From Afton, we drove to Coventry. On that road my father pointed out a house he had built in the 1950s, when he oversaw a construction crew that was part of the real estate development side of my grandfather’s business. “Do you want to go back and look at it closely?” I asked; we had already passed it quickly.
“No,” he said, cheerfully. “I just wanted to show you. I wasn’t even sure it was on this road.”
We were already into unfamiliar terrain, and not certain of the right back roads between the various villages we intended to visit. “I used to know all these roads like the back of my hand,” my father mused, as we stopped at one unmarked crossroads and peered in each direction.
“That was a while ago now,” I said. “If you don’t drive around the county every day, you’re going to forget – and this is at the other end from the more familiar part. But I don’t suppose there’s a map in the glove compartment?”
He opened the cabinet and rummaged around; no map. “It’s OK, we’ll stop and ask people,” he said. “I’m not proud.”
It had been exactly a week since his knee replacement surgery, and although the pain was still constant, he was able to keep his leg down – as it was now - for longer periods of time. Still, every now and then his leg contracted in a muscle spasm that made his whole body jerk and his face contort. I looked over with consternation as he hit his good thigh with a fist while the spasm continued, and then subsided. “Do you want me to stop?” I asked.
“No. It’s OK,” he said. “it’s going away.”
We arrived in Greene and drove down one side of the large cemetery where my father’s eldest brother is buried. “So how did Aunt Doris describe the location?” I asked.
“She didn’t.”
“What do you mean?”
“She couldn’t describe it. She didn’t know how to tell me.”
“Great. So what shall we do?”
“It’s up on the top somewhere, the new part on the far side. She said to go in by the building. What building? Does she mean that thing?” He pointed out the window at a structure.
“Beats me.” By then we had turned a corner and were going along the southern end of the cemetery. A crowd was gathered under some trees in the interior, and Kate Smith’s voice blared, distorted, through loudspeakers, singing “God Bless America.” Smaller groups of people were moving through other parts of the cemetery, doing the same thing we were: visiting family graves. We decided to turn around and go back to the top of the hill, where we entered the cemetery near a building and slowly made our way over the narrow gravel roads toward the newer part. I looked out the window, scanning the headstones, and stopped: “Dienhart, ” I read.
My father looked puzzled. “What’s that?”
“Isn’t it one of Aunt Doris’s family names? I’m going to get out and look.”
There was a row of graves with individual markers, all arranged near a larger headstone with the family name. I noticed one married couple, Fred Dienhart and Betty Gross, and stuck me head back in the car window. “Betty Gross,” I repeated.
My father brightened immediately. “That’s Doris’s maiden name.”
“I thought so.” I went back and looked again for my uncle’s name in the family plot: nothing. I came back to the car and got into the driver’s seat. “Well, there are single red geraniums on all those graves. I’d say she’s been here. But no Uncle Porter.” In the distance, shots were fired, and a trumpeter played taps.
It was getting hot. We drove to the top of the cemetery, asking a few knowledgeable people for help, to no avail. We looked more and more aimlessly out the windows. People were starting to stream toward the eastern side; the ceremonies were over. “OK, let’s forget it,” my father said, abruptly. “We’re not going to find him today. Go down there and we can get out and not run into the crowd.”
We left the cemetery and turned onto the main road; the traffic came to a halt. I heard a “rum-rum-ta-TUM” ahead of us to the right, and started to laugh. “Oh-oh, Dad,” I said. “Bad timing.”
“What the hell…” he said, as we watched a group of veterans, in various military uniforms, march rag-tag out of the cemetery behind a color guard bearing flags. Behind them came an ambulance and some fire engines, and then the high school marching band in full uniforms, playing a Sousa march. Next came another set of flags, and some smaller heads.
“Look, even the cub scouts!” I said, glancing sideways at my father’s face.
“I’ll be damned,” he said. “We’re not going to get out of here for an hour.”
“Sure we will,” I said, amused. How many Memorial Day parades had I marched in as a kid? The first one as a second-grader with Mrs. Thompson’s brownie troop, then later with the girl scouts, and from sixth grade with the marching band... The sight of the Greene band took me back, in their old-fashioned green wool uniforms, trimmed with white, just like the ones I remembered them wearing at all the old-home-day parades and dusty county fairgrounds where our bands competed against each other through the endless summers of central New York in the 1960s. My parents had come to nearly every parade, every competition, waiting patiently on hot sidewalks or fairground racetrack grandstands to cheer as we marched by. No wonder this little parade, with its drumbeats that made my heart beat faster and my head arch to get a better view, loomed like a potential Rose Bowl to my father.
The traffic started to move, following the parade into town. A flagman up ahead was waving cars to the right. “Shall we bail?” I asked.
“Yep. It’s a long way around to Rt. 12, but we don’t have much choice.”
“The back road to Oxford.”
“OK,” I said, and we headed up the road and out of town. As we picked up speed he glanced down and pointed silently to the stick shift. I shifted into fifth, and gave him a withering look: he'd never stop telling me how to drive. He grinned. I saw houses and farms that I’d seen before. “All right,"I said, "I think I know where I am now.”
“Good,” he said, and fell asleep.
"All right, I think I know where I am now." ..."Good"...
Most of my family is buried in Kansas. I have now, on my desk, a pile of pictures and notes from my materlinial line. One of them shows a "ranch" in western Kansas in 1910. There is dust in the air. One of the psalms says "I am wonderfully made...", and I think that is the truth. That's why we remember.
Scott
Posted by: Scott | June 02, 2007 at 10:30 PM
Beth, this is such a wonderful post. You have that unobtrusively perfect sense of timing that makes an ordinary sentence such as "'Good,' he said, and fell asleep." land like the final hammer-stroke of a master carpenter.
It reminds me of E.B. White at his best; it's quintessentially New England.
Posted by: dale | June 03, 2007 at 01:13 PM
Beth, Dale has expressed my sentiments exactly. What a lovely sequence of posts about your Memorial Day family time; such a nice touch to include the correspondence with your friend from China.
Posted by: Bitterroot | June 05, 2007 at 12:06 AM