by Chris Fabry
Mount Pleasant Cemetery is a small town of its own, sitting on a hill, surrounded by leafy trees that give shade and shelter for inhabitants. I remember coming here as a kid, visiting our grandparents’ graves, distant uncles and aunts and cousins taken too soon. We’d mow, weed, plant flowers, and lay wreaths. The oldest graves date to antebellum days with headstones that crumble at a hint of wind. There are men buried here from every conflict in which our country has called poor, young white men to file out of the hills and take their place in the ranks of patriots.
As a boy I quickly learned that a graveyard is no place to play. One leapfrog over a child’s headstone was all it took to send my mother flying after me, her eyes like fire. “Will, we respect the dead. We don’t dance on graves or use this as a playground. Understand?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Carson’s was the only car in the parking lot. A small, white church stood at the entrance to the cemetery, its steeple casting a cross shadow on the length of the yard. The doors to the church were closed, but I could shut my eyes and bring the smell of the wooden pews back from memory. The stained glass was still there, faded and dull now. The concrete steps had weathered and cracked, and I imagined older men and women clinging to the iron railing running up both sides and the pastor in his suit from Sears or JCPenney.
The graveyard rose in the middle and sloped at either side. It was like walking on top of a well-baked pastry. The oldest tombstones were in the middle, flanked by the younger dead. I noticed they had cleared a patch of the woods at the end to make room for more of us, and there were several fresh graves, the ground still brown and grainy from recent burials.
I turned left and made my way to the edge of the woods, respectfully staying true to the lines and angles of the deceased. I stood before a headstone that said Walter E. Pfelt. Carson walked up beside me as I said, “Is this . . . ?”
“You didn’t hear?” Carson said, dropping his head. “Of course you didn’t. He passed a couple of months ago. No, just before Thanksgiving, I think it was. Just dropped dead at the A-Z and plowed into a big display of gherkins. I heard it was a real mess.”
For as long as I could remember, Carson and I had pronounced the man’s last name “Pee-felt” even though the P was supposed to be silent. We even said it to his face, and he never corrected us. He managed both our Little League teams, our jerseys emblazoned with the word Dodgers on the front and Mohr’s Tire Farm on the back.
“He always had a flair for the dramatic,” I said.
We stood looking at his headstone a few moments until Carson broke the silence. “Remember that stop sign you ran through?”
“I didn’t know you were there.”
“We were at practice at the other end of the park, and I wandered over. You got thrown out at the plate by about half a mile.”
I remembered like it was yesterday. “I just made up my mind from the moment that ball was hit that nothing was going to stop me until I got home.”
“You were flyin’,” Carson said.
“Unfortunately that kid in right field had a cannon for an arm.”
Carson laughed. “Didn’t even bounce. Threw it right to the catcher and he just stood there and waited, like a cat coming up on a mouse in a trap. Shoulda seen your eyes.”
“I was going to bowl him over like Rose did Fosse in the 1970 All-Star Game, but it didn’t work out.”
“What’d Peefelt say? He chew you out?”
I chuckled and shook my head, patting the tombstone. “He knew how bad I felt. He grabbed my arm and helped me up, then dusted me off. The other team was jumping up and down like monkeys at feeding time, hollering and falling on each other by the pitcher’s mound. Everybody else wanted to kill me.”
“I remember. I turned around and went back to practice so I wouldn’t have to claim your body.”
“Peefelt bent over so I could see into his eyes and he said, ‘You know what I like about what you just did? I like the fact that you didn’t slow down once you’d made up your mind. You threw everything you had into that. You live your life like that, Will, and you’re gonna go places.’”
“He sure was right,” Carson said with more than a hint of sarcasm.
“He made me want to be a Little League coach. All the other coaches would have yelled at me or turned and walked away, but he met me at home. It was almost like he took the pain away when he did that.”
“You still remember it.”
“I remember blowin’ most of my foot off too, but it wasn’t half as much fun as that game.” I nodded toward the grave. “So long, Mr. Peefelt.”
