Life was slow and death quick then, and with all the boggy land it took a long time to reach anywhere. Doc Johnston, who was summoned to cure me, took much too long to get to our little farm, and I died of wasting consumption while he was on the way.
When he arrived, the Doc proclaimed I had passed, and then they buried me right here on this hillock, where redolent honeysuckle blooms, gold and white, would most likely grow.
Later, they buried Mom there in the grave between mine and Grandpa’s. Mom had tried hard to keep me alive, and she always said how hard it was for her to go on living without a man around the farm, and then the war came, but not for me. One body buried here in an unmarked, shallow grave was a victim of that war. Another buried surreptitiously was a victim of murder foul, with the murderer never found. Neither of those was family.
My brother paid for these headstones that have cracked, sunk and twisted, and footstones, else you’d have never found us. The way those two willows grew up and heaved the ground with their thick, wandering roots and the way tangled, flowery greenery covered everything always, it seems nature conspired to keep us a secret and failed.
Birds nested and rabbits, black voles, and mice, burrowed here and there for generations, and eastern worm snakes snapped like small flesh whips their way into my coffin to eat their fill and curl about my bones. Alive, I feared worm snakes, but now our intimacy comforts me as I encompass those who compass me.
You came to clear our graveyard and wash our gravestones: for that, I thank you kindly. You’ve cleaned many other such; I know this from the gentle way you cleared the leafy foliage and washed each stone with bristling brushes and let flesh-colored worm snakes be when they dove for cover through cracks in cover stones placed to keep coffins with bodies down where they belong in this sodden, hallowed soil.
You fought through thick blackberry, gorse and honeysuckle vines down to layers of wet papery sough and rank, mildewed compost, and I saw you press and pull with both your hands and brush back your hair from your brow with soil-black wrists and sweat all over in sunshine, toiling like a happy plowman.
When you came with crook and staff, I thought at first you were the thing whose scythe reached for me when I was sick and brought Mom here later as well. But you didn’t smile the way the other did, and you didn’t bear an hourglass with its sand run through, wear a hood, limp or smell like sulfur. Even so, I didn’t cotton to your disturbing us until your rays of light pierced through the hollow, right to where my rags, and bones and all those worm snakes lay dazzled and wriggling as if today I was reborn and stand anew.