Cars on both sides of the highway pulled over and turned on their lights as mourners in Chevrolets and Plymouths and Fords followed a black hearse and cars filled with flowers to the cemetery.
So many flowers.
“Flowers are for the living,” Grandma says, so she has most of them delivered to Pinecrest Sanitarium, a huge brick building where people with tuberculosis were quarantined and treated, sometimes for years. “Besides, that’s what your grandpa would want me to do.”
As the hearse carrying my grandpa arrived at an open grave on a gentle rise, the last car pulled onto the funeral grounds. I watched the black iron gates of Sunset Memorial Cemetery swing shut behind us.
Epilogue: we are going home . . .
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
T. S. Eliot
Fifty-five years after Grandpa’s death Sissy and I drive through the black wrought-iron gates and up the rise to the gravesite. We stand at the foot of my grandpa’s grave. Humbled and small, I am in the presence of greatness.
“I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my strength.”
The mountains fold around me.
The marble tombstone is elegant. That’s Grandma’s doing. Luther Clevland Cales 7.7.1877—7.30.1952
Grandma’s name and date of birth are also cut into the stone: Clerrinda Adkins Cales 9.12.1887
But Grandma isn’t buried next to Grandpa. She’s lived in Florida for more than four decades and decides that’s where she will stay. “Be easier on the family,” she tells me. Since most of us have migrated to Florida, I nod like I agree.
I am holding her hand when Grandma dies on December 14, 1990, at age one hundred three and a half. We bury her next to Vertis, the second of her sons to be buried before her—the first an infant boy—where her two daughters, my mother, Iva Kathleen, and aunt, Lila Lora, will be buried in time. Years later, I consider moving her to the gravesite next to Grandpa, having the date she died carved into the stone. I decide against it. She made her decision, and I will continue to honor it.
But as the heir next in line, I can be buried there. Two people can if they are cremated, which is what my husband and I have planned. An old rhyme comes to mind,
I’m a West Virginian born and bred,
and I’ll be a West Virginian when I’m dead.
Terry is a native Pennsylvanian. I ask how he feels about being buried in West Virginia. “That’d make you a bona fide, dirt-dyed hillbilly,” I tell him.
“I’m going wherever you go,” he says.
“All right then. We’re going home.”
The last four generations of the unbroken chain of women in my family—my mother, me, my daughter, my granddaughter—are together at my mother’s home in Florida for what will be the last time. Mother, who never smoked, is dying of lung cancer. She is cold, so I go to a closet and pull down a quilt. Behind it is a small brass-trimmed cedar box, meant for storing trinkets or jewelry or memories. I use an old wire coat hanger to retrieve it from the back of the shelf. Mother says it was Grandma’s, so Rindy immediately claims it for herself. She asserts ownership of anything once owned by this great-great-grandma whose name she carries. She shakes the box, then opens it. It is empty. She turns it over. There is an inscription, printed in Grandma’s uneven scrawl:
TO RINDY FROM HER GRANDMA IN HEAVEN
We all laugh and cry at the same time, reminding me once again of the joyful sound of Pentecostals praying. Grandma’s presence is with us in the room.
She visits me sometimes, turning lights on and off to get my attention. Signs from her appear everywhere I go, and I follow her footprints to unexpected places.
I see her looking down on us, and she is laughing.
She turns to Grandpa, “Looks like they found the memory box.”
He smiles and shakes his head. “Sure took them long enough.”
Now and again, when autumn days crisp like a Winesap and the stars line up just so, the trees fluoresce into brilliance. And when they do, I am grateful to bear witness. As the last faded leaf falls from the cherry tree, scabby limbs are bared to the cold. Night skies come earlier and blacker, lit by stars that glitter like diamonds.
We are in the waning days of such a season.
I think back to tent meetings and dinners on the ground, to sugar water on my pigtails, and old hymns floating on soft mountain air.
Faces and voices and sweet sacred places turn in my head.
My eyes click open.
Grandma says, “Don’t you be running on that red dog road.”
But I do.
I run wild, whooping and yowling against the pale November sky.
Amen.
Acknowledgments
My heartfelt thanks to . . .
Grandpa and Grandma Cales for being the best teachers I ever had. They taught me that the gift is in the giving. That I should put myself neither above nor beneath anyone. That the world is a good place already and I should try to make it better. I give them credit for most of the good in me.
My mother Kathleen for buying us a home and fixing the roof and the washing machine herself. For taking me to open my own savings account when I started school. Brainy, responsible—a remarkable role model. She was skilled and talented and an artist in everything she did.
Aunt Lila for her unfailing good
