The Floatplane Notebooks Read Online Free PDF

the graveyard. “Lord amercy. There’s a bunch of good people in the ground here. And there ought not to be ‘ary another one added.”
    â€œThere’s some more room back there, isn’t there?” I asked.
    She looked up at me. “Sure is, but it’s been a good while—thirty years or more—and people just sort of started getting buried at church graveyards, and so that makes this like a little museum. You wouldn’t put a new piece of furniture in a museum, would you?”
    â€œI don’t guess so.”
    â€œYou hear about how this graveyard got started?”
    â€œNo ma’am.”
    â€œWell, it was when my great-granddaddy and grandmother, Walker and Caroline, lived here, and my granddaddy was a little boy, Ross. He was a pistol, that Ross. I remember him. He had a great big mustache when he died, 1918, buried right over there. He was something. He had real light blue eyes which got lighter and lighter and when he died theywere almost white. His nose was sort of up-tilted, which is why he grew that mustache, and when he got old his galluses held up pants so big at the waist he looked like he was standing in a barrel. He was the one lived his whole life in that house that was right there. He remembered when the graveyard got started, too. I heard him talk about it. What happened was a field hand died. This was a cotton field and the field hand dropped dead, and they buried him on the spot. Didn’t have no family. Fellow by the name of Pittman. He’s buried right there. Unmarked. Then somebody else died, somebody’s baby I think. Most of the ones unmarked, them over there, are infant graves. And there’s the little rock that says ‘Born Ded’ on it. Ross carved that on there. Come here, and I’ll show you.”
    We walked over to a small stone, about the size of a football, but flatter, and sure enough, there it was, chipped into it: “Born Ded.”
    â€œThen of course that tombstone there is Tyree and Loretta and over there is Ross and Helen and his other wife and then there is Walker and Caroline, the ones that buried the field hand. My mama and papa are buried back there in that back row: Dink and Fair. And then all these others.” She shook pine straw off the rake. “Oh yes, and Vera. She collected a Confederate pension—her husband got killed in the Civil War. Can’t remember his name. She lived alone, and chickens roosted on her bed. She was a laudanum addick. Would drink that stuff and dance up a storm. She wore a bunch of petticoats and had great big pockets in her aprons. She’d walk nine miles to get that laudanum when she was, Lord, over seventy years old, I guess. My, my. Courseyou’re not old enough to be interested in all this yet.”
    â€œOh, yes ma’am, I—”
    â€œThen too, it ain’t your blood kin.”
    â€œOh, yes ma’am, I am interested,” I said.
    I thus found myself looking into the eyes of one of the very backbones and spirits of this marvelous family, which continues even unto today—witness Mr. and Mrs. Copeland, Meredith, Noralee, and now Thatcher and me—unabated into the future.
    I think about my mother and father’s parents and grandparents, buried in large conventional cemeteries—so unromantically—without an entire enclave, an entire force as it were, buried all around them. It seems to me that the tradition of being buried here should be renewed. It’s the most peaceful place imaginable: the pond, the wisteria, the majestic pine trees.
    â€œWhen the house stood over there,” said Aunt Scrap, “right over there, my great-grandma, Caroline, planted that wisteria plant by the back steps. She had seven or eight names—I used to could say them. Course I won’t born when she planted it, but I do remember when it grew back there, trimmed—beside the back steps, up a trellis. Then it come up by the pond and