From Linda Lee Greene, Author/Artist
In light of so many unspeakable
tragedies in an out-of-control world, to put hopeful words of any kind to paper
touches on the grotesque. However, life’s troubles concurrently remind us of
our courageous ancestors who sacrificed so much to pave the way for us. They
would roll over in their graves if we give into helplessness and are thus
struck silent. To be human is to contend with disaster and the grief it leaves
in its wake. We must express our grief even as we attempt to master our despair.
We have learned through our everyday living that grief can be transformed as
something bearable through acts of love. To honor our traditions is an act of
love that celebrates and validates our forebears. It is also a comfort-seeking pursuit
for us as we carry on in their absence. The following is a true story. It recounts
such an act of love on the part of my family:
“My maternal
ancestors were faithful to their generational commitment to express their
respect and gratitude to their deceased relatives and friends by visiting their
graves on every holiday and change of seasons. Each visit involved decorating
and maintaining the graves.
Back when my mother
and her siblings were youngsters, their old car of the day being too small to
accommodate their large brood, their mighty team of broad-backed workhorses,
Roger and Smoky by name, pulled the heavy, buckboard wagon on their visits to
the various graveyards in the area. Mommaw and Poppaw, taking a rare break from
the demanding duties of their farm, were at the helm of the wagon. Dean, the
baby of the family, sat between his parents on the high seat of the buckboard,
a vantage point that overlooked the ample rumps of the horses. In the back, the
seven other children, my mother among them before she was my mother, sat on
bound bundles of hay perched vicariously on the gaping floorboards that formed
the flat bed of the conveyance. The group of them, in perfect harmony and at
the top of their lungs, accompanied by Uncle Bob and Uncle Bussy on their
mandolins, sang the old song, “On Top of Old Smoky,” while the groaning wagon
appeared in danger of imploding from the weight of its human cargo and the
strain of the rough terrain that suffered its challenged wheels and chassis. Years
later and as the first grandchildren born to the family, my brother and I also
rode on that wagon on similar excursions, singing that old song in unison with
our aunts and uncles at the top of our voices. My brother and I then got to
ride between Mommaw and Poppaw on the high seat that overlooked the broad backs
of Roger and Smoky. I was a grown woman and married, with children of my own
when suddenly one day it dawned on me for the first time that the song was
about the Great Smoky Mountains rather than a horse named Smoky.
I still can see in my
mind’s eye the wobbly wheels of the buckboard and the iron-shod hooves of the
horses kicking up clouds of dust on the deeply-rutted, mud-caked lanes that lead
to the remote cemeteries. One of my prized possessions is the old, earthenware
jug that contained the grease Poppaw used to lubricate the screeching wheels of
the buckboard. The interior of the jug’s fissured walls are coated to this day
with black and slick remnants of the grease. During those journeys, every once
in a while, Poppaw yelled, “Whoa, Roger…Whoa Smoky,” and the buckboard came to
a grating halt. While the horses snorted from their huge nostrils and pawed the
ground with their heavy hooves, their hot bodies steaming and making auras of
their perspiration all around them, down from the high seat on his long legs
Poppaw jumped, pulling the jug from beneath the seat, a stick jutting from its
open top. The working end of the stick was wrapped in a grease-blackened cloth,
and he smeared the axles of the wheels with it.
At the entrance to
the road that loops the community of Cedar Fork where my parents spent their
formative years, although several new homesteads have sprung up over the years,
still it feels to me as if I’m entering an evolutionary backwater, a safe-haven
cut off from the rest of the world. These days I come to call in my car rather
than on a buckboard. I take the right turn in the loop that leads past “Greene
Acres,” the location of the fallen log cabin where my father and his family
lived back in those days. I pull my car into the area, park, and then walk to
the edge of the property, its border high above Cedar Fork Creek.
In the canyon below,
sunlight filters through the trees, winking gaily upon the rushing water of the
creek. I stretch my eyes to get a glimpse of the footbridge by the ancient,
mountain spring that was the source of drinking and cooking water for my father’s
large family long ago, and a bright ray of sun, as if switched on for my
benefit by the Hand of God, isolates it and sets it aglow. I take it as a
“token” message, a greeting from the spirit of my paternal grandmother, and I
smile and wave at her as if she is actually standing there. Satisfied that my
presence has been acknowledged and welcomed, I return to my car. Over the
decades, the markers of my deceased, maternal relatives have accumulated in the
graveyard in Cedar Fork, and I am shocked, as always, at the increased number
of them, as beneath the tires of my car the gravel on the lane to the small,
country cemetery loudly pops and crunches. There exists a legend that birds
shun other neighboring trees, preferring to gather en masse instead among the
leaves of an ancient pipal tree in a shimmering land across the sea, the pipal that
is said to be a direct descendant of the holy tree the Buddha sat beneath while
attaining enlightenment during his days of contemplation there. It might be my
prolific imagination at work, but I swear a similar phenomenon occurs in a
venerable oak tree that arches above the burial plot of my family, where, among
Civil War and other war veterans, upper-crust titans, and lower-caste farmers
of the area, Mommaw and Poppaw, my mother and father, my sister and most of my
nearest, deceased maternal kin now lie.
And as if in
testimony to my childhood memories of such a phenomenon, while its abutting
trees appear to be empty, huddled within the gnarled branches of the wizened,
oak tree, the gathered birds are perched. As I approach the graves, my presence
sets in motion the flight of the birds, their overlapped and snapping black
wings, for those brief moments in time, blotting out the sun.
I have read that
birds are manifest angels on earth, but I am less wise about such things than
when a child. Knowing it will not be confirmed to me until I complete my own
earthly journey, I leave it to the humming wheel of the universe, and to my elders,
all of whom on my mother’s side of my family, are already there in Cedar Fork
Cemetery, and where someday my remains will mingle with theirs.”©
The above essay is an adaptation of an excerpt of GUARDIANS AND OTHER ANGELS, my novel of historical fiction and true family lore. It is available in eBook and paperback on Amazon at http://goo.gl/imUwKO. –Linda Lee Greene
