Any bloodline is a carving river and parents are its nearest shores.
--Ivan Doig
I had occasion to be in my father's neighborhood recently. The land of my old man. That happens to be a graveyard, to which I stopped in, as opposed to whistling past. Townes Van Zandt rumbled "Flying Shoes" on the car stereo, the musical backdrop to my quest for his grave. I didn't plan it that way. Just a mystical moment before I stepped out into the residue of a rainstorm that left wet grass and still, roadside puddles.
My father rests in a corner in the far reaches of this particular cemetery, adjacent to a rusted chain-link fence that sequesters a residential yard featuring sparse grass, an aboveground pool, an empty aquarium, a disheveled blue tarp and a nonbarking dog who has at least some German shepherd in him. Sun-worn shingles. Relatively small planes from the nearby airport pass overhead, propeller sounds slicing through the space that divides us.
My father expired, like old milk, in 1979 at age 50 and would have been approaching 82 had he not drunk himself to death. The worker who led me to the grave told me they were "multiple graves," more than one person in a hole.
"He's in the same one as Fannie," he said. The dearly departed Fannie Payne. She entered the world in 1909 and left in '79, same as Dad. I wondered about her lot in life. Their grave markers measure about 2 feet by 8 inches and bear the names and birth and death years. Fairly straightforward.
"Are they separated with something...just dirt?" I asked.
"They each have their own cement crypt. One on top of the other. Some welfare people from Trenton."
"So this would have been the budget plan?"
"Yeah. Sometimes people want to move the person who's underneath, but the family of the person on top says 'You're not moving my relative.' "
Maggie Collins' marker abuts my father's on top. If someone had told me more than one person occupied each grave and asked me to guess who lay where, I would have said Maggie reposed with my father, based on grave-marker position. But he said it was Fannie.
Nearby, three people appear to be entombed together, their markers aligned like rungs on an abbreviated ladder. Wet dirt, not quite having graduated to mud, partially obscures one engraving, and a severely trimmed arborvitae casts its shadow over the gravesite like a slumping sentinel. I push aside some of the dirt with my thumb and it leaves a slug trail on the granite. A woman, age 40, and two boys, 22 and 10. Same last name. A mother and her progeny? A sister with her brothers? Seems unlikely, given the ages. Did they go in a car accident? Did someone gun them down? Did they drown swimming together? I'm gathering they didn't get smothered by an avalanche while back-country skiing, given the pauper's grave. Do the mom and 10-year-old lie in a single, cold, cement embrace?
Nobody appears to tend to these graves, other than the landscapers, who must weed-whack the encroaching grass lest it envelop each stone. A partial bouquet has blown over into this potter's field from the area in which those who were at least somewhat more well-heeled reside.
I don't pray at the graveyard. I don't talk to my father. I wonder who paid for this. His siblings? They couldn't have come up with a more-well-appointed final resting place? Didn't they hold him in high-enough esteem? I suppose it doesn't matter. It's good money after bad.
More questions arise, few answers. Does anyone else visit you, Dad? Would I even have called you Dad, or would it have been Pop? Would we have fished? I wonder whether we would have drunk together and contemplate an after-dark graveside drink. Did you love your kids? How could you not? What did you lack that enabled you to walk away? Were you that weak, or just that selfish? Did disease render you incapable of any other course of action? Were you such a shit-heel that I ended up better off because you died? Is it better not to have known a man such as you, of whose DNA I am half-composed? Were I to have known you, I might have been better able to channel my rage. Instead, those unanswered questions linger like briers on a shoelace. I'd prefer to take my sorrow straight, like Iris Dement.
My own two boys seem to have a particular affinity for me. They're not quite old enough to recognize that they know much more than I do, but the little one, especially, is unabashedly affectionate. He wants to wake up to say goodbye on days when I have to leave for work early. He mauls me when I arrive home. And I'm a better man for it. My father denied himself that opportunity and, so, denied me. He could have been a drinker and a good man and a flawed but present father. Instead, he was just a drinker.
A life, for me distilled into a stone slab, like the distillation of spirits that course through me.
