Numbering The Stones

If you look carefully at the photo above, you will see a daddy longlegs in the upper left quadrant. I took this picture this past Saturday while Jinx and I were exploring in the little country cemetery near our farm. We were there explicitly to count the gravestones, something I had been meaning to do for some time.

The gravestone itself is one of my favorites, the marker of a Jesse Lane, who served the Confederacy in a regiment from his home state. The stone is simple and dignified, like the ones at Arlington National Cemetery, and I usually touch it in passing. On this particular cool day, it radiated gentle heat from the sun, even though the rays hadn’t been touching it for very long that misty morning. I was pleased to see the daddy longlegs sitting there, absorbing the comforting warmth from the rough surface, a surface into which was cut a name and an organization and a place and some dates. The fragile little fellow was part of a set piece of history, a natural slab of a human being’s existence and death, a reminder of the end of us all. He crawled up there from the damp green grass, the grass which feeds cattle and hides spiders and softens the strikes of my bootheels and pleases the eye on a spring day when it is dotted with dandelions and nodding white clover.

As I mentioned, Jinx and I went up there to count gravestones. But JInx was not with me during my task. He remained down on the road, watching me as I moved among the stones and pointed and counted in a whisper.

I found his refusal to enter the cemetery a bit odd, but I was distracted by my task and didn’t watch him particularly closely at that moment. I continued counting and paused to pray near an infant’s marker. The words are illegible, washed by more than a century of Virginia rains and snows, scrubbed by wind and sun, cooled by ice and moonglow. I sat before the small stone and offered a prayer for the child’s soul, and for the soul of one of my aunts who died in infancy when my grandmother, sick with fever, rolled over on the baby she’d kept in the bed with her to keep her warm. My aunt Oleta was smothered to death by the woman who gave birth to her, and my grandmother suffered under the millstone of grief and guilt until her own death in her eightieth year. Many is the time I have knelt and touched the small stone marking Aunt Oleta’s grave in our family cemetery back home. The spring after her death, her father, my maternal grandfather, planted a nandina bush at the foot of her grave. It grew and thrived, and is still there today. My sister and I pelted each other with its small, red berries during our childhood, and I took a cutting from it when I had seen 40 winters of my own, in an unsuccessful attempt to start a nandina of my own from Aunt Oleta’s. Some living things are not meant to propagate, not meant to leave the place where their roots are sunk.

But about Jinx. When I finished my tombstone tally, the dog fell in beside me and trotted briskly back to the farm, stopping to nose along the culverts and bark at a cow and chew some long grass. By the time we reached home, I had forgotten about his refusal to enter the garden of stones.

That evening, when it was time for the spotted menace to take me for a stroll, we started off as usual, but when we neared the cemetery, he stopped dead still in the road, refusing to budge (one of his nicknames is “Budge,” in part because when he decides to stand fast, no human exertion can move him). I continued walking, but Jinx stood there watching me, still as one of the gravestones up on the slope above us. I came back to him and we peeled off and started down a beautiful little lane that leads to the farm of one of our neighbors, a kind man and his wife, who is an author and poet. Jinx was fine going down that road, but when we turned around and headed back, he would not go near the cemetery. I stood in the middle of the road, lit only by moon and stars, and looked around.

Because I once had the first half of a two-part supernatural experience in this cemetery, I was still and watchful, and I felt compelled to speak aloud. “I am here. Is there something I need to know?”

Silence. And so I looked up into the stars, and one of them blazed across the black expanse. We headed back to the house.

The next morning, I saw another shooting star. And Jinx again refused to approach the cemetery, even when I coaxed him with a treat.

That night, which was Sunday, we had a replay of this same curious thing. Again, I felt the need to speak aloud. “I am here. Is someone here with me?” But all remained mystery, and the air was dark and close around me, and Jinx watched my face, as if to anticipate my reaction if someone or Someone or some One answered my question. We returned home, mystery intact.

And this morning, the same. I turned on the flashlight to scan the gravesites above us, and there was nothing out of place, nothing alarming. I held the flashlight at my hip, and it shone through the zipper of my jacket, from which dangles a small medal of Saint Joan of Arc. The swinging medal seemed to dance in the battery-powered beam. This time I did not speak. Jinx and I walked home. I turned to look behind me several times, because I had to.

It feels like unfinished business. Or anticipation. Or loaded energy. It’s not an unpleasant feeling, but I’m not entirely comfortable with it, either. Why won’t my dog walk beyond a certain point, and why the odd behavior?

I won’t read into it. Neither will I discount anything. I am, after all, the man who quietly and sincerely believes the trees are aware of him, the man who talks to insects, the man who speaks prayers in Latin, not understanding a word of it but feeling impelled to do so all the same. I will not discount anything; my intuition tells me to heed.

~ S.K. Orr