The Ordways Read Free

of scrubbing the overalls of a family of working men against a washboard, their hands looked as if they had been cooked, and when they extended them in one of their shy, faint handshakes, they felt feverish to the touch. They spoke a different language, too. Slow-talking, unused to having to shout to make themselves heard, speaking little in any case, they spent their hoarded and antiquated words as my grandfather in town in the stores counted out his old-fashioned Indian-head pennies and his nickels and dimes from deep in his long stocking-shaped purse and stacked them in neat deliberate stacks on the counter. Alongside their grandchildren they presented a picture of wild flowers, more like weeds than flowers, stubborn, tenacious, tough, and a domesticated seedling of the same species, shade-grown and delicate.
    Though Mabry itself was small its graveyard was quite large. It served a numerous community scattered among the piney woods and the red hills to the north and east, and out on the prairie, who, while they preferred not to be jostled by neighbors in this life, craved close companionship in death, or else feared they might be overlooked on Judgment Day unless they were found in God’s own crowded back yard. They had been burying there for a long time. One passed under a roofed gateway where, on those drizzly days that funerals are always held on, the coffin rested on sawhorses while the service was read. Down the path, padded when we used to go there on graveyard working day in the fall with brown pine needles, on the left, beneath a broad knotty oak which peppered them with acorns, lay the Jervises, whose care and upkeep devolved upon the community, the family having “died out.” Beside the burial plot of this extinct clan, though strongly impelled to hurry past, I used often to linger, trying to give features and a voice to the host of spirits who hovered there, beseeching me, on that day when all the dead were resurrected by the memories of those who had known them, to grasp their hand and save them from sinking deeper and deeper into oblivion. Hastening on, one passed the Leonards, a son of which tribe on one memorable graveyard working day was to disabuse me of the notion that I had nothing to learn from country boys, to teach me the most unsettling things about myself, and to make it hard for a time for me to look any girl in the face. Then came the Claibornes, all, according to their tombstones, asleep in Jesus, a state of repose which I never could succeed in picturing to myself. The next large plot on the right was ours.
    The monuments in Mabry graveyard reflected the poverty, and the taste, of the survivors of the dead. Small, with minimal inscriptions. In many plots there were no stones but instead homemade wooden crosses, the hand-carved legends full of quaint misspellings and highly personal abbreviations. On some graves stood upended fruit jars, purplish through exposure to the sun’s rays, inside which, through beads of moisture, one saw bouquets of faded crepe-paper flowers. Children’s graves were numerous, and on them were often to be seen china dolls, perhaps one of those pistol-shaped bottles filled with colored candy pills, a celluloid fish or duck, on the still humbler ones simply a glass or porcelain doorknob or a few marbles, sometimes a teething ring, a pacifier. Among some family plots one saw, left over from Memorial Day and by October bleached, color-run, and tattered, the flags of three nations: the Republic of Texas, the Confederacy, and the United States.
    We used to arrive early, first among our own family and among the first of those car-borne, before work had begun, oftentimes before sunup, when Mabry was a sketch in grisaille upon the immense blank canvas of sky, at an hour when it was truly as if the dead, as so many of their monuments testified, lay asleep—still forms beneath patchwork quilts of leaves drawn up to the chins of their headstones. Wagons and