The Circle Be Unbroken
I grew up assuming my family was normal, that what we did was just the stuff that people in general do. But now I am old enough and traveled enough to realize that some of what I once considered “ordinary human behavior” belongs instead to family idiosyncrasy. It turns out that my kin did not always initiate me into standard human behavior, but something else. Some of what we do is just our own devising, the result of how our collective idiosyncrasies, eccentricities, and even brute preferences worked out. This explains why we sometimes relax on Christmas by target shooting cheap holiday ornaments with my father’s old .22. It just happens that we find this more fun than whatever else people can do on an idle afternoon when the more orthodox festivities are finished. But other bits of our behavior have been harder to sort out. They are unusual, but seem more fundamental than what idiosyncratic preferences could explain. How we handle our sick, injured, and dead is like this.
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For much of my life, I believed that among human beings generally, it is customary to follow your sick into hospital. When any of my family are hospitalized, it’s a given that a crowd will assemble – in the waiting room, the consultation room, the examination room – always as near our patient as we can get. We cluster thickly in moments of genuine medical crisis or high tension. If one of our number is taken to the emergency room or undergoing surgery, we gather en masse. Once the dust of an immediate crisis settles, we tend to thin out, taking unorganized turns setting round the clock. Our ill and ailing are rarely alone, as if when sickness strikes, it takes a vigil to get through it. We do not, however, behave as people keeping vigil. We don’t turn to prayer or wait in quiet solemnity. We just talk, and talk most about whatever experience has lately thrown into our paths or memory has mysteriously summoned up for reflection.
During my father’s most recent surgery, I wiled away the time discussing with my first cousin once removed whether the buckbrush bedeviling our farm’s forested areas has biblical justification. He thought it did, but whether his remedy of choice – a toxic broadcasting of Monsanto chemicals – enjoys biblical warrant we left unaddressed. On one of my grandfather’s visits to the emergency room for the stroke-like spells he suffered late in life, my uncles ruefully recalled the summer one of them accidently cut the legs off the other’s beagle with the hay mower. My uncle had then owned two beagles, Pete and Repeat, but as much as this incident still sorrowed them both, neither could remember which beagle died, legless, that long ago day. (I think of that dog – Pete, or maybe Repeat – every time I see vultures gathered over a newly made bale, a sure sign the mower caught something that bleeds.)
Conversations such as these also mark what we do where the dead are concerned. When my grandmother died at home in her last illness, my grandfather kept her there for a time so that those of us hastening homeward could arrive and “set with her a bit before the undertakers get her.” As I knelt by my grandmother’s corpse in her dim bedroom, my family’s distant voices drifted over us from another room. They were talking about a preacher who once stayed at the farmhouse and exercised Grandma’s considerable ire because at every meal he was especially greedy in drinking her sweet tea. She handled this masterfully, as was her way, by laying his place with ever-smaller cups, knowing that even his rapacious thirst would draw a line against requesting too many refills. This story ended, as most of ours will do, in laughter, though it was more than a little dimmed, like a ritual recitation of hope no one could just then quite believe in.
We carry conversations such as these straight onward to grave. Our funeral lunches are filled with them and we gather annually to have them near our dead. On Decoration Day, we picnic at the small cemetery that abuts our farm, a lonely little patch of rocky acreage no good for farming. Like most in the rural Ozarks, our tiny graveyard bears no signs of the increasingly corporatized funerary industry. The grass gets mowed because my uncle and aunt mow it, and the graves are decorated in whatever fashion we who are left see fit. In truth, we don’t even know who all is in there or where. A few decades past, a neighbor with kin buried there got a little too industrious about cleaning it up. He aimed to remove all the rock that can foul a mower blade, but in the process took away many of the broken stones that were all that remained of some of the markers. So too, family history has always understood there to be Civil War dead in there somewhere, never marked.
We take our annual picnic round an aged oak, tables and lawn chairs haphazardly arranged to make the most of its shade. In the cemetery’s sunny regions, a cousin will start a game of baseball. Someone always brings ice cream that will slowly melt while we idly talk of hay, whether it has rained enough to make much or how early in the season my cousin’s wretched baler will break down this year. The graves themselves, freshly tidied for the day and new with spring plantings, stand silently a bit apart. While we rarely talk of those laid in them, still we come, all at once, to set with them a bit again, our talk of nothing special, just as it was when they still lived. No one talks of why we do this, nor lately do we even plan it. Where once someone would organize us, calling round to fix a time, of late we just show up near noon, bearing chairs, food enough to share, and inevitably forgetting to bring bags to use when it comes time to carry off our trash.