We moved down the row, passing familiar names that brought faces to mind. Chaney. Ullom. Hall. Black. Meadows. I could give addresses and phone numbers for most of the families laid to rest here because they had lived in one place their entire adult lives.
Under the fading shade of an oak tree I found my father’s grave. He rested beside his mother, father, two sisters, and a brother. The final plot was for my mother—her name already etched in the stone with only the year of her death left blank. The grave was well tended, as he had done for his own parents, and I assumed Carson paid Jasper Woods to keep it. Jasper was a grizzled old man when I was a kid, with a perpetual stream of tobacco juice running down his chin and a pack of Pall Malls rolled into his shirtsleeve. He moved like a phantom around the grounds, cleaning and mowing even those graves he wasn’t paid to care for.
“Jasper’s still around, isn’t he?” I said.
Carson pointed to a small, metal trailer parked behind the outbuilding that held the mowers and garden equipment. “A bunch of us pitched in and bought him a new trailer after his other one burned. Even has a toilet hookup and running water so he can take a shower.”
“What did he say when he saw it?”
“Just mumbled a few things and spat. Same old Jasper.”
No one could understand Jasper better than my father. He was an interpreter of the strange language of the toothless, bespectacled nomad who had lived at the cemetery as long as anyone could remember. In that sense he was not a wanderer, but one look at his disheveled clothing and rattletrap truck led you to believe he was trying to escape something or someone. He lived in blessed seclusion, among the vagaries of the human mind.
I often wondered if the reason I was drawn to certain outcasts in prison was because of the example of my own father. He showed a love and compassion for Jasper, and the man returned his kindness with almost caninelike obeisance. My father was the alpha, Jasper the pack dog. Every year my father filled in the man’s meager income on his 1040 form and mailed it, using our address. When the refund invariably came, I would accompany my father to Jasper’s trailer. Jasper would stare at the check and mutter something, at which my father would laugh and clap him on the back as if he were a professional comedian.
On Thanksgiving and Christmas my father and I would drive to the cemetery carrying plates full of turkey and ham and stuffing and cranberry sauce and all the fruits of our holidays covered with Saran wrap. We’d make the long walk, angling through the graves until we came to his place.
Jasper’s eyes would widen with excitement when I’d say, “Happy Thanksgiving” or “Merry Christmas.” My mother always fixed the best desserts, and though I could not understand many of his words, I did understand the emotion he expressed when he mumbled about her rum or carrot cake.
The only time I ever saw my father at odds with Jasper was when the people of the church complained about Jasper’s dog. He was a short-haired mongrel that loped through the cemetery like it was his own, with the proclivity to lift his leg on some of the most well-to-do members planted in the ground.
My father was elected to tell Jasper the bad news that his dog—unnamed by Jasper but Carson and I called it “Urine”—would have to go. I was with him, skirting the edges of their lopsided conversation. “We just can’t have a dog peein’ and poopin’ on the graves, Jasper. It’s nothing personal.”
Jasper mumbled louder than I h
ad ever heard him. His sentences were filled with n and h sounds, punctuated with the dribble and spit of the tobacco juice. He pointed past the church toward the road. “Nat daw obaan mmhn behh ahhn moh kihh huh cuh aroh heeh,” he yelled.
Afterward, with my father’s help, I had pieced together his argument and that one sentence: “That dog obeys me better than most kids who come around here.” Jasper was right. The dog did obey, but when Jasper wasn’t around or was tending the back plots, the animal had a mind and direction of its own.
Jasper seemed perplexed that anyone could feel his dog wasn’t hospitable. In fact, he was known to nuzzle the preacher’s hand when he read, “Ashes to ashes and dust to dust . . .” The mongrel seemed to have an uncanny ability to pick out the most bereaved in the crowd and sit at their feet.
“I’m sorry,” my father said. “I really am. The people are serious about this. They say if the dog doesn’t go, you’ll have to leave.”
