of rule she's given herself. Not a prayer and not a complaint. A record of what is so.

I have taken that as my rule for these notes too. I've been trying to be careful, to not overstep, to keep my feelings in the margins and out of her lines. But a translator also puts what is. If I leave out the bullock, I lie. If I leave out the boy, I lie worse.

Jenna called on video this evening from her kitchen in Ohio.

It was six there and seven here and she was making dinner, with the laptop propped on the counter against the bread box, so I mostly saw the underside of her cabinets and occasionally her face, flushed, coming into view to say something and going out again to stir. Owen, who is nine, was doing homework at the table behind her, and Hazel, who is six, was on the floor with the dog. Through their window I could see the hills of southern Ohio, low and rounded and wooded, with the leaves out in full summer green and the evening sun coming slantwise through them. It looked to me like the inside of a green glass bottle. It looked like the opposite of here.

I'd sent her the translation of the ditch entry an hour before. She'd read it at a red light, she said, on the way home from her shift at the hospital in Jackson, and had cried at the light and had to be honked at.

"Two babies," she said. "Grandma Delphine never said anything about that."

"I don't think she knew," I said. "I don't think anybody knew. Tomos might not have."

Jenna came into view with a wooden spoon. "But then she had Tomos. Right? That's where we come from. After all that, she finally had him."

"Two years later," I said. "In 1876."

"Oh, thank goodness," said Jenna, and went back out of view. I could hear her telling Owen to put his math book away and set the table.

I didn't say anything else, and I have been thinking all evening about why.

Here is what I didn't tell her, because I haven't been certain of it and I'm still not.

After the ditch entry there are four more entries in 1874, and two in 1875, and they're ordinary: the wheat, a flood in the spring that carried off a neighbor's fences, a long description of a neighbor's wedding with dancing in somebody's barn until two in the morning. And then, between the last entry of 1875 and the first of 1876, there's a page missing. You can see it in Jenna's photographs if you look at the gutter of the book. A stub of paper, cut close and clean with a knife or a razor, sticking up from the binding like a shorn stalk.

It's the only missing page in the book.

The entry right after the stub is dated February 1876, and the first sentence is *Daeth Gwenno*. Gwenno has come.

I have not translated that entry yet. I've read it, many times, in the Welsh. I'm going to do it next. And I've been telling myself, all through this one, that I'm doing it in order because a translation should go in order. That's true. It's not the whole truth.

Owen came on the screen at the end, sent by his mother to say goodnight. He's a serious child with a cowlick and very large glasses, and he asked me, as he's asked me every call since April, to say something in Welsh. I said *Nos da, Owen*, which is good night. He tried it: *Noss dah*. Close. Hazel came pelting into view from the floor and shouted *NOSS DAH* directly into the laptop's microphone, and the dog barked, and Jenna, out of view, laughed and said, "That's it, that's bedtime," and the screen went dark.

Then I sat at Nain's kitchen table with the laptop closed until the stove had burned low, and listened to the clock from Wales ticking in the front room four minutes slow, and thought about a page cut out of a book with a knife, and who would do that, and what you'd have to want gone.

Nain came in for a glass of water. She looked at me and asked what was wrong.

I told her about the missing page. She sat down across from me, which she doesn't do at night because of her knees, and looked at the scan of the stub on the screen for a while.

"Your father did that," she said, "with his schoolbooks. When he'd written something he didn't like."

"This isn't a schoolbook."

"No," she said. "It isn't." And she got up and took her water and went to bed without saying anything else, and I could hear her not sleeping, through the wall.

I stayed at the table and read the last line of the entry once more, the one I had numbered in Utica before I knew what it would cost: *I write it because it is so, and this book is where I put what is so.*[3]

Gwenno

**17 February 1876.**

I have taken out the page I wrote last night. It was true, but it was not mine to keep.[1]

Gwenno has come. She came up from the landing in Wiliam Huws's cart with one box and her shawl over her head against the dust, and she is nineteen and taller than me as she promised, and thin in the face.[2] She stood at the door of the house and asked me was she welcome. I told her this house was hers before she reached it.

She sleeps in the back room. Ifan has moved the loom out to make space and says nothing, which is how Ifan says yes.

The poplars Ifan set along the ditch last spring are over my head now. From the door they make a line so straight you could rule a page against it.[3]

M. E.

---

**Translator's notes**

[1] So she cut it herself.

I want to set down exactly what I felt reading that first line in the Welsh, the first time, in Utica, in May, before I'd decided to come home. *Rydw i wedi tynnu allan y dudalen a ysgrifennais neithiwr. Roedd hi'n wir, ond nid fy lle i oedd ei chadw.* I read it and put the laptop down on the kitchen table and walked around the apartment twice. Then I came back and read it again.

Two years earlier, in the ditch entry, Marged gave herself a rule: this book is where I put what is so. Here she breaks it, on purpose, and tells you she's breaking it. She doesn't hide the cut. She could have torn the page out and gone on as if nothing had happened, and no one would ever have known there was a page. Instead she writes, at the top of the next one: I took something out. It was true. It wasn't mine.

It wasn't hers. That is the whole of the next twenty years of this diary, I think, and I didn't understand it in May. I'm only starting to now.

I've translated it as plainly as I could: not mine to keep. The Welsh is not quite that. *Nid fy lle i oedd ei chadw* says it was not her place to keep it, and a place is always somebody's, as though the thing on that page belonged to one other person in particular. I've chosen the plainer reading for the text and I'm putting the other one here, in the margin, because I can't shake it.

[2] *Tenau yn ei hwyneb.* Thin in the face.

I asked Nain about this. I didn't tell her why. I read her the sentence and asked whether there was anything in the phrase that I was missing, any old sense of it.

She took her glasses off and cleaned them on her cardigan, which she does when she wants time.

"It means her face was thin," she said.

"And nowhere else?"

Nain put her glasses back on. "That's what you think it means."

"I'm asking what you think."

She looked at the window, at the bare poplars along the street and the line of the meseta beyond the roofs, and she said, "My mother used to say Gwenno left something in the valley when she went to the mountains. She said it once to my aunt, in the kitchen, when they didn't know I was listening. I was about ten. I asked her what it was and she said a cooking pot, and told me to go and feed the hens." Nain looked back at me. "I always thought it was a cooking pot."

"Did you?"

"No," Nain said. "But I wanted to."

I want to be careful in this note, as careful as Marged was, because I don't have anything yet but a cut page, a turn of phrase, and something a woman said in a kitchen in 1950. That's not a fact. That's a margin.

But I went to see Señora Davies anyway, the next morning.

She lives in a narrow house on a back street near the old railway station, with a yard full of geraniums in tins, and every room of it is filled with paper. Not mess. Paper in order. Shoe boxes labeled by decade on shelves. Folders tied with ribbon. Scrapbooks of newspaper cuttings from the valley paper going back to before she was born, inherited from her father, who kept them, and from his mother, who kept them before him. She is ninety, very small, with white hair cut short as a boy's and eyes that are bright and pale behind thick lenses, and she greeted me in Welsh and then in Spanish and then, to show off, in English. She knew who I was before I said it. She said I had my father's ears, and that he'd once fixed her gate with a coat hanger and it had held for eleven years.

I asked her if she had anything about who came out on the ships in the 1870s.

