Why Do They Put Fences around Cemeteries?
Three years after William stayed the summer with Clyde and Maureen, a few days after Clyde's seventieth birthday, Clyde drove his old Chevy sedan downtown to get a prescription filled for his wife, Maureen. He saw the log truck, but he didn't see the reach sticking out behind the load, and he drove right into it. The steel-clad beam smashed through the windshield, hit him in the head and shoulder, and drove past him into the back seat.
The reach cracked bone in his face. After that, one eye looked down toward his feet while the other looked straight ahead. A scar zig-zagged down the right side of his face.
He made a joke of it. "That eye didn't do me any good anyway. I was near blind in it. I was tired of my face being the way it was, so I changed it around some."
If you asked, "Well, did that help? Is it better than it was?" he'd reply, "Oh yes. Now my wife doesn't have to worry about other women falling in love with me, because I'm not near as good-looking as I used to be."
Maureen was nearly blind by then. Clyde never had been handsome. He was devoted to Maureen, and she to him. But Clyde liked to joke.
Both he and Maureen had been married before. Clyde's first wife became devoted to whiskey and to the men who brought it and drank with her while Clyde tried to make a living from a small farm. He caught her and threw her out.
He didn't like the farm they had started together anymore. He sold out, packed his children and goods, and moved to the Willamette Valley in Oregon, a valley of rich soil and abundant water.
Maureen and her first husband, Jack began their family on a farm in Kansas. A stream ran through the farm that first year and gave them a good start, but dry years followed, and the stream only ran in the spring. After several dry years, it didn't run at all. Stock ranged lean on sparse pasture and died in winter.
Jack raged at the loss of the lush, green, crop-growing, cattle-fattening land he had thought he had. He quoted; "...cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life;
"Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee."
Crops blew away in dust storms. Animals and people starved. Rage consumed him. He struck out at anything that came to view. Maureen wondered if she and the children would live through this man's rage at circumstance.
Two of her brothers headed for the green valleys in Oregon. They stopped on their way and questioned Maureen until she admitted that her bruises came from her husband, and she feared for her life and for the lives of her children.
Her brothers packed her and her children and all their belongings. Albert, with his 45-70 across his elbow, faced Jack down when he came after what he thought were his possessions, his wife and children. Before Jack's rage could pit him against Albert, Jack realized he didn't care anymore. His wife and children could leave, and he would be freed from the obligation to feed a family, freed from this prison of a place.
Clyde had five children, and Maureen had four. They married and raised them all together. They had each other and a small piece of land.
Their brothers and sisters criticized them for lack of ambition and vision and for simple tastes. The depression hit, and most of the brothers and sisters lost everything their ambition and long vision had brought them. Clyde and Maureen couldn't offer money to save a failing business or a foreclosed home, but they boarded and fed Maureen's sister and her husband and their four children, five of their own children, and two single brothers through the depression. Clyde liked to say, "There's one big bunch of us in a small house, and kids bedded down in the woodshed and the hay mow, and if you add together everything every one of us owns, it adds up to almost nothing."
Maureen would let a little time pass before she added, "and not one of us has gone hungry yet."
They kept pigs, three milk cows, three or more steers for beef, chickens, rabbits, turkeys, and guinea hens. They grew apple trees, plums, cherries, peaches, and pears, and a large garden. They raised most of the feed for their own animals. Clyde "worked out" as a stock handler at auctions and sometimes as a buyer.
Instead of getting worse through the depression, Clyde's and Maureen's position got better. It was easier to get work if Clyde would take stock or pieces of land for pay, because cash was scarce. It was easier to feed all the people if he did take stock for meat, or as breeders for meat, or if he took land to grow food.
There were no jobs, but everyone on the place worked. They worked in the garden, worked in the orchards, built fences, repaired buildings and helped neighbors, made clothes and mended clothes, fed and took care of chickens, rabbits, pigs, cows, and horses. They cooked food for the day and canned and dried food for winter and gave food to the church for those who otherwise would go hungry.
World War Two exploded on the world. The young men went to war. Industrial production built to meet the needs of war. Everyone who had not gone to war worked in factories to produce goods for the war.
