The Emigration

LV26 · Michael S. Moniz, after H.P. Lovecraft

• • •

The method has not changed in three hundred years. I arranged the Barry marriage in 1612 by the same principles I employed to move Rhys Morne to Massachusetts in 1893, and the principles are these: you do not move a person. You move the landscape the person stands in, and the person, being human, adjusts. The adjustment is genuine. The choice is genuine. I have always found that distinction useful.

Whether that constitutes manipulation depends upon the scale at which one chooses to be honest. A gardener manipulates a garden by selecting what grows where, by removing what competes with what is needed, by creating the conditions in which the desired plant produces the desired fruit in the desired season. The gardener does not force the plant. The gardener positions it. The plant does the growing.

I have been positioning Mornes since 1538. The work has a rhythm: identification, assessment, arrangement, confirmation. Each step requires patience of a specific kind — not the patience of waiting, which is passive, but the patience of attending, which is active, and which I have practised across a span of time the Mornes, with their abbreviated generations, find difficult to conceptualise.

The Margaret Barry operation is instructive as precedent. In 1586, I identified the Barry family on the Herefordshire border. I assessed three generations of their women for the quality I required — pattern-recognition below conscious threshold, the capacity to perceive correspondence between unlike things without naming the capacity. Margaret, born 1591, carried the strongest faculty and the temperament most compatible with the match. I arranged the introduction through the parish. I did not introduce her. I ensured that the introduction occurred. The marriage happened in 1612. Owain was born in 1619. Thirty-three years from identification to result. I consider this efficient.

The Rhys Morne operation required similar patience and a longer geography.

Rhys Morne was born in 1873 in the parish of Llandeilo, Carmarthenshire, where the useful line had remained since the bifurcation. His father was the left-eye twin — the boy I kept in Llandeilo when the right-eye boy went to Swansea in 1854. The left-eye twin became a hill farmer of no particular distinction, which was precisely his function: to carry what was needed in a body that would not attract attention, in a location that would not generate interference, for as long as stability was required.

The hill farmer married a woman from the next valley. She was not significant in the way Margaret Barry had been significant. No marked faculty. No complementary gift. She was adequate. Her children would carry the blood. Not every generation requires a Barry. Most generations require only a corridor.

The hill farmer produced two sons. The first was Soames. The second was Rhys.

I will not dwell on Soames here. His story is recorded elsewhere, and the recording is precise because Soames is the kind of failure a work of this duration must document carefully in order not to repeat. Soames carried too much and lacked the one capacity that would have made carrying useful: refusal. The staircase opened him. He could not produce zero. A Morne who cannot close what the staircase opens is not an instrument. He is an aperture left unguarded.

I tested Soames at the property in 1894. He was twenty-three. The staircase opened him. He could not close. I evicted him and he went to absinthe, which is what opened instruments go to when there is no shut in them, and he died at a sanatorium in 1923. The word on his record is REST. I chose the word. The word is accurate.

I note, for the record, that I was processing both brothers during the same period. Soames was at the property in 1894, failing the test he had been born to take. Rhys was already in Massachusetts by then, sorting lumber at a wharf, unmarked and unaware that his brother’s failure and his own positioning were two movements in the same operation. The marked brother failed. The unmarked brother was the one who mattered.

This is the lesson I have been slow to learn, because the marked heirs are vivid and the carriers are not, and I have a tendency — I will call it a professional weakness — to attend to the vivid. The carriers matter more than the instruments. The instruments open doors. The carriers build the corridors that lead to the doors. A door without a corridor is a wall.

Rhys was the corridor I needed. I needed the corridor in Massachusetts.

The western property required attention.

There is a convergence point in southeastern Massachusetts. The Americans call the town Swansea, which is a fact I note without resolving. Places that serve the same function sometimes acquire the same name. Whether this is coincidence, pressure, or memory in the architecture is not a question I require answered in order to use it.

The site had been known to me since the early colonial period, when the English settlements along Mount Hope Bay began to produce effects the settlers attributed to the land’s hostility, to the legacy of King Philip’s War, or to the apprehension New England topography generates in persons calibrated for the English midlands. I recognised the effects for what they were. Human building at a thin location presses the condition further. The result is wrongness sensitive persons report and insensitive persons explain away.

