The White Lady

by Brett Rutherford

Part Four of "A Northumbrian Wedding"

And now I turn, and facing me,
the polar opposite of the old invader
and his dragon visage, there stands
tall as an oak, The White Lady.

I see, again, the black-hued rats,
how dark they clot the landscape,
blotting with sable hues the fields of wheat,
spoiling the grape, and the apple harvest.

She sings with flute-like tone, “Away! Away!”
The rats stop. She waves her hand
toward the River Tyne below, to where
the rich groom’s yacht
     has shouldered out the fisher-boats.

“Away! Away!” she cries,
and the rats surge up below us,
flooding the gangplank to vanish
into the yacht’s interior. As fast
as they had come, the dark wave
of pestilence thins out, is gone.
Packed they must be in every inch
of space below the decks, all but
invisible steerage passengers,
bound like their predecessor rodents
to teeming Manhattan. “Away! Away!”
she sings again, and all
are gone and still.

                                I swoon at this,
and without knowing how, I find myself
again in the company of one
whose feet are lily-pads, who then
returned me to the wedding hall.

The bride is lovely. None seem
to notice that her pristine gown
is made entirely of small, white mice.
The groom’s cloak seems full
of raven wings and clinging martlets.
Beaks, snouts, and claws reach out
at wedding cake and goblets.
All is as planned, and as my
crisply engraved invite presaged.
Guests come in the guise of animals.
As merry it is as a Furry convention.
Though no one is drunk, the dancing
grows more and more wild as sun
sinks and a silver moon rises.

Who said that Northumberland is stern,
has never been to a Robson-Rutherford Wedding!

 

 

March 3, 2023, from a preceding night’s dream.

Lord Rutherford's Castle

 

by Brett Rutherford

Part Three of "A Northumbrian Wedding"

As crowds flow past and into the banquet hall,
I find myself alone. The barred door
of the castle keep, bronze studded with iron,
forbids my passage. I knock
my umbrella against its dark shielding.
A hollow booming echoes back — I dread
that Lord Rutherford, my cousin drear,
as much averse to weddings as to funerals,
will come running in his bathrobe,
or that some chain-mailed retainer
will pull the vast door ajar and menace
me with the very sword we brought
into this land from Flanders. But no,
my knock presumptuous just fades away.

I spy a lesser door, and stones
whose curious hand-holds pose
a challenge like some Chinese puzzle box.
Somehow my hands know where
to put themselves. With ease,
one cornerstone pulls out; the door
on a spring’d hinge just opens itself,
and in and up I go. My feet
know when to tread, and where
exactly one must side-step so as
to miss a plummeting to brain-dash.
As quick as a rabbit racing, I find
myself at the castle’s high precipice,
standing on checkerboard flagstones.

A rude stone sculpture, crumbling
and eaten away by ivy, rears up,
half-man, half-dragon, but faces in,
as though to guard from eyes the view —

And what I see! Oh, words
for once have almost failed me.
A horizon high, impossibly so,
two rivers meeting, and on
its level island, white and gold,
three towers by time unchanged:

a cathedral as new as on the day
it was completed, rainbow-hued
as its multi-colored windows
gleam brighter than the sun
without; a great, good hall
to shelter the merchant arts and serve
workman, lords, scholars and clerks;
and higher than both, a castle
beyond the dream of fairy-tales
with trees and hanging gardens blessed,
a place of neither strife nor war.

Rats at the Wedding

 by Brett Rutherford

Part Two of "A Northumbrian Wedding"

I have come
for the Robson-Rutherford wedding.
The inn’s last room is mine,
secured by my distant-cousin status.
My room overlooks the Tyne.
The castle beyond is all a-stir,
the grand hall packed with visitors.

Yet the old keep and its twisted turret
is barred and closed.
     Lord Rutherford forbids
the tread of curious idlers
upon its steep unbannistered steps,
windows unpaned; uneven-floored
the crenellated tower-top is, where
one might plummet to the very dungeon.

I pass a train depot and shelter
whose sign points out
the way to London, Edinburgh,
Paris, and Rome, though no one
seems to come or go
by either train or autobus. Indeed,
a colony of wharf-rats, obscenely fat
have taken residence on every bench
and nest in piles of yellow ticket stubs.

“Don’t mind them,” Lady Robson advises.
“As she is marrying an American,
the silly creature, we’ve drawn the rats.
Off to New York they go, and not
a moment too soon for Northumberland.”
This is an elder lady’s fantasy, I guess.

How such a Pied-Piper feat could be
accomplished was beyond my figuring.

Assuredly the rats are here for cake,
like all the distant relatives come on
with smiling insincerity and gifts
(white elephants that rotate fete to fete).