After the war, industry built for war production stayed in business with production for defense and production of consumer goods. Almost everyone made high wages, spent big, and bought the future on the installment plan. Every homeless family bought a house. New cars began to fill the roads. Everyone worked hard and kept the wages rolling in.
Most people of the nation, welcoming the new way of industrial production and jobs for the people, had little time for gardens, milk-cows, orchards, or putting up food. The greeting of the day among so many barely clear of the depression was not, "how are you?" but, "are you working?"
Clyde's youngest son made more in a year than Clyde had
ever made in ten. Clyde found no criticism of himself in that. He was proud of his son.
It didn't matter to Clyde and Maureen that progress left them behind. They weren't looking for changes and new ways.
When William, Clyde's youngest grandson, turned sixteen, he went to stay with Clyde and Maureen for the summer.
They hadn't seen each other for ten years, while William's father worked construction in the south. Willy, his grandfather had called him when he was small. Clyde disregarded William's stricture against being called by a nickname and still called him Willy, and William let it be.
When he was six, William had refused to have anything to do with Maureen, because he knew she was step, not really his grandmother at all. When he was sixteen, he saw the love for her that knit up Clyde's days, and he accepted her into their fellowship.
The blossoms on the cherry trees gave way to tiny green cherries. Clyde and William went to town in Clyde and Maureen's old Chevy sedan while Maureen stayed home and fixed lunch. Among other purchases, Clyde bought a basket of ripe, red plums. The next morning before breakfast, he said, "Willy, climb this cherry tree. Get up there about the first branches. That's good. Right there. Now take this plum and tie it out there as far as you can reach. That's just right. Now another one over there. You got the idea. Let's put all of them up there."
When they finished breakfast, Clyde said, "Come out and look at the cherry trees, Maureen. They're sure putting on fruit."
Maureen stepped down from the porch and walked to the nearest tree and looked up into it. She said, "Well, I never saw cherries that big,..." She looked at Clyde and William standing there looking at her and grinning, and she said, "Clyde, you...," and she flailed at him with the dish towel and chased him back into the house.
They bought turkey eggs and slipped them into the chickens' nests for Maureen to find during her daily gathering. They planted full-grown carrots from the store among the rows where they had all planted seeds only three weeks before, and then they brought Maureen out to help them harvest carrot's for the supper's salad.
Evenings after supper, William's grandfather told jokes and stories.
"Why do they put fences around cemeteries?"
"Why, Grandpa?"
"Because people are just dying to get in."
William remembered the next joke his grandfather told had troubled him when he was six, and it troubled him again when Clyde told it while the three of them sat in the back yard under the apple tree as it got dark, but he said nothing about it; he was sure his grandfather didn't mean to disturb him. He meant it just as a joke.
"There was a fellow who had a young son, and he was good to his son, except when he was drinking, and then he beat the boy. Well, people would see the boy with a black eye and other bruises, and they would ask, 'What did you do to make your father beat you so?' and the boy would say, 'Nothing. Nothing at all.' Maybe the boy would have run away, but when his father was sober, he was very good to him, and he was always very sorry he had beat the boy and tried to make it up to him every way he could, and the boy loved his father, so he stayed. He didn't run away.
"For quite some time, the father didn't drink at all, and everything was fine. Then the boy's mother took up with another man and ran off and left them. That set the father to drinking again, and he took to coming home late. Sometimes, he jerked the boy out of his bed and beat him. Well, people would see the bruises, and they would ask, 'What did you do to make your father beat you so?' and the boy always replied, 'Nothing, nothing at all.'
"The boy looked a great deal like his mother. Some thought that might be why his father beat him so when he was drinking. He could have run away, but he thought if he left too, it might just finish the man. He hoped and prayed that his father would come to his senses and quit drinking, and they could go on and have a good life, even without the mother. The boy thought if the father quit drinking, he might find a woman who was a better wife and mother than the one who ran away.
"Well, it didn't go that way. One night, the father came home very drunk and jerked the boy out of bed and beat him so badly that the boy died early the next morning. They took the father away to jail, and they buried the boy. I can show you his gravestone up at the cemetery. That's been more than thirty years now, but to this day, if you go up to the cemetery and you stand there at his grave, and you ask him, 'What did you do to make your father beat you so?' he will say, nothing, nothing at all."