--Ivan Doig
I had occasion to be in my father's neighborhood recently. The land of my old man. That happens to be a graveyard, to which I stopped in, as opposed to whistling past. Townes Van Zandt rumbled "Flying Shoes" on the car stereo, the musical backdrop to my quest for his grave. I didn't plan it that way. Just a mystical moment before I stepped out into the residue of a rainstorm that left wet grass and still, roadside puddles.
My father rests in a corner in the far reaches of this particular cemetery, adjacent to a rusted chain-link fence that sequesters a residential yard featuring sparse grass, an aboveground pool, an empty aquarium, a disheveled blue tarp and a nonbarking dog who has at least some German shepherd in him. Sun-worn shingles. Relatively small planes from the nearby airport pass overhead, propeller sounds slicing through the space that divides us.
My father expired, like old milk, in 1979 at age 50 and would have been approaching 82 had he not drunk himself to death. The worker who led me to the grave told me they were "multiple graves," more than one person in a hole.
"He's in the same one as Fannie," he said. The dearly departed Fannie Payne. She entered the world in 1909 and left in '79, same as Dad. I wondered about her lot in life. Their grave markers measure about 2 feet by 8 inches and bear the names and birth and death years. Fairly straightforward.
"Are they separated with something...just dirt?" I asked.
"They each have their own cement crypt. One on top of the other. Some welfare people from Trenton."
"So this would have been the budget plan?"
"Yeah. Sometimes people want to move the person who's underneath, but the family of the person on top says 'You're not moving my relative.' "
Maggie Collins' marker abuts my father's on top. If someone had told me more than one person occupied each grave and asked me to guess who lay where, I would have said Maggie reposed with my father, based on grave-marker position. But he said it was Fannie.
Nearby, three people appear to be entombed together, their markers aligned like rungs on an abbreviated ladder. Wet dirt, not quite having graduated to mud, partially obscures one engraving, and a severely trimmed arborvitae casts its shadow over the gravesite like a slumping sentinel. I push aside some of the dirt with my thumb and it leaves a slug trail on the granite. A woman, age 40, and two boys, 22 and 10. Same last name. A mother and her progeny? A sister with her brothers? Seems unlikely, given the ages. Did they go in a car accident? Did someone gun them down? Did they drown swimming together? I'm gathering they didn't get smothered by an avalanche while back-country skiing, given the pauper's grave. Do the mom and 10-year-old lie in a single, cold, cement embrace?
Nobody appears to tend to these graves, other than the landscapers, who must weed-whack the encroaching grass lest it envelop each stone. A partial bouquet has blown over into this potter's field from the area in which those who were at least somewhat more well-heeled reside.
I don't pray at the graveyard. I don't talk to my father. I wonder who paid for this. His siblings? They couldn't have come up with a more-well-appointed final resting place? Didn't they hold him in high-enough esteem? I suppose it doesn't matter. It's good money after bad.
More questions arise, few answers. Does anyone else visit you, Dad? Would I even have called you Dad, or would it have been Pop? Would we have fished? I wonder whether we would have drunk together and contemplate an after-dark graveside drink. Did you love your kids? How could you not? What did you lack that enabled you to walk away? Were you that weak, or just that selfish? Did disease render you incapable of any other course of action? Were you such a shit-heel that I ended up better off because you died? Is it better not to have known a man such as you, of whose DNA I am half-composed? Were I to have known you, I might have been better able to channel my rage. Instead, those unanswered questions linger like briers on a shoelace. I'd prefer to take my sorrow straight, like Iris Dement.
My own two boys seem to have a particular affinity for me. They're not quite old enough to recognize that they know much more than I do, but the little one, especially, is unabashedly affectionate. He wants to wake up to say goodbye on days when I have to leave for work early. He mauls me when I arrive home. And I'm a better man for it. My father denied himself that opportunity and, so, denied me. He could have been a drinker and a good man and a flawed but present father. Instead, he was just a drinker.
A life, for me distilled into a stone slab, like the distillation of spirits that course through me.
