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“It’s right up here somewhere,” she pointed. It was springtime, and flowers flooded the roadsides. My mother looked out to where my grandmother pointed and sighed. I thought she was disappointed or angry at something, but the sigh was different than that. The sigh she just let out sounded sadder than anything else.
“Mama,” she offered. “Would you like to stop somewhere along the way to get some flowers?”
“Naw, that’s alright,” my grandmother waved her off, her nose so close to the window she was nearly touching it. I watched silently from the back seat as she slowly closed her eyes and opened them again. “On second thought,” she started, and she closed her eyes again, words choking in her throat. Without hesitation my mother pulled the car to the side of the road, and patted her mother on the arm.
“It’s okay, Mama.”
“Yeah, Grandma. It’s okay.” I desperately wanted to be supportive. I’d loved her dearly for as long as I could remember knowing her. A fat tear squeezed its way out from between her eyelids and trickled down her face. She wiped it away before opening her eyes again.
“Manda,” my mother offered, “Why don’t you hop out and pick some wildflowers for your grandmother?” Eager to do anything to help the great woman’s hurting heart, I jumped at the chance. Being only seven, I had several advantages over the adults. I could move faster through the weeds, I had no fear of snakes, and my hand could hold a lot of flowers before I’d start to think about bugs. I also had no hesitation when it came to picking flowers, but the adults around me always seemed to shy away at the very idea. I grabbed the door handle to my right and flung the door open. By the time I bounded into the small roadside field filled with bright yellow flowers, my grandmother had already turned to look at my mother instead of the field where I was standing. She was hurting, and I needed to help.
In a few short moments, I had my arms loaded with flowers. Most of them were what I’d come to know as “Chicken Flowers” and were tiny little yellow specks on long, slender green stalks. But I’d also managed to find a few poppies, tulips, daffodils (which my grandmother called Joniples) and even a couple of dandelions and clover flowers. I approached the car slowly since I could see my mother and grandmother speaking quietly together. My mother was consoling my grandmother.
I opened the back seat and started to climb in, but their voices indicated they had not finished talking yet. The tone of my mother’s voice changed, and she seemed to speak in riddles so that I wouldn’t understand what they were saying. I hung onto every word, wanting to sleuth my way into comprehension, but nothing stuck.
“Look at the flowers I found, Grandma.” I beamed. She turned in her seat to look back toward where I sat, and she beamed.
“Those are lovely,” she said, wiping a few wayward tears from her cheek. “They’re perfect.”
“So, do you know where it is once we get there, Mam?” My mother was trying to direct the conversation back to being productive. I knew that tone in her voice.
“Not exactly,” my grandmother shrugged. “I’ve never been here before. I just know the address, and I think it’s right back in there. Behind this bunch of trees.” She pointed toward a grove of thick woods and traced her finger out toward the road we were on. “The map showed a road right down over there.”
“Well, let's see if we can find it. The sooner, the better,” my mother glanced at the perfectly clear sky as though she were hoping for rain. We pulled back onto the road, and in less than a mile, my grandmother pointed to a pull off with a gravel path leading back into the woods.
I fidgeted restlessly in the back seat. Some bugs were crawling off the flowers onto my arms, and it was beginning to itch.
“Be still, Baby,” my mother urged me.
“I think that’s it,” my grandmother said, not exactly excited. My mother turned on her blinker and slowed down to make the turnoff.
“Grandma, would you like the flowers I picked for you?”
“Why don’t you hold on to them for me, Dear.” She patted my offered hand and smiled at me briefly through her pain.
“Okay,” I smiled back, still desperately wanting to take away all the hurt she was feeling.
We made the turn, and the tires crunched on an old dirt road. Past rainfall had washed out parts of it over the years, but the cover of trees made the road so dark it was hard to see too far ahead. The trees closed in thickly and scratched at the car as we pressed onward in the old Aries. Tensions in the car grew thick.
I tried to lean as far forward as I could to read the aged metal sign over the gateway entrance, but my eyes couldn’t focus on it quickly enough to make out any words other than “Cemetary” at the bottom. I had no idea what town I was in, what road I was on, or what city I might be nearest. Without a doubt, I knew that I’d never be able to find the place on my own, even when I grew up.