Rats, rice, and diamonds, the stuff
of weddings since ancient times.

Where Do Rutherfords Come From?

Before the 1600s, my Rutherford ancestors vanish across the Scottish border. We came from the "Debatable Lands," a border region where bands of men called "reivers" indiscriminately plundered and killed anyone who had the misfortune to be in their way. Often both England and Scotland ignored the raids, or even encouraged them. It maintained a dangerous no-man's-land between the two countries.


The clan Rutherford of West Teviotdale of the Middle March was among them. Today they would be regarded as serial killers, as they seemed to take great pleasure and pride in their work. The reiver bands ranged from a dozen to as many as 3,000 when incursions were made far beyond the border.


Sir Walter Scott was descended from Rutherfords, and in his first published long poem, "The Lay of the Last Minstrel," (1805) he relates an assassination carried out by "A hot and hardy Rutherford/ whom men called Dickon Draw-the-Sword" (Canto VI, Part VII).


The story of the Reivers and the Debatable Land is outlined here. The ruined towers and fortresses are where my ancestors wreaked havoc.

Border reivers on Wikipedia


This map, which traces the horrific feuds and battles of "The Debatable Lands," shows the original home of the Rutherfords and Robsons, my ancestors. Unfortunately the full map is out of print. But with this most recent bit of research, I now know where we came from back to the 1300s.





The town of Hawick even has an annual festival where the descendants of the fearsome Reivers dress up as borderland marauders. The principal focus of the people of Hawick appears to be RUGBY. The name of the town is pronounced "Hoick." This page traces Hawick back to the 600s (an Angle settlement) and the arrival of the Normans in the 1100s.


About Hawick in Undiscovered Scotland



A tantalizing line from another Reivers page: "In 1598 in an incident, the Scottish Halls and the Rutherfords were allegedly singled out by English officers as two surnames to whom no quarter should be given." King James I, after 1603, set out to eliminate the Debatable Land and drive out all its inhabitants, who were scattered across the border and far and wide. (This is how my Rutherford ancestors wound up in Northumberland.)


Hawick is our ancestral home from the 1300s to 1603. My great grandmother was Annie Robson Rutherford, her Robsons having wound up in Blackblakehope in Northumberland. So the Rutherfords and Robsons were probably intermarrying for hundreds of years.

Another clan site lists Robertus Dominus de Rodyrforde and other even earlier Rutherfords.

Although most of these lines went extinct, there is no doubt that all other Rutherford are offshoots of this Rutherford clan. I do not have the begats and marryings that directly connect the Northumberland Rutherfords of Elsdon, but the history pretty much locks it up. No one was named Rutherford because they thought it was a nice name to be connected to.


This is the Rutherford coat of arms:

 

Now I have another generation back on the marauding, limb-hacking, cattle-thieving clan Rutherford of Teviotdale. Yesterday I posted about Dickon "Draw-the-Sword" Rutherford who is in Sir Walter Scott's "Lay of the Last Minstrel."


A footnote provides more details about an earlier Reiver, a Rutherford with a plundering band of nine sons:


"The Rutherfords of Hunthill were an ancient race of Border Lairds, whose names occur in history, sometimes as defending the frontier against the English, sometimes as disturbing the peace of their own country. Dickon Draw-the-Sword was son to the ancient warrior, called in tradition the Cock of Hunthill, remarkable for leading into battle nine sons, gallant warriors, all sons of the aged champion.


"Mr. Rutherford, late of New York, in a letter to the editor, soon after these songs were published, quoted, when upwards of eighty years old, a ballad apparently the same with the Raid of the Reidsquare, but which apparently is lost, except the following lines :


"Bauld Rutherford ho was fu' stoat,
With all ha nine sons him about,
He brought the lads of Jedhrught out,
And bauldly fought that day."



Britannicus adds:

*** ***

And to think that I spared my enemies...

I need na' ha' dun that.

The Secret

by Brett Rutherford

Since you had to leave town, I lived
in West Newton with Gertrude and Claudius.
The town hugged two river banks
of the angry, dark Yoghiogheny. Hornets
buzzed on the bridge that divided it.
Trains roared through the middle
of the tiny main street. It was a place
you went when you needed to be
where no one knew your original name
or why you left where you came from,
where a man and a woman could pretend
to be married, and no one asked
for proof on paper. So I was Hamlet,
in teen-boy guise, housed with my mother
and the man who was once an uncle,
now a no-name lord of the manor.
In my basement laboratory I tried
in vain to make alchemical potions
that might turn a grown man to a frog,
or tastelessly poison a chutney jar.
None of my called-down curses ever worked.
The miscreant sat in his TV room at night
watching Gunsmoke and John Wayne westerns.
My mother spawned a daughter, and then
a son as well, while “Uncle” spewed scorn
on my useless, book-centered universe.
He railed against Jews, bragged that the town
would never build a park or a swimming pool
“’cause if we did, the niggers would come.”