“Wheh I goh tah hmn?”
“I’ve got some friends on a farm over in Hamlin. I can ask them if they need a good dog. Maybe they’ll take him.”
The next day I rode in the middle of the truck, my father to my left and Jasper to my right. The dog sat between Jasper’s legs, sniffing at the wind blasting through the cab of our truck, watching the trees go by, licking and sniffing. They say a dog’s sense of smell is a lot more sensitive than a human’s, and I figured that was why the dog liked Jasper. The man was a veritable olfactory smorgasbord. His clothes hadn’t seen the inside of a washing machine except for the few times he allowed my mother to do a load for him. His boots were caked with the mud of the dead, his armpits smelled cadaverous, and I could only imagine the inside of his home, his bed, his kitchen. I couldn’t even think about his toilet.
Two weeks after Jasper dropped the dog at the farm and waved good-bye to him in that field, Urine returned to the cemetery. I suppose Jasper’s scent was just too strong. Jasper tried to hide him at first, but soon someone from the church called my father, and I accompanied him on one of our longest rides together.
“Why can’t Jasper tie him up?” I said, stating the obvious.
“I’ve told him the same thing, but Jasper says tying up a dog is a sin. I guess he tried it, and it nearly broke his heart to see it run back and forth, wearing a path out beside the trailer.”
“It’s better than losing him, isn’t it?”
“Will, it’s hard to understand some people. Why they do what they do. With Jasper, it’s easy. Because of what he went through as a child, he can’t bear to see an animal caged.”
“What happened to him?”
My father clenched his teeth and thought for a long time. “Let’s just say his parents weren’t the most well-adjusted people on the planet. His mama loved him, but she had other kids to care for, and when she died, his daddy kept him locked up so he wouldn’t go roaming at night.”
“Locked in his room?” I said.
“Something like that.” He shivered and shook his head. “I’ll take you back to their place someday. Maybe. But don’t be too quick to judge Jasper about his dog. Have you seen the way animals sidle up to him?”
“I figured it was because Jasper smells more like a dog than a human.”
Another father would have shamed or scolded, but my dad smiled, his eyes crinkling. “You may be right. But I think it might have more to do with his gentle spirit. Jasper has every right to be angry at the world, but somehow he turned that meanness into goodness. There’s not a soul on earth as close to God as that old boy.”
“I’ve never seen him in church,” I said.
Daddy nodded. “I don’t think he’d be welcome. People would be more concerned about the way he smelled than the state of his soul. But I’ve seen him in the summer standing outside an open window, staring off into the sunset. Seems to me he’s praying. Some people are given a great gift of not caring what others think or about anything but being faithful to what they’re called by God to do. I think Jasper is one of those people.”
We pulled into the church parking lot, and as soon as we closed the doors, Jasper was outside his trailer looking at us. He lived about a hundred yards from the church, and as we came through the main gate of the cemetery, he darted inside and emerged with something black in his hand. The dog jumped up on him and followed.
“Oh no,” my dad said. “Jasper!”
A shot rang out. It was the only time I ever saw my father step on a grave. He bolted for Jasper’s trailer, and I caught a glimpse of the young man he once was, fast and lean. The wind whipped his hat from his head, and it landed on a fresh grave. I grabbed it, and when I caught up to him, he and Jasper were standing over the dog’s lifeless body. Blood splattered Jasper’s coveralls, and he said something through an expressionless face as he turned over the first shovel of dirt. My father put a hand on the man’s shoulder.
“Mind if I have a minute alone?” I said to my brother.
He checked his watch again. “Yeah. I’ll head back to the car. We should be getting home soon. Jenna—”
“I’ll only be a minute,” I interrupted.
I knelt and studied my father’s stone. It was gray, the kind Daddy said he liked as he roamed the grounds. Not too big. He always had a problem with people or families who thought they were important enough to take two parking spaces. It was the same in death.
