Watching my kids walk among tombstones bearing their last name is an unsettling sight. I know my fears are macabre and out of place, but I still see ghostly hands reaching out of the grassy plots caressing ankles lightly, marking my kids, claiming them. Despite the sun and blazing blue sky and country fields with grazing horses, this bucolic scene still feels like it could turn into a Thriller video at any minute.
I look for signs of distress on my kids’ bright, young faces but they seem only curious and intrigued by the family tree growing here before them…grandparents, great-uncles and aunts, second cousins, third cousins….the complexity of branches is overwhelming. My husband’s family comes alive for us in a cemetery in Gadsden, Alabama through names, dates and most importantly through stories.
My husband first heard these stories almost 22 years ago when he came to Gadsden to find his father. In 1998, our first son was born and Chris was taken by love and loyalty and commitment to fatherhood. But it pushed him to confront his own fatherless childhood and to wonder what could cause a man to abandon his own son, to just disappear like a neighbor that moves away. Gone without a trace….until Ancestry.com came along and Chris turned detective tracking his father all the way to Alabama and picking up a whole lot of relatives along the way. Which is how we came to find ourselves at Aunt Joyce’s house on the first night of our cross-country trip a few years ago, one day before Fathers’ Day.
We arrived late to Aunt Joyce’s empty house which was the sweetest gesture of Southern hospitality. Our family of five fills a space quickly, best to clear out and let us move in. This welcome feels like more than hospitality which seems reserved for guests and friends and weary travelers passing through. This was a loving, familial gesture, leaving the key under the mat for her brother’s child.
We settled into unfamiliar beds for the night surrounded by pictures on the bedside tables of relatives we couldn’t name and into rooms without memories of our own; unlike the nights we sleep at my mom’s house or my dad’s house where the rooms pulse with the past.
The next morning we shower and dress and try not to leave a trace of ourselves in the house despite our bulging suitcases in the bedrooms and the rumpled pillows I can’t seem to smooth. We go out to breakfast and return to find Aunt Joyce in the kitchen making potato salad and listening to 80’s R&B on the radio. She is open-armed and full of easy conversation with a Steel Magnolias’ accent that makes Virginia feel very Northern.
Thankfully, I had my hair done before leaving on this trip because Aunt Joyce is a stylist and was lovingly checking out my roots and my 14 year-old daughter’s split ends. She admired my color, the blond freshly painted and foiled just a few weeks prior to our arrival. I finally felt sure I had gotten my money’s worth. She worried about what we would do for haircuts on the road. Later that day she trimmed Emma’s hair on the screened porch, and I still think of the blond tresses we left in Alabama. I imagine a few strands being lifted in the breeze that day and scattering into the leaves and grass and trees tangling in a nest maybe or still lingering today in Aunt Joyce’s yard.
Before that afternoon haircut, it was late morning and the June heat was gaining on us, so we decided to head out to the family cemetery on Father’s Day. In some young faces, you can see the old woman growing and in some old faces, you can see traces of the girl. When Aunt Joyce began telling stories of growing up in Gadsden as we drove through its streets, I could see her as a child on the porch of a rural house playing and dreaming. She pointed to her old high school as we passed it, and we saw her coming out with books in hand, a sepia toned snapshot of the sixties. She told us about the boys who went to Vietnam and didn’t come back, and we could see the soldiers in uniform, the sorrowful, stoic mothers, the streets empty of young men.
Chris and I know what it is like to have lived in a place our whole lives and how passing any street or shop can trigger a movie reel of the past that plays memories in technicolor. The graveyard, too, is a trigger for memory and even more so, for biography. Aunt Joyce steps near to each grave and links Chris to each family member. This is your grandmother; she died after she stepped on a rusty rake. She was the most sought after prayer warrior in church. This is your grandfather. He only had one arm. He believed in hard work and was a deacon in the church. They had nine children. Half of the siblings gave themselves over to addiction of one kind or another. The other half have lived respectable lives. A few of the boys came back changed by Vietnam including your father. Here is one of my cousins who never came back at all. He was so loved, a favorite really.
We drift past large and small granite tombstones emblazoned with names and dates with too few years between the beginning and the end, even my lazy math brain can see this. We pause at the shared markers, the names of husbands and wives inscribed as they might have been many years before on a wedding invitation.
In no other place do we long more for the dead to speak then here in a cemetery. If only this were Spoon River…
One generous year when Chris’s mother accepted Chris’s need to know more about his father, she gave us a film reel and projector with footage from their honeymoon and also of him on a ship while in the Navy. The film doesn’t have sound, no confessional monologues or epitaphs delivered by the dead. But there is the miracle of movement and gesture and expression and full moments captured so much more than a split second snapshot, a still life.
I remember we set the projector up on the kitchen table and Chris’s father waved and grinned at us from a beach glittering brightly on the wall of our first house. The father-son resemblance is so much more than physical features and body type. There’s something else: a vibe, a spirit, an attitude, personality, charm and a full smile that overtakes their whole face.
The Alabama relatives all told us how much Chris looked like his father, how much they were reminded of their brother when they looked at Chris and listened to him tell stories. Like a Pentecostal preacher, he is all feeling and expression, hands in motion and fevered intensity. By all accounts, even from Chris’s mother, Paul was ambitious and charming and came home from the Vietnam War aimless and unmoored with a temper heated by alcohol and mellowed by pot. There are lots of ways to be orphaned by war, lots of ways for fathers to go MIA.
Chris’s aunts and uncles did their best to love their brother’s son as if they had known him his whole life. After leaving the cemetery, we went back to Aunt Joyce’s house for a cookout with cousins and more cousins and second cousins. We played basketball in dire heat and Texas Hold Em’ in blessed air conditioning. We ate grilled sausage and potato salad for lunch, drank gallons of sweet tea and ate Popeye’s Chicken for dinner. Henry spent hours playing with JT, his second cousin. They connected quickly and rumbled with light sabers striking plastic on plastic throughout Joyce’s beautiful home. They rambled Darth Vader dialogue and Luke Skywalker retorts until Henry’s finger was suddenly smashed accidentally by a direct saber hit. Under his thumbnail, a red wound bloomed more like a bruise than one filled with blood ready to burst.
Henry shook his hand a hundred times trying to rattle out the pain without tears. The throbbing subsided, but the mark stayed with him the entire trip across the country. I couldn’t help but to think about the similarity in the unintentional marks and hidden pain Chris’ father left on him and how he has tried to shake it away all these many years I have known him.
Leaving marks, that’s what family does sometimes. Some are intentional, many are not. Some bring pain and some are barely noticed. Some we can ignore and some stay with us for a lifetime. The mark Aunt Joyce and his other Alabama relatives left on Chris was one of kindness and sweetness and acceptance and has stayed with him ever since.
The mark left by his father is a forever scar he will take to his grave but the pain and the doubts it caused shaped him into the father he is today.
I am in tears. Wow. I have learned so much about everyone's childhoods that I never thought to ask when we were kids. Chris, you remind me of Grampa Boothe with your talent to retell history as it was meant to be heard. Thank you both for sharing your lives in your stories. ❤️