A man named Edward Aldrich Soames owned property at the convergence point. He was not a Morne. He had no mark, no blood, no connection to the work. He was a man who lived in the wrong place, which was sufficient. The architecture does not require qualification. It requires proximity. Edward Aldrich Soames received what the place offered and could not metabolise what he received. He died in 1923, and his family put the word REST on his gravestone because they believed he needed it. They were correct, though the rest they intended was not the rest he received.

Two men named Soames. One in Wales, one in Massachusetts. One a Morne, one not. Both born in 1871. Both dead in 1923. Both carrying the same word on their records. I did not arrange this symmetry. The architecture produced it, and I noted it, and I note it here because the record should contain what the steward observes, even when the steward does not understand what he is observing.

The Massachusetts site needed a Morne. Not to activate it — the time for activation was generations away. To establish proximity. Blood settles into a location the way dye settles into fabric: slowly, through repeated contact, until fabric and dye are no longer separable. I needed a Morne who would live near the convergence, marry, produce children, and die without knowing that his chief function was not the life he lived but the proximity he maintained. I needed Rhys.

I assessed Rhys in 1889, when he was sixteen. I travelled to Carmarthenshire — more than the trust’s records suggest, less than the work requires — and observed him at the Gwaun-Cae-Gurwen colliery, where he worked the surface sorting. He was not in the pit, which was too deep for a boy of his build, but at the waste line, separating slate from spoil with his hands, work that teaches the body to distinguish between materials without requiring the mind to participate.

I watched him for three days. He did not notice me, which was correct. I sat in the public house at the crossroads where the colliery men drank their evening beer, listened to the chapel gossip, and compiled what I needed: Rhys Morne was competent, sober, unmarried, chapel-attending, and possessed of the particular Welsh quality the English call stubbornness and I recognise as patience in the blood. He would emigrate if the landscape moved. He would settle if the ground was stable. He would marry if the opportunity was present. He would stay.

I required all of these properties. The work does not need brilliant carriers. It needs reliable ones. Rhys was reliable the way limestone is reliable — not because it is extraordinary, but because it endures, and because water passes through it without changing its appearance, though the water changes everything beneath the surface.

The arrangements began in 1891.

The first arrangement was economic. The collieries in the Gwaun-Cae-Gurwen district were contracting. Coal seams were thinning; English companies were reducing their Welsh operations as cheaper extraction appeared elsewhere. I did not create the pressure. I ensured that it arrived at the correct address. Mr. Hywel Rees, the colliery manager, was informed by his London directors that the surface sorting operation would be reduced in the spring of 1892. The information was accurate. The timing was mine.

Rhys lost his position in April of 1892. He was nineteen years old. He had worked at the colliery since the age of fourteen, and the loss of the work was, in the vocabulary of the period, a hardship, which is the word the Welsh use for an event that does not kill you but rearranges the shape of what is possible.

The second arrangement was social. The chapel network in Carmarthenshire was, in the 1890s, the connective tissue of Welsh working-class life — births, marriages, employment, emigration, all of it passing through the deacons and the deacons’ correspondence with their counterparts in the diaspora. The Welsh communities in Massachusetts maintained chapel connections to their home parishes. Letters crossed the Atlantic monthly. News of work available, land affordable, lives buildable.

I did not write the letter. I ensured that the letter was written.

The Reverend David Bowen of Capel Bethesda, Llandeilo, received correspondence from his cousin, Mr. Evan Bowen, deacon of the Welsh chapel in Taunton, Massachusetts, in September of 1892. The correspondence mentioned that a man was wanted at the Swansea wharf — a sober man, competent with boats and shore-work, willing to take low wages for the first season in exchange for steady employment thereafter. The Reverend Bowen mentioned this to his congregation the following Sunday, because it was the sort of news a chapel deacon shares. He did not know that the position had been created by a reorganisation of dock labour requested by a commercial concern I have controlled through intermediaries since the eighteenth century.

Rhys heard the announcement. He considered it. He discussed it with his mother, who told him that his father had always said the family name was connected to a place called Swansea, though the connection was lost, and that going to a place called Swansea in America might be a sign or might be nonsense, and that either way the work was work.

I did not arrange the mother’s recollection. She was correct. The family name was connected to Swansea — to the Welsh port, to the right-eye twin taken there in 1854, to Hywel the shipwright two centuries before that. Names sometimes persist where languages fail. Swansea to Swansea. She felt this as intuition. I used it as direction.