She went straight to a shelf without looking and took down a folder. Inside were typed copies, made in the 1960s by some society or other, of the passenger lists of the ships that brought new settlers to the colony through that decade. Hundreds of names. Some came direct from Wales, some by way of Buenos Aires, some from the Welsh settlements in the United States. She found the one for the summer of 1875 into 1876 in less than a minute, and ran her finger down a column of names, and stopped.

*Rowlands, Gwenllian. 19. Bala. Soltera. Sola.*

Single. Traveling alone.

Señora Davies looked at the entry, and then at me, and said nothing at all. And I understood, for the first time, that she had looked at this line before. Maybe many times. And that the whole valley, in its quiet way, has always been better at not saying things than at saying them.

[3] The poplars.

This is the first time in the diary that Marged mentions the poplars by name, *y poplys*, which is how she spells it, the old way. Ifan planted them along the ditch in the spring of 1875. By the time Gwenno arrived they were over Marged's head.

It's a strange detail to end this entry on. Her sister has come off a ship, alone and unmarried and thin in the face, and been taken in, and the husband has moved the loom without a word, and the diarist has cut out a whole page of what she knows. And then she finishes by telling you that the trees outside the door make a line so straight you could rule a page against it.

I've spent a lot of time on that sentence. I think it's the most Marged thing she's written yet. When the world goes crooked, she looks for something straight. The edge of the meseta. The cut of the ditch. The line of the trees. She steadies herself on it the way you'd steady a pen against a ruler.

Ruled lines are something I know about from the other side. When I was small Nain made me practice my handwriting in a copybook with double lines printed on it, a top line and a baseline, and you had to make your letters touch both lines exactly, every time. If I went over the top line she made me do the row again. I hated it. My handwriting is still terrible. But I have Marged's handwriting enlarged on the screen in front of me now, line after line of it, and it touches the top and bottom of an invisible ruled line across every page, without any ruling to guide it, for thirty-one years.

In Utica I spend most days in a courtroom, standing a little behind and to one side of whoever needs me: a man in a borrowed tie, a mother holding a folder of school forms against her chest, a boy of nineteen who will not look up at the bench. I say in English what they say in Spanish, and in Spanish what the court says back, half a beat behind, in the first person, as though I were each of them in turn. None of the words are mine. The stenographer takes down my English, not their Spanish, and by evening I could not repeat a single sentence I spoke. In nine years I have carried a great many people's words across that little gap between the witness box and the bench, and I have not kept one of them. I'm not complaining about it. That is the work: you carry it over, you set it down, you let go. I only notice the difference more now. Marged had one book and one bottle of ink for thirty-one years, and she couldn't wipe anything away. When she wanted something gone, she had to take a knife to it, and then she had to say so.

I walked home from Señora Davies's house the long way, along the river. It was nearly dark, and cold enough that the wet mud at the edge of the water had frozen into ridges that crunched under my boots. Above me the telegraph and power lines along the riverside road ran between their poles in long low curves, sagging and rising and sagging, black against a sky that was going from orange at the bottom to deep blue at the top. A row of small dark birds sat on the wires, evenly spaced as notes on a staff.

I took a photo of Señora Davies's passenger list entry on my phone before I left. She let me. She held the folder flat for me and said, "Be careful who you show that to, *cariad*."

I haven't shown it to anyone. I've put it in a folder on my laptop by itself. I haven't put it in the family space with the diary scans. I keep telling myself that I'll put it there once I'm sure.

Jenna wrote in the margin of the shared file tonight, next to this entry: *Gwenno's here! That's so cool that the sisters were together. Did they live together long?*

I wrote back underneath: *About twelve years.*

That's true. It's what the diary says. And it's the first time I've written something in this translation that was true and was also a way of not telling her something. I don't like how easy it was.

Y Bachgen

**10 August 1876.**

The boy came yesterday before the light, with Mrs. Huws and me and no one else. He is long and red and very angry, and he has a fine voice.[1]

Gwenno is sleeping. She has slept since noon. I sit by the stove with him and write this with the book on my knee and him in the crook of the other arm, so forgive the hand, Mam.[2]

We will call him Tomos, for Tada.

He is ours.[3]

M. E.

---

**Translator's notes**

[1] *Mae ganddo lais da.* He has a good voice, or a fine voice. In the valley, and in Wales, that phrase has always carried more than it would in English. It is what you say of a child who might one day sing. Marged knew it. She is joking, the morning after a long night, about a newborn bawling, and also she is putting him down already, at a day old, for the choir. That's how I read it, anyway. I've kept "fine" because "good" sounds like a report card.

Tomos Ellis did sing, as it turns out. Uncle Thurman has a clipping from a Jackson County newspaper from 1911 that lists a T. Ellis as a soloist at a Welsh singing festival in Oak Hill. Thurman sent me a picture of it in May, very pleased. I didn't know then why it would matter to me so much that the boy grew up to have a fine voice.

[2] The handwriting in this entry is the worst in the book. It slopes downhill across the page, and on the last lines it nearly runs off the right-hand edge, and some of the letters are so loose they look like knots in a piece of string. She wrote it, she says, with the book on her knee and a newborn in the other arm. You can see it. You can see exactly where the baby moved: three lines from the bottom, the pen skids in a long thin line across two words, like a skate mark on ice, and she leaves it and goes on. That skid is the first trace of Tomos Ellis on paper. It's a hundred and fifty years old.

I did the transcription of this page at two in the morning, at the kitchen table, with the house asleep around me and only the light over the stove on, because I couldn't sleep, and because I'd begun to feel that the night was the right time for it. The clock in the front room ticked its four minutes slow. Once a truck went by on the road by the river, and its headlights crossed the ceiling in a long bar of light from one corner of the room to the other and were gone. I typed her loose, downhill letters into the middle column one at a time, slowly, the way she must have written them, with the pen in one hand and the baby in the other arm.

*Maddeua'r llaw, Mam.* Forgive the hand, Mam. She's still writing to her mother, after eleven years. Her mother, as far as I can tell from later entries, was still alive at this point in Bala, and would have been reading these pages, in her daughter's imagination, over her shoulder. I've kept the "Mam" untranslated, because the Ohio family will understand it, and because every Welsh-speaking person on earth calls their mother that and I can't make myself write "Mother."

[3] *Ni sydd biau fo.*

He is ours.

I've written this note five times now, and deleted it five times. I'm going to write it a sixth time and leave it.

Literally, the phrase is something like "it is we who own him" or "he belongs to us." It's the plainest, most ordinary way to say *he's ours* in the Welsh of the north and of this valley. You'd say it of a dog, of a field, of a child. There is nothing hidden in the words themselves.

And I can translate it straight. *He is ours.* Three words in English, the last line of the entry, standing by themselves. When Uncle Thurman reads that aloud under the park shelter on the third Saturday in July, with sixty people in royal blue T-shirts sitting at picnic tables in front of him, it will mean exactly what everyone in Ohio has always believed it means: that after two lost babies, Marged and Ifan Ellis finally had a living son, and they named him Tomos, and he grew up and went to Ohio and they are all descended from him.

That is a faithful translation of the sentence. It is not a faithful translation of the page.

Because she doesn't write "I have had a son," and she doesn't write "my son." She writes *the boy came*, with herself and Mrs. Huws and no one else, which is a strange way to describe your own childbirth. She writes that Gwenno is sleeping, and has been sleeping since noon, which is a strange thing for an unmarried younger sister to need to do the morning after someone else's baby was born. And she writes *he is ours*, plural, which could be Marged and Ifan, and almost certainly is meant to look like Marged and Ifan, and might also be Marged and Gwenno.