Two or three times a month, Clyde and Maureen gathered pop bottles and beer bottles from beside the roads they had selected as the best picking they could do in a day. By the end of the day, they had a car full of bottles, and they took them to the store and traded them for cash.
William went with them once, but he couldn't shake the thought that kids gathered bottles for candy money, and drunks gathered bottles for money for wine, but respectable people neither threw them out of their cars nor gathered them into their cars. He thought anyway it was a time they liked to be alone together, so after the first time, he stayed home and did chores or went down to the basketball court to see if there was a game he could get into.
Clyde said, "Willy, I'm getting too old to take care of everything here. You can help me set it up so it's easier to take care of." He sold his horses that summer, and one of his cows. He sold twelve acres of wheat land and the orchard across the county road from the house.
William climbed the ladder onto the roof at daylight and stripped old shingles off and let them slide off the roof to the ground. The sun came up, and the day heated up until sweat poured from him. His grandfather called to him from the ground. "That's enough for today, Willy. It's too hot. We can find something cooler to do for the rest of the day."
When William had stripped the roof of all the old shingles, Clyde tied bundles of composition shingles to the end of a rope, and William pulled them up a conveyor they leaned against the roof. Clyde gave instructions from the ground. William snapped chalk lines and nailed down shingles.
They finished the roof and cleaned up everything on the ground and hauled it to the dump in a trailer Clyde hooked up behind the old, black sedan. Clyde put his arm around William's shoulders, and they looked up at the new, green roof. "That roof will outlast me, Willy."
"Not it won't, Grandpa. We'll have to do it again in about twenty years."
William crawled under the house with jacks and blocks and a light. His grandfather lay on the ground and looked under the house and told William where to place the jacks, and William lifted the sagging kitchen floor and placed blocks to hold it. They built a new chicken-house and pen.
Leaves turned color. Nights turned cooler. Clyde and Maureen drove William to the bus depot. Before they left the house, Clyde handed William three one-hundred dollar bills folded into a new leather wallet, with a clip on it. "Clip that inside your trousers, and don't take it out the whole trip. Here's two tens for whatever you need on the way home, so you won't have to pull this wallet out where anybody can see it."
"What's all this money for, Grandpa? You don't need to give me money."
"It's for you. You earned it. You know what a roofer would have charged me to do that roof? Four-hundred dollars, just for the labor, not including clean-up, and that's only part of the work you did here."
"That's too much money."
"It isn't enough, but it's what I can pay."
When William was twenty-eight, Maureen died. William told Anna, "I'm going to take some time off work and go get my grandfather."
"Go get him? You mean bring him here?"
"Yes."
"Have you written him about it?"
"No. I'm just going. If I write him, he'll say no, but if I just go get him, I can talk him into it."
"Are you sure you can? How do you know he'll come with you?"
"I know. I haven't seen him for a long time, but I know what he's doing. After Maureen's eyesight failed, he spent most of his time taking care of her, and then all his time when she got sick. Now he's sitting there with nothing more he can do, and grief is eating him alive."
William drove all that night and all the next day and part of the next night. Fifty miles from town, he drove into the forest, rolled out his sleeping bag, and slept until daylight.
As first light washed the eastern horizon with grey light, William ate fruit, cheese, and bread. He put everything in his pickup and walked down to the stream and washed. He sat by the stream, where the running water sang songs to the early morning, and he watched the sun rise. Then he drove to his grandfather's house.
When Clyde opened the door, William said, "Grandpa, I wanted to see how that roof's doing."
"Roof? What roof?"
"The roof we shingled when I was sixteen years old."
"Well, Willy, it's doing fine. Hasn't leaked a drop since we put on new shingles." Then tears ran down his face. "Come in, Willy. You should have let me know you were coming. The house is messy. People from the church have been helping out, but there's a lot in the house I don't want other people to do."
"Grandpa, I came to get you. Anna and I have a nice place on the ridge in the pines. There's space everywhere to walk. We've started a garden. You can give us some advice about gardening and work with us in the garden if you want to."