I stayed at school as late as I could,
volunteered for anything that kept
my presence from his shadow.
He made me know I was not welcome,
a bookworm boarder to last as long
as the child support payments came
from my silent and absent father,
and after that, “I want you gone.”

The house had one book only
that was not mine: on the dryer,
opposite their bedroom door,
a well-leafed copy of Lady Chatterley’s

Lover that opened instantly
to the sex scenes. My uncle
had used it to seduce my mother,
sweet poison to eye and ear.

I tried to imagine their coupling,
but judging from the contents
of the medicine cabinet, for
hemorrhoids, psoriasis, and
unpronounceable ailments, all
I could picture was something
like a Hammer Films blob
undulating upon a mattress,
as though two pizza slices
had toppled upon one another
inside the melting oven.

The new town
tolerated me. I had Latin at last
to occupy my thoughts,
new streets to haunt,
a vast night gallery
of riverside graves
where I could brood
and plan my escape
or some spectacular
suicide.

When poetry came.
I figured I wouldn’t last
to thirty, anyway.

When summer came
and I could run off
to my grandmother’s house,
a scant five miles
from Scottdale,
the exultation of home
came back to me.

I phoned my friends,
and one by one their mothers
answered and said, “No.
Tim’s not around.” “Dave
won’t be around this summer.”
“Tom is not permitted
to take a phone call right now.”

I never saw my friends again.

Decades – no, a lifetime later,
I hear from an old neighbor,
the Polish girl whose porch
we could see from our kitchen
window. “You were just gone,
she told me. “One day, just gone.
Our parents wouldn’t tell us why
you were gone. Your whole family
just vanished without a word.”

I choked up as she told me,
“We cried forever.”

My mother took up
with my father’s sister’s husband,
and not content to run away,
they wove a story:
that my father and his sister
“did it first.” Incest, that is.

Their proof: a missing condom
that his young daughter and a friend
had blown up as a water balloon
and thrown away in secret;
and the mailman’s account
of seeing someone naked
moving around in the afternoon,
pale skin viewed through panes
of an inner doorway.

So, armed with “They did it first”
and D. H. Lawrence, the furtive nights
and parked-car couplings began.
Two divorces, and the flood
of door-to-door and phone-
to-phone gossiping. Have you heard
about the Rutherford incest?
Brother and sister — the mailman saw
everything. And wasn’t it almost
incest, what the other two did,
a woman and her in-law?

More than four decades later
I came to the town again. The street
of yellow bricks greeted me
with a full rainbow against
the backdrop of nearby hills.

It was just a town. A place
of stately homes, a new library,
a red brick church
my great-grandparents helped build.

I ought to feel happy here.
The graves of my ancestors
are here in their fine plots.
My grandfather had been Burgess,
a great-uncle a financier;
even a Rutherford bookstore once.

Yet I kept looking backwards,
tense at each corner expecting
the crowd with pitchforks,
torches hastily lit to be rid of me.

Who can undo
the evil of false witnessing?
Who can come home
to where they “cried forever?”

Four Generations in the "Media"

I am the fourth generation of U.S. Rutherfords in my line, involved in news, books, print and other media.

"Rutherford News" was founded in Scottdale by my great-grandfather, then run by my grandfather Thomas H. Rutherford as a newsstand, newspaper distributing office, stationer, and bookstore. He was succeeded by my uncle.

Here's a news story from 1910 about how the Rutherfords celebrated New Years:

ANNUAL NEWSBOYS
DINNER GIVEN

T.H. Rutherford of Scottdale
Entertains All His
Paper Carriers

It Was the Eighth Affair

Sumptuous Spread at DeHaven's
Restaurant Last Night Enjoyed by
Thirty-Five of the Boys and a
"Flash-Light Picture Made.

Scottdale, Jan 5 (1910) – The eighth annual newsboys' dinner which Thomas H. Rutherford, the newsdealer and stationer, tendered to his faithful force of coming men of Scottdale who deliver the newspapers every day was another triumphal success. It occurred last evening and about 35 boys sat down to a feed that pleased them immensely and gave them a good time that they appreciated greatly, as anyone might know who saw them at the table. They were from the big boys down to the little tads who aren't much bigger than the papers they carry, particularly when the papers are the Sunday monsters.