I've now read ahead. I didn't want to. I made myself.

I went through every entry from August 1876 to the end of the book, quickly, in the Welsh, looking only for one thing. From this day until he is twenty years old, Marged never once, anywhere in the diary, calls Tomos *fy mab*, my son. Not once. She calls him *y bachgen*, the boy, hundreds of times. She calls him Tomos. She calls him *y cnaf*, the rascal, when he steals sugar. She calls him *cariad*. But she never writes *mab*. And as soon as he's old enough to talk, she writes down the things he says, and he calls her *Mam*, and he calls Gwenno *Modryb*. Aunt.

Except once. There's one entry, very late, where she does write it. I'll come to it when I get there. I'm not going to skip ahead in the translation.

This is the problem, and I'll put it down here plainly, because this is the place where I put what is.

I've been asked to make a translation. I can make a translation that's correct in every word and that tells the Ohio family a story they already believe. Or I can put a note here, in the margin, that says: I think Gwenno was his mother. And then the shirts in the box on Thurman's porch are wrong. And Delphine, who has been sending Nain a Christmas card with a picture of Marged in it every year since 1965, finds out at eighty-eight that Marged isn't her blood, and that Nain's Gwenno is.

I haven't decided anything. I'm writing that down too.

I need to explain something about the family space, because it bears on this.

When Jenna first invited everyone into it last winter, she set Delphine up with a special kind of access, a viewing-only one, so that Delphine could look at everything, read the translations, scroll the photographs, listen to Nain's recordings, but couldn't change or delete anything by mistake. Delphine asked for it herself. She said she pressed the wrong things on her tablet and didn't want to be responsible for losing Marged twice. Jenna told me this in May, laughing. I thought it was sweet. I didn't think about what it meant: that Delphine could see every word I typed in the right-hand column, as soon as I typed it.

She's been reading every entry as I finish it. She can't write in the columns, but she can leave a note at the bottom of each page, and she has, every one, in the same careful capitals. Under the willow box she wrote: *I HAD NO IDEA. THAT POOR GIRL.* Under Gwenno's letter from Bala: *THIS IS NAIN'S GWENNO!!! TELL OLWEN.* (Olwen is Nain. I told her. Nain smiled for about an hour.)

Under this entry, which I posted an hour ago, she has written:

*HE IS OURS. OH, MARGED. ALL OF US. D.*

I read that and closed the laptop and went out into the yard in my socks.

It was late afternoon, the light already going, and the sky over the meseta was very clear and high, and you could see the pale line of the plateau's edge running away to the west beyond the town without a break, out to where the road disappears. There is a single power line that runs from the corner of Nain's street out across the fields toward the river, pole after pole, getting smaller, and the wire between them catches the low sun and shines like a thread pulled tight. I stood there with my socks going damp on the cold flagstones and followed it with my eye until I couldn't see it anymore.

Nain came out after a while with my shoes. She put them on the step without saying anything. Then she said, "Recording," and went back in.

I didn't understand until I followed her. She'd sat down by the stove in her chair and pulled the little microphone over and switched it on, and when I came into the front room she pointed at the other chair and I sat, and she started to talk in Welsh, slowly, into the microphone, looking at me and not at it. She talked about her mother's kitchen in 1950. About the cooking pot. About her aunt saying, *Poor Gwenno*, and her mother saying, *Hush, it was a long time ago and it turned out well.* About Nain going out to feed the hens with the words going round in her head. About how she'd thought, as a girl, that if she were Gwenno she would have gone back for the cooking pot.

She talked for eleven minutes. Then she switched it off.

"There," she said. "Now that's in the box too. You do what you want with it. But don't tell me it isn't so."

Florencia will transcribe it on Sunday. It'll go up with the others, under the scan of this page, where Delphine can listen to it. Or it won't. Nain has left that to me.

I put my shoes on. Then I sat down at the laptop and typed the English into its column at last, three words and a number: *He is ours.*[3]

Borrowed Milk

**22 April 1877.**

Gwenno feeds him and I carry him. Between the two of us he wants for nothing, and he is getting fat as a lamb.[1]

The riders came down to the river this week, as they do most autumns now. The woman with the gray horse came to the house. Her daughter is a young woman now and rode her own horse, and she has a child on her back in a carrier of skins.[2]

The woman looked at the boy in my arms, and at Gwenno in the doorway behind me, and back at me. She said nothing, and I was grateful. Then she went to her horse and brought a skin, very soft, and put it in the cradle, and showed me with her hands how to fold it round him. I gave her bread and the blue shawl that was Mam's.[3]

When they had gone Gwenno cried, and I let her.

M. E.

---

**Translator's notes**

[1] *Mae Gwenno yn ei fwydo a finnau yn ei gario.* Gwenno feeds him and I carry him.

There's no way to make that sentence mean anything other than what it means. A woman in 1877 in a hut by the Camwy, with no bottles, no formula, no cow in milk yet that year (Marged mentions the cow going dry in March), could feed a baby in one way. If Marged had borne him she would have fed him. She's telling you who did.

I think she knew. I mean I think Marged, writing this, knew exactly what she was writing, and that anyone who later read it with Welsh enough would understand. She cut the page in 1876 that said it outright, because it wasn't hers. But she didn't cut this. She wasn't going to lie in her own book. She just wasn't going to shout.

I sent this entry to the family space at nine in the morning, in the Welsh column only. I left the English column blank.

I've never done that before.

[2] I've written "a carrier of skins" for the thing the young woman carried her baby in on her back, which is Marged's description, and I'm not going to add to it. I don't know the right name for it in the woman's language and I won't guess. I'll note only that this is the second generation Marged has seen of this family, and that the two families, hers and the gray-horse woman's, have now known each other for ten years. That she writes "as they do most autumns now," as you'd write of a neighbor.

[3] And this is the debt, I think. Or part of it.

In 1867, when the colony was starving, Marged gave a crust with sugar on it to this woman's daughter. Ten years later the daughter is grown and has her own child, and the woman comes to Marged's door, sees a baby in Marged's arms and the baby's real mother in the doorway behind, and understands something at a glance that most of the valley has the good manners to pretend not to understand. She says nothing. Then she brings a gift for the baby and shows Marged how to use it. Marged gives her bread and her own mother's blue shawl, which must be the most precious thing in the house after the diary.

I'm not going to say what the woman felt, or why she did what she did. I don't know. Marged doesn't know either; she only says she was grateful. I'm leaving that alone. But I will say what I see, which is two women, one Welsh and one Tehuelche, who never shared a language, keeping each other's counsel across ten years and a river.

Jenna saw the blank English column at eleven her time and called me.

"Is something wrong with the file?" she said. "Your translation's not showing up for the new one."

I could have said yes. It would have been easy. Some technical thing, I'll fix it tonight.

"No," I said. "I haven't done it yet. I'm stuck on something."

"On what?"

"On a word."

Jenna was in her car in the hospital parking lot, on her lunch break, and I could see the sun coming through the windshield and the edge of a cinder-block building and a row of parked cars behind her shimmering in heat. She looked at me for a while through the screen.

"Okay," she said. "Thurman wants to know if he can end the reading with the one where Tomos is born. He says it's the perfect place to stop. 'He is ours.' He's been practicing it."

"Tell him to wait," I said. "There's more."

"How much more?"

"Most of it," I said.

