The Cemetery
The Cemetery
A cemetery sits at the center of my life. Actually, it sits at the end of a dirt road about a mile from my house, but it might as well be the very place my blood pools and gathers before wending its way back through my body. In the past two years I have walked to the cemetery every day, many times twice a day, often with Michael, sometimes alone, or with our dog, more recently with Aidan, a blanket draped over the stroller to shade him. I realized the other day that in the past two years I have probably made the cemetery walk six hundred times, close to the same number of times I have laid my head on my pillow to sleep, eaten breakfast, or put on my underwear. I could walk other places—up the road to visit the neighbor’s goat or across the street to check on the dairy farm—but I don’t. Every day I turn right when coming out of the driveway and wander down to the dirt road. Somehow the idea that a cemetery rests at the center of my life doesn’t feel strange. Perhaps it is more that the cemetery centers me, something to do with its windfall of trees amid this high desert plateau, or maybe it has to do with walking.
Whitney Cemetery is a relatively young cemetery. In the West, non-Natives have only been burying their dead for the past hundred and fifty years or so. Friends from the East who come to visit describe cemeteries in Boston or Connecticut that have headstones dating back to the colonies. I imagine their marble surfaces have worn smooth through centuries of weather and neglect, dissolving the names of the dead, monument following corpse back into the earth. Here, though, in my cemetery, you rarely see a headstone older than the late 1800s, and even those are infrequent. Whitney and the surrounding area were first settled by non-Natives in the 1860s. While I am sure people began dying immediately, it probably took some time to establish a collective place to bury them. I would think you need to believe that you will actually remain in a place before you are willing to consign your dead to the earth in any organized way.
Whitney is also a Mormon cemetery, as it was the Mormons who established towns in this part of Idaho. It is one of a number of small cemeteries in the area all of which are marked by a grove of trees, an eruption of the vertical, in an otherwise relatively treeless valley bottom. So when I say it is my cemetery, I am using the possessive in the loosest of ways. None of my relatives are buried in the cemetery; none of the names on the headstones appear in the narrative I tell of my past. I am an outsider to the Mormon belief system and a stranger in this tiny town. Nevertheless, Michael and I are the only people who visit these dead daily and, while we never bring flowers or tend the gravesites, such use seems to bring with it a measure of responsibility, if not possession.
I have met the actual caretaker, Dave Weaver, a worn man who is free with his smiles and always willing to stop his work and chat. He lives up the street from us in a house fronted by so many aspen that in the summer you cannot see his door. Years of work in the cemetery must have made him crave the companionship of trees, and now he both works and sleeps amid the rustling of leaves. Dave is a fourth-generation sexton. He inherited his trade from his father, the job of grave digger handed down like a recipe or antique chest of drawers. Because, while he spends his days cutting the grass and making sure the sprinklers are working, his main job, the real work, is digging. Dave’s father dug three hundred and fifty graves in his lifetime before bequeathing the job to his son. I am not sure how graves are dug in the rest of the country, but here in Whitney, Idaho, a rural town where the old are getting older and the young are moving away, the graves are dug with a shovel and it takes about two days.
Grave digging is a craft, akin to leatherwork or blacksmithing. You only have to see one of Dave’s graves to realize how much will be lost if there is not a fifth generation. With perfectly pitched sides, not a root or rock to disrupt the cool, black surface, Dave’s graves are beautiful. They are inviting, that’s the only way to describe them. I want to jump into them, lie down, take the dirt he has carefully placed to the side and pull it over me like a quilt. That something in the natural world can be so perfectly squared, tidy, and neat is a tiny miracle. Standing over the grave, late in the day when the crickets are beginning to chirr and hum and the cool from the recently-dug hole wraps my ankles like a vine, I see his work as the gift that it is, the last gift, given to the dead, a womb of earth, a bed.
I have seen Dave dig about a half dozen graves or so. Often we come upon him in the afternoon, his head barely above the earth, piles of dirt to both sides that grow steadily as he removes the four tons necessary for a standard grave. Our dog barks, after all men are usually above the ground and not in it, but the barking doesn’t seem to bother Dave. He waves cheerfully and we all pretend that his shoveling does not mean one more person has just left a life that he or she loved fully and completely. Sometime later, when, I don’t know, he must use a tool to smooth the sides like fondant on a cake. Because by the next day, the grave stands clean and ready, and by the day after that it is covered with wreaths and flowers and a strip of Astroturf that conceals the scar in the earth until the grass can grow again.
All this makes it sound as though the cemetery is a depressing place. After all, besides the sexton and the county clerk, Michael and I are probably the only ones who keep abreast of the death rate in Whitney. And such knowledge should feel heavy. But Dave literally whistles while he works, and I feel only gratitude for such lovely graves. Perhaps I would feel differently if the dead were my own. Perhaps I would feel differently if I had lived for generations on this land. But mostly I cannot wait to reach the cemetery, to move from the open dirt road surrounded by alfalfa fields and merge chest deep into the shadows of the trees. Mostly I feel alive amid all that death, thankful for the many shades of green and the sound leaves make in the wind.
