Though Mom always had a knack for saying the right thing, she also had the unfortunate gift of saying exactly what she thought about something when she thought it. I remember coming home from the Ville with the hubby and the kid and sitting out on the deck with Mom and Dad. Since my paternal grandparents live just up the road from them, they often walk down to catch up on the happenings of the day. On one particular visit, Mom and Dad had just had a piece in the field below their lawn plowed for a vegetable garden. Grandpa and Dad were going to walk down there to look at.
“Aren’t you going to walk down here to look at this garden, Reba?” Grandpa said, pausing in the driveway to look up at her where she was seated on the deck.
“Well, I reckon I’ve seen dirt before,” she spat the words angrily, out of the blue. The look on his face was priceless. His eyebrows flew up and he just looked like he was thinking, all right, then. And he turned and walked away. I didn’t know whether laughing my ass off would put me in the line of fire, but I couldn’t help it. Luckily she thought it was funny too. Dad said it had just been one of those days, no one could say the right thing--or anything for that matter.
On Memorial Day, Dad, my brother and sister, and I went to the graveyard. They had added dirt to her grave to level it off. I sat on the grass at the edge of the dirt. It was hot. They stood on the opposite side of the grave.
Dad looked down at the grave, kicking a little at the dirt that was there, “Well, I reckon you’ve seen dirt before.”
After a silent moment, “Did I tell you we’ve got the okay on the bench? He [the groundskeeper] said that he didn’t mind as long as he could weed eat around it.”
The bench was going to be made from one of the sandstone rectangles that Grandpa Tolman had cut out of the side of a mountain in Eastern Kentucky. Several years back, the family had carried the stones out of the woods from the fireplace of the old homestead and hauled them back to our current home town. Beside the driveway at Mom and Dad’s house is what I call the miniature Stonehenge. Made from one of the mantle stones as the seat and two smaller stones as the legs of the bench; Mom’s will be like that, with a bronze plaque.
At the funeral we had stayed while they lowered the casket and covered the vault with its cement slab of a lid. My oldest sister took a shovel full of dirt and threw it in, and the next dug in her high heels and did the same. Some people thought we were weird for staying so long. But, as Dad said, if we were going to do it, we were going to see it through to the very end. The rain was drizzling down, and there we were, watching them put her in the ground. My sister had summoned the rain, and how fitting it was that the funeral was drenched in rain as we shed our tears.
On the way out of the cemetery Dad asked us what we thought about for the headstone. My sister said that she wanted a bench so that there would be someplace to sit when we came to visit her at the cemetery. We all thought that that was a good idea. And so it will be.
In Berea, Kentucky, where Grandma Roark, my great grandmother, is buried, is another one of those stones, set flush with the ground, adorned with a bronze plaque as well. I guess as long as there are Roarks around to do it, that’s the way it will be done.
Even now it doesn’t seem real to me. I spoke at the funeral. I said a few lines, then recited her favorite poem, "The Children’s Hour" by William Wadsworth Longfellow. For Christmas our sister had made us all framed copies of the poem. I had remarked how, after spending hours, then days reminiscing, trying to decide on a memory to share with everyone, one thing that we did agree on was that everyone knew that Mom loved to read. As children we would read together, and she would impress us by reciting passages and poems. I was okay until I began reading the poem. I ignored everything that I had learned in public speaking—I didn’t make much eye contact, I didn’t project (but thanks to the microphone, that wasn’t a problem), but I did the best that I could. When I was about half way through the second stanza I was crying so much, I apologized, and then my Uncle came up and encouraged me to take my time. All I could think was to keep on going, finish the poem so everyone could hear its beautiful and heart breaking lines.
At some point, every day, I think about calling Mom. I’ve never actually picked up the phone to do it. But the feeling is always there. Even when I moved away all I had to do was pick up the phone. And whether the words she spoke worked to comfort me or to piss me off, she was always right. I guess that’s why I got mad when I did, because I hate being wrong. Mom was the best at everything that involved life. She always knew the right thing to do. Now I can only hope that enough of her strong spirit rubbed off on me so that I can be a good mother, a good wife, a great person--like her.
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