"I can't just pull up on short notice and go."
"Why not? You're not doing anything here that can't wait a few weeks while you come up and keep us company."
"No, Willy, I'm not leaving here. This is where everything I own is, and all my memories."
William didn't mention it again. For three days, he visited with Clyde and helped clean and put the house in order. He told the people from the church, thank you, but no more food. He did all the cooking and threw leftovers from the church away.
He said, "It's too bad you don't have pigs anymore. Throwing garbage to the pigs is more fun than feeding it to a garbage can."
Clyde cried parts of every day. William didn't say anything about it, but he put his arm around the old man sometimes.
The fourth day William was there, the evening closed in dark around them, sitting in the living room. Neither of them bothered with a light switch.
Out of the darkness, Clyde spoke, "Don't live the way I've lived, Willy, because you won't have anything at the end of it. I'm alone, and everything before now means nothing. If it meant anything, I wouldn't feel the pain in my heart that I feel now."
"Bullshit."
"What?"
"Bullshit."
"Willy, I don't... That doesn't sound like you, Willy. I don't understand why you would say that."
Neither of them could see the other. Several minutes passed before Clyde said, "William, I remember something I haven't thought of for many years. That was about fifty years ago. That was when that Jack Mason man killed all those people. That was a terrible thing that man did, really terrible. Someone spoke of it after church, and I spoke up and said that. I said, 'That was a terrible thing that man did. He must be put to death, but it isn't punishment enough, and it won't begin to pay for what he did.'
"There was a young woman there in the cafe, and she said, 'I agree with you, even though I'm married to the man you're talking about.' They had two little children. They were with her. I don't have any idea in the world what happened to that woman and those children.
"They couldn't stay there. She had nothing to do with the killings, but the people shunned her. The Bible says the sins of the fathers are not visited on the children, so it was wrong to do that. I had nightmares about that for a long time, but I haven't thought about it for many years.
"William, I'm tired. I'm going to bed. I'm tired of your cooking too, so I'll cook breakfast."
When he put the muffins on the breakfast table, Clyde said, "Blueberry muffins."
"When I stayed here the summer I was sixteen, Maureen made blueberry muffins a lot. They were my favorite."
"Yes. I remember that. William, I thought about it and prayed about it, and I'll go with you, if you can bring me back when I'm ready to come home."
"Sure I can."
"An old man might not travel as well as a young man."
"We have time. We can camp out and rest anytime you get tired of riding. I get tired of riding, too."
"William, I never did hear of you getting married again. How did I miss out on that?"
"I didn't get married again. Anna and I aren't married. We'll get married when all the legal work gets done on my divorce."
"It isn't right for you to live together if you're not married."
"Grandpa, you lived with Maureen for more than three years before you were married, because getting your divorces took so long."
"How'd you know that?"
"You fathered a bunch, but you never did teach any of them to keep a secret."
"Maureen said you and me was two of a kind. Maybe she was right."
The young man tended the old man while they traveled. "Come on, Grandpa, you can walk a ways more. There's a bluff up here where we can see the river a thousand feet straight down, white and wild water rushing down through the roughest rock canyon you'll ever see."
They sat by the pickup and ate. The sun dropped behind the mountains. Night settled on them in the high country quiet. Clyde said, "You probably think a man who cries is a fool."
"A man who doesn't cry is a fool. But we need to grieve well and then leave grief behind. It's time to start remembering all the joy Maureen brought to you and be grateful for what she did in her life. Celebrate her life. Grief is for the living, but it's only for a while."
William bought red delicious apples and kept his grandfather from seeing them. He got up before Clyde was awake and tied some of them on a small juniper tree. After breakfast, he said, "Let's go see how the orchard's doing."
"Apples ripe in May? They won't be sweet, though. They don't sweeten up till after the first frost."
"There's been a frost. They're sweet. Try one."
"I've known folks would shoot a man for stealing apples."
"Wild trees. The owner of this place doesn't even know he has an orchard up here. His house is in the village."
"We won't tell him, will we? This is a good apple. Try one, William. They're good."