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It naturally did not take long into my adulthood to find that our family practices are so far from commonly shared that they could even be counted peculiar. Many do leave theirs in hospital, unattended for hours at a time by naught but doctors, nurses, and other people paid to help. Few at all die at home nowadays but when they do, the living rarely keep them there for long on purpose. I’ve more than once had the impression that some consider graveyard picnicking macabre. Yet even as I long ago recognized that ours is not standard, regulation-issue human behavior, neither could I escape a deep, inchoate conviction that there was something right and fitting in our ways. Our habits might not be what people do, but still they were what we must do. Sometimes years go by without our shooting ornaments at Christmas and it simply will not matter, but should anyone be hospitalized alone or the graveyard be empty of the living that last Monday in May, it would seem the world itself was set awry and wrong. I’ve never known just why this is but think I’ve lately found an explanation.
I recently came upon a book called Gone to the Grave, by a reporter named Abby Burnett. In it, she details the death and burial customs common to the Ozarks during the century spanning 1850 to 1950. As I made my way through Burnett’s descriptions of now archaic Ozarks practices – setting up with the sick, as well as with the dead, hearty Decoration Day celebrations in graveyards – I found us there.
People in our region did indeed maintain vigils for their sick, for reasons both practical and superstitious. Setting up with the sick meant there would be someone on hand to know when medicine was needed or to administer it, to recognize distress or need, to give or fetch help, and, at the very worst, to see and summon all if the end was coming on. Burnett quotes a 19th century practitioner of the art as saying, “Sometimes there would be a large crowd all night in the sick room. This, however, was not objectionable. The number of people coming in to set up registered the patient’s popularity.” That seems exactly right to me. Part of the wrongness I’ve always discerned in the sick abiding alone consists in just the worry that others might think that here is a person about whom no one cares. Worst of all would be for one of ours to pass with neither “loving hands nor pitying hearts” standing near.
More striking still are Burnett’s descriptions of Decoration Day. A notice from an 1898 newspaper she cites largely captures the spirit of our own event: “All persons are requested to come and bring a basket well filled with grub, so we can have a good time.” And, furthermore: “All persons who come are expected to leave their prejudices and dogs at home.” Farm dogs, it seems, have always been the same. Like these long ago sorts, we aspire to picnic without them, but they arrive despite our wishes, for they know that some tender-hearted sort will pass them a bit of chicken. By Burnett’s account, these earlier Ozark folks were more deliberate on Decoration Day, dressing up where we come as we are and featuring some preaching where we just eat and talk. But as it was for them so it is for us, and “for one day each year at least the cemetery” can still be “a vibrant, colorful place,” as well as “of comfort to the community.”
To be sure, some of what Burnett describes decidedly does not apply to us, at least not as we presently are, though I now suspect it did apply to our ancestors. In setting with our dead, for example, we are not watching out for cats – apparently, one long ago reason to keep watch over the dead was to fend off the “unspeakable calamity” of feral cats with an appetite for dead flesh. Nor do we build our own coffins or dress our own dead, but the hymns one Opal Arnold Taylor described – “the hauntingly sweet and sad refrains from the old worn song books” – are ours even still. Most fundamentally, as one of Burnett’s sources says, I think we find it a pleasure “to go to ol’ graves cause you know your family gathered around that grave at one time, and you know you’re walkin’ in their tracks there.” A lot of what we do, it seems, but walks in tracks laid long ago by kin and neighbors, those who followed these old ways before they were old. At least that is part of what I can conclude after reading Burnett’s study, though there is something still unsettling in all of this, I find.
