Abandoned Graveyard (2009)

Robert Frost, receiver of 4 Pulitzer prizes, who died in 1963 shortly after he gave a poem at the Kennedy inauguration, is one of our country's greatest poets.

In a Disused Graveyard

The living come with grassy tread
To read the gravestones on the hill;
The graveyard draws the living still,
But never anymore the dead.
The verses in it say and say:
"The ones who living come today
To read the stones and go away
Tomorrow dead will come to stay."
So sure of death the marbles rhyme,
Yet can't help marking all the time
How no one dead will seem to come.
What is it men are shrinking from?
It would be easy to be clever
And tell the stones: Men hate to die
And have stopped dying now forever.
I think they would believe the lie.

Robert Lee Frost

Some years ago, my cousin, a few years older then me, called me about a “find” on land which had been in the family for a very long time. He said, “you remember the small, old cemetery in a field owned by one of our uncles completely “grown up” with bushes which we always referred to as an old cemetery full of snakes.” He continued, “ I don’t think anyone had been in the place for 50 years or more. I decided to take some of my “help” there with some bush axes and clean the place up.  I was amazed to find the graves and the tombstones of 2 of our relatives who had died in the civil war.  Do you know anything about them?” 

Knowing that I was the one cousin, the one member of the family, who had shown interest in history and genealogy, he had even called me about the age of many relics at the old family church built by our great grandparents.  He said, “Their names were Nathan and Cyrus.”  It was a matter of history records in the courthouse that these two along with some other family members had participated in the Civil War. The courthouse records did not indicate their survival. Some of the early family in particular a physician and nurse who were brother and sister to my grandfather, had moved back up north to Morristown NJ from where the family had originally come to NC. It was believed that these 2 uncles had gone back there after the Civil War.  The significance and the tragedy is, that the great uncles had been brought home for burial and were evidently buried in this place along with several other family members who perhaps died in the great flu epidemic.  Old family members now are buried in a cemetery near the road and near the old family homes of both my mother and father. 

In recent years, of course, with all the younger members of these families, better educated and looking for better opportunities no longer live in the area.  The cousin who called me, is the only family member in the old family church, built in 1874.  Most of the other relatives are long gone, dead or moved away totally.  And, in the modern years of perpetual care cemeteries, the fact that family members have become people of wealth, their fathers and mothers have been buried in city cemeteries where “cleaning and maintenance” of cemetery property is not their responsibility.

There was a time, in the country, when families would gather at a cemetery usually a time in connection with “homecoming” at the church, when they would clean and maintain the cemetery. The only time most descendants go to an old family cemetery anymore is in the case of a “pang” of genealogy curiosity when they want to get some dates off a tombstone. The conscience “heart trouble” which bothered me and I suppose my cousin, was the fact that, like most veterans, who have had the “guts” to defend their country and the “pride” to march into battle “thinking” their family and their country would appreciate their belief and faithfulness in what they were doing was short lived.

It would be interesting to know how their bodies were returned to the “dirt” which they had plowed as young men for internment by their own families, not a grave digging platoon of the army on some foreign battle ground. Since the family church had not been built at the time, it was built immediately after the war, I’m sure services were held at their old family homes, which is about deteriorated and I am sure that family members shed tears before they were buried in probably a family constructed box. ( Before the time of funeral homes and manufactured caskets saw mills would saw a timber wide enough, which after drying out could be used for the construction of a burial box. Such wood was a mainstay at every farm home. The sanitizing of death was unknown to the early pioneers. Today’s death, is a sanitized impersonal semi- ritual, some of the caskets even have inner spring mattresses.  The satin which lines today’s fancy burial casket was not available even for the kings of yesteryear and embalming is a new science, since the body starts deteriorating one-half minute after death. (The “keeping out” of a body because of the “purging” sequence was the most unkind thing that could happen to a family.)

It could be that since my great-great grandfather was a large landowner he had the influence of being able to have his sons transported home for burial.  In any case, it is a shame that their graves were forgotten, that the small area that the graves were located, as is always the case, just became a wilderness of trees and bushes, continuously plowed around by the tenants who farmed the land.

My father, a descendant of these veterans, was a superior farmer in every respect as was his father etc. In ‘housing” the crops each year, the seed from superior plants were always saved for seed. It is a fact of human nature animal husbandry and agriculture, that you use the best for reproduction. It is sad that we have forgotten this fact in human reproduction.  My father selected the most beautiful pigs for his brood sows, the most beautiful calves for his milk cows, the most beautiful ears of corn for his seed corn.

For most of my life, I carried in my pocket a seed of corn which, every time I felt of it, I knew that I was the best and that the best was expected of me.  The alcoholic carries in his pocket a small Christian cross when he is tempted to take an alcoholic drink he puts his hand in his pocket and feels of the cross, knowing that better is expected of him.  One of my less educated employees (and I have had my share of those that do not know anything about anything, certainly would think a kernel of corn should be thrown away) disposed of this kernel of corn some years ago.  But I carry the thought in my “very being” everyday of my life that the very “holy spirit of God” in dwells me and I have never forgotten the price paid for me.

So, it bothers me that my descendants did not remember and did not hold in high esteem their ancestors who went to war to fight for their belief whether it was right or wrong.  The black people who worked on my descendants farms did not leave after the emancipation. It was God’s business about the different colors of skins of the different people of the world. According to historical records, my family never “owned” other people, they all worked together, until the last old house occupied by black slave descendants were destroyed by a storm some years ago. One house on my grandfather’s farm was called “Elisha's house”.  A black man who had stayed on until his death like his folks before him, sharing in the work and in the meager profits of the farm. 

Who knows what these two fallen, civil war soldiers would have done with their lives. Like and uncles and aunts, they may have returned to the place of landing in New Jersey, they may have contributed to life in Eastern NC. Anyway, from an abandoned graveyard, and there are many others throughout the world we find the final resting place for those who served. Service is humanity is the greatest work of life (Jaycee creed)