Ridge Stories Read online

Page 10


  We arranged bouquets in either glass mayonnaise jars that had been washed clean or in orange juice cans that had been de-lidded with a can opener and covered with aluminum foil.

  On the car drive to the cemetery, we kids each balanced a bouquet between our feet and held another in our hands. At the graveyard, we added water and then carefully positioned them at the headstones of our relatives, the Grays and the Johnsons, ancestors who had been laid to rest in the clay bosom of the ridge.

  On the Sunday before Memorial Day, the church congregation honored the dead formally. All the children in the Sunday school lined up before the altar while the Sunday school superintendent, Sandy Mott, distributed the little flags the town had purchased for that purpose. Sunday school teacher Minnie Williams gave each child a nosegay of garden flowers that the ladies of the church had brought from home.

  As Mae Buroker plunked the stirring chords of “Onward Christian Soldiers,” we marched down the aisle, out the door into the sunshine, and filed into the cemetery. We searched out the little wrought iron star flag holders that denoted military veterans, stuck in the flags, and propped the bouquets against the gravestones. Ladies of the congregation, clutching lace-edged hankies, helped the smaller children.

  We were unusually quiet as we worked at our task, sensing the solemnity of the occasion. The adults in the congregation watched in near silence. Some of the farmers cleared their throats while a number of women twisted their handkerchiefs. When the last flag and the final bouquet had been stationed at the remaining veteran’s grave, old Reverend Lester Matthews offered up a prayer under the blue May sky while the ridge folk stood with bowed heads.

  Many of those parishioners have since passed away and are now buried in the little Pleasant Ridge Cemetery themselves. And few people would use glass mayonnaise jars or foil-wrapped cans as improvised vases for flowers picked in the woods or cut from flowerbeds in their lawns. The church itself has been closed for years, but the pine trees remain, along with the clumps of orange lilies, peonies, lilacs, blackberry bushes, black-eyed Susans, and goldenrod.

  Some folks consider cemeteries rather eerie places. As a child growing up on Pleasant Ridge, I soon got over that notion. I viewed the graveyard that flanked the little white Pleasant Ridge Evangelical United Brethren Church as just another part of my life. And even now, as I pot geraniums, I think back on that sleepy little cemetery.

  When I was a preschooler, my mother began sending me to Vacation Bible School, which lasted one week every summer. The less vigilant teachers permitted us to play among the graves. In lieu of a playground, the headstones were wonderful climbing structures, or hiding places in games of hide-and-seek, or obstacles during games of tag.

  Although some might consider this a lack of respect for the dead, I know I would prefer to have laughing children playing on the earth above me than a drooping spray of fading plastic flowers.

  One summer, when I was a teenager, I earned spending money by helping mow the cemetery grass. It was cash well earned. The mowing was slow because I had to guide the mower close to the hundreds of headstones, temporarily remove grave markers, and move potted geraniums and plastic floral arrangements.

  I soon learned that if a potted plant had even a hint of green left on it, or a plastic bouquet still bore a trace of color, some mourners expected it to remain a loving tribute on the grave.

  After all these years, I still can summon up the sensory impressions connected with mowing that country cemetery. I can smell the freshly cut grass, the warm petroleum scent of the power mower, and the lushness of the wild berry bushes along the fence row. I can see the verdant leaves of the orange lilies crowding the base of an old gnarled lilac bush.

  After completing the task, with aching muscles I would survey the newly mown cemetery, and the sight never failed to give me a satisfied feeling. I had transformed the overgrown field into a manicured park.

  One memory of the cemetery brings a smile—the great outhouse flap. The outdoor toilet behind the church had decayed to the point where it, too, should have been buried. A member of the congregation who had carpentry skills built a large new outdoor privy with separate adjacent compartments for men and women. The new building was placed halfway down the hill of the gravel parking lot between the road and the cemetery.

  A controversy ensued. One of the largest clans on the ridge had a huge plot at the roadside edge of the graveyard. As it was a source of pride to the family, they lavishly adorned it each Memorial Day.