“What are we doing here,” I ignorantly asked. Both adults in the car sighed. Neither had wanted to tell me, but surely they knew there would be questions once I realized we were in a cemetery. How would they ever expect a seven-year-old not to ask questions?
“My brother,” my mom answered me. My mother had two brothers, one older and one younger. I knew both of them, and as far as I knew,, both of them were at work that day. I couldn’t understand why they would be hanging out in a cemetery two hours away from their hometown and why we would be meeting them there.
“Uncle David? Or Uncle Mike?” I was clearly confused.
“Neither one,” my mother hushed me. I knew enough to stop asking questions, so I leaned back in the car’s back seat and silently watched while we drove into what appeared to be an ancient cemetery.
“It would be in the newest section,” my grandmother pointed toward the back. “They stopped using this cemetery right after that, I think.” She glued her face to the window again, trying to read the headstones as they passed them slowly. Most of the headstones that I could see were difficult to read. They’d been so worn by weather and elements that the dates were often washed away completely. The oldest one I could see had a late 1700s date on it. Still, the dates seemed to get newer as we traveled farther back into the cemetery toward an enormous oak tree in the far corner. I watched as the dates went from the early 1800s to the late 1800s and finally started to show dates from the same century.
“Over here, I think.” My grandmother indicated toward a small group of tiny graves under an outstretched arm of the giant oak. Tiny headstones, no wider than eight inches across, marked a group of graves for what I could only assume were tiny children.
Completely silent, the three of us exited the car and walked toward them. My grandmother inspected the headstones one at a time, feeling things we couldn’t even begin to imagine. Tears flowed freely down her face, but her eyes were held open wide as she looked closely at the dates on each little stone. I looked at each one as we went, not having any idea of what we were looking for.
The headstones all seemed to be dated between 1928 and 1931, and while most had names, a few were left with nothing but dates on them. My grandmother was focusing her attention on the headstones from the year 1930.
“April... May... June... July. Here it is.” As she said the last words, her voice choked in her throat, and she hid her mouth with one hand. “July 1st, 1930,” she managed to get out. I looked. It was the only date listed on the tiny stone. While so many of the others had two dates to indicate a date of birth and a date of death, this one only had a single date. Curiosity inside me burned white-hot, but as frustrated as I felt, I knew not to ask. Instead, I slowly approached my grandmother and handed her the massive bundle of flowers I held in my arms.
Gently, she took the flowers from me with a slight nod of her head. “Thank you, Dear.”
My mother held her arm as my grandmother lowered herself to the ground. Little by little, she cleared away leaves and debris from the tiny grave and replaced them with the flowers I had gathered only moments before. My mother stood back and hugged me to her side. She took a brief moment to brush some hair out of my face before reaching down to kiss me on the cheek.
“You know I love you, right?” Something inside my grandmother was terribly broken, and it was breaking a piece of my mother off too.
“Yeah,” I nodded. “I know.”
“Good. Don’t ever forget that. For as long as you live, I’ll always love you.”
I still had absolutely no idea what was going on, but I remember I wrapped my arm tightly around my mother’s waist that day and held on for dear life. I hoped they would explain to me what I had witnessed that day, but I also knew that there was a good chance I’d never understand. My mother said we had gone to find her brother, but my mother was born in 1953, so I couldn’t understand how someone buried in 1930 could be her brother. None of it made any sense to me. But I wished like crazy that it would. I began to cry, partially out of frustration but mostly because my grandmother was crying again, this time in sobbing tears that seemed to have no end.
“Hop in the car,” my mother commanded, and I obeyed. As she was closing the door behind me, she finally explained part of what I had been so curious about and why my grandmother was hurting so badly. My heart broke for her, even though I couldn’t begin to comprehend the pain at only seven years old.
“Her baby was what you call stillborn. That means he was already dead when he was born. She never even got to give him a name.”
I played the words over and over, trying to understand them. My mother went back to the grave and helped my grandmother to her feet. She walked with her around to the other side of the car and helped her to get back inside. We drove away that day and never spoke about her unnamed secret pain again.