She said she'd tell him. Then she said, "Lowri, are you okay?" and I said yes, and she said I didn't look okay, and I said it was the light in Nain's kitchen, and she let it go, which is a thing she's good at and I'm grateful for.

It was Wednesday, so after lunch I went up to the cemetery with Nain.

She walks slower than she used to and won't take my arm, so we went at her pace, up the steep street past the old school and the bakery with the bread cooling in the window and the corner where the boys used to sit on their bicycles. She stopped twice to talk to people. One was a man of about seventy on a ladder, cutting back a grapevine on the front of his house, who called down to her in Welsh and asked if this was Héctor's eldest and said I'd gone American, and Nain said, "A little," and walked on. The other was a girl of about eleven walking a dog, who said *Buenas tardes, Señora Olwen*, and Nain answered her in Spanish and then, as the girl went on, called after her in Welsh to ask about her mother's hip, and the girl answered in Welsh without turning around, perfectly, and kept walking.

"Her mother brings her to the classes," Nain said. "Tuesdays. There are fourteen children now in the beginners. When you were small there were four."

The Welsh classes. I'd forgotten them. I went from five to twelve, in a cold room with a portable heater and a map of Wales on the wall, taught by a woman from Cardiff on a two-year post who was horrified by how we said our vowels. She made us read aloud from a children's book about a red tractor, one sentence each, round the table, and corrected every word. My father used to collect me afterwards in the truck, and on the way home he'd ask me to say the sentences again, and then he'd say them back to me in the valley way, the way his own nain said them, with the vowels long and flat as the plain, and tell me both were right. I think now that he was teaching me something about translation before I knew the word. There is more than one correct way for a thing to sound. You choose, and you keep the other one somewhere close.

At the cemetery the afternoon was still and the light very clear, so you could see the whole valley below laid out in its lines: the river turning through it, the long strips of fields between, the gray brush strokes of the poplars along every edge. Far to the east was a smudge of Trelew. Far to the west the road ran out along the valley floor until it was a single pencil line, and then not even that.

Nain took the dried hydrangeas out of the jam jar on my father's grave and put in fresh ones she'd cut that morning. In July they're not much: the last few, a faded mauve going brown at the edges, the flower heads light as paper lanterns. She arranged them carefully and stepped back.

"He'd have known what to do," she said. "About your Marged."

"What would he have done?"

"Told everyone at once at the top of his voice," Nain said, "and then been sorry, and then bought them all dinner." She almost smiled. "You're not him. You're more like me. You'll sit on it till it hatches."

We stood there a while. A pair of birds I didn't know the name of, small and brown with a pale stripe, were going in and out of the cypress hedge at the top of the cemetery.

"I didn't come back," I said. "Nine years."

"No," Nain said.

"I'm sorry."

"I know," she said. "You're here now. You're doing a thing he'd have liked." Then she said, "Write something on his page. People ask me if you've seen it."

I sat down on the low wall at the edge of the path, and took out my phone, and opened my father's page, where my photograph of his stone was still sitting with nothing under it. I wrote, in Welsh, *Rydw i adre, Dad.* I'm home, Dad. And then, after a while, in Spanish under it: *Perdón por tardar.* Sorry I took so long.

Nain read it over my shoulder. She didn't say anything. She just tapped the screen once, the way she taps Marged's handwriting when a word is right.

On the way down the hill I asked her about Delphine.

"Does she know? Could she have known?"

Nain thought about it for a whole block.

"She had a photograph," Nain said. "In 1965. Of Marged, with Tomos as a boy. You've seen it."

I have. Thurman has it framed. It's a small studio portrait, from Trelew, from the 1880s: Marged in a dark dress, seated, looking straight out, and a boy of eight or nine standing beside her with his hand on the back of her chair, in a jacket too big for him.

"There was a third person," Nain said, "cut off at the edge. Just a sleeve, and a hand on the boy's other shoulder. Delphine showed it to me and said, 'I wonder who that was.' And I said I didn't know."

"Did you know?"

"I knew it was a woman's sleeve," Nain said. "And I knew what my mother said about the cooking pot. And I was twenty-seven and she was a guest." She stopped walking, at the corner by the bakery, and turned to look at me. "So I've done what you're doing too. Sixty-one years ago. You're not the first one in this family to sit on it."

We walked the rest of the way down without talking. At home I opened the 1877 page, where the English column was still blank, and typed the first sentence into it with its number after it, so that whoever reads it next is sent down to the margin and finds us there: *Gwenno feeds him and I carry him.*[1]

The Chair

**28 October 1882.**

The eisteddfod. We went in the wagon, all of us, with Gwenno and Rhydian and the baby, and Tomos on Ifan's shoulders from the wagon to the door so he could see over the crowd.[1]

Tomos said his piece in the children's recitation and forgot the middle and began again from the top and finished. He did not win. He was not sorry. He had a sugar biscuit from Mrs. Huws for not crying, and that was the prize he wanted.

I sent in a verse on the subject they gave, which was *The Ditch*. I sent it as Helygen.[2] It took the second place. The judge said the ending was plain. I am putting it here because it is mine and this book is where I keep what is mine.

*No hand of mine laid out this land.*
*Men marked the ditch with stakes and string.*
*I only set my letters down*
*the way they set the poplars in,*
*in rows, against the wind, to keep*
*a narrow ground where small things grow*
*that no one planted. Let them grow.*[3]

M. E.

---

**Translator's notes**

[1] An eisteddfod, for the Ohio family, is a festival of poetry and music and recitation, with competitions in each and judges who give their verdicts from the stage in front of everyone. It goes back centuries in Wales. The settlers brought it with them, and the valley has held one in some form nearly every year since the early colony. There are still several each year in Chubut: a big one in Trelew in the spring, a youth eisteddfod, a smaller one in Trevelin in the Andes. People compete in Welsh and Spanish both now. Children recite. Choirs sing. And the highest honor for a poet is to win the chair, an actual carved wooden chair, which the winner keeps. Some of the chairs from the early years are in museums now. Some are in people's front rooms. One that a great-uncle of Señora Davies won in 1911 is in her hall, with a stack of shoe boxes on the seat.

Rhydian is Rhydian Bowen, a farmer from the valley, whom Gwenno married in 1880. The baby is their daughter Catrin, born the year before. Catrin is Nain's grandmother. My great-great-great-grandfather is the man driving the wagon two chacras down the road; my great-great-grandmother is the baby in Gwenno's arms. I've put a note about this in the family tree, at Catrin's box, and attached this entry to it.

Tomos is six here. He sits on Ifan's shoulders. His mother, whom he calls *Modryb*, sits beside his Mam in the wagon with her new baby. I translate what is written.

[2] *Helygen* means willow. A single willow tree.

Competitors at an eisteddfod send their entries in under an assumed name, a pen name, so that the judges don't know whose work they're reading. When the winner is announced, the pen name is called, and whoever owns it stands up. It's one of my favorite things about the whole tradition: for a moment, in a hall full of your neighbors, you are only your poem.

Marged chose *Willow*. After the slip she planted by her door on her first day in the valley. After the tree that became Mari's box. After the stump that came back.

[3] This is the first verse I've ever had to translate that someone in my own family wrote, and it's taken me most of three days.

Here is what she wrote, roughly, line by line, in plain English prose, before I tried to make it into a poem: *No hand of mine measured this land. Men marked out the ditch with stakes and line. I only set my letters, the way they set the poplars, in rows against the wind, to keep a narrow ground where small things grow that no one sowed. Let them grow.*

My first attempt at a verse kept her rhyme scheme, which in the Welsh is loose but steady, and it came out jingling, like a greeting card. I threw it out. My second kept her meter exactly and lost all the meaning. My third is the one above. It doesn't rhyme the way hers does. It keeps the turn at the end, which is the important thing.