  Unfortunately, the new privy obstructed the view of the plot from the road. The young toilet builder was so upset with the criticism directed at his act of charity that in the middle of the night, he whisked the toilet off the grounds and hid it in his woods.

  For several days, ridge folk scratched their heads, puzzling over the mystery of the disappearing toilet, suspecting an outhouse caper and keeping their eyes open hoping to discover it annexed behind some neighbor’s house. Finally, the conscience-stricken carpenter returned it, and, as a compromise, relocated the building to the foot of the hill, allowing passersby a panoramic view of the centerpiece cemetery lot.

  When the first frost is on the horizon and my geraniums continue to bloom on my patio, I remember the Pleasant Ridge EUB Cemetery, now the resting place of my parents as well as other ancestors.

  And I remember my younger brother standing at the foot of the stairs, his arms outstretched to bar my way as I carried pots of geraniums to winter in the room we shared. He did not appreciate my enthusiasm for them, but as the bigger sibling, I prevailed.

  I had developed an early interest in plants, but as I lacked the cash to buy them, I learned propagation techniques. Geraniums were easy; one clipping placed in a glass of water soon developed roots and was ready for a pot of dirt, and if put outside during the summer, quickly became a magnificent, lavishly blooming plant.

  And now comes the moment of full disclosure, as the statute of limitations has long passed.

  When I was young, people often honored their departed relatives and friends by placing potted geraniums beside grave markers on Memorial Day. I would wait until a few weeks had passed, and then bicycle over to the cemetery, plastic bread wrappers stuffed in a back pocket. Discreetly, with the practiced care of a master gardener, I would take inconspicuous geranium cuttings, adding to the colors in my collection, and then pedal quickly home to root them in water. By summer’s end, I had every possible shade of red, pink, and white available in the world of geraniums.

  Now, rather than resorting to grave robbing, I purchase small rooted geraniums from a big-box discount store, repot them, and with generous doses of water and fertilizer, quickly bring them to an impressive size resplendent with blooms.

  Yes, I reckon I’d as soon be buried on Pleasant Ridge as anywhere. The time has passed when I could have sat down with the cemetery trustees, studied the creased and penciled map of grave plots over a cup of coffee, and for twenty-five dollars purchased a grassy spot under a nodding pine, a real bargain for eternal peace.

  But I might still have my ashes scattered in the breeze over the graves of my ancestors, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, resting eternally on the clay bosom of the ridge.

  I remember the days when the cemetery was as alive and vital as the church sitting beside it. Now Memorial Day is celebrated with an open house at the restored but empty church, when people return and remember, some of them, no doubt, finding a place to tuck a potted geranium.

  When Angels Wore Bedsheets

  On the afternoon of the Christmas program, Guy Williams would walk across the road from his farm to the Pleasant Ridge EUB Church to stoke up the furnace, an antiquated heating system that did little more than take the chill out of the drafty old building. Down the road at our farm, we started chores early, and I didn’t dawdle putting the milking machines together.

  The church was half full by the time my family arrived, as Christmas and Easter were the two occasions when nearly everyone on the ridge attended.
Going to a service at night was a novelty. On Sunday mornings, the huge room was inviting, filled with light from the tall, clear-paned windows. But at night the shadows transformed the familiar setting into one both intimate and remote, depending on whether I glanced at the faces crowded together in the dark oak pews or at the blank windows.

  The sight of Gramp and Granny already seated in the congregation—him wearing his teeth for the occasion and her fidgeting with a Christmas corsage—banished all thoughts of remoteness.

  The scent of cologne mingled with the earthier smells of the barn on those of us who had just finished milking and with the woodsy smell of pine from the Christmas tree. A wispy white pine from Sandy Mott’s woods was positioned up front to the left. It was decorated with a miscellany of Christmas ornaments, some handmade with more love than craft, such as the shiny snowflakes snipped from tin coffee can lids with tin shears.