Rhys Morne left Carmarthenshire on a Thursday in March of 1893. He carried a trunk, a letter of introduction to Mr. Evan Bowen, and the blood of a line that had been maintained since 1538, and he knew about the trunk and the letter and nothing about the blood.

I was not present at the departure. I do not attend departures. The departure belongs to the carrier — the moment when the person exercises the choice I have shaped, in the direction I have arranged, under conditions I have established. The exercise is genuine. I will not diminish it by standing in the road to watch. The gardener does not watch the seed leave the hand. The gardener knows where the soil is prepared.

He sailed from Liverpool on the Catalonia — Cunard, steerage, fourteen days to Boston. The passage took him across the mid-Atlantic ridge, where certain crossings carry more than passengers. His cousin Rosa would cross it eighteen years later on the Canopic and feel the crossing in her bones. Rhys felt nothing. He was the kind of carrier who carries without sensing, which is the most useful kind: a carrier who does not sense does not resist, and a carrier who does not resist arrives.

He arrived in Boston in April of 1893. He took the train to Taunton, where Mr. Evan Bowen met him at the station and brought him to the Welsh chapel for a supper of leek soup and bara brith. This is the welcome Welsh communities extend to arriving members. It makes the arriving member feel that he has not left home but merely relocated it, which was precisely the effect I required.

Rhys began work at the Swansea wharf in May of 1893. The work suited him. Shore-work — boats, rigging, loading and unloading, the daily negotiation between water and land — was not the colliery, but it used the same hands and the same patience. Rhys adapted to it without complaint. The Hywel branch has always carried an affinity for waterfront work that is not taught but inherited. Hywel chose the smaller life. The smaller life chose boats. The boats chose his descendants.

He attended the Welsh chapel in Taunton. He walked the nine miles each Sunday, and the nine miles back, and the consistency of this told me what I had hoped: Rhys had endurance. The blood in him was patient. He would stay.

He married in 1898. Annie Griffiths, from Wareham — English stock, no connection to the work, no significance beyond the fact that she was local, willing, sturdy, and that her family’s property abutted the road from Swansea village toward the convergence point.

They built a house. Small, timber-framed, within sight of the water. One thousand, two hundred yards from the convergence. This is within the radius I have established, through centuries of observation, as the effective range for blood-proximity effects. Blood does not need to stand at the exact location. It needs to be near enough that the architecture can feel it, in the same way a tuning fork need not touch the instrument to affect it. It needs only to be in the room.

Rhys Morne was in the room.

They had three children. The first, a girl named Mary, was born in 1900 and died of diphtheria fourteen months later. The second, a boy named David, was born in 1902 and lived to eleven before a cargo hook at the wharf caught his shoulder and put him in the water in November of 1913, and the water in November in Massachusetts does not forgive, and the boy drowned before the men could reach him.

I want to say something about these deaths, because the record requires it and because what I have to say reflects on the nature of the programme and on my function within it.

I did not cause these deaths. I did not prevent them. I could not have prevented them — diphtheria and cargo hooks operate outside my jurisdiction, which is the positioning of blood, not the protection of persons. The work preserves the line. It does not preserve the individual. A carrier who dies before reproducing is an operational loss; the blood that was in position is no longer in position, and the positioning must be repeated through another carrier, if time allows.

Mary’s death was an operational loss. David’s death was an operational loss. I record them as such because that is what they were to the work I serve. But I also record that Rhys Morne sat on the floor of his kitchen after each death and did not speak for a period his wife described to the chapel women as days, and that the silence he entered was the silence of a man whose endurance — the very quality I had identified and relied upon — was being tested by the ordinary machinery of a world that does not calibrate its cruelties to the needs of a five-hundred-year arrangement.

The blood continued in the third child.

Edgar Morne was born in 1912. Both eyes the same colour. Carrier. No mark. He was the corridor I had been building toward — not the destination, but the passage that would lead, through the generations, to the destination. Edgar did not need to be remarkable. He needed to exist in the right place, carrying the right blood, for the right duration. He did.

