Every year my family goes to Egger Cemetery on the first Saturday in May and decorates our graves. We put flowers on our family graves, walk the cemetery, point out the place where Molly Halbert went fox hunting with Papaw and where the old homeplace was, have lunch at our same Mennonite bakery, and generally have a good time. I thought I'd write up how it went this year, which is the same as every year.
We leave Meridian mid-morning and set out for Columbus up Highway 45. This is the highway I drove up when I first left home for school, and we drive it every year to decoration. We stop in Brooksville, at the Mennonite bakery, eat taco pie, and argue over the check. Then we drive into Columbus. We go first to Friendship Cemetery and leave a live chrysanthemum on Alva's grave. Alva was my grandmother's sister; her husband buried her away from the rest of us. It is strange that she lies alone in an unfamiliar cemetery. We argue on the way to her grave about which turn to make; does she lie on Maple Dr. or Crepe Myrtle Dr.? We never get it right. It has only been two weeks, and I can't remember right now which one it is.
After decorating Alva's grave, we drive through the bad part of Columbus. The houses are all shiny new. There was a tornado and some federal disaster relief, so lots of people have new and tidy houses instead of the shacks that were here before. We notice the roses. They are called "Seven Sisters" because there are seven little flowers clustered together to make each bloom. They are always in full bloom the first weekend in May, and we always say,"That's why decoration is this weekend. They could use the roses that grow in everyone's yard to decorate. That was before florist shops." Decoration has a script, and we follow it like a liturgy. The words themselves are traditions passed down from our dead. I heard the words as a child, learned the legends of my people as children always have, through hearing them repeated. Livy hears them now.
We drive from Columbus to Caledonia, where Mimi (my grandmother) was born. As we drive through the town, she points out every location of note, following the script: Mullins Well where Uncle Charlie killed himself, the church where the minister ran off with a lady from the choir, the field where Wiley Henderson died working and got dragged home by the mule, the road to our oil well (the proceeds of which total about $100 a year, divided among 5 children), and the sign pointing the way to Flint Hill, where Papaw went to singing school.
Our cemetery is outside Caledonia on Wolfe Rd. We pause as we pass through the gate; Mimi points out her daddy's name, Clarence Smith, written right on the gatepost. He gave half the land; an Egger gave the rest. She tells us that he was a supervisor in Caledonia. The house where she was born used to sit on the top of a hill separated from the cemetery by a stand of trees. I can vaguely remember what they old homeplace looked like, but now it has been torn down. There is a new red brick house there now, and horses graze without leads on the unfenced yard.
We drive into the cemetery and get down to business. There are artificial flowers to be put on all the main graves: Mimi's parents (the Smiths), my dad, Aunt Lovie and Uncle Harvey and their infant twins, Papaw, and Ray (Mimi and Papaw's 4th child). These are all right next to the little chapel, except for my dad, and so they have to look just right. There will be a service on Sunday, and people will see them and think of us and say, "My, those look just lovely. Those Freemans always do a good job." My dad is buried in a newer section of the cemetery. We decorate him next. He is near Aunt Willie Lou and the Hendersons, so we visit them while we are over that way.
The next part is my favorite. We walk out into the oldest part of the cemetery. Usually my mom and I go without Mimi because she has seen 48 people she hasn't seen since last year and is deep in conversation. Mama and I start with the Freemans, Papaw's people. We decorate his daddy and his granddaddy and his great-granddaddy and all the wives and mothers and infant children. All these Freemans get artificial flowers on long stems stuck into the ground next to their tombstones. We always stop at James Freeman's grave, under the cedar tree, and count up all the greats. He is my three greats grandfather and Livy's four greats. He came home from the Civil War in a wagon. We stop to look at Margaret Idella, who my mother is named for. Her grave got run over by an old lady who accidentally put her car in reverse, and so her stone is very new and an easy way to find our row. We remember to count up the babies that died from yellow fever, one after the other, and we always say how glad we are to have modern medicine. Then we go visit Aunt Molly and Uncle Jim, who lived with Mimi's family when she was a child. Mimi thought Aunt Molly was mean as a snake when she was little, but now she imagines what it must have been like for a childless aunt to live in the middle of that hullabaloo and she is more understanding.
The last grave is the only one we decorate who isn't a relative. We start from James Freeman and walk 27 paces diagonal toward the far corner. A tiny grave lies there, worn down to almost nothing and practically unreadable. We always trace the letters with our fingers since they are hard to see: Goudelock. This is the Goudelock (pronounced Gadlock) baby. We tell the story again, of course. There was a minister at the little Caledonia Methodist Church who had a tiny baby that died while they were here. Methodist ministers have to move on, and the mother couldn't stand to leave the baby without anybody to see to the grave, so Julius Freeman, Papaw's daddy, promised to always decorate the grave. And still, we always decorate the baby, just like it was our own people, and we think of the minister's wife. It gives me chills now, writing this, when I think of my mother and I honoring a promise made by my great-grandfather. The decorating of this grave, more than any other we do, makes me feel continuity as if it were a concrete thing.
All this time, Livy has been running wild through the graves, like I did as a child, getting muddy and stepping in fire ant hills. We have done the work of decoration (the digging and the cleaning), and we have done the remembering and the repeating. We are tired, and Mississippi is hot in May. We clean our hands, pack up the trash to take home, and drive back into the present.
