My uncle was down from Brooklyn today, and he wanted to see some of the family's old property in Carrollton, Webster County, Miss., so off we were in the car for a day trip. My grandmother packed us a picnic, and my dad and I came along for the ride. I was kicking myself every inch of the way for not having a camera at hand. This, though, is the house that we visited, my great-grandparents', Mamaw and Papaw. Papaw built it, and lived there the rest of his life; Mamaw spent all but her last failing year there. You will note, of course, that a roof isn't exactly supposed to sag. And the floor inside has a distinctively wavy quality. Nevertheless, it's standing. It's been used as a hunting club by some handy relatives, who keep it up. I wish I could show you the terrifying old heater, the tiny bathroom with one of the first showers in Carrollton, the spot just outside the back door where I bathed in a tin tub when I was a tiny girl.
After we ate lunch there, we went up to Edgeworth Cemetery, a little place up in the high woods next to the tiny Baptist church of the same name. It's hardly an acre in size, but it's got all my father's family -- at least, those that were still speaking to each other when they died -- and a good many of the people they knew. There was Lafayette "Fate" Brown, an old crank who came near to shooting my young father in the '70s -- a dispute over a pig, I can't tell you what exactly. He had to swear out a peace bond against Fate eventually. This course of action turned out considerably better than Mamaw's prediction -- "You're gone have to kill him, son. You're just gonna have to kill him." Of course he didn't, and Fate Brown died in his own time, and Mamaw too, and she lies next to Papaw and both of them not fifty feet away from Fate and his wife, all things forgotten and all just as well. At the other end of the cemetery, one of the two new graves bears the dates 1978-2004. This young man grew up at the same time as I did, he played the same games and heard the same news of the Challenger and the Berlin Wall and 9-11, he got a good job and married and started a family, and then he died and now he is in that hot silent earth with Fate Brown and my grandfather and my Mamaw and Papaw, next to Mary Ola Hightower 1894-1903 and Zuella Williams 1880-1906, where the ants make red clay hills over the best-tended graves and the poison oak comes closer every day.*
I mentioned Fate Brown's grave to my dad. "Too bad I don't have to piss," he said.
That opportunity for entertainment wasted, I passed the time by reading epitaphs. You get a lot of "Not dead, but sleeping" on your early 20th-century graves, which is a bit unsettling to me personally. There was a great deal of "She was the sunshine in our home," which suggests a stock phrase of the local monument shop. My grandfather died suddenly and relatively young, so while his memory was fresh my grandmother selected the cemetery's one epitaph that was no platitude: "From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever."
It surprised me to realize that, as morbid as I am, I never gave thought to an epitaph of my own, but the title of this post came to mind pretty quickly.
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* Warning: do not visit small wooded Mississippi cemeteries with any frequency. Paragraph formation and sentence construction may be severely impaired.
