Winterguide 2012

“Plot Next to Angel”
By Morgan Callan Rogers
Portland Magazine, May, 2003

“Ever notice how these friggin’ flowers smell?” Steven grumbles. “They stink. And they’re ugly.” Pots of red geraniums sit next to his father’s grave. He hunkers down with a trowel and starts digging up the ground in front of the stone so he can plant them.

Jack’s been dead almost three years now. He died just after we got married. Steven’s mother usually takes care of Jack’s grave. But this year she’s off on a cruise with her new husband, Dick. She gave us a map of the graves before she left and said, “You put the flowers out this year. We won’t be back in time for Memorial Day.”

It upset Steven when his mother married Dick, but it didn’t surprise me. Dick lived next door for years. When Jack died, Dick crossed their adjoining lawns to console Steven’s mother. It only took six months before he was mowing both lawns.

Steven found his father dead in a cabin he and their buddies had rented for a four-day weekend. He still has nightmares about it. He gets depressed and he sits in front of the TV and watches sports for days. “Leave me the eff alone,” he tells me. He gets back to me when he feels better. It’s good when he does. We sit in his big chair and watch sports together.

He wanted me to come with I’m today, so I’m here with the map in my hand, watching him tear up the ground. Fat worms writhe in the upended earth. Steven shakes a geranium loose from a pot, pushes it into the ground, and shoves soil over the roots.

I say, “Maybe this fall we can plant tulip bulbs here. Big, yellow ones. Jack liked yellow.”

“How in the hell would he know what color they are, Sarah?”

He has a point. I pick up the worms I can see and hide them from the birds behind the flowers. Then I study the map. It shows where people who get flowers are buried. Jack is done. So are Grandpa and Lizzie, Steven’s sister who was killed in a car accident. There are three to go: Steven’s Uncle Bill, Gene Peabody (a friend of the family), and Aunt Jane.

“Who’s Aunt Jane?” I ask.

“Some great aunt of ma’s.”

“She gets a flower,” I say. “I’ll do that. You do Bill and Gene?”

He shrugs and puts another flower into the ground.

“I’ll walk,” I say. “It’s not far.”

I hold Aunt Jane’s flower against me as I go past people planting and watering their plots. Big butts bend over granite or marble slabs, or over some unseen marker in the ground. Little American flags hang limp next to some of the graves. They look like they could use some water.

The map takes me left, then right, over a wooden bridge, and I cross over from the new section to the old section. People in the old section have been dead 100 years or more, whereas people in the new section haven’t been dead that long.

There’s New England merchant royalty in the old section. A ten-foot granite tree begins a row of marble crypts that cradle the remains of shipbuilding ancestors. Windows illuminate one of the crypts. Everything is white except for the brass plates lined just so along the rows of caskets. Just so even unto death. I bury my nose in the geranium petals and walk on.

A knee-high picket fence separates a small plot of land from the rest of the cemetery. Tiny white crosses mark the graves of baby and toddler orphans who died back when they didn’t have shots and there were diseases that could take a child just like that. I cuddle the flower close and imagine the soul of an orphan moving up from under the ground and entering into me. I’d try to keep it safe and warm, although I couldn’t hold my own baby inside of me for more than six months last year. I still feel sad. We’re going to try again, though. Steven says maybe next year.

Past the orphans’ graveyard, things get run down. The stones lean against each other like drunken drawings in a scary comic book. I know I’m close to Jane’s grave because Steven’s mother has scrawled the words ‘plot next to angel’ on the map, and there is an angel straight ahead.

The angel’s granite face is streaked with dark lines. Fungus creeps along her arms, and a green bug with wings is crawling up her praying hands. I flick it away and walk next door.

Two skinny stones stand side by side. They were white once, but time has blackened the writing on the faces. The unkempt grass is peppered with periwinkle forget-me-nots. I lean in close to those tiny blue faces and I just want to dive in. When I die, I don’t want to go into a tunnel of light, I want to disappear into a blue as pure as the color of these flowers.

Jane’s name is on one of the graves above the flowers. Something is etched underneath her birth and death dates. The words are fuzzy, but I can still make then out. “…But flowers distill’d, though they with winter meet, Leese but their show, their substance still lives sweet.” It’s pretty. It’s attributed to Shakespeare.

Jane’s husband, Horace, is buried next to her. There is writing on his stone, too. It says, “Life is but a summer’s day, a journey to the tomb.” There’s no credit given to the author. It’s grim, but practical. Maybe Horace wrote it. Horace, it appears, was a no-nonsense guy.

I picture Jane and Horace in their kitchen. Supper is over, Jane has cleaned up, and they sit and read by the stove. When Horace finishes the paper, he goes to bed because he’s a farmer and he has to get up early. Jane doesn’t notice when he leaves. She’s reading her Shakespeare. And though she needs to be up before he does, she dives deep into the book, away from the kitchen and her farmer wife’s life, deep into the heart of the poetry, down past the words and into the meaning.

“Found her, huh?”

I jump a little, but it’s just Steven. He’s smiling because he’s scared me a little bit. He smells like the dirt he’s been digging in. His shirt is soaked with sweat. He holds up the trowel.

“Plan on using your hands?” he asks. He shakes his head. “Look at this place. Christ, why bother?” He cuts into the earth. The trowel clunks against something in front of Jane’s grave.

“For Chrissake, now what?” he says. He rips up forget-me-nots and grass to expose a tiny tombstone. It sticks out of the ground like a tooth that’s coming up. Something, maybe frost, has shoved it close to Jane’s stone.

He starts digging in front of the little stone. “Put it here, I guess,” he says.

“They had a baby,” I say. “A baby who died.”

I lean against the angel. The lichen on the stone scratches my bare arms.

When he’s done plating, Steven gives me a salty kiss.

“Could’ve been a dog, Sarah,” he says. “You don’t know for sure.”