Vacancy

I walked through the graveyard, with the sun cutting the heavy mercury and cadmium clouds into pieces and the green farmland sodden with Fall rain.  The pinyon and juniper stood a sort of unassuming green along the ridges with the silver sage.  The good red earth of the Montezuma County highlands contoured itself in draping skirts and concentric rims along the islands of erosion fighting natural vegetation.  The clouds started to come apart, drawn by their own gravity into droplets and then to the earth below.  The sun still shone where the clouds were not.  The cottonwoods burst into a sort of October flame.

This was not the graveyard of an assuming people.  There were no great monuments.  The stones were on the small side, a few hand carved and weathered into near unreadability.  Somewhere under the stone, the home-made coffins of mothers, daughters, sons and fathers were long since reduced to splinters spilling their biological load into the surrounding loam.  Some of the graves were new.  The soil still mounded up so that the soaking and sinking and the collapsing coffin wouldn’t leave an indentation.

A few brethren milled around in their denim work coats discussing where the likely good hunting locations would be in the glade.  The women cast wary eyes on their own children, the mortality of whom had been made manifest in the tiny coffin waiting to be lowered into an empty grave.  The parents of the coffin had tried their whole life to conceive and God had not seen fit to bless them until earlier that year.  The lord then saw fit to remove the blessing a few months into the arrangement.

The Brethren are a tough people. Laconic and a little more in touch with the pain of being sentient mortals.  They don’t believe in the trappings of modern life.  Lawyers, doctors, politicians, warfare.  They rely on God exclusively.  They will send sons to war when they are asked and they will allow the laws to come and go.  But they let God tell them through a system of prophets and prophetesses what God would have them do.  Generally God is pretty common sense about the whole thing.

He did tell these parents they would conceive.  He never gave them any reason to hope to hold a live son or daughter.  The faith of the parents is such that they never questioned God on this niggling allocation of blessing.  Babies still die in the world of The Brethren and life is not something to be taken for granted. Neither is the soil or the rain or the game in the fields.

After a few shaky bars, the hymns got stronger and the voices reached up into the disintegrating clouds where the sun was losing ground.  One of my cousins put his hand up on the shoulder of the father whose jaw was set into concrete and whose eyes were staring intently into the hole. The hand shook him.  The jaw moved a little.  Not to talk.  Just a vague back and forth movement they eyes got a little more intense.  My cousin’s dad took the hand off of the Father’s shoulder and gave my cousin a withering look.

The Father returned to his stoicism.  And the coffin was lowered by rope into the hole to sit in the mud and water pooling in the bottom.  The Brethren don’t throw dirt or flowers into graves, or any of that other Catholic nonsense.  We filed away from grave.  Reassurances were uttered and not listened to.  God was invoked a time or two, sometimes with alarming conviction.  The men lounging around on the nearby backhoe perked up and lit cigarettes.  My dad and the Father were good friends inside the already closeknit church.  We hung around until the other cars were gone with the two of them discussing the benefits of the Ford 352 vs. the 351 Windsor small block.  Finally, the grieving found its way deep into the man where only he could deal with it by thinking and grinding the world into his own mental mortis pot. We shook hands and made plans to hunt.  The Mother had long since retired to the cab of their pickup.  The Father joined her and started the truck.  There was no embrace or screaming drama.  Just a silent dialog of survivorship.

Me and my dad loaded up in our old van.

As I shut the door, the backhoe fired up, blowing black smoke into the rain.

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Just a nice October thought for you nice people.