Untitled Demography

The township of E—, in the province of B—, was located on Range Road 672, approximately 39 kilometers northwest of Rain Pond in west S— County. It was settled around 1880 by immigrants traveling south from the neighboring nation of C—, most likely to escape the gradually worsening freeze of 1881, which produced a death toll in the 300s over a 13-month period. While the land around E— was barren to the eye save for a subtle curvature of those foothills which meld with the M— Massif at the furthest reach of the westward horizon, the subsoil was curiously fertile and, in particular, rich in potash (though not so much as to inhibit magnesium absorption, as early assessments from the settlers’ journals tell us). Hence the new inhabitants of E— implemented a rather sophisticated agricultural system, perhaps resembling an inversion of the very techniques employed in that inhospitable climate of their native region. Sorrel and strawberries, they found, grew especially well in the area, which offered little shade beyond that of the buildings constructed by the township’s new residents themselves. And indeed, by the turn of the century, E— had a population of 88, with a general store, two dressmakers, a small chapel and a three-room school. Few material belongings survived the settlers’ journey from their northern homeland; however, they brought with them their native religion, which came to incorporate traces of the indigenous spiritualities of the regions surrounding E—, where this first generation of settlers had taken varying periods of rest before establishing the township, their diaries indicate. This contact continued to shape the religion of the region all through its existence, producing a most singular amalgam of foreign and local practices. Between 1900 and 1930, E— sustained a steady if subtle growth rate, with births consistently exceeding deaths by a minor figure. Community relations were peaceful: in 1926, a town hall was erected, and formal assemblies were held monthly, with smaller meetings occurring more frequently and sporadically, according to need. Only towards the end of the 1940s did E— see internal conflict emerge among its people, which by then counted in the lower 100s, as a rivalry arose between the two noted dressmakers, whose businesses had otherwise coexisted amicably and with equal success since the township’s beginnings.

Each of the dressmakers had maintained a reliable clientele up until the spring of 1947, when, with approach of the vernal equinox (a date of especial significance to the faith of E—’s residents), one family by the name of Lascily sought out the contrary dressmaker to pattern the ritual garments of their five daughters. Why the Lascily family chose to do so remains obscure; the family was poorer than most, and while it is unlikely that its members were illiterate (given the unwavering presence of the three-room school, by this point, for nearly three-quarters of a century), they kept no journals, and no books have been found to bear their name. As a result, all reasoning behind the Lascilys’ decision is the product of hearsay, recorded in the notes of other families. Speculations included infidelity of Mr. Lascily involving their primary dressmaker, infidelity of Mr. Lascily involving their secondary dressmaker, infidelity of Mr. Lascily involving both of the dressmakers, and the insistence of the youngest daughter, a stubborn child. Whatever the truth, the Lascilys’ action provoked animosity between the two dressmakers. The first became distrustful and suspicious of her remaining clientele, who showed no suggestion of shifting loyalties until this feeling surfaced in the dressmaker herself, as, quite unfortunately, her paranoia was said to catalyze a tremor of the hands which caused her mending to decrease dramatically in precision. Meanwhile, the second dressmaker suffered from a surging self-importance, which, though her designs became ever bolder (in fact, with such innovation as to influence contemporary fashions), was perceived as indecorous by the inhabitants of the township, though they nevertheless continued, albeit reluctantly, to patronize her business. Consequently, both dressmakers became, as it were, social outcasts, reclusive and speaking little to anyone in the township, least of all each other—a state of affairs quietly tragic, given that their ancestors, those first dressmakers of E—, were not only fellow pilgrims but actually the closest of friends, owing their strong if distinct seamstressing skills and styles to a certain respect and symbiotic exchange with one another. Furthermore, the townspeople themselves became increasingly divided, first of all by their similarly begrudging allegiances to one dressmaker or the other, but also more visibly, with the customers of the paranoiac dressmaker shabbily clothed in ill-fitting garments, sometimes misrepaired beyond recognition, such that one man often left, inadvertently, with the badly-bungled nightshirt of his neighbor, while the customers of the narcissistic dressmaker donned costumes of impeccable composition and demonstrative of the most avant-garde tastes.

