“Mr. Vaughn, what we are dealing with here is a perfect engine,
an eating machine. It’s really a miracle of evolution. All this machine
does is swim and eat and make little sharks, and that’s all. Now, why
don’t you take a long, close look at this sign.”

“Are you saying I shouldn’t go in the water with an open wound?” I asked. “Especially if I’m wearing my seal costume?”

“Egg-zackly!” he said.

It didn’t strike me as odd at the time that was quoting Jaws. I’d been doing a bit of research on Wood’s Hole, where I’ll be catching the ferry to the Vineyard, and I knew that it was home to the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, and the director of the Institute had reviewed Peter Benchley’s Shark Trouble as “intended more as an argument against the hype than more fuel for it. The author’s introduction,” she wrote, “emphasizes how much has been learned since he wrote Jaws in 1974 and that sharks, including the most fearsome ones, are in much more danger from humans than humans from sharks.”

It wasn’t until I told the story to NovySan and he asked, “What does Jaws have to do with Martha’s Vineyard?” that I realized…

“I don’t know. It was set in New Jersey, wasn’t it?”

“Was it?” his daughter asked. “I thought it was in Jamaica or something.”

“No, it was New Jersey,” I said. I was positive. But not so positive I didn’t look it up the next day. And as far as I can tell… Amity Island could be almost anywhere along the Eastern Seaboard, but might very well be off the coast of Massachusetts – you know, like Martha’s Vineyard. The first few pages of the book, which I skimmed through on Amazon, told me nothing except that Amity was a place that New Yorkers came for the summer. The Wikipedia entries for Martha’s Vineyard and Jaws told me the movie was filmed on the Vineyard. I was terribly confused. But then I found the link to New Jersey I was looking for – the one that explained why, all these years, I’ve thought that fictional white shark had terrorized the Jersey Shore.

In the Google Books preview of Paging New Jersey: A Literary Guide to the Garden State, I discovered that a series of shark attacks on the Jersey Shore in 1916 was one of Benchley’s inspirations for Jaws. The information was familiar enough that I know I’d read it before – probably around the same time I first read Jaws, which must have been in high school. (It’s on a dusty bookshelf in my mind, right next to The Exorcist and Rosemary’s Baby – and wouldn’t that be an awful mashup? Or brilliant, maybe.)

And so, once again, the Internet informs me that something I’ve known for years isn’t something I knew at all. At least I didn’t invent a disease this time.

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

Milk fever, as I remember it, followed the birth of a stillborn child. The poor mother’s unexpressed milk hardened inside her breasts, resulting in pain, swelling, infection and then death. I categorized it as a subset of childbed fever – really, puerperal fever caused by poor hygiene. (When I tried to Google it today, all I could find was a description of certain “morbid symptoms” which might appear in the week after childbirth, but which don’t appear to be fatal, and several references to a hypocalcemic condition that may affect dairy cattle, goats and dogs, and which may well be fatal if not promptly treated.)

And then today, researching something else entirely, I learned that Nancy Lincoln died of milk sickness, which was caused by snakeroot poisoning. A common affliction in the early Midwest, it occurred when cattle ate the very toxic white snakeroot, and passed the poison through in their milk.

So what about that stillborn child, I thought? That younger brother or sister whose death robbed Lincoln’s mother of life? Never existed. There was a younger brother, who died in infancy, but five or six years before Abe’s mother died. There was, however, an older sister, Sarah, called Sally, who died in childbirth at the age of 20. Her baby died, as well.

Somewhere in my mind, then, Lincoln’s mother Nancy (who might well have had milk fever after the stillbirth of Lincoln’s younger brother) and his sister Sarah morphed into a single person, buried in a grave under the poplar trees, where irises bloom in the spring. Always assuming I didn’t make that part up, too.

*And that’s something else I learned today – Lincoln didn’t grow up in Illinois at all. Now I’m wondering how many other bits of history I’ve just got wrong!

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh