Grace: Crepe Myrtle

42

Gravedigger

His name is Otis Cox

and the graves he digs with a spade are acts of love.

The red clay holds like concrete

still he makes it give up a place

for rich caskets and poor

working with sweat and sand

in the springing tightness of his hair

saying that machine digging

don’t seem right if you know

the dead person.

His pauses are slow as the digging

a foot always on the shovel.

Shaking a sad and wet face

drying his sorrow with a dust orange white handkerchief

he delivers a eulogy.

Miz Ruth always gimme a dipper of water

Then among the quail calls and blackeyed susans

Otis Cox shapes with grunt and sweat and shovel

a perfect work

a mystical place

a last connection with the living hand.

James A. Autry, Nights Under a Tin Roof

1974

My grandmother didn’t stay in the house on the hill after the passing of my grandfather, but moved to a smaller place not far from her son’s, my uncle’s, house. Her new house had a deep, narrow lot that ran back to a railroad embankment and she put her garden in. For most of the next twenty years she raised her corn, peas, okra, tomatoes, limas, and pole beans. She had a peach tree that, if there wasn’t a late frost, produced fruit as sweet as any I ever tasted.

I usually spent part of my summers with her. I didn’t stay as long or as often as when I was younger, but enough to get to know the neighborhood and accumulate a stash of comic books in a closet and toys in the garage. When I got older I discovered among my grandfather’s books an edition of Homer, B.A. Botkin’s collection of American folklore, and Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom. I  was to wonder ever after how much of these I knew from my own reading and how much had simply seeped in sitting on porch swings on summer nights.

I was in school at the University of Arkansas up in Fayetteville when Kennedy was killed. With my new wife I drove down through the Boston Mountains and watched the funeral on my grandmother’s television. 

Siting with her that day in 1963 and remembering her age, I asked her if the event was anything like her memory of the McKinley assassination. She said that she’d just been a girl and she didn’t think it made much news at the time. She didn’t really remember it. They certainly didn’t hear about it quickly since they didn’t get a newspaper. And it was before radio. Maybe the news came out by train. What she did remember was the reaction to Roosevelt’s death. But she didn’t want to talk about that either.

The stately horses that pulled the caisson and the prancing black horse with reversed empty boots in the stirrups has stayed in my memory. Much of those days has stuck in my memory. King’s eloquence of the previous summer, the open-mouthed gasp of Oswald as Jack Ruby’s bullet tore through his gut, the rumors and realities of new substances spreading to the east from the west — LSD and peyote, freakish chord changes in guitar solos, the brave white civil rights activists suddenly encountering their own draft status and finding a new and different cause.

But I never had the occasion to ask my grandmother about those disorienting changes.

When my cousin called me to tell me my grandmother had died, I was at Fort Campbell, Kentucky. With my wife and daughter I traveled to Arkansas. My older brother, in the Air Force, came up from a base in Texas. My younger brother, just out of the Navy, came up from Florida. My parents came from Florida. My cousins, in Fort Smith and Van Buren, met us at the airport. 

The funeral was much smaller than the one I remembered for my grandfather. The circle did not complete itself until I stood at the grave. The rectangular hole in the ground must have been blasted and then shoveled out. My infantryman’s eye saw the shards of stone and the loose dirt hidden by a tarp. My older brother and I had decided to wear our uniforms and the sunlight flashed off badges and ribbons as we listened to a preacher, who obviously didn’t know our grandmother at all, read from the books of Job and John.

Crepe myrtle is an interesting plant. It will grow as either a bush or a tree, depending on how it is pruned when young. It is an exotic, originally found only in Asia. These days it is common throughout the South. It begins to bloom near Easter time in Florida, but waits almost until mid-July in Arkansas before its red or white blossoms break out. Later in the year, each year, it will shed a layer of bark and will look, for several weeks, a lot like the mottled camouflage of an infantryman’s field uniform. In my youth my grandmother’s street was lined with them.

Next to the grave was a crepe myrtle tree. Probably the same one the bee had been visiting when my grandfather was buried. Now it was considerably larger and spread irregular shadows over the grave and the mourners. It was past blossoming time and the bark was beginning to slough away in loose strips that hung from the trunk. 

It was not part of the ritual for us to watch the casket into the grave. Instead the words were said, a benediction was pronounced, and we all walked away back to our cars. The empty rectangular hole was behind us, up under the crepe myrtle, waiting for the casket to be lowered.