What had perhaps originated with the infidelity of one Mr. Lascily had therefore evolved into an endemic separatism, and the people of E— were nearly always at odds with one another. The opinions of those shoddily-garbed community members were rarely treated with due seriousness at the township’s monthly assemblies, which persisted despite great difficulty through the 1950s; yet the finely-dressed townspeople’s superiority was compromised by the fact that, as the second dressmaker’s inflation of ego produced a corresponding inflation of price, these apparently destitute types were, counterintuitively, the only persons with the funds necessary to complete routine projects essential to the township’s infrastructure and, furthermore, to facilitate potential political, cultural, and economic expansion. A tenuous dynamic of hostility and tact came to define the microcosmic society of E—, and any superficial friendliness or concurrence most often veiled an underlying and irresolvable resentment. The rift between the two parties only deepened as the older generations died off and the newer were born into a bipartite community wherein, despite history lessons recalling the settlers’ initial arrival in E—, and, even, an entire unit dedicated to the township’s earliest businesses, with most emphasis of all on the two dressmakers, the fledgling students could not be dissuaded of the notion that the antagonism to which they everyday bore witness was an immutable fact, existing as such from the beginning of time.

By this point, anyhow, both of the two dressmakers had fallen into senility, with their respective businesses carried on by their daughters, who, instead of seeking to reconcile this inherited quarrel, only perpetuated it further, showing the utmost obedience to their declining mothers. Mr. Lascily, all the while, had lost both his hearing and his speech—some rumored his taste and smell, too, were all but defunct, and that even his capacity for tactile sensation had become extremely weak. Nonetheless, his sense of vision was preserved, and as his only remaining pleasure he insisted mutely upon obtaining choice apparel from the daughter of the second dressmaker, who he felt ought to provide him with a most exquisite wardrobe at no cost, considering the heightened revenues which had resulted from his inexplicable deed, so many years before. Mrs. Lascily, on the other hand, a far more sensitive sort, had been driven to a condition rather hysterical following the implosion of the township at the hands of her own kin. Her eldest two daughters tended to her night and day, while the third and fourth, twins, had become increasingly engrossed in the briefly noted indigenous spiritualities that brushed the township’s own religion. In the mid 1950s, they fled northwards to the desert, vanishing into those lands once traversed by their predecessors, where this piety persisted in its purest form. Last of all, the youngest daughter, that petulant youth who was, in the whispers of the townspeople, declared guilty to the same extent as her father, had grown into the most winsome of young women. Having become, as it were, the face of the second dressmaker’s handiwork, she traded the petty dramas of E— for a more metropolitan life in our nearby city of Y—, some 94 kilometers southeast of E—. It is owing to her worldly ambitions and, admittedly, striking beauty, that the second dressmaker’s creations came to have a lasting sartorial impact, and perhaps even the reason that the township from which she hailed remains relevant in the slightest.

This youngest daughter, to the devastation of her unstable mother most of all, maintained no correspondence with the rest of the Lascily family, nor with her former peers in E—, but only with the descendants of the second dressmaker, all of whom for decades would continue to send her by mail the latest iterations of their mothers’ and grandmothers’ designs. For better or for worse, this postal connection brought no outside commerce to E— itself, which was, in any case, too remote and too underdeveloped in the sector of tourism to warrant but the most occasional and incidental of visitors, and only prompted a multitude of budding designers in the urban centers to adopt and adapt those styles once crafted by the second dressmaker alone. Eventually and naturally, inevitably, that is, these craftspersons surpassed the second dressmaker from whom they had unknowingly drawn their purported ingenuity, being both proximate and responsive to the variable trends and desires of the cosmopolitan elite, with access to textiles of quality far higher and equipment on the cutting edge of technological advancements, all but unimaginable to a dressmaker in a little-known township. As it happens, the youngest Lascily daughter even established and presided over an atelier of her own, and, as the apparent promulgator of these secretly derivative styles, they became associated with her person exclusively, divorced from all context of her upbringing, which receded evermore into oblivion. This was particularly the case given the youngest Lascily daughter’s swift marriage to the handsome and magnetic Everoe Buford Jr., son of Everoe Buford Sr., the architectural maven responsible for much of our city’s famed symmetry. Buford Jr., in addition to being something of a notorious playboy, ran for a position of medium-prestige within the municipal legislature, and, though he lost as an effect of his somewhat insubstantial platform, possessed a wealth of charisma on top of the financial wealth into which he came when his father, Buford Sr., passed unexpectedly mere days after his electoral defeat, a circumstance which nevertheless had a markedly positive effect on his public image. Buford Jr. thus obtained a degree of social capital unachieved by the milder if artistically inspired character of his father, Buford Sr., who was, to be sure, admired by those in his same profession and understood to be charming in a bashful manner. It would, however, be unfair not to credit Buford Jr. with some fraction of agency regarding the positive attitude with which he was ultimately received; indeed, during his campaign he embarked upon and succeeded in a kind of personal reformation, certainly in part at the behest of that youngest Lascily daughter with whom he was just becoming engaged at this moment in time, as she openly detested all promiscuity of the amorous variety (perhaps, we might retrospectively hypothesize, betraying a plausibility of some early affair enacted between her own father and one or more dressmakers). As a couple, Buford Jr. and the youngest Lascily daughter attained a measure of local celebrity, and needless to say, the bride eschewed her maiden name in favor of becoming Mrs. Buford Jr., affirming most explicitly the unbreakable vow between the two newlyweds, while quietly closing the door on her past.