  Along the front of the church, faded brown curtains hung on a wire stretched from one side of the church to the other for the occasion. Behind it, the picture of Jesus remained, but the old Victorian parlor table that served as an improvised altar had been temporarily moved down to the basement to make more room on the stage.

  After a good-bye glance at my folks, my sister and I joined the other children who were taking their places behind the curtains, shushing one another to silence. My toddler brother Larry had to stay behind. My mother tried to entertain him while chatting with her good friend Dorothy Johnson.

  Mae Buroker, with her wreath of graying red braids haloing her squinting smile, shed her coat and took her place on the piano bench. After flexing her arthritic fingers for a moment, she flipped to the Christmas carol section of the hymnal and began thumping her way through those familiar tunes while the remainder of the audience filed into the church.

  Finally, the moment arrived. Someone flicked the light switch and the church dimmed, illuminated only by the tree and the lamps doubling as stage lights. The audience hushed in anticipation as the rings hissed along the wire, the curtains opening on Margaret Ann, my little sister.

  With freshly washed blond hair and a red taffeta dress that my mother had made for the occasion, she was a vision of childhood beauty. Saucily swinging her arms and grinning impishly, she chirped through a poem of welcome.

  Many of the recitations had been performed a week earlier at the grade school Christmas program and tended to celebrate the coming of Santa Claus rather than the birth of Christ, such as cousin Don’s recitation of “’Twas the Night Before Christmas.” Others had been practiced in the church on preceding Sunday afternoons. My poem retelling the glory of Christ’s birth was of that sort. My head buzzed and my palms perspired as I concentrated on a perfect rote delivery, staring at my freshly polished shoes.

  Mae slid back from the piano to make room for my Uncle Vern, an angular farmer-pianist with weather-reddened cheeks and work-callused fingers. Those hands that milked cows and shoveled manure could perform an impressive chord-rippling version of “Star of the East.”

  The minister’s granddaughter, ten-year-old Nancy, her glasses magnifying her eyes and her white knee socks at half-mast, diligently wheezed her halting progress through an accordion solo of “Whispering Hope.”

  Balding bachelor John Merriott in a vintage tan houndstooth sports coat faced the piano rather than the audience, hands behind his back, and bellowed a basso rendition of “O Holy Night.” As this was an annual performance, we children had all perfected imitations of old John’s vibrato style, and while some of us backstage sang along sotto voce, the rest of us stifled giggles and poked one another.

  The highlight of the evening was the pageant: angels in bedsheets and gold tinsel halos, shepherds in bathrobes with canes, and wise men in kimonos that were Ben Denman’s souvenirs of World War II.

  Betty MacDonald, cloaked in a blue-dyed sheet, portrayed Mary. A pretty girl, she was especially radiant that night, and no one could tell that the skirt she wore under it was hemmed with safety pins, as she had run out of time making it. The words of the Christmas story, as familiar as a mother’s face, never lost their impact, even if the reader, with more spirit than skill, informed us that “Mary was with great child.”

  At the conclusion of the pageant, Reverend Matthews clambered on the stage in his baggy serge suit, and after loudly clearing his throat and beaming smiles in all directions, offered the benediction.

  The tolling of the church bell announced the arrival of Santa Claus, who in his red and white flannel suit and matted-cotton beard bore a striking resemblance to Gordon MacDonald, a coincidence we all chose to ignore. He distributed small paper bags filled with hard candy, peanuts in the shell, and apples. Children gave their Sunday school teachers gifts—my mother had bought a lace-trimmed hanky for me to give to Minnie Williams—and in return received a memento, sometimes a Bible bookmark.

  After gifts had been opened, treats sampled, and performances complimented, we returned home, the community Christmas observance in the Pleasant Ridge EUB Church a prelude to our family celebrations that were reserved for the actual holiday. We’d drive to Richland Center on Christmas Eve to look at the pretty decorations on the fashionable side of town that we of more modest means denigrated as “Mortgage Hill,” but just as we were about to leave, Mother would worry she had left the iron plugged in and go back inside the house for a few minutes. Off we’d drive, scraping frost from windows in preparation for viewing strings of colored lights, and then we’d return home to find that Santa had visited during our absence.