The judge said the ending was plain. That's the phrase she records: *Dywedodd y beirniad fod y diwedd yn blaen.* I think the judge was right and missed the point. The ending *is* plain. *Let them grow.* Three words. She'd written a verse about ditches and poplars and handwriting, all of it about straight lines, things laid out by measure and set in rows. Then in the last line she lets something in that wasn't planted by anyone, that came up in the narrow ground between the rows. And she says: let it.

I read the translation to Eze tonight.

He'd asked me to come to a choir rehearsal, which is held on Thursday evenings in the hall behind one of the chapels, in a big cold room with a wooden floor and a piano that hasn't been tuned since the 1990s and a row of radiators along one wall that clank. There are twenty-two singers, and they range in age from sixteen to eighty-one, and most of them are not Welsh by descent at all, Eze told me, but have joined because their friends were in it or because they like to sing, and they learn the Welsh words by ear from a sheet with the pronunciation written out in Spanish spelling. They are preparing for the spring eisteddfod in Trelew. I sat at the back on a stacking chair in my coat and listened for an hour while they took the same eight bars of a folk song apart and put them together again, over and over, the director stopping them every few seconds to fix a vowel, until on the last try it suddenly came out whole and right and filled the room, and everyone laughed at once. The director, a retired bank clerk from Trelew with a pencil behind each ear, rapped the piano lid and said in Spanish that they'd got it once and now they had to get it a hundred times, and they groaned and started again. A woman of about seventy in the alto row, who had been in my mother's class at school, turned round during the break and handed me a mint and asked if I'd come home to stay. I said no. She said that's what they all say, and turned back.

Afterwards Eze walked me home. It was very clear and very still, and so cold the stars looked sharp-edged, and the smoke from every chimney on the street went straight up into the dark without bending. I told him about Marged. All of it. The page, the passenger list, the milk, the photograph with the woman's sleeve at the edge. He listened all the way to Nain's gate without interrupting, which I had forgotten he could do.

Then I read him Marged's verse, in the Welsh, from my phone, standing at the gate under the streetlight, and then my English.

He was quiet for a bit.

"She's telling you," he said.

"She's telling herself."

"She knew someone would read it," Eze said. "You don't put a poem in a book if you're the only one who'll ever read it. You put it in your head. She wrote it down." He pushed his hands into his coat pockets. "Small things grow that no one planted. Let them grow. Lowri. That's the boy."

I said I knew.

"So what are you going to do?"

I told him the truth, which was that I didn't know, and that Jenna had emailed that afternoon to say the printer in Jackson needed the final file for the reunion booklet by Monday. Thurman has designed it himself. It's going to be a small paperback, forty-eight pages, with a photograph of the diary on the cover and the family tree folded in at the back, and my translation in the middle, a hundred copies, one for every household. Jenna sent me a mockup of the cover. Across the top, in a font Thurman picked because it looks old: THE DIARY OF MARGED ELLIS, OUR FOREMOTHER.

"Then you have till Monday," Eze said.

"Then I have till Monday," I said.

He said goodnight, in Welsh, and walked off up the street toward the tea house, and I watched him go under the line of streetlights, getting smaller, until he turned the corner.

Inside, Nain had left the light on in the kitchen and a plate on the table under a cloth. Under the cloth was a slice of black cake. Torta negra, *teisen ddu*, the long-keeping fruit cake of the valley: so dark it's nearly the color of the meseta at night, dense with raisins and candied peel and walnuts, made with dark sugar cooked down almost to burning, and soaked, in some houses, with something stronger than tea. The settlers made it because it would keep for months, through the winters and the long trips across the plain to the Andes, wrapped in cloth. Every family has its own recipe and believes the others are wrong. Nain's is her mother's, from a recipe card in her mother's hand, with the amounts in ounces, and with a note in the margin in another hand altogether, older, very slanted, saying *mwy o driog*, more treacle. A photograph of that card is in the family space too now, on the recipe shelf Jenna started, next to Delphine's mother's recipe for Welsh cakes on the griddle and a Tackett recipe for green beans that Jenna says is a crime.

I sat at the table and ate the cake and looked at the note on the recipe card on my phone, the slanted *more treacle*. Then I opened the scans and found an entry from 1879, where Marged writes out her own black cake recipe, and compared the handwriting.

It isn't hers. The slant goes the wrong way, a little more upright. But the *m* is made the same way, with a little hook at the start, the way the schoolmistress in Bala must have taught both sisters. It's Gwenno's.

Cwm Hyfryd

**9 November 1888.**

They have gone west. Two wagons, Rhydian and Gwenno and the three girls, and the Morgans with them, and the oxen, and the dog that will not stay.[1] We walked beside them to the end of the ditch and then stood on the bank and watched until the wagons were one wagon, and then a mark, and then nothing on the line of the plain.

Last night Gwenno asked me at the stove would the boy come with them. I said ask him. She would not. She said, *He has a mother.*[2]

He is twelve. He stood with Ifan this morning and did not cry until they were out of sight, and then he went into the poplars and I let him be.

I cannot see the mountains from here. She says she will write when they are under them.[3]

M. E.

---

**Translator's notes**

[1] In 1885 a party of riders, most of them young men from the valley, went west across the whole width of the plateau, nearly four hundred miles, to explore the country toward the mountains, and came back with word of a green valley at the foot of the Andes, with forest and rivers and grass. The Welsh named it Cwm Hyfryd, the pleasant valley. Within a few years families had begun to move there, crossing the plain in wagons drawn by oxen, a journey of many weeks along a rough trail by the few watering places. The town that grew up there was called Trevelin, which means *mill town*, because one of the first things the settlers built was a mill to grind their wheat.

Gwenno and Rhydian went in 1888, with their three daughters, of whom Catrin was the eldest. They stayed. Nain's mother was born there. Nain was born in Gaiman only because her mother married a Gaiman man; her aunts and cousins stayed in the mountains, and she spent every childhood summer with them.

[2] *Mae ganddo fam.*

He has a mother.

I sat with this line in the bus from Trelew to Trevelin for most of a night, and I'm going to write the note now, in Trevelin, at the kitchen table of Nain's cousin Gwladys, with the window behind me full of mountains.

Gwenno, who bore him, says that he has a mother, and means her sister. Marged writes it down. Then she writes that he did not cry until the wagons were out of sight, and that she let him be. Two women, each giving the boy to the other, on the same night, at the same stove, and both of them right.

It is three words in the Welsh and four in English, and I don't think the English needs anything else. I think the margin does.

Nain and I came on the overnight bus on Friday. It runs west from Trelew along the national highway across the meseta, the whole width of the province, and it is one of the emptiest roads I know. Once you climb out of the valley, the land goes perfectly flat in every direction, a gray-brown plain under an enormous sky, and the road runs across it ahead of you dead straight to the horizon and over it, and then there is another horizon and the road runs straight to that one too. Alongside it, for hours, there is a single fence, five strands of wire on wooden posts, and at long intervals a gate, and once in a long while a track going off from the gate toward a farm you can't see. Hours go by without a town. We passed a group of guanacos at dusk, standing very still near the fence and watching the bus with their long necks up. A little after that the light went, and there was nothing outside but the black and a few stars and, very far off, one light I watched for twenty minutes before it disappeared.