It is a wonder to find a book like Burnett’s. Indeed, it had on me the force of revelation: However much we may depart from the ways now common, I thought, we’re not strange; we’re anthropological. This seems, in several ways and at least on first inspection, a kind of honor, or at least a warrant to be weird. We have stopped trying to cure each other with madstones, calcium deposits filched from the innards of dead deer that our kind once believed to heal the sick, but we carry on with what might count as the better of our traditions. No longer prone to sew ourselves into longjohns we will wear all winter without a wash, our remaining habits are our best, for who could want a world where none who love you are by when you must reach that last necessity? We stand by our ill and ailing, ready for whatever may be needed, and we stand by our dead, even when life has gone on long without them. This has a logic I can like, a suggestion that we are a people grown or growing wise even as we stay within the traces of our past. Yet still I fear the logic does not hold. For it assigns us more purpose than the evidence will bear.
Burnett’s book ends with noting, “By the end of World War II almost all Ozark burial customs had been abandoned.” As people shifted into styles of work that left little room for the labors of these practices, the practices faded and, so too, the “reasons for the oldest traditions and superstitions had long been forgotten.” In this final observation, I saw us again. Even as we persevere, we have stopped doing the most arduous parts of what was once our norm. In my own lifetime, that once unthinkable bought paper bucket of fried chicken has found its way to our picnic table and only part of what we eat is cooked by hand. Worse still, Burnett has also got us right in this: We somewhere lost our own logic. I do as my ancestors did, but it took a book to tell me so.
What exactly does it mean to practice the old ways when they are just the only ways you know? In truth, I know less of what to make of us than I did before. Burnett’s account of Ozark folkways explains a lot, but while the people she describes did much as we now do, they knew why they did it. Theirs were rituals robust with purpose and with meaning, codified by shared faith and fear. Their vigils sought to fend off death and where that failed, they could at least fend off the cats. Our version of these is shambolic and confused, like a primitive compulsion we answer as we can – not mutely, to be sure, for there will always be dead dogs and greedy preachers to occupy the spaces that more purposive talk once filled. But we are as a people who answer metaphysical necessity obliquely, doing what we have inherited to do but indirectly and unsure of why we do it. Maybe we are not so anthropological after all.
My dog has the habit most dogs have. When he prepares to settle for a nap, he circles round the spot, his paws making a tight, repetitive circumnavigation over just the place he’s picked for sleep. I once heard it said that this ritual trampling of his bed or of a carpet confesses it origin in that time when dogs were wild. A dog circles round where it will lay to first lay down the tall grass, tamping down the strands to make itself a nest. For my dog of course the need for this has passed – the bed or carpet are ready there if he wished to just lay down at once. Yet some primeval internal workings continue on in him and so he goes on circling.
What if, I wonder, we’re like my dog – doing some once meaningful thing because dumb instinct now demands it even as the need for it has passed? Our drifting, idle talk by sickbed, deathbed, and grave is but a sign of tall grass long laid flat, our gathering together an instinctive trampling done on some ultimately brute internal command. That can’t be right. Or it can’t be all there is, I think. I want for us a purpose.
Dogs can have a purpose and perhaps theirs is ours as well. A dog tamping down the tall grass will lay flat a place for rest, but its circling also comprehends all within the circuit. As he turns and spins in readiness for rest, he has an eye toward the horizon, watchful for a predator who could disturb his rest, or worse. Perhaps it could be the same with us, our desultory talk the vigilance that looks like slack, our languid ways but stealthy indirection as we remain alert to the stalking beast. I sometimes think I hear its low growl beneath our idle talk. I heard it plainly lately when we gathered in our cemetery, not to picnic but to bury. My uncle then stood where generations of our kind have stood and made the oration that would see off one of us. His scripture on the occasion rehearsed the familiar refrain that “death is the last enemy,” though he amended this and made it more decisive, pronouncing death the enemy. And there it was and there we were, arrayed against it. We might then seem as but defeated, earth fresh turned and over one of ours before us. Perhaps death is the last enemy, but I also think my uncle’s error right. It is not just last, but also first and second, and all that would be counted between first and last. For it comes not once and last, but again and again, as it takes us each by each.
Aside our sick, our dead, and at last our graves, in idle talk or in defeat, we can comprehend all within the circuit. What you cannot stop, you can nonetheless resist, and this I think we do. Someday the graveyard really could be empty on Decoration Day, no one left to flatten out the grass and keep fresh old tracks for others to trace later. But not yet.