When Aidan was only a week old, Michael and I took him to the cemetery on his first outing. I had to walk slowly, my body still sore and stitched from birth, each step reminding me that Aidan had come into this greening world out of me. Our dog, Pippin, walked with us, assuming the position alongside the stroller that he would maintain for the next many months. It was the second week of April and spring had exploded in the forty-eight hours we had been in the hospital. The Bradford Pears lining the driveway to the emergency room had, days before, only been buds, but wagged heavy white blossoms as we left. The trees in the cemetery—maples, crabapples, cottonwoods, oak, and ash—were just beginning to leaf out, throwing dots of bright green against winter-bare limbs. We showed Aidan the hawks and the sweet blue flowers, we let him feel the wind moving over the fields, and we welcomed him into the natural world amid hundreds of graves.
He knows the cemetery as well as he knows his own bed. Often in the afternoons, I take him up there and we lie amid the graves and watch the leaves dance against the sky. He loves the movement and remains content for a long time. Lately he has taken to pulling up the grass that grows over the graves, catching four or five spears and bringing them to his mouth for a taste. For him, the cemetery is a place of life, a green and growing place
Sometimes I wonder what others might think, people whose relatives are buried there, people whose names are already inscribed on headstones, awaiting only their death for completion. I wonder what they would think if they saw me nursing Aidan as I sit on a bench not four feet away from the gravesite of a church prophet, or if they saw Pippin running with abandon, or if they watched me push the stroller over graves to reach a place in the shade where we can enjoy the antics of the hawks. On the rare occasions when someone comes up to the cemetery while we are there, I generally try to corral the dog and stay on the gravel road. I imagine they would not like the way I use the place, would call it disrespectful and wish me away. But it is not that I do not think the place is sacred, for I do. It is more that I think every place is sacred and worthy of being beheld. Why only honor particular patches of land and the dead who can be named? Every spear of grass that Aidan will ever pull from the earth covers someone’s body. The cemetery, it seems, is no different than the backyard or the surrounding fields.
And yet.
According to the map that stands in the middle of the cemetery, Marie Benson was the first person buried there. She was five years old and it was 1890. May to be exact, a time when the newly planted cottonwoods that stand along the east edge of the cemetery would just be snowing down their cottonseeds, stirring in the mourners recent memories of a harsh winter and wicked wind. The cottonwoods, now more than a hundred years old, rise like skyscrapers against the Idaho sky. They are home to red-tailed hawks and great horned owls, giant birds that swoop when we approach, shriek their annoyance, and circle off into the fields to await our passage. Then, though, in 1890, I imagine Marie’s family huddled together on the bluff overlooking Spring Creek, few trees to block the wind as it swept down from Red Rock Pass, committing their tiny daughter’s body to an empty stretch of ground. Perhaps they found themselves hoping that more bodies would follow so as not to leave Marie alone. Perhaps they knew on that raw spring day in a new land that Marie was only the first of many.
She was. Sidney Gilbert followed a few months later. Born in 1890. Died the same year. On his grave marker, a tired marble slab, all that can be read is his name and the date. Unlike Marie, whose body was tucked away in what has become the southeast corner of the cemetery, Sidney was buried in the middle. A beautiful blue spruce rises near his headstone, and I wonder if it was planted the same year that he died. The spruce trees around our house are a hundred years old, planted the year our house was built, a decade after Sidney’s death. They tower over the house, throwing an afternoon shadow that runs across the street and rises up the hill on our neighbor’s property. Buttressed on all sides by these giants, we have always felt our home was a nest. During the frequent wind storms it can feel as though we, too, are swaying, caught in their boughs, gently swinging. If I were Sidney’s mother, I would have insisted that a spruce be planted by my infant son’s grave, a grave that would have sat alone, atop a gentle rise, a mile from town. Perhaps, I would have hoped, the tree would sing my baby to sleep when I no longer could.
But I am not Sidney’s mother, I am Aidan’s, and learning that my cemetery initially held the bodies of babies and children rather than the fully-lived lives of the elderly sobers me. I would imagine, here, what it is really like to bury your child, but I cannot. Not even for the sake of story.
There are more babies buried. Many, many, many more. The headstone that moves me the most, the one I always point visitors to, and the one I always visit in my mind even when I don’t visit on foot, is the one for the Newbold family. It is a testament to loss. Reo Newbold, born in 1912, married Margaret. She was two years his senior, scandalous maybe, but I imagine they were in love. Likely they married during the Great Depression when there was very little hope. Maybe they had moved out here from back east, hoping that dairy cows or sugar beets would provide a family income. Maybe Reo had a brother who had moved first and sent letters home that described a valley cut by the Bear River, fertile and empty, urging Reo to leave his job at the steel factory and take a chance. Maybe it was Margaret who, tired of long hours and double shifts, late at night when they were both in bed, whispered of a better life, a new start. For whatever reason, they found themselves in Whitney, Idaho, teetering on the edge of Zion, the Mormon promised land.
Baby Boy Newbold is buried with Margaret. No date of his death is given, but the writer in me imagines that his mother died in childbirth, after years of trying to conceive, leaving Reo alone with his dairy cows, the promise sullied, the land not easy or forgiving.