The banquet, for it had many a more pretentious one faded for its lavishness, took place at Dennis DeHaven's restaurant on Broadway, where a number of the dinners have been given in the last several years. From fried oysters to pie, cake, and ice cream and fruit, with a lot of other things sandwiched in during the evening, the cuisine of the house shone with great brilliancy, and the appetites of the guests were satiated by the time they accomplished the eating of the dinner. Besides Thomas H. Ruutherford, there were present Stephen R. Rutherford, who has charge of all the newspapers, and George H. Shupe of The Independent and A. L. Porter of The Courier.

After the dinner was over, J.A. Chadderton and James Tarr of the Ping Pong Gallery in the Reid block brought their flashlight machine in a "caught" a picture of the dining party.

Mysteries of Elsdon Churchyard

It was inevitable that I would finally write a poem about my ancestral home in Northumberland, the town of Elsdon, from my which great-great grandparents emigrated to Pennsylvania.

1

Why did the bell
of Elsdon Church
resound
across the landscape,

shaking the ground
of the tumulus mound
above the empty motte
of Elsdon Castle?

Why did the voice
of St. Cuthbert’s minister
echo deep mystery
in even a commonplace
sermon, bass-deep
from a voice that was
no lower than baritone?

Thank the medieval
architect who thrust
three horses’ skulls
upright into an oaken
cabinet,

a resonance box
suspended
within the bell-tower.

Bell above
thrice amplified below
and out across
the countryside;

preacher in pulpit
graced with the tone
of thunder-Jehovah.

2

Whose the stone
coffin that leans
against the wall

of St. Cuthbert’s?

No one can move it,
and no one knows
what sacred corpse
reclined within its hollow,
sculpted to human
silhouette.

Monks, it was said,
came here with relics
of St. Cuthbert,
in flight from the Vikings,

but who could flee
cross-country
with a stone sepulchre
and the eight horses
and cumbersome cart
it would take to haul
an entire saint
and his equipage?

No, this was not Cuthbert
whose tomb
rests finally in Durham,
but some unknown knight,
perhaps, who willed
himself a mighty coffin
where neither rat nor worm
could mar his godlike
features —

Yet what is left?
Lidless, leaning
against a wall
where dogs and derelicts
can lift a leg,

flesh, armor and bones
all gone, a hollow
in human outline,
no man and
Everyman.

3

Before Elli’s Valley
became “Elsdon,”
before the invading
Vikings,
before the Normans,
who built Elsdon Castle
before the Saxons,
guttering the Anglish
tongue, Romans
lived here and prospered,
secure in their reign
amid their household
and temple gods.

Here, against the unwilling
walls of Saint Cuthbert’s
a Roman gravestone.

To the divine Manes,

he of the prefect
of the first cohort
of the Augustan of the Lusitani,
also of the second cohort
of the Breuci, subcurator
of the Flaminian Way
and of the distribution
of maintenance,
subcurator of public works.

Julia Lucilla had this erected
to her husband well deserving.
He lived forty-eight years
six months and five days.

Pushed back southward
from the Antonine Wall
to Hadrian’s Wall, then out
of Britain altogether
as barbarians swarmed Europe,
Romans left only stones,
deep-buried lares and penates
beneath their houses,
the envied ruins
of colossal baths, the heads
and torsos of toppled gods.

Still, every English ghost
looks out to sea
for the dreaded Viking sails,
and treads lightly, lest
a Roman hand reach up
to seize its ankle.

Turn any stone
and a face looks up.

Four Generations of Rutherfords in the "Book Business"

Runs in the family, even though I was separated from the Rutherfords at age 13.
My great-grandfather John Rutherford came from England to Scottdale, PA, and ran a book and stationery store (other Rutherford siblings had shoe factories, coal mines, banks, and a steam engine factory).
My grandfather took over the "bookstore" and became a newspaper distributor for several counties. Untold numbers of paperboys worked for him, and he sponsored 12 boy scout troops.
Some of the Boy Scout troops had marching bands and they probably bought their instruments at a local store called "Rutherford Studios." It was rumored of the Rutherfords that any of them could pick up any musical instrument and be able to play it within a few months.
One auntie secretly wrote poetry.
The news store was inherited by my Uncle Bill, a grumpy man with an eye-patch who lived above the store. Rutherford News closed forever sometime in the late 1970s.
As a child in Scottdale, I would cut up magazines and rebind them in various ways and sell them to neighbors; I also printed a mimeographed science newsletter and tried to draw comics. By the fifth grade I was writing monster plays and staging them in a local garage, and charging admission to the all the neighborhood kids. People in town said I was just like my grandfather.
And here I am, a curmdugeon, publishing books and picking away at writing and music. Did I have any choice in the matter?
This corner building was the site of Rutherford News. Since it was built around 1880, it was probably always in the family.