Then my father asked after his father and she said, Why, yes, he’d been in the neighborhood. She didn’t know he had died, but she knew where he was likely to have been buried, and she showed us to what remained of a road that would take us right to the place, not three miles from where we stood. The road was overgrown, but as you walked along you could see the ruts. The brush grew lower in them, because the earth was still packed so hard. We walked past that graveyard twice. The two or three headstones in it had fallen over and it was all grown up with weeds and grass. The third time, my father noticed a fence post, so we walked over to it, and we could see a handful of graves, a row of maybe seven or eight, and below it a half row, swamped with that dead brown grass. I remember that the incompleteness of it seemed sad to me. In the second row we found a marker someone had made by stripping a patch of bark off a log and then driving nails partway in and bending them down flat so they made the letters REV AMES. The R looked like the A and the s was a backward z, but there was no mistaking it.
It was evening by then, so we walked back to the lady’s farm and washed at her cistern and drank from her well and slept in her hayloft. She brought us a supper of cornmeal mush. I loved that woman like a second mother. I loved her to the point of tears. We were up before daylight to milk and cut kindling and draw her a bucket of water, and she met us at the door with a breakfast of fried mush with blackberry preserves melted over it and a spoonful of top milk on it, and we ate standing there at the stoop in the chill and the dark, and it was perfectly wonderful.
Then we went back to the graveyard, which was just a patch of ground with a half-fallen fence around it and a gate on a chain weighted with a cowbell. My father and I fixed up the fence as best we could. He broke up the ground on the grave a little with his jackknife. But then he decided we should go back to the farmhouse again to borrow a couple of hoes and make a better job of it. He said, “We might as well look after these other folks while we’re here.” This time the lady had a dinner of navy beans waiting for us. I don’t remember her name, which seems a pity. She had an index finger that was off at the first knuckle, and she spoke with a lisp. She seemed old to me at the time, but I think she was just a country woman, trying to keep her manners and her sanity, trying to keep alive, weary as could be and all by herself out there. My father said she spoke as if her people might be from Maine, but he didn’t ask her. She cried when we said goodbye to her, and wiped her face with her apron. My father asked if there was a letter or a message she would like us to carry back with us and she said no. He asked if she would like to come along, and she thanked us and shook her head and said, “There’s the cow.” She said, “We’ll be just fine when the rain comes.”
That graveyard was about the loneliest place you could imagine. If I were to say it was going back to nature, you might get the idea that there was some sort of vitality about the place. But it was parched and sun-stricken. It was hard to imagine the grass had ever been green. Everywhere you stepped, little grasshoppers would fly up by the score, making that snap they do, like striking a match. My father put his hands in his pockets and looked around and shook his head. Then he started cutting the brush back with a hand scythe he had brought, and we set up the markers that had fallen overmost of the graves were just outlined with stones, with no names or dates or anything on them at all. My father said to be careful where I stepped. There were small graves here and there that I hadn’t noticed at first, or I hadn’t quite realized what they were. I certainly didn’t want to walk on them, but until he cut the weeds down I couldn’t tell where they were, and then I knew I had stepped on some of them, and I felt sick. Only in childhood have I felt guilt like that, and pity. I still dream about it. My father always said when someone dies the body is just a suit of old clothes the spirit doesn’t want anymore. But there we were, half killing ourselves to find a grave, and as cautious as we could be about where we put our feet. We worked a good while at putting things to rights.
It was hot, and there was such a sound of grasshoppers, and of wind rattling that dry grass. Then we scattered seeds around, bee balm and coneflower and sunflower and bachelor’s button and sweet pea. They were seeds we always saved out of our own garden. “When we finished, my father sat down on the ground beside his father’s grave. He stayed there for a good while, plucking at little whiskers of straw that still remained on it, fanning himself with his hat. I think he regretted that there was nothing more for him to do. Finally he got up and brushed himself off, and we stood there together with our miserable clothes all damp and our hands all dirty from the work, and the first crickets rasping and the flies really beginning to bother and the birds crying out the way they do when they’re about ready to settle for the night, and my father bowed his head and began to pray, remembering his father to the Lord, and also asking the Lord’s pardon, and his father’s as well. I missed my grandfather mightily, and I felt the need of pardon, too. But that was a very long prayer.
Every prayer seemed long to me at that age, and I was truly bone tired. I tried to keep my eyes closed, but after a while I had to look around a little. And this is something I remember very well. At first I thought I saw the sun setting in the east; I knew where east was, because the sun was just over the horizon when we got there that morning. Then I realized that what I saw was a full moon rising just as the sun was going down. Each of them was standing on its edge, with the most wonderful light between them. It seemed as if you could touch it, as if there were palpable currents of light passing back and forth, or as if there were great taut skeins of light suspended between them. I wanted my father to see it, but I knew I’d have to startle him out of his prayer, and I wanted to do it the best way, so I took his hand and kissed it. And then I said, “Look at the moon.” And he did. We just stood there until the sun was down and the moon was up. They seemed to float on the horizon for quite a long time, I suppose because they were both so bright you couldn’t get a clear look at them. And that grave, and my father and I, were exactly between them, which seemed amazing to me at the time, since I hadn’t given much thought to the nature of the horizon.
My father said, “I would never have thought this place could be beautiful. I’m glad to know that.”
We looked so terrible when we finally got home that my mother just burst into tears at the sight of us. We’d both gotten thin, and our clothes were in bad shape. The whole journey didn’t take quite a month, but we’d been sleeping in barns and sheds, and even on the bare ground, during the week or so that we were actually lost. It was a great adventure to look back on, and my father and I used to laugh about some fairly dreadful things. An old man even took a shot at us once. My father was, as he said at the time, intending to glean a few overgrown carrots out of a garden we passed. He’d left a dime on the stoop to pay for whatever we could find to steal, which was always little enough. That was something to see, my father in his shirtsleeves straddling a rickety old garden fence with a hank of carrot tops in his hand and a fellow behind him taking aim.