Docent tour, then a picnic lunch. After that, a tombstone scavenger hunt. I tag
along behind the trio of kids I’m responsible for, a ghost
of graveyard fears they’ll never own. Death has become an embarrassment and
not much more. Every word from our mouths
is some fresh way to tell them there’s nothing to be afraid of. The mild shank of
spring, still a long time till the end
of the school day. No one’s afraid of anything here. For me, sightseeing in a
cemetery is a strange pastime, but to these kids
it’s just play in a cluttered greenspace they have no reason to respect. Don’t step
on the graves, I tell them. Over there is Confederates’ Rest
where old soldiers forsook family to lie beside comrades-in-arms; further on is the
trench full of yellow fever dead, just follow
the granite-edged path. Here and there, the wealthiest families have put up
mausoleums like strangely formal garden sheds. I was taught
to fear the ground the dead took up. Once during a graveside service in the
churchyard where my Rogers people are buried,
a five-year-old cousin, headstrong as any of us, went running through the
cemetery pulling up fistfuls of plastic tulips
and faded fabric roses from where they’d been stuck in the earth to decorate a
resting place. Aunt Callie caught her by the arm,
the old woman’s hair as blue as a gun barrel, the exact color of the shadow she was
casting across a headstone, her voice
so tremulous and preacherly it might have come from beyond the grave, and I
heard her say, You’re pulling those flowers from the fingers
of the dead and buried. Too old to believe it, I remember shivering anyway. My
son and his classmates check off
the grave of Captain Kit Dalton, pardoned for riding with the James Gang upon
his promise to lead an exemplary life,
and another Cadillac hearse drags a cortège of cars into the cemetery, every
headlight burning, the third funeral of the afternoon.
The boys make to investigate a raw grave where no marker has been set, the purple
crenellations of the undertaker’s tent restless
in what wind there is, shading the mounded earth that will take its sweet time
settling back to level. There’s a language of grave monuments
the docent had tried to teach them: the lily equals purity; a laurel wreath means
“battle won.” All those Maltese crosses
on the Confederate graves ranked down the hillside are one last argument for the
Lost Cause. But the truth is told in words the dirt clods utter
rolling from the sod-polished bucket of a backhoe, the complaints they make
composing themselves into a conical hillock, waiting
to be shoveled back into the hollowed out earth, turf grass soon to green up and
send runners rooting in that soil, same as any other.