Author: Charles Wells
Category: Nonfiction
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Chapter 7
Chuck looked around at the countryside, as far as his eyes could see, and everything in view held a reddish tint. The trees, bushes, even the cows in the pastures, all wore the same red squalor of clay dust. “It hasn’t rained in a while” he realized.
To a stranger, the cemetery would be impossible to find. Chuck parked the jeep on the edge of the dirt road, as close to the rain ditch as he dared, and got out. The humid morning air struck him in the face almost sapping his breath away. “Darn and its only six-thirty.”
For a moment, he changed his mind about going, and then reversed. He was already this far into the venture so he stepped across the narrow road and jumped the ditch. Grabbing the top strand of a rusty fence with one hand, he took the fence post with the other, stuck the tip of his shoe through a lower wire loop, and then swung his body up and over. The fence creaked with tension but held his weight.
He and Matt use to play in the fields and woods nearby as kids, especially among the tall grave markers in the cemetery. They would romp and stomp, barefoot and brave...always picking up cuts and scrapes from briars, broken glass, and barbed wire fences. It was a wonder they hadn’t died of lockjaw from blood poisoning.
With a glance back toward the road, Chuck started across the field of knee-high grass. When he was ten years old and crossing such a field, he never bothered about where he stepped because at such an age, dangers were all but nonexistent. Today, even with shoes on his feet and wearing long pants, he took enough time to spot possible hiding place for dangers and cow dung. He was nearing the right edge of the pasture headed toward a clump of old oak trees about twenty yards in the distance. The field he now crossed belonged to the Pary family.
He looked for an elm tree that once stood at the north corner of the cemetery but it was gone or he wasn’t in the right spot. He reached the fence and saw a chest high tree stump that served as fence post. Somebody cut the tree hoping to kill it because the base was absorbing the wire and lifting the fence off the ground, as it grew. He could see where a dozen rows of fence strands had grown into the bark of what was once an elm tree.
Flicking at one of the strands with his finger, he remembered how he and Matt often attached copper pennies to a tree and watched them over the years as the tree absorbed them. Staring at the stump, he recalled how Matt, always the more daring, would climb as high in the tree as the reach of limbs allowed. Then, with the skill of a monkey, he would swing from branch to branch, limb to limb. He could put a Georgia fox squirrel to shame. “What have you gotten into, big brother?” Chuck spoke aloud.
The words echoed through the woods and softly faded in the distance. He looked for a clear area to cross the vine-coated fence, found one where a game trail crossed and then led off in the general direction of the old graves. He followed it deep into the tangled vines and thorns.
The entire area, overrun in places with vines and briars, kept him wary of rattlesnakes or wasps. Either could easily hide among the undergrowth. Yellow jackets, especially, favored building their underground hives beneath such ground cover and could be vicious if disturbed. Nonetheless, the urge to see the cemetery was stronger than the urge to turn back, so he kept moving forward, cautiously, but forward nonetheless.
The path led into the trees and then deeper into woods beyond. A cloud of bugs and insects skittered everywhere in the air around him. One sudden explosion of winged motion sent him backwards several steps. It was nothing but harmless bugs disturbed by his intrusion. He waited a second, catching his breath and wiped a bead of sweat from his forehead. “I wish I was ten years old again. I would’ve already been there and back by now.”
With a deep sigh, he edged forward again. It took thirty cautious steps to find the rusted gate of the old Veal Cemetery. It wasn’t much of a gate anymore. Just a knee high pile of broken bricks, rusty metal, and strands of wire the game trail followed through. On the opposite side, it veered off to the right, still headed toward his Grandfather’s grave. “How convenient” he grumbled, and stepped through the gate opening and into the cemetery for the first time in twenty years.