The third day, they drove into the driveway on the ridge.
Anna and Clyde hit it off well. His story-telling skill enchanted her. He told her about the apples on the mesa as if he didn't know it was a joke, but he also told her about the plums in the cherry tree the summer William came to stay. He told of a dozen jokes they had played on Maureen and on each other that William had forgotten.
William kept after him. "Grandpa, walk a little every day. Even if it isn't very far."
Clyde was proud of the progress he made. By the end of the second week, he walked more than a mile down the road and back every day. He worked in the garden. Sometimes he found it hard to bend down or to get into a kneeling position, or once kneeling, to get up again, but Anna was there to help him after William went back to work.
They planted many seeds, and the garden grew green and lush. Clyde had more than eighty years to tell about, and he told some of it while he and Anna worked together in the sunshine in the garden. One day he stopped in the middle of a story and said, "I think this old man talks too much."
Anna said, "No. You're not going to get out of finishing that story and a lot more. This young woman loves to hear what you say. I love gardening anyway, but it's twice as much fun with you here to work with me and to tell me about your life."
Clyde didn't like the appearance of some of their friends, especially the long-haired men. "How do you tell the men from the women?"
William said, "If it gets to where you need to know, you'll be able to tell."
He didn't like the bearded ones any better. "Doesn't anybody around here know how to shave?"
"Come on, Grandpa, you've seen beards go in and out of style in the time you've lived. They're in style now. You don't have any trouble telling which are men if the men have beards. You'll have to make up your mind what you want to see."
Anna had no folks. Clyde escorted her in the wedding ceremony, proud to do it. Afterward, he called her grand- daughter and hugged her and held her hand.
Clyde sat down in his walnut and leather rocking chair one evening in early autumn, after supper. 9:30, Anna touched his shoulder, to wake him to get ready for bed. She stood touching him for a long time and then leaned forward and put her arm around his shoulder and her head close to him. "William. William, he's gone."
They were quiet for a long time. William said, "We'd better take him home."
"Shouldn't we do something about it here first?"
"I don't think so. He has to go back. I promised. If we start notifying authorities, it might start getting complex and expensive to get him home. I don't think I need to know what laws I might be violating by taking him across country myself. I'm just going to go ahead and do it because it's the sensible thing to do. We'll put the camper shell on the back of the pickup and bed him down in back."
They pulled onto the highway within three hours. They drove through two towns and then onto the freeway, eating up miles in the dark night. William said, "Sleep if you can. You might have to drive later so I can get some sleep. There's a lot of road to drive."
Late the next day, they took Clyde's body in, and William talked to the mortician. "Don't mess with him. We washed him and dressed him, and he's ready."
"The law calls for embalming."
"No, it doesn't. I checked the laws, and I have copies with me. I've just decided I'll stay right here with my grandfather until he's buried."
As the man marched away, William said, "Keep that thermostat turned way down. We got time to go yet." Then quietly, William said, "I couldn't help it, Grandpa. I had to try to get some kind of lighter mood going. It's gloomy as a funeral parlor in here."
After the funeral, everyone left the cemetery but William and Anna. William hadn't slept much in several days. He and Anna put their arms around each other. They both cried then. After a while, William stepped back and said, "We keep this up, our clothes are going to be soaking wet. You okay?"
"I'm okay."
William thought of the jokes. The fence around the cemetery and the boy who always said nothing, nothing at all. "Do you feel up to driving, Anna?"
"Yes, I do. I'm okay."
"We could get a motel and catch up on some sleep."
"I don't want to do that unless you really need to. I'd rather head for home. The garden is going to be in bad shape if we don't get there soon. You're going to lose your job. And we really can't afford a motel. I wouldn't want to tell you how much money we have left."
William said, "I'm going to bed down in back and sleep, then. See if you and this pickup can eat up a couple of hundred miles."
They hugged each other again, for a long time. Then William bedded down in the back. Anna climbed into the cab, drove onto the highway, and headed east. William worked to shut down all his pointless thoughts, until he knew only dusk falling, the sound of the engine running smoothly at sixty miles an hour, the broad land ahead, and falling deeply into sleep.