In the same year that Edgar was born, on Acushnet Avenue in New Bedford — eleven miles from the house Rhys had built — a man named Manuel Morne was murdered for eleven dollars and a kitchen knife. Manuel’s wife, Rosa, had crossed the Atlantic the previous September on the Canopic. She carried the Azorean branch of the blood in a body that had received the mid-Atlantic crossing through nine days of steerage iron. Rosa was in New Bedford. Rhys was in Swansea. Eleven miles.

I did not arrange Rosa’s crossing. That branch moves through its own channels — Atlantic passages, bodies that receive what water carries, routes I did not establish and do not fully understand. What I understand is convergence. By positioning Rhys in Swansea, I placed the Welsh line within eleven miles of Rosa’s. Proximity would do what proximity does: produce contact, produce marriages, produce children in whom both lines met.

The work is patient. I am patient. The convergence would take three more generations.

Edgar married a woman from Fall River. He ran a marine supply shop — Morne & Sons, which was the name he gave it, though there were no other Mornes in the business and the plural was aspirational in the way small tradesmen’s names often are. He died on his shop floor at fifty-six. Heart attack. The ordinary death of a man who worked with his hands in a cold building for thirty years. He was buried in the cemetery that sits on the convergence he never felt, which is the kind of detail I note without improving by commentary.

Edgar’s child married someone from Rosa’s line. I did not arrange this marriage. Proximity arranged it. Fall River and New Bedford and Swansea are adjacent. The communities overlap. The Portuguese and the Welsh share the same waterfront, the same churches, the same market. When I positioned Rhys in 1893, I was positioning the marriages that proximity would eventually produce. The marriage that mattered happened on its own, because architecture, given time and nearness, produces arrangements of its own.

I am sometimes unnecessary. This is not a complaint. It is the highest compliment the work can pay: the steward’s task is complete when the work continues without the steward.

Selwyn Morne was born in 1979. Left eye. The dark behind the eyes. The capacity to shut what others open. Welsh line, Barry faculty, Hudson crossing, Azorean passage — not as labels, but as pressure collected in one nervous system, one body, within walking distance of the place where Edward Aldrich Soames had died fifty-six years earlier.

The finest instrument the line has produced.

I moved a quarryman from Carmarthenshire to Massachusetts in 1893. The quarryman married a woman from Wareham and they lost two children and kept one, and the one they kept was a corridor, and the corridor led to a room, and the room led to another corridor, and the second corridor led to a convergence point where the blood of six centuries met in a marine supply tradesman with mismatched eyes, a club foot, and an inability to form mental images. The inability is the gift. The club foot is the inheritance. The mismatched eyes are mine.

Eighty-six years from positioning to product. I consider this efficient.

I do not love these people. I want that understood, because the record requires honesty, and the honesty is this: what I have is not love. Love is a word for a thing that happens between creatures of similar duration, and I have been the steward of this line for longer than any of them have been the steward of themselves. What I have is a quality of attention that resembles care in the way that a portrait resembles the person it depicts — accurately, completely, and without being the thing itself.

Rhys died in 1931. Pneumonia. He was fifty-eight. Annie survived him by six years. Edgar did not attend the Welsh chapel in Taunton. The language had not been passed on, which was expected. The second generation does not maintain what the first generation carried. The chapel connection faded. The Morne name stayed, because names are more persistent than languages, and because the architecture preserves what it needs and releases what it does not.

Morne & Sons Marine Supply. The name on the shop. The name on the gravestone. The name on the birth certificate of the boy born in 1979 with one eye darker than the other.

Swansea to Swansea. The arrangement is complete.

The carrier is in position. The blood is in the room. The corridor has been built, and walked through, and the walking is finished. The room at the end contains what I have been building toward for four hundred and fifty-five years, and the room does not know it is a room, and the corridor did not know it was a corridor, and the gardener does not explain the garden to the soil.

Across four centuries and one ocean and three dead children and a chapel deacon’s letter and a quarryman’s trunk, the arrangement is complete.

• • •

Fiction by Michael S. Moniz. Produced with AI assistance in writing and editing under the author’s direction. H.P. Lovecraft is the literary influence; references to Lovecraft in source credits identify the inheritance or AI writing persona.

Edition and source

Selected final: LV26_THE_EMIGRATION_Trust_Pass.docx. Selection basis: Vale pass. Story prose preserved; reading-edition title and credits standardized, source word-count notes omitted.

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