  After the doors were closed in the EUB church, gradually the fire in the basement furnace would die. The sanctuary, illuminated only by starlight, would cool and wait patiently for the coming Sunday morning service.

  Minnie and Mae

  The names Minnie and Mae were conversationally linked in our Pleasant Ridge neighborhood, like Tom and Jerry, Amos and Andy, Mutt and Jeff. Both enjoyed recreational rubbering on the telephone party line—secretly listening to private telephone conversations on party lines, commonly shared by up to ten households in rural areas in the 1940s and ’50s.

  And both Minnie and May were church ladies, Minnie teaching Sunday school and Mae playing the piano for Sunday services. Minnie sometimes picked flowers from her garden and arranged them in a tall-handled white wicker basket to place in front of the altar. And physically they were a matched set as well, like a pair of salt and pepper shakers, both short and heavy, their hair braided and then pinned in crowns. While Minnie lived across the road from the Pleasant Ridge Evangelical United Brethren Church, Mae lived in the house next to the church. The women were anchors during services, with Mae seated near the piano and Minnie by a back window on the east side. Although married, they both sat alone, as neither husband set foot in the sanctuary except to lend manpower for banquets in the basement.

  Because the church lacked a well, these banquets required milk cans of water to be brought in. Minnie’s husband Guy might bring one, and Mae’s husband Elmer, on occasion, the second, carrying them down the cement steps, grunting and straining at the weight (both were skinny farm men resisting retirement, who still wore the same size overalls they had when young and muscular, before hard work had begun to sap muscle size rather than build it). After depositing their cans at the spot on the kitchen floor where the ladies all pointed, then briefly touching their engineer-style striped hats, they quickly made their retreat up the steps as ladies called, “Thanks!” in their wake.

  I never saw much of Elmer, usually only glimpses of him. When my siblings and I knocked on Mae’s door for Halloween trick-or-treating, she answered with laughing and clapping, delighted at the cleverness of our costumes. Basking in her praise, we helped ourselves to modest selections from her candy bowl, and then, laughing still more, she would urge us to take more and more. We could hear broadcast voices and smell tobacco, indicating that Elmer was listening to the radio and smoking his pipe in the rose-papered parlor where Mae’s upright piano sat, but she never call
ed him to come see us. Apparently, children for him were like churches, best enjoyed from a distance.

  Minnie’s husband Guy seemed similarly scarce. Once an exemplary student, Minnie had taken an achievement examination upon her high school graduation to determine if she had acquired the necessary knowledge to become a grade school teacher. After passing the test, she found herself the next fall in a one-room school in front of a couple dozen students ranging in age from five to fourteen. Soon after, she met a young farmer who lived in her school district and agreed to marry him, resigning her teaching position. She moved into the farmhouse Guy’s parents had owned. And just as she had begun teaching when little more than a girl, now she began married life, preparing meals in the kitchen with cupboards and woodwork painted a pale green and giving birth to babies in a floral-papered bedroom. When her children left the nest, she returned to teaching, this time at Sunday school, with a half dozen children at most and only for an hour each week.

  Guy had been a good husband, but like many couples, they spent long hours apart. He was out in the barn milking cows or in the field tending to crops, while she maintained their home. When she went to church Sunday morning, he smoked his pipe and read the newspaper in their living room. Their lives intersected in the kitchen and in the bedroom.

  During her summers, Minnie filled her front porch with rows of potted house plants, some in wicker stands. She especially took pride in her jade plant, a huge succulent in a giant clay pot. It had grown so large that each spring when Guy moved it out onto the porch, he told her that he might not be man enough to move it back inside come winter.

  When I was a teenager, Minnie took a slip for me from her jade plant. After letting it grow roots in a glass of water, I potted it. As years passed, my jade plant grew larger and larger until eventually it was good sized, but never as large as Minnie’s plant loomed in my memory.