“Well, I made it, just like you said,” I whispered. “I came back. I’ll take care of Mama now, for whatever time she has left. I wish I could have been here for you. I wanted to at least say good-bye.”
His face swept through my mind like a flash flood. Pictures of him younger, a sepia tone to his skin. Him asleep on the couch, me watching a game. Him and his father standing by an awning, near an old Chevy, squinting into the sun, a foot apart, hands clasped in front of them, not touching. A grainy video played in my mind, with yellow streaks running through it, the kind you see of those famous stars when a find is made in their basement. Only these movies would never be seen by anyone but our family. My father riding the tractor. My mother in the kitchen. Carson and I called her “Our Lady of Perpetual Baking Soda.” Shep, our white and brown collie, panting in the summer dust and my father sitting beside him on the porch, a blue sky framed in the background. Those were the images I carried of my father and a thousand more.
A car door slammed, and Carson started the engine.
I patted my father’s headstone in the same way he had patted my head so many times when I was younger. I found a path and walked it, looking from side to side at the graves. Most were early 1900s here, but I was surprised to see one newer stone. At the bottom, under the names and near the ground line, were the words, “Jesus said, ‘Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these.’”
I stood transfixed. Children’s lives taken at such an early age. Lives forever entwined with my story.
Carson honked and I joined him, knowing I was about to enter my hometown, free-falling into a life I had left so many years ago. Fear—metallic and strong, tasting like blood—bubbled up from somewhere under the earth. I had navigated the years away, avoiding taunts and threats and indescribable evil, but this new voyage, coming home, somehow scared me more. I felt out of control, tossed on unending, unforgiving waves. Life has a way of doing that. At one moment you’re moving in a direction that seems sensible, even exciting, and the next you’re hurtling, breaking from orbit, wondering what forces caused gravity to loosen its hold.
What would I say to people who asked what I was going to do with my life?
Carson cut through the belly of Hurricane and under the railroad until he found Virginia Avenue, a familiar stretch of back road that had strangely narrowed in my memory. The homes seemed closer to the road, and I could almost read the fine print in the satellite dishes that dotted the double-wide trailers and small homes. As kids we would travel this road in search of an open tennis court. There always seemed to be someone
on a front porch, kids swinging in a tire suspended from a walnut tree branch, but now the porches were barren and the front windows flickered the light of big-screen televisions.
I remembered when this road was unpaved and the ruts from the trucks taking the back route were so deep that we had to ride the side of the hill, the car pitched precariously at a seventy-five-degree angle. Those were the days before mandatory seat belts and air bags.
We drove in silence, the chirp of crickets and a soft humidity settling over the fields and meandering streams. I had heard the same at Clarkston, a faint, muted melody that somehow seemed too far away to grasp, but here I felt I could reach out and touch it. Grab it with a fist and hold on tightly.
Fireflies—we called them lightning bugs when we were young—drifted up, their rears flashing yellow, as if something was approaching, some unstoppable train that was bearing down on them, and there was nothing they or any of the rest of us could do about it.
Railroad tracks ran to our left, an old freight line that chugged through every evening about this time. Later in the night it would pass the other way, coming and going, a cycle of the hills.
“Think I might find an old Ball jar in the basement tonight and fill it full of those lightning bugs,” I said, breaking our silence.
Carson glanced at me like I was roadkill, a mess of blood and guts by the curb of some five-star restaurant. “Why would you do a fool thing like that?”
I closed my eyes. “Just to see what it feels like. To be a kid again. To get excited about something innocent and pure.”
“Go ahead and bring a big jar of bugs into the house and see what Mama does,” Carson said. Then he thought a moment. “On second thought, after what you’ve been through, it would probably be better to do that the first night and get it over with. She ought to know you’re crazy from the get-go rather than getting her hopes up.”
We crossed under the I-64 bridge, and I read the same spray-painted message I had seen every day on the way home from school twenty years ago: “Dogwood Sucks.” A newer message was written on the other side, where my family could see it every time they drove past: “Fry Will Hatfield.”
