After her own death, I suddenly understood Mom’s reluctance to consign Dad to the ground. At first it was just impossible; there was no way to drive so far, from Nashville to Lower Alabama, through streaming tears. Later, the logistics were daunting: How would we get permission to open the family plot by even a posthole digger’s width when it was already accommodating as many of our dead as it could officially hold? We all agreed that driving in at midnight was out of the question: this was the deepest part of rural Alabama, where everyone is armed. Permission from the preacher would be required.
On the fifth anniversary of Mom’s death, it came.
I am dreaming when the alarm goes off the morning my siblings and I leave to take our mother’s ashes home. In the dream, some children and I are singing: “Ashes, ashes, we all fall down.” One child stops the game and says severely, “We aren’t supposed to have ashes in our pockets.”
On I-65, just past Prattville, kudzu smothers every fencerow, and I strain to see the famous mill wheel, no longer turning, through the tangle of vines, but the GO TO CHURCH OR THE DEVIL WILL GET YOU sign is gone now. We turn off the interstate after Montgomery onto the blue highway that will take us home, to the place I still think of as home though I have not been there in years, not since my grandmother’s death. The mimosas are in bloom. In the pastures that spread back from the road, egrets stand upon the dozing cows and pick at the edges of the ponds near the road.
We pass the last house our grandparents lived in—the one they built from cinder blocks when the big house became too much for them to keep up—and head straight for the church. In its cemetery, a mockingbird sings in a tree by the gate, competing with another mockingbird in the pines across the yard. Birdsong and wind are the only sounds in this corner of the universe.
My brother takes out the posthole digger, which I packed primarily as a symbol, a nod to the specificity of Mom’s plan. I did not expect it to be useful, at least not compared to the long-blade shovel I also packed. But the posthole digger, it turns out, is the perfect tool. Decades after she left her birthplace for good, our mother still remembered the exact texture of its soil, a mixture made mostly of red sand and dust that yields to the blades with no resistance at all. Within only a minute or two, my brother has dug a hole large enough to hold our parents’ ashes.
He opens the boxes, and then the boxes within the boxes, and then the plastic bags within those, and he shakes the ashes into the hole. It would be easy to scrape the leftover soil into the hole with only our feet, but we all seem to have a vague, unspoken sense that kicking dirt into a grave would be disrespectful, though neither of our parents had been the sort to stand on ceremony. My brother and sister and I each take up a handful of dirt to drop into the hole on top of the ashes. We look at each other. Should we sing? Say a few words of prayer? No one steps forward to lead, and so my brother finishes up with the shovel. The mockingbirds sing their own hymns, and we all step on the mounded dirt to pack the soil tight.
They are buried now in the graveyard between the church where Mom was baptized and the schoolhouse where she learned to read. They are buried now deep in the soil she sprang from, deep in the soil her parents sprang from, deep in the soil their parents sprang from. They are buried near all those who came before them, too far back for anyone to remember.