Nain slept almost the whole way with her head against the window and her cane between her knees. I didn't. I had the scans open on my laptop, on my knees, and the family map open beside them, and a little before midnight I did something I'd been meaning to do: I traced the old wagon trail from the valley to the Andes onto the map, the way Señora Davies's books describe it, from watering place to watering place, a dotted line running west across the blank brown of the satellite picture. It runs close to the road for a while and then wanders off on its own. The bus was crossing it and recrossing it in the dark. I put a pin at each of the watering places I could find named. Then I put one at the end of the ditch east of Gaiman, with the date, *9 November 1888*, and a note: *Marged, Ifan and Tomos stood here and watched them go.*

We came down into the mountains in the early morning. You see them first as a line of white along the bottom of the sky, so low and so far off it looks like cloud, and then the plain begins to roll and break, and then the first hills come, dark with scrub, and then there they are all at once: the Andes, standing up out of the land, white from top to bottom with the winter snow, close enough to see the shadows of the gullies on them in the sunrise. Trevelin is in a wide green valley at their feet, a town of low houses and long straight streets running out from a central plaza in eight directions, like the spokes of a wheel. And everywhere, again, the poplars. Lines of them along every road and every field and every farm boundary, enormous ones, bare in July, their tops swaying in the wind off the mountains. In this valley they're even taller than at home.

Gwladys met us at the bus station. She's Nain's first cousin, eighty-two, broad and red-cheeked, in a fleece jacket and rubber boots, and she kissed Nain on both cheeks and then held her at arm's length and said, in Welsh, "You've shrunk," and Nain said, "You've grown," and they both laughed for what seemed like a full minute, standing in the cold in the bus station parking lot, while I held the bags.

Gwladys lives in a wooden house on the edge of town with a view of the mountains from every window, and she still keeps hens and has a vegetable garden under a layer of straw. Her kitchen has a wood stove and a long table and a shelf of jars. It smells of smoke and apples. Before dinner she drove us into town in a small truck that smelled of hay and dog, to show me the old mill on the stream outside town, which is a museum now, with its great wooden wheel standing still in the winter and the millrace running clear and fast beside it, straight as a ruled line between its stone banks. Gwladys said her own grandmother, Catrin, used to bring the family's wheat here in sacks on a cart, and wait in line with the other farmers, and talk. "That's what the mill was for," she said. "The flour was the excuse." On the way back we passed a tea house on the main road with its lights on and steam on the windows, and a line of tall poplars behind it bending all one way in the wind off the snow, and Gwladys said the cake there was better than in Gaiman, and Nain said that was a lie, and they argued about it happily all the way home.

Back in her kitchen, on the wall over the table, in a frame, is a photograph of a woman in a dark dress, seated, with three girls around her.

"Gwenno," Gwladys said, when she saw me looking. "With Catrin and the other two. Taken here in 1895. She was thirty-nine."

I'd never seen her face. There's no picture of her in the family space. I stood in front of it in my coat. She has a long jaw and a straight nose and her hair pulled tightly back, and she's looking a little off to the side of the camera, as though somebody had just come into the room.

She has Tomos's ears. I know because I've seen his, in the studio portrait from Trelew that Thurman has framed.

[3] She did write, when they were under them.

Nain had told Gwladys why we were coming. After dinner, which was a lamb stew with potatoes from the garden and bread Gwladys had made that morning, Gwladys pulled her boots back on and drove us into town again, to the small brick chapel on a street behind the plaza, where a neighbor keeps the key and the Welsh society keeps its books. In a cupboard in the back room, behind a stack of folding chairs and an electric heater with a frayed cord, there is a shelf of ledgers bound in black cloth. They are the members' roll, kept since the first families came over the plain: one page for each household, written in by the family itself on arriving in the valley, and added to whenever anyone was born or married or died or moved away.

Gwladys found the Bowens in a few minutes. Their page is dated March 1889, the first spring under the mountains, and it is in Gwenno's hand, the Bala slant turned a little more upright, the same hooked *m*. *Rhydian Bowen, ffermwr.* *Gwenllian Bowen.* Then the three girls, with the years they were born, Catrin first. And then, below the girls, after a small space, as if she had stopped and lifted her pen and thought about it, one more line:

*Tomos Ellis, ganwyd 1876. Gyda'm chwaer yn y dyffryn.*

Tomos Ellis, born 1876. With my sister in the valley.

No other household in that ledger is written that way. Every other family lists only the people under its roof. Gwenno put him on her page anyway, in the place where a mother sets down her children, and then wrote where he was, so that anyone who came looking would know he was not lost.

Nain read it out loud, slowly, with her finger following the line under the bare bulb, and I didn't need my laptop for it. Gwladys stood by the cold heater with her hands in her fleece pockets and looked at the floor. I took a photograph of the page, very carefully, flat on the table, and then I put my phone down.

I'm going to call Delphine tomorrow. Before the booklet, before Thurman, before anyone. I'm going to call her myself and read her this, in Welsh first and then in English, and then I'm going to let her decide.

Fy Mab

**14 March 1896.**

Tomorrow my son goes north.[1]

He goes to Ifan's cousin at the iron furnaces in Ohio, where there is work and Welsh enough in the streets, they say, that he will not be lonely. He has his box packed. He has his father's knife and Mrs. Huws's scarf and a letter from his Modryb in the mountains that he has not let me read.

I am giving him this book. I have written in it thirty-one years and now it goes where I can't follow. Tomos, when your Welsh is old enough, read it. Everything in it is so. The page I cut out you know already. You knew it before you could read.[2]

You had two of us. Neither one was ever sorry.

Go well, *cariad*. Write to us both.[3]

Mam

---

**Translator's notes**

[1] *Yfory mae fy mab yn mynd i'r gogledd.*

Tomorrow my son goes north.

There it is. Twenty years of *the boy*, and *Tomos*, and *the rascal*, and *cariad*, and on the night before he leaves, for the first and only time in the book, she writes *fy mab*. My son. In her best hand, which is not the hand she uses for wheat and floods. The letters on this page are small and even and very upright, as though she had sat down at a cleared table with her pen freshly cut and ruled the lines first in her head. The ink is the darkest it has been in years. I think she saved a little, for this.

And she signs it, not *M. E.*, the way she has signed every entry since the cave mouth in 1865, but *Mam*. It's the only entry in the book addressed to him.

[2] I called Delphine from Gwladys's kitchen on Sunday morning, which was Sunday morning in Ohio too, an hour behind.

Jenna set it up. I'd sent her a message on Saturday night that said only: *Can you help me call your grandmother tomorrow? Just her. I need to read her something before the booklet goes.* Jenna didn't ask why. She wrote back, *She's up at six. I'll take the tablet over at 8 her time.* And at eight her time there was Delphine's face on my laptop screen, very close to the camera, as old people's faces always are on calls, so I saw mostly her eyes and her reading glasses and her white hair set in careful waves. Behind her was the window of her front room in the house outside Oak Hill where she has lived since 1961: a porch railing, a hanging fern, and beyond them the green Ohio hills in a summer haze.

Nain sat next to me. Gwladys made coffee and then sat at the far end of the table, pretending to read a seed catalog.

"Olwen," said Delphine, when she saw Nain. "Look at you." And Nain said, in English, which she rarely speaks and speaks beautifully, slow and formal, "Delphine. My cousin. Lowri has something to read you."

