Reclining at Gravestone

Cades Cove at Smoky Mountains National Park: outside of Primitive Baptist Church. Church was constructed in 1887 and founded in 1829. Picture by Jarek Tuszyński / CC-BY-SA-3.0 & GDFL, CC BY-SA 3.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

I do not have an affinity for graveyards. I have a familiarity with them. If you press me, I will admit that I have a relationship with graveyards, from even before my father took me to legions of graveyards, in mountains and in vale, upon the plains of the ocean and upon the plains of the Mississippi River, within the hollows of this land, and on its gentle rises beneath the sentry oak trees, in search of his identity. As a pastor, Dad stood in the midst of very many graveyards, comforting the bereaved at that most awful of moments, the committal.

My mother flew into histrionics at that moment for Dad, and I was instructed by the funeral director to take her into the safe havens of the limousine, and, since the digger is as God, I obeyed, and did not witness the moment, and did not participate in it, as A.P. Carter intones about his mother’s burial:

Well I followed close behind her

Tried to hold up and be brave

But I could not hide my sorrow

When they laid her in the grave

Can the circle be unbroken?

Thus my courage was not broken. On certain autumn evenings, when I was a little boy, up there in Catfish, N.C., Dad took me to church so he could finish some work or run some meetings while I rode my bicycle in the parking lot and in the graveyard. The graveyard was old, quite large, and occupied two sides of a hollow, the graves lined out in great semi-circular rows, an amphitheater of the dead, watching the playacting in the church buildings below.

I think I’ve written about this somewhere before (it’s such a treasured memory): my bicycle was also quite old, painted white a few owners before it came to me, so old that the paint was coming off in a fine powder, like a disintegrating skeleton. It was something of a chore to push it up between a column of graves, from the bottom of the hollow up to the rim, the very last row, where the oldest graves were. I made out in the soft glow of the evening, after the setting of the sun, the numbers, the dates. Some of them began with a 17. I confess a thrill at discovering people who were born in the 18^th Century.

In that thrill I mounted my bicycle, a single speed dealie with iffy coaster brakes, and let her go. There was no need to pedal, for gravity took the bike faster than I could have ever pumped the pedals. There’s nothing for it: the picture is obvious. Row, row, row your boat, and all that. Those people born in 17-something or other were young like you, once. One wonders, in morbid moments, why such weeping over the most ineluctable of fates.

One enduring achievement of my father is the erection of a large stone cross at the bottom of that particular graveyard, dominating the entrance of the church. Going in or out, you are architecturally driven to cast your eye upon it and, beyond it, the multitude of graves. Very early in the morning, on the first day of the week, just at daybreak, he tried to wake the dead all by himself, reading the Gospel according to Saint John the Twentieth Chapter at such volume that the lame might walk, the deaf might hear, the blind might receive their sight, and the prisoners might burst their fetters as newborn Supermen. Then the brass band struck up the Resurrection tune, leading the pilgrim throng into the sanctuary, whereupon the organist tried to match the key in which the brass were blasting, but to no avail; the changing temperatures, as science dictates, were changing the characteristics of the resonant qualities of the trumpets, trombones, and flugelhorns so that all were lost, dissonance reigned, and chaos ensued, as it always is among us who feebly struggle to meet those who in glory shine.

But I digress into springtime too soon. So be it.

Racing down through innumerable graves in the autumn evenings yields to climbing up through innumerable graves elsewhere, in the spring mornings, where that strange phenomenon of snow in the morning succumbs to the heat of the day (it was the same walking to school in the springtime, crunching hoarfrost underfoot while wearing short pants because it would be too hot for long pants by lunchtime), melting water rebaptizing all these who succumbed in that long, uninterrupted train. We were looking for Dad’s ancestors. Mine, too, for the record, but I think you get the point.