Or not. Reo is also married to Blanche, ten years his junior. Whether at the same time he is married to Margaret is not clear. Marriage dates are left off the headstone, but all are buried together; a man, his wives, and his children sealed in eternity. My guess is that Reo had two wives. Even though at the time polygamy was outlawed, it was still not uncommon. The house we own, one built by the grandfather of a church prophet, has a second house not twenty yards from the main house, the perfect place to keep a second family. From the upstairs window where Michael has his study, I imagine the first wife keeping tabs on the second, wondering to herself as she absently wipes dust from the window sill which bed her husband will choose that evening. She is eight months pregnant, her belly thrust out like the prow of a ship, making it all the more likely he will choose her sister wife, a woman twelve years her junior. The sister wife’s house is not as grand as her own, she tells herself by way of comfort. It has a simple stair case leading to the second floor, rather than the stunning hand-carved banister running the length of her own. He may choose her bed, she thinks, but I am the one with the twin parlors. Drawing her fingers along the wood molding that surrounds the window, she thinks it is enough.
But I am imaging the woman who lived in our house, and that is not Blanche. Blanche lives with Margaret and Reo on the dairy farm. And unlike Margaret who has had trouble getting pregnant, Blanche finds that her body is made for carrying babies. When Margaret dies in 1940, Blanche is just beginning what will become two decades of birthing. By the time she dies in 1995, Blanche will have given birth fourteen times. For close to fourteen years she will fall asleep to the pulse of a double heartbeat. Fourteen times she will catch her breath when her baby first begins to move. More than a hundred months will be spent wondering, awaiting a new, tiny being.
Half of her babies, though, will live longer than a day. Seven die. While carrying babies is not a problem, keeping them alive is. Next to Blanche and Margaret and Reo’s grave, runs a low thin headstone marking the place where seven babies are buried. Every infant died the day it was born, with the exception of one who lived one day, a spring day I find myself hoping. To consign one child to the grave seems impossible to me. Seven, incomprehensible.
Reo and Blanche name them all, and all fourteen, the living and the dead, are engraved on their headstone along with Margaret and Baby Boy. I know enough of Mormon theology to understand the importance of listing the fruit of their union. As a Mormon male, a priest imbued with godlike abilities, Reo will ascend to higher levels of heaven the more children he has. His offspring are sealed to him in the Temple, bonded to him for eternity. While Blanche will have to wait and see if Reo calls to her from the Other Side, inviting her into heaven, Reo’s place in the eternal kingdom is assured because his wives have borne him fifteen children. In the past, I have always felt a mix of sympathy and anger toward Blanche. She was pregnant for close to a fourth of her life, and there were babies at her breast for half her days. More painfully, she saw seven babies laid in the ground. I imagine her sitting with each newborn in her hands, the pain of labor endured so often that it has become a companion, waiting to see if this one will live through the night. Can she endure another loss? Can she let another go? Outside the bedroom door, her other children clamor for her attention, wanting, wanting, wanting. She looks down at the tiny bundle in her arms and notes his ragged breathing. Moments ago his skin was rosy pink and now it has taken on a sallow color, like the belly of a maple leaf in the fall. The neighbor women have left, leaving Reo alone with his wife. Noting the baby’s difficulties, he sighs aloud and gets up, gathering his hat along with the forgotten bloody sheets and candle stubs. Turning from Blanche’s bedside, he finds himself wondering whether the ground has frozen yet.
Reo. Reo. For two years now my sympathies have been with Blanche whose body was bent from birthing. But now I think of Reo, imagine him as he buries yet another child, throwing a handful of dirt over the grave, trying not to notice that the grave has been dug too close to the others and that the wooden edge of a rotting casket can been seen, worrying his hands along his thighs because they will not remain in his pockets, and wondering when all this dying will end.
Cemetery, from the Greek for burial place and the Latin for cradle. Death and birth linked at the level of language. What is this ritual that I undertake each day, one which finds me making the rounds of the dead with my infant son? Standing at the Newbold grave, brushing leaves away with my foot so that I can see the engraved names that muster like soldiers, I look to Aidan who has fallen asleep in the stroller, watch his chest rising, and pull the blanket up around him.
Aidan’s birth on a day in April brought more than the blossoming of Bradford Pears. With his arrival came the attendant possibility of unbearable loss, a presence that catches like a cloud on a mountain, keeping the valley in shadow. Walking in the cemetery as light splashes through autumn maples to land on the ground in galloping rivers of color, I am struck by the testimony given by land and marble. There is so much green, so much brightness, so much life in this tiny plot of land, but tangled up with the leaves and the hawks and the blades of grass that can live as long as trees is a record of personal devastation. Standing at its center, the ash tree fountaining into the sky, I imagine the lives of Blanche and Reo whose decisions ribbon across generations and wonder to myself if Dave’s back hurts at night. The Newbold graves now free of leaves and Aidan still asleep, I commit my feet in the direction of home, knowing that with my departure the hawks return to their nests.