So I read it to her.

I didn't read everything. I read her the cut page entry, from 1876, *I have taken out the page I wrote last night. It was true, but it was not mine to keep.* I read her *Gwenno feeds him and I carry him*. I read her *He has a mother*. I read her the line from the chapel roll in Trevelin, *Tomos Ellis, born 1876. With my sister in the valley.* I read each one in Welsh first, because I thought Marged's sentences should be heard in her own language by her great-granddaughter at least once, and then in English. And then I read her this page, the last one, all the way through, and stopped.

Delphine didn't say anything for a long time. On the screen she took her reading glasses off and held them in her lap. Then she looked up, past the camera, out of her window.

"My daddy told me," she said, "that Grandpa Tomos got a letter every year on his birthday from a lady in the mountains in Argentina. Every August. Right up until 1931, when they stopped. Daddy said she was his Aunt Gwen, and that Grandpa used to read the letters out on the back porch in Welsh, to nobody, just reading them out loud, and then fold them up and put them in his shirt pocket for the day." She paused. "When he died they found a whole bundle of them tied up with a bootlace in the drawer by his bed. Daddy didn't know what to do with them. He couldn't read them. I think he buried them with him."

Nain said, very quietly, "Gwenno died in 1931."

"Well," said Delphine. "There you go."

She looked at the camera again. "Is that what this is, honey? Gwen was his mother?"

"I think so," I said. "I'm almost sure."

"And Marged raised him."

"Yes."

Delphine nodded slowly, three or four times, as if agreeing with somebody I couldn't see. "Then I've got two," she said. "That's not losing one. That's getting one."

I couldn't say anything. Nain said it for me. She said, "That's how my mother put it too," which wasn't quite true, but close enough.

Then Delphine said, "Olwen, does this mean we're cousins twice?" and Nain worked it out on her fingers, out loud in Welsh, Gwenno to Catrin to her mother to her, and Gwenno to Tomos to his son to Delphine, and said, "Second cousins. Not third, the way we thought. Closer." And Delphine laughed so hard she had to put her hand over her mouth, and Jenna came into the frame from somewhere to see what was the matter, and then the three of them were all talking at once in two languages across six thousand miles, and I sat back in Gwladys's kitchen chair and let them.

The page I cut out you know already. You knew it before you could read.

I don't know what that page said. Nobody will ever know. But Marged says Tomos knew it, and Delphine's story says she was right: he read his other mother's letters out loud on a porch in Ohio every August for thirty-five years. He knew who he came from, both sides. He just didn't write it down where his children could find it. He left that to the book.

[3] *Write to us both.* *Ysgrifenna atom ni'n dwy.* "Both" is feminine in the Welsh: *ni'n dwy*, the two of us women. There's no way to keep that in English. I'm keeping it here.

At the end of the call, Delphine told me what she wanted. She was very clear about it. She's a retired schoolteacher, it turns out; she taught third grade for thirty-four years in Jackson, and when she decides something she says it once.

The booklet goes to the printer on Monday with everything in it. Every entry. Every note. The cut page and the passenger list and *He has a mother* and the line from the chapel roll. "Don't you tidy her up for us," Delphine said. "She didn't tidy herself up."

The title changes. Delphine dictated it to Jenna, and Jenna typed it into Thurman's file while we watched: *THE DIARY OF MARGED ELLIS, WITH HER SISTER GWENNO.*

She would tell Thurman herself, that afternoon, at Sunday dinner. "He'll be fine," she said. "He'll be thrilled. He'll have a whole new branch to look up. I'll have to hide his magnifying lamp."

And the shirts, I asked. The sixty shirts.

"Leave the shirts," said Delphine. "Every word on them is true."

I read them over in my head after the call. *Descendants of Marged & Ifan Ellis, Chubut 1865, Ohio 1896.* She's right. Marged and Ifan raised the boy who is the grandfather of every Ellis in Ohio. That's descent. That's exactly what Marged meant.

After the call I went out of Gwladys's back door and stood in her garden, between the rows of straw over the sleeping vegetables. The poplars along the edge of her land stood up into the clear sky in a perfect line, and behind them the Andes were enormous and white in the late-morning sun. I'd been crying a little, and I let myself. Gwladys's hens came and looked at me. Gwladys found me out there. She'd brought my coat, which I'd left on the chair, and she put it round me without asking, as if I were one of her hens that had got out, and stood beside me looking at the mountains.

"When I was a girl," she said, "my grandmother Catrin used to talk about her brother in the north. Her big brother. She'd say, *Tomos would have known how to fix that*, about a fence or a gate, and we'd say, Who's Tomos? And she'd say, *My brother in America*, as if everybody had one." Gwladys pushed her hands into her fleece pockets. "I thought she'd made him up. Children do. I thought he was like an imaginary friend she'd had and never grown out of."

"He was real," I said.

"I know that now," said Gwladys. "I'm eighty-two. I've just found out my grandmother's imaginary brother was real and lived in Ohio and sang solos." She laughed, a short surprised laugh that went up into the cold air. "I'm going to have to tell the whole valley. Olwen will hate it."

Nain did not hate it. Nain, when we went in, was at the kitchen table on the phone to Señora Davies.

I sat down across from her while she talked, and opened the laptop, and went to the family tree.

Tomos Ellis's box had two gray lines going up from it, one to Marged and one to Ifan. I added a third, going up and across the page to Gwenno. I didn't remove either of the others. Beside the new line I typed one word, small: *birth*. Beside the old ones, after some thought, I typed *raised*.

Owen, in Ohio, who is nine and has been learning to read the family tree on his mother's laptop, saw the change before supper and sent me a message through Jenna's account, all in capitals like his great-grandmother: *WHY DOES TOMOS HAVE THREE.* I wrote back, after some thought, *Because he was lucky. I'll tell you at the reunion. In Welsh, if you want.*

Black Cake

**A loose sheet, found inside the back cover. Undated. In another hand.**[1]

*For the children, when there are some.*

*bara* — bread
*afon* — river
*ffos* — ditch
*mam* — mother
*modryb* — aunt
*helygen* — willow
*llinell* — line
*inc* — ink
*mynydd* — mountain
*cartref* — home
*cariad* —

T. E., Oak Hill[2]

---

**Translator's notes**

[1] Jenna found this on the Monday morning when the booklet went to the printer. She'd taken the diary out of the trunk one last time to photograph the back cover for Thurman's design, and when she opened the cover flat on her kitchen table the endpaper lifted at one corner, where the glue had given out, and behind it was a folded half sheet of lined paper, gone the color of weak tea. She sent me the picture at seven in the morning her time with no message at all. Then, a minute later: *Is this him??*

It's him. The handwriting is a young man's version of Marged's copybook hand, the same Bala schoolroom slant come down a generation, but squarer, more careful, the letters pressed hard as if he were afraid they'd get away. The paper is from a lined school tablet, American, with a red margin rule down the left side. He wrote the Welsh words on the left of the red line and the English on the right, so that the red line runs between the two languages all the way down the page like a river between two banks.

He wrote it in Ohio. He must have written it some years after he arrived, once he'd been away from Welsh long enough to be frightened of losing it, and before his children were born. *For the children, when there are some.* His first son, Delphine's father, was born in 1905.

The list stops at *cariad*. There is nothing on the English side of the red line. Just the dash.

I've translated that as a dash.

