Spain Dad, a baby blog

St Mary’s Church by roytsaplinjr.

I spent Saturday afternoon in a tank top weed eating around tombstones in the cemetery where my grandmother is buried. The stones are scattered around a rural church, which sits like a schoolhouse on the corner where two highways cross, giving a handful of folks a reason to pull into the gravel parking lot on Sundays.

My uncle Willie is the janitor at the church. We were staying with him for a few days while my dad took care of some business for my grandpa, who is still sorting through bills and things after moving into a health care facility.

Willie said there was work for us to do at the church, so when we pulled up on Saturday, he put my dad to work mending the carpet on the front step, and told me to get the weed eater from the shed. My cousin Rhett was already buzzing around on a riding lawn mower at the far end of the property.

When I finished trimming, I found Rhett and my dad sitting on the front step drinking Root Beer. I told Rhett I hadn’t found Grandma’s grave. So, after they finished their drinks, we followed Rhett through the cemetery, reading the names on the stones.

When we found Grandma’s headstone, which looked as new as it did twenty years ago, we sat in the grass, and Dad told us stories. He told us he and the other kids had played Hide and Go Seek around these tombstones. He told us about Ada, his catechism teacher, and Ed, who he had worked for in high school and who had killed a kid pitching hay. He reminded me of Great Grandpa’s German accent—he would say “threes” as “drees”—and how Great Grandma would crow when she laughed. He told some of Grandpa’s jokes and sang one of his barbershop songs. He told us about the diary barn burning to the ground at the old farm place.

My dad had spent his childhood here, while I had only come to visit a few times. I didn’t really know this place, or the last names on the headstones. I wasn’t familiar with any of it. Still, I was tied to it, somehow. This place defined my dad, as childhoods do, and so, it defined me too. There was a history here that eventually led to me. As my dad talked, the beginning of my story was being pushed back in time, rolled out, so I could see that I was not very original at all. I was unmistakably one of the family.

As we pulled out of the parking lot and headed down the highway, I got thinking about Alleke. I wondered if she would know anything about this place.

I imagined her chasing the pigeons across the cobblestones, and for a moment, she seemed so far away…from the place, of course, but also the history.

It’s going to be difficult for Alleke to understand where she comes from. America is a land far, far away, which makes her a child out of context. All she’s got most days are the stories we tell her.

For more about rural America, read an essay I wrote called Some Say the Midwest is Dying…