Spring Hill Cemetery - Charleston, WV

To get to the old cemetery, you have to pull off the highway sharply and with gut. From the middle lane, you must reach and leap for the exit, traffic be damned. As your car dives, midway, you wonder whether you’ve missed an oncoming Walmart truck that any reasonable adult should have seen and whether, in another half second, you will realize your carelessness as you are mashed into the pavement, your personness wiped out of your body. Or maybe you’ll land and go about the rest of your afternoon with your usual nonchalance, which is, after all, how you generally spend afternoons. Suddenly, the spin of the ramp says that you’ve made it, and you hold onto that turn with every available tendon until you’ve passed through it: a revolving door into a quiet, wild place.

The road coils and climbs, steeper than you remember hills to be. Little squat houses jab into the sides like hastily placed pins that hold up a woman’s chignon for an evening. While she dances and laughs, she feels the danger that they will give a sigh and give up, letting her slippery black hair splash onto her neck.

You find a row of porched houses, hunkering together by the road -- afraid of the mountain's empty space. You peer into the windows, wondering who built them and who lives there now. This is the unfashionable side of town with a view of the city's vacant warehouses. A young man in a dirty t-shirt opens a screen door to get something out of his parked car. A satellite dish balances on the side of a porch roof. The house on the end belongs to a whimsical woman with a well-loved cat. She has wicker porch furniture and lavendar cushions and a glass and iron wind chime that she got from her friend who is an artist. You can see your mother living in a house like this.

You drive through gates and up to an office with a terracotta roof. Nobody answers the sound of you coming in, and you hear people in the back arguing over the details of a burial package.

"So, you're telling me that the only ones we can get together in the family area are between Aunt Gertie and Aunt Mildred?"

"Looks like it."

"I would die."

"I don't think that'll be a problem."

"You're impossible. This is serious. I knew I should've come myself."

"I just meant that you won't care where you are. You'll be dead. Why don't we take the papers and look them over at home. We're taking up too much of her time."

"Fine."

A well-dressed couple in their 60's come through the office. You smile a vague nice-weather-we're-having smile, and they leave quickly.

On the shelves are bound and stamped books called, “Death Book,” “Mausoleum I, II, and IV,” and “Pending Sales.” You think about asking for a map but don’t want to mark yourself as a tourist; the kind of person who seeks out her own ancestors and joins internet sites for this purpose and enshrines her findings in a scrapbook and politely tolerates the living locals.

Before you can leave, a woman comes out of the back and sizes you up as exactly this. “Can I help you, honey?” she asks.

“Well. Um. Yes. Could you tell me how old the cemetery is?”

“Well, we’ve got records dating back to 1900 or so.” She waits for you to make another demand and then asks, “You looking for someone in particular?”

“No. I was just curious.”

The woman looks at you, trying to place the kind of person who wanders around an out-of-the-way cemetery on a Monday afternoon, alone, with no people to seek out. She points to the mausoleum, which pretends to be Italian with its dome and matching terracotta roof. Above the door, a stone reads, “A.D. 1910.” She says, “The mausoleum has been here since about 1910.”

“OK.”

You stare at each other. You consider offering her an invented ancestor -- a ne'er do well who ran off with a three ring circus.

Instead, you say, “Thank you,” as if this were the very fact you needed to know.

You start up one of the asphalt roads. The oldest part comes first. It grows uphill, working its way though Christian names from 1815, when people were careful to write that they had come from England and to engrave the stones with bits of scripture in snaking script. It was important to be from somewhere, to be someone’s wife or daughter, and to leave the world with something to think about. Maybe these things are still important. You notice Civil War death dates and the font become crisp and modern in the '20s. You wander up through the steady flow of lives and deaths, though two World Wars, working your way up through the 20th Century, remembering dates and events from your history textbook, trying to place them next to these small lives.

At the top, the Catholics added their own section. An iron and bronze sign tells who assisted with the consecration of the land and which seminary students won out on the vying for this honor. At the bottom, it says the land had been "blessed and dedicated to the memory of loved ones on one of the warmest days of the year." The phrase strikes you as foolish and earnest. It mattered to someone that the day be remembered. Someone wanted to wrap the dead in the cottony air of late summer. And inside the line, you sense a joke played on the priests and their protégés as they suffered in their wool though ninety-five-degree sunshine to honor the absent and indifferent dead.

The road winds down around to the oldest part. Five men run tractors through the grass aisles, chopping through the daisies and dandelion puffs that grow ragged over the bulwarks between family plots. As fast as they cut, the weeds rebound and reclaim their places. The wild place elbows for more room.

You remember the clean-shaven ground of the cemetery back home. There, people carve places for the dead between but apart from the places for living. The dead just move across town and become drive-by sites on your commute -- wandering places for eccentrics and havens for drug-seeking kids. People come and talk to the stones and leave flowers, and a custodian keeps things. We keep our losses close, dropping by when we need to feel sad or afraid.

Here, death has been sent out and away to the hill to keep an eye on things. But before your eyes, the careless wild is taking over. The edges of the yard soften as the woods chew at them. Flat plates of leaves reach toward the fresh-mowed lanes. Weeds and seedlings sprout between headstones, pushing up past where the obelisks can reach, dwarfing them and mocking these puny man-towers.

Grasses throw themselves across the waist of a small headstone for an unnamed infant son whose life is listed in months and days the way a mother tells her baby’s age to a friendly stranger in the produce section of the grocery store. It hurts. The rain and sun suck the engraved verses out of the stones so that you can barely read them. They do not matter.

Crows and blue jays call out for their rightful piece of wood. A beaver wanders out of the bushes, evaluates the scene, and sleepy, sighs as she turns back and wraps herself in the living green to wait. She is patient. Soon, we will melt back into the hillside and be carried in earthworm gut into the nearest stream or tree or dandelion weed. Some child will pick us up, blow on our feathered seeds, and watch us fly, amazed, imagining where we will land.

You watch the men ravage the dandelion weeds with motors, knives, and poison cans. The city pays them well to fight back this life. To keep it neat, trimmed, and polite. Protecting a death that’s up and away, out of sight, keeping an eye on things. One of the men smiles. "It's a hot one today," he says. You nod. The blue jays laugh.