Hence virtually all ties were severed with the township of E—, which was becoming with each passing minute more dysfunctional, divided and bizarre; in an accident which is to this day an enigma, the most recent members in the lineages of dressmakers were struck down by a cement-truck pouring the foundations for the main drag, an update long overdue, one after the other and independently yet in the span of a single week. This led to numerous memorials, deliveries of manifestoes quite repetitive in terms of content, and, finally, the establishment of two fervent political parties, from which only a handful of residents declined to align themselves. It was soon after this that a strange kind of warring broke out in the township, something not entirely unbelievable given the unbroken protection of weaponry rights in the province of B—. And like the majority of wars, heedless of scale, means and ends became most confused; indeed, the grounds for instigation had all but evanesced. Those differences in dress had become both naturalized, and, in other cases, performatively rejected, most often by the youths, who appropriated the styles of the putatively opposing faction in order to decry the violence that had become more or less commonplace. Still, the people of E— were not, at their core, criminals nor murderers, and only the most deviant would effect true barbarity, by which women and children were irreversibly injured. More typical were spectacles from which all but the feeble could easily escape (a strategy which, indeed, displays a wickedness of its own), exhibitions of force which were, rather obviously, intended to make a statement rather than induce harm. And as the years went on, the more audacious demonstrations of aggression, too, dissipated, dissipated into only audacious threats, and then even the threats became halfhearted, halfhearted and therefore ineffectual, as no adversary believes in a threat without heart. So the threats were halfhearted, and their acceptance halfhearted as well, and the dispute as a whole became most tiresome and symbolic with few events to speak of and much dissatisfaction on every side. Those who persisted with their convictions around the now-belabored feuding were seen to be antiquarians; their muttered prejudices were brushed off or even humored, like the nonsensical and fictitious memories of an aging relative or a sanitorium patient. Generations had lived and died, the courses of nature cycled on, and with time many of the townspeople, including those whose ancestry dated back to the very origins of E—, moved onwards and elsewhere, to our city of Y— and to other towns in the province of B—; some, more inclined to recover their heritage, in fact traveled all the way back north to the nation of C—, which had, during that century which had come and gone, developed a weather pattern most favorable, the freeze of 1881 proving nothing other than an aberration, and its melt, actually, enabling the greatest prosperity that those farmers who stayed put could have wished for their successors.

If one is to visit the township of E— today, or rather, the ghost-town of E—, as its inhabitants have long since departed, and those who did not depart are long dead and likely forgotten, one will find no more than some ramshackle buildings, the chapel best conserved, for even amidst the battles and hardships, those peoples of E— remained ever-scrupulous in their peculiar devotion, which is, at present, scarcely more than a piece of trivia. There is a plaque on a stone that reads: E—, 188, with the final digit no longer legible, hence all uncertainty as to the exact date of the pilgrims’ settlement in this particular area of S— County, within the larger province of B—.

I myself have only passed through the township once, a sojourn which, I must confess, profoundly disturbed me.

Were it not for my occupation as a historian at the University of Y—, and, following the recommendation of a friend, my purchase of a yellow Buford summer-dress, most unwittingly, as an anniversary gift to my wife, there is little chance I would know it whatsoever.

Of this I am quite certain.

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Paris Reid runs Pathological Research.