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PatchWork |
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PatchWork |
Last Updated 09/06/05
Email: joy@our-town.com
Chillicothe Cemetery
On any trip back to Chillicothe, a
visit to the cemetery is a part of the journey. My parents rest there beneath
the dark brown earth, with a red granite marker as a headstone. It’s necessary
for me to spend a little time there and remember.
Happy memories surround me even as the pain of missing them hangs heavy
on my mind.
Over
there are the graves of my Uncle Alvie and Aunt Ruby.
Alvie was my dad’s brother and is one of several siblings whose graves
help formthe patchwork of this cemetery. They
had one child, a skinny little girl they called Roselle.
After years of not knowing where she was, she called me one afternoon.
She had read a story of mine in a magazine so she called to tell me how
she liked it and then her voice broke and suddenly she was crying.
She told me that she was very sick and felt that she would die soon. She
wanted to be buried in Chillicothe beside her mother and daddy.
She was living with a daughter in Longview and she didn’t want to be
buried there.
I called a few
days later and her daughter answered. She said Rozelle had died the same day she
talked to me. She said they buried
her there in the marshy lands near Longview.
I hung up the phone remembering how her mother used to fry salt pork and
call it “brook trout”. She
would make us little biscuit sandwiches and we’d eat them under that big
cottonwood tree in their back yard. Then
we grew up, she married a soldier and moved away and we never saw each other
much after that.
As I visit the
graves of my relatives, mental pictures of long summer days, dinners with twenty
or more family members, hog killing and harvest time with everybody pitching in
to help are as clear as if they happened yesterday.
Many
of my cousins, the children of
those aunts and uncles, are also buried in that little cemetery and time spent
at their graves calls back games we played together while the adults were
playing serious games of 42. One of our favorites was “Sardines”. It was sort of like hide and seek except one person went to
hide and then the others tried to find him.
They hunted individually and when the “hider” was found, the
“seeker” would get in with him. By
the time everybody found the others, it was like a bunch of sardines.
There
are old friends in that cemetery and I can’t leave without stopping by the
grave of a special friend. He wasn’t a boyfriend but better than that, a friend who
happened to be a boy.
When Jacky was
5 years old he was riding with his dad on a stalk cutter.
The little boy slipped into the whirling blades.
His leg had to be amputated just below the knee.
He limped a little but otherwise got along very well with an artificial
limb. I remember how he used to
take it off and toss it aside when we’d sneak into the city swimming pool late
at night.
One
time, just before Christmas, we sat in Stewart’s Café downtown and Jacky
shocked diners who knew nothing about his artificial leg, by breaking big sticks
of peppermint candy as he hit them across his “wooden” leg.
I
was shattered when Mama called me while I was still in college to say that Jacky
had been knifed in a robbery and that he had died in his bed.
They never found who killed him. I
stop by his grave, remember all the good times we shared, and in my mind hear
his laughter.
There is a
grave that I know is here, but I can’t find it. I walk up and down reading all the names, searching for that
person that was old when I was young and yet just died recently.
He was a friend and I want to find his final resting-place.
Just across the way, the caretaker is preparing the place where there
will be a burial later in the day.
I
walk over and give him the name I am looking for. He leads me directly to the
grave. He studies my face.
I look so much like my sister that he guesses the relationship.
This is a small town. His
mind is turning, wanting to put me in the proper niche. Where did I go? Who
did I marry? He scratches his chin
and then his face brightens. “Oh
yes, didn’t you marry Jim White’s boy?”
I
return his smile but disappoint him by saying, “No, my name is Whitis, not
White. I didn’t marry a
Chillicothe boy, my husband is from Dallas.”
Gathering
my coat around me, I face the north wind that forever blows in west Texas, and
walk toward my car. Little bits of sand start to pepper my legs.
It’s been a good visit, one that’s best made alone.
At my car I turn and look out over the markers, each with a story to
tell.
“Till
we meet again,” I whisper as I get in my car and drive back to town.