A wise and learned counselor of mine had heard this before, from at least one other of his patients. When I told him about my father’s obsession with graveyards and genealogies, he asked, “What do you think he was looking for in there?” This is a question which has since had me looking in all sort of high places and low, dark places and lighted, sordid and beautiful. It’s the same quest: what was he looking for in there? What am I looking for in him?

I shared with my second sister, Mary Anne, some of the things I’d written here earlier, and she caught the one about our fear of waking him because of his obvious and untreated post-traumatic stress. She related to me this one: “Once I tapped Mama very gently and whispered as quietly as I could in her ear, so that I couldn’t hear the sound of the words in my own ears.” Mary Anne was smiling while she told this to me. She continued, “In the blink of an eye, Dad woke up, sprang straight into the air, and without touching the ground, somehow grabbed the shotgun from under the bed, and landed, standing with both feet upon the mattress, at the ready.” She described how he slept holding onto the headboard spindles, as if he were in his cot aboard the U.S.S. Braine. She also described the encounter with Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever from a different perspective, wherein she entered the master bedroom just as Mom was applying cold washcloths on the rash on his knees. “He howled like a wounded wolf, and I wouldn’t come near him for six months.”

I think Dad was a sensitive soul, not a wolf, but a dove, and he was, indeed, wounded, something delivered upon him at the moment he was born. I’ve seen the house where he was born in mid-1941, outside Cullman, Alabama, pinned between U.S. Route 31 and the railroad tracks. My grandfather is buried in a graveyard a stone’s throw from there. Dad is buried in a different graveyard another stone’s throw from that one. His grandfather is buried in yet another graveyard some miles away. We searched many graveyards, finding more grandfathers, uncles, aunts, and distant kin than you can shake a tibia at. Whatever was in those graveyards was peace from whatever was in his soul, and, let me tell you, I wish I could find it.

I’d love to press my counselor and confidant more, as he’s heard so much of this, and from enough of his patients that I actually fit a pattern he has observed, but dammit all, he has grown old. He can’t remember things very well anymore, and he has difficulty moving about. I have known him since he was in his mid-60s, which is not old; now he is approaching 80, which is old. The paint is coming off him in a fine powder, and rapidly. And, dammit all, I’ll weep when he goes.

But the sun is high, and it is hot. Over yonder near that oak tree is a patch of mown grass where there are no graves yet, where the shade is just reaching, and where a mountain breeze is just beginning to kiss. We can fetch the cooler from the back seat of the car and haul it over to that spot. The nearest grave is absolute gray, entirely colorless, neither black nor white, without interest except for the daguerreotype mounted upon it, a picture of a little girl, convex and oval, mounted on ceramic, perhaps, for the mawkish who will encounter her until the world breaks open. She’s dead, killed by a virus of some sort, Spanish Flu, I think, the same one that killed my grandfather’s brother just before Grandfather went to war and got his wound.

We shall spread out the blanket to discourage the ants and lay out our food: cold fried chicken, bread, and potato salad, the kind with plenty of mayonnaise and pickle relish in it. A cold Dr. Pepper washes it all down, followed by a satisfying belch, a father and a son reveling in a graveyard, reclining, as Jesus reclined at table with the Pharisees, as he reclined at table with his disciples, as all the saints in heaven recline at table eating cold fried chicken and potato salad with plenty of mayonnaise and pickle relish (drinking Cheerwine, no doubt, instead of Dr. Pepper), yes, we recline at gravestone, and nothing happens.

The decrepit Primitive Baptist Church building is just over the hill somewhere nearby, the civilizing magnet for the settlement, once upon a time, when the wilderness of that particular ridge was yet untamed by people with names such as Duke, Hamrick, Hambricke, Harcombe, Halcomb, and every variation thereof, the men, their driving wives, their commanding sisters, all taken under by the one who has put everything under futility, and nothing happens, no adventures, no mishaps. Nothing rattles, nothing scrapes, not even the click of a hammer against a firing pin. Everything is as quiet as a stream.