Sitting Outside The Gates

This week marks the one-year anniversary of two deaths. The contrast between the lives of the two dead people is more striking with every passing day.

The first was a young woman from an affluent background. She was sullen, self-absorbed, and from what I could see, cruel to her family. Her parents had done everything they could to usher her into adulthood, providing for her material and educational needs, and supporting her frequent and wildly unrealistic ideas about what she wanted to be when and if she grew up. When she died, it was what coroners like to call “death by misadventure.” The remaining question for her family and friends continues to be “Was it intentional or accidental?” Perhaps they will never know.

The other death was that of an older man, a man about my age. He was the living quintessence of a poor mountain man. Long beard, tattered clothes, slump-shouldered, continually attended by his pack of friendly dogs. He puttered along the mountain roads on a four-wheeler that had seen several collisions, most of them beer-fueled.  Yes, he liked his likker, as they like to say in these parts. I recall waving at him as he passed my place one evening, and a neighbor who was visiting me remarked, “There he goes. S’blind drunk, he cain’t see through a ladder.” But this man was as kind and gentle a soul as I have ever encountered. He always had a shy smile, and I never heard him say a single negative thing about another person. Animals seemed to be drawn to him as if by magic, and I always felt a wave of peace settle over me when he was around, even if he staggered just a bit or slurred his words. Over a period of months, his weary body shut down, at least partly due to the excesses and abuses upon which he had heaped it. In the end, he simply went to sleep and didn’t wake up. His brother found him a day later, the dead man’s dogs having summoned him by their howling on the front porch.

I attended the young woman’s funeral, and it was quite the production. The church was packed with sweating mourners. Many people stood and paid tribute to the deceased. Young musicians played sad songs on the guitar and the piano, and most of those in attendance were weeping throughout the service. Later, at the grave, a large crowd stood in 90 degree heat and waited patiently for the rites to be performed and the prayers to be said and the final goodbyes to be whispered. And for weeks afterwards, I heard a continual stream of “It’s so sad,” and “What a shame, what a waste,” and “She was such a wonderful person.”

I also attended the mountain man’s funeral. I wasn’t able to go to the church for the service proper, but I did make it to the graveside service. There were less than twenty people there, including the dead man’s brother. As I was walking up the hill to the grave, one of my neighbors joined me. “Guess we shouldn’t be surprised,” he said to me. “He wasn’t no-account.” At the grave, several of the mourners made similar comments. “Maybe he can find some peace now” was the kindest thing I heard. Later, after the minister finished his business and the coffin was being prepared to be lowered into the rocky soil, I approached the dead man’s brother to offer him some words of condolence. He shrugged off my words with a curt, “He brought it on himself. He wouldn’t listen.”

I left the burial service with bitterness flitting around me like a cloud of gnats. How can we be so willing to give the benefit of the doubt to this one, but not to that one?

I don’t even think about the young woman anymore. I imagine she has plenty of people thinking about her, though I doubt her young and easily-distracted friends are among them. I do think about the dead mountain man, though. I miss him. I miss his easy humor, his shambling gait, his well-combed rug of a beard, his ever-present beer can in his enormous, gnarled hand which he would lift to me as I passed him on the twisting gravel road. Will I see him again? I don’t know, but I like to think I will. I also like to think of him sitting in a green field somewhere breezy, with a half-dozen grinning dogs cavorting around him, watching his sun-blasted face as he smiles through those missing teeth — are they still missing now? — and speaks in quiet tones to the only real friends he ever had.

~ S.K. Orr