FriendBurst Blog

A walk thru the family graveyard:

   It’s a story I would rather not tell, but feel I must.  The love and laughter of days gone by had a counterpoint in grief.  It would be easy to view our past thru rose colored glasses, but that would be just a fairy tale; nothing more.  There is no joy in life without tragedy and our ancestors saw both in spades.

   Once each year on Decoration Day (now called Memorial Day) my Father would collect all of his sons, and as many relatives as he could, to clean the Riter family graveyard.  We climbed the hill to “Old Moldy” with an assortment of hand tools, axes and brush hooks.  As the day progressed, grass, weeds and briars were cut.  Fences were then repaired and gravestones reset as necessary, leaving the cemetery to look modestly presentable for another year.  As the smallest of the boys during these years, I was of little use for real labor and spent a large part of the day reading the grave markers and asking anyone who would talk to me a thousand questions about each.  I wondered what the people were like when still living and where they were now.

   I noticed, with particular interest,  that two of the adjoining stones were for children having died only one day apart.  A girl, Ellie, and a boy, Spencer, were four and six years old respectively.  The stones were of limestone, which preserves engraving less well than granite.  From what I could read, they were s/o and d/o my Grandpa and Grandma Riter.  When queried about it, my Father explained that he wasn’t born yet when all of this happened.  He was visibly uncomfortable just talking about it.  “Childhood diseases,” he said.  “Look around you.  A lot of children didn’t live to grow up in those days.”  He made it bluntly clear to me that we were much too busy to talk any more about it.  I knew better than to broach the subject again.

   For some reason, it stayed in my memory well into adulthood.  Tragedy struck my wife and myself years later when our own infant son suddenly died during the night.  God help anyone who knows such loss, for nothing less than the experience itself can teach the pain involved.  I believe it was our sense of duty to our living children that held us together as a family, and for a time, I wondered if my own sanity could be salvaged, or if I even wanted it to be.

   During these hard times, I revisited thoughts of Ellie and Spencer at rest these many years in the Riter cemetery.  I once wondered out loud in front of my Mother how my grandparents could have lived with that much grief.  She poured us each a cup of coffee and sat down at the table.  “I know the children you speak of quite well through your grandmother Mason,” she said.  “She often spoke of them and actually believed that she, at least, had survived the ordeal.  Of course, neither she nor your grandfather really did.”  With that she began to tell me a story that I was now able to understand.

   She told me about a boy named Spencer who was the apple of his Father’s eye.  Although too young to accomplish much around the farm, he followed grandpa everywhere he went.  He carried tools for him, discussed the crops, livestock, and rain, or lack thereof, as if he were old enough to understand all these things that he knew grown up farmers worried about.  He was grandpa’s constantly, wide eyed companion from sunup to sundown.  Ellie was grandma’s girl.  She carried her own supply of homemade sunshine and happiness.  Becoming cross with her took extreme effort.  Staying that way was impossible.  There was never a room so dark nor a spirit so depressed that she could not lift to a higher level.  Such were Spencer and Ellie to their parents and all who knew them.

   Early, one summer afternoon, while grandpa and Spence were repairing fences in the Cumbridge Meadow, little Spencer suddenly sat down.  He was white as a sheet and when granddad felt his forehead, he later said that he could have fried an egg on it.  “You need to go back to the house now and tell your Mother to make a mustard plaster for you.”  Spence rose and walked slowly to the house, arriving in time to find that his little sister was also ill and being tucked into bed by their frantic Mother.  She immediately order the eldest son to hitch up a horse to her butty and go bring the doctor from Wileyville.  It was an eight mile ride and would take time, but without help, she knew neither of the children would make it.  When the doctor arrived, he was greeted by a sight that he had seen more than enough of lately.  It was Scarlet Fever, a disease from the blackest pits of Hell.  There were no effective drugs available.  Old midwife’s root and herbal concoctions (even the ones learned from Indians) had long since proven themselves useless against this killer.  Folks said death visited an average of two children from each family around the county that summer.  Over the years, my own visits to the graveyards of Wetzel County have pretty much borne that out.  More than a few doctors even stopped making house calls that year, and were rumored to have spent the remainder of the season in their own wine cellars.

   That Friday night Spencer succumbed, and come Saturday morning, it was Ellie’s turn.  As was the custom, funeral arrangements were made quickly.  Men of the neighborhood built pine boxes, dug graves, and found large fieldstones to use until proper tombstones could be obtained.  Draft horses and a wooden sled carried the coffins up the hill to the graveyard.  An elderly minister tearfully conducted one service at the house and another at the graveside.  This part of his business was, by now, becoming unbearable.  After the service, grandpa and grandma walked home together without speaking.  She sat quietly on the porch swing and stared into empty space.  He paced the floor for a minute and then left for the field where he and Spence had been working.  As she sat, she noticed bare footprints in the soft soil of the yard.  They were Ellie’s.  She had so loved playing outside without her shoes.  In weather as good as this summer’s, it was not discouraged.  It occurred to grandma that this was all she had left of a beautiful child.  Suddenly grandpa reappeared.  He was holding Spencer’s coat which had still been hanging on the fence where they last worked together.  He stood there shaking and holding the coat in his outstretched hand as if offering it to some invisible entity.  Still neither of them could speak.  kHe laid the coat down on the empty end of the swing and walked straight to the cellar.

   “He’s going to get drunk,” she thought.  She was right.  It was said that grandpa was never sober again, not on purpose anyway.  As she sat there, it started to rain.  To her horror, she saw Ellie’s footprints beginning to melt.  “You have her spirit, God!”  She cried, “at least leave me her memory!”  She even began to throw her clothing over what remained of in a futile effort to save those precious prints.  It was all to no avail.

   Grandpa didn’t change much for the rest of his life, sobering up only as much as duty required, or when the kids were able to hide the whiskey and cider.  This was also the day grandma began going mad.