[2] The reunion was on Saturday the eighteenth, at a county park outside Jackson, Ohio, under a long open shelter with a green tin roof and twelve picnic tables, at noon their time, which was one o'clock in Gaiman. I watched it from Nain's front room on my laptop, which Florencia had set on a stack of encyclopedias on the table so the camera would be at face height, and which Jenna's son Owen carried around the shelter on the other end, on his mother's tablet, held out in front of him at arm's length like a tray.

So I saw the reunion the way a nine-year-old saw it. Very low, very jerky, and full of people's stomachs. Sixty people in royal blue shirts with yellow letters. A table of food that went the whole length of the shelter: deviled eggs, a ham, three kinds of potato salad, a sheet cake with the Welsh dragon on it in red frosting that someone had copied off a flag and given slightly too many legs. Coolers. Children running out into a mown field. A horseshoe pit with two old men at it. Beyond the shelter, the hills, deep green, and over them a hot white summer sky with no wind in it at all. On my side of the screen, the sky out of Nain's front window was a hard winter blue, and the bare poplars along the street were swaying.

Thurman read. He stood at the end of the shelter with the booklet in one hand and a microphone that whistled, a big pink-faced man in his blue shirt, with reading glasses on a cord, and he read the entries in the order I'd put them in, with my notes, all of them, every one. He read the cave and the willow and the gray horse, with the pause at the bracket. He read the willow box and had to stop and wipe his glasses. He read the cut page. He read *He has a mother*. The shelter was quiet in a way I wouldn't have thought sixty people could be quiet, with children in it. A dog barked somewhere and someone shushed it.

Then he read the pen name. He'd come to the verse, from the eisteddfod, and he said into the whistling microphone, "In an eisteddfod they call out your pen name and you stand up. So." And he called out, "*Helygen*!" mangling it badly, and then everyone in the shelter who'd read the booklet, which was most of them, stood up, all sixty of them in their blue shirts, and Delphine stood up last, slowly, at the front table, with Jenna's hand under her elbow. And Owen spun around with the tablet to show me, so for a moment all I saw was a wheeling blur of blue and green and sky, and then he steadied it, and there they were, standing.

I said *Helygen* back, from Nain's front room, properly, with the *ll*. I don't think anyone heard me but Nain.

At the end Thurman asked me to read the last entry in Welsh, so they could hear what it sounded like, and I did. *Yfory mae fy mab yn mynd i'r gogledd.* I read it to the end, to *Mam*. And I read them Tomos's list after, the Welsh only, slowly, *bara, afon, ffos, mam, modryb*, down to *cariad*, and stopped there where he stopped.

Delphine said something to Jenna. Jenna leaned toward the tablet and said, "Grandma wants to know what the last one means. The one he didn't finish."

Nain answered before I could. She leaned in close to the laptop camera, so close that in Ohio, Jenna told me afterwards, all they could see was one blue eye and the brass button of a cardigan, and she said, in English, slowly, "It means love. It means *sweetheart*. It means *darling*. It means the person you're talking to." She sat back. "He didn't know which one to write. So he left it."

The reunion went on after that, the ordinary way. People came up to the tablet one by one and said hello and told me which branch they were from. A man of about seventy, a cousin of Thurman's I'd never met, showed me a tattoo of a dragon on his forearm and told me he'd got it in 1974 in the Navy and never known till today what it was for. Hazel sang me a song she'd learned at camp. Somebody's teenage son asked me if Argentina had wifi. I said goodbye at two their time, three ours, and Owen carried me to the car and put me face up on the dashboard and for a while I looked at the inside of a windshield and a green branch moving on the other side of it, and then Jenna found the tablet and ended the call.

That evening, at Nain's kitchen table, with the stove ticking and Florencia drying the cups, I said what I'd decided.

I go back to Utica at the end of the month, and the court calendar fills up again in August. On Tuesday evenings, from September, I'm going to teach Owen and Hazel Welsh over a video link from my kitchen table in Utica to theirs in Ohio, for half an hour, and any other Ellis child who wants to come, and any grown-up who wants to sit at the back and pretend not to listen. Jenna said yes before I'd finished asking her, the night before, on the phone. Delphine says she will sit at the back.

I've already started the word list. It lives in the family space, on its own page. Every word has the Welsh and the English beside it, and next to each one a small button that plays Nain's voice saying it. We recorded them on Thursday and Friday at the kitchen table, Nain and I, one word at a time, with the little microphone on its stand between the sugar bowl and the jam, and Nain repeating each word two or three times until she was satisfied, and sometimes telling a story in between that had nothing to do with anything, which I kept too. We started with Tomos's list. *Bara. Afon. Ffos. Mam. Modryb. Helygen. Llinell. Inc. Mynydd. Cartref.* Then I'll add more, every week, the way Jenna added the relatives to the tree, one at a time.

The last word on the list is *cariad*. On the English side I've left it the way Tomos left it, with a dash. When you press the button, Nain says it, and then, after a pause, because the recording kept running, you can hear her say in Spanish to someone off to the side, "Is that it? Did it take?" and Florencia saying yes. I didn't cut that off either. It's true, and it's hers.

I flew back in October, for eleven days, on leave I did not really have.

The Eisteddfod del Chubut is held in Trelew in the spring, in a big gymnasium near the center of town, and it runs for most of a weekend and most of each night, because nobody in the valley has ever believed a competition should finish before two in the morning. The bleachers were full. There were folding chairs in rows across the court, families with thermoses of mate and paper bags of facturas, and at the far end a stage hung with the flags of Argentina and Wales side by side. Outside, the poplars had come into new leaf, a green so pale it was nearly yellow, and every time somebody opened the side door the wind off the meseta came in and made the banners breathe.

Owen and Hazel were entered in the learners' recitation for children under twelve. Jenna had brought them, on Delphine's money and Delphine's orders: *Let them say it where she said hers.* For six Tuesdays they had learned Marged's verse in the Welsh, the one she sent in as *Helygen* in 1882, line by line over the video link, with Nain's voice on the word list for every hard sound and the Tackett dog barking whenever Hazel tried the *ll*. There were nine children in the category. Two came from the Tuesday beginners in Gaiman, the girl with the dog among them, and one from Esquel. The compère announced that two had come all the way from Ohio, first in Spanish and then in Welsh, and the bleachers clapped for them before either had opened a mouth.

Owen went first, in a borrowed jacket, with his glasses pushed up his nose. He said the whole verse straight through, too fast, every vowel where it belonged, his eyes fixed on the clock at the back of the hall.

Hazel went sixth. She got through four lines, as far as the poplars, and stopped. The gymnasium went so quiet I could hear the wind working at the side door. She looked at Jenna in the third row, and at Nain beside me, and then she went back to the top and began again, and this time she did not stop, all the way down to the last three words, which she said in Welsh so loudly that the old men at the back laughed and clapped before she had finished her bow.

Neither of them won. The adjudicator, a woman from Cardiff with a voice that carried to the rafters without a microphone, gave them each a certificate of merit and said from the stage that the little one had done the bravest thing a reciter can do, which is to begin again from the top. Nain laid her cane across her knees and said nothing at all. Then she took my hand, which she does not do.

Florencia drove us home along the river in the dark, Hazel asleep across Jenna's lap in the back seat with her certificate in her fist, and I opened the scans on my phone to the entry for the twenty-eighth of October, 1882, and read it again by the light of the screen. *Tomos said his piece in the children's recitation and forgot the middle and began again from the top and finished. He did not win. He was not sorry.*