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prairie markers
SE-04-023-29W-3 People think I'm a drunk drinking alone in this car, parked in the campsite back by the outhouse and wood. A lady came down the lane with some kids and I know she said something. Can't really blame her. Lord knows I'm a sight. Drove for hours with your urn against my leg, crying with my arms wrapped around the steering wheel. Didn't bring a thing but your ashes and some whiskey. It was September five years ago last we were here, talking about our remains as if it would be easy. I argued you'd wash up on some river bank, and you said "imagine instead that I float to the sea." But I can't. I'll get a plot in town (that's settled now), up in the corner where the lupines grow thick by the fence. They've dammed the river and it's too late to ask where else. You'd float forever in that lousy lake. It's not the same now I know the river ends here.
SW-27-066-22W-4 He came down from the road through a break in the trees, heart black as his idling car. Past Baby Cardinal's iron crib and Crazy Mary's unmarked grave; past Preacher Bob who dicked adolescent girls and old man Sinclair who shot his wife in a drunken fit. He comes every year to visit his father - took a rifle from the wall and blew away what can't be answered, like who's to blame. What happened in the cabin that night blurs, and his eyes water. It's always the same. Dark clouds race beneath an overcast sky, omen shapes tear apart close above the clearing, trees all round shake like mad rags. The cold wind traces red his old wound. He scratches his wrist and touches it to the stone, then leaves the same way he came. Booting the accelerator, he lays a strip of rubber twenty yards down the highway.
NE-22-059-03W-5 Buddy Jones took a corner too tight, sailed off the ramp in his half-ton, graceful as a bomb. Haunts cutlines now, some miles from the mill. Remember, your red hair saved you once: your laughter still echoes in camps up and down the lake. The old gang still goes hunting, rye and rifles for everyone, just looking for a good time, no harm in that. Your brother goes with them, once a year in the fall. He flew clear, drunk as you, rumour has it he was driving. Matters for the insurance. Talking about it makes him crazy. He stops by the cemetery some Fridays on his way to the bar, stares at your photograph and holds the cold antlers: same rack in the trophy shot. He downs a beer and lights a candle in the empty. There's bottles almost all the way around your plot.
NW-18-055-07W-5 Dust sifts in off the fields and the cafe fills with diesel: coffee, cream, two sugars to go. I say my hurried good-byes, then board with all I've kept. The four o'clock swings south, past the cemetery and out of town. I'll miss that place most: the path up from the marsh, the cattails burst white, the graves and creaking gate. From that rise I watched all four roads out of town and imagined each to its end. There's a name I used to trace: Grampa Wilson, not a year settled before his bull put him through a barn wall. Sometimes I sat with the two little ones we never knew. Now, it's your place too. The tulips should rise this season, the rosebush will bloom for years. I made a border of painted bricks and left your favourite china cup, the one with the gold around the rim. All night yard lights nod through the dark like thoughts and the city comes all to soon at dawn. I sleep without unpacking and wake at five to the creak of a gate, then rise to make tea in your old pot, a concoction of mint and tears. It's time, I know, just before our supper bell, when the long shadows stretch from row to row.
SW-20-048-14W-4 I came out to see the place one last time: the weathered sheds and wreck of a barn, the garden we all once shared. I walked to the bench at the edge of the hill, up in the saskatoons, where you sat for hours watching the sky and clouds. I can't pass those berry bushes without you, how sure you were. Not sure if all I see's a sky, if prayers are answered. In late and drunk down to the room you offered, after all the family gave up. He'll come round you told them. Mornings on your rocker marking lessons, chapter and verse, tea and toast. You liked it black, I remember that. Saved the rickety red table from the nook, the old cupboard, rocker too. Still your eyes lift from the page: don't be silly, of course the sky's not empty.
SE-17-033-01W-4 A white sun blazes on dry buttes above the river. The sky is as wide as a bowl over the plain - amber grasses and sand. There's a mound of rocks at the base of a near hill, and an old wooden cross. Someone down at the ranch said you were a lone Indian: just over the fence, beyond the deserted church. No one remembers a name, or how you came to be here. Swallows play in the low bush at the head of your grave. A dog barks in the distance and two mule deer break for the coulee. I catch a glimpse of their tawny hides and sense their warm blood. But they're just as suddenly gone.
SE-01-033-28W-5 By Order of the Board: only flat markers are allowed in the newer sections of the cemetery. The caretaker mows biweekly and doesn't want anything to catch in his blades. No plastic elves or porcelain lambs, no cloth wreaths or vases of any kind, no framed photos of people with awards, no replicas of trick ponies or show-stopping dogs, no crossed hockey sticks or threadbare baseball gloves, no favorite dolls or Tonka trucks, no fancy baskets or glass-faced boxes, no upright markers of any kind, no perennials or shrubs. But upturned stones still fall free of the shovel, and the caretaker places them on the slabs, like offerings in defiance of the Order.
SW-16-022-22W-4 The broken-vaned windmill traces a tired arc, voices a rusty whine and wooden groans that disappear on the wind. Everything has come and gone long ago. The cemetery lies across the railbed, at the far end of town: two iron crosses and one pine enclosure. The rest remain unmarked, depressions, a few bits of ragged wood, a overgrown mound. The fenced space could contain a hundred graves, they must have expected more. The grain elevator can be seen from anywhere on the narrow plain, a dark and solitary tower. Doves fly in and out a high window, sunlight catching their wings the instant they appear, as if another world exists behind the blackness.
SW-11-016-28W-4 Half a wagon wheel and a bronzed lariat at the head of his grave, Fred Donovan was a champion roper. The homestead still stands, ramshackle and grey, set on a treeless butte jutting over a bend in the river. The main house looks like someone came by to make certain everything was good'n broke, windows blown out and buckshot up the walls. An owl has moved into the bedroom and deposited pellets of fur-wrapped bone, so perfect it seems each small creature could be put back together again. Unopened mail is strewn over the kitchen floor, letters and bills, an uncompleted loan application, an invitation to the Annual Knights of Columbus dance - 23 October 1963 - the same week Fred died, in an accident at dusk on the old ferry road. He married Ethel late in life and they had ten good years. You can guess her size by the coat in rags, hanging beside once white shirts. There's more shoes on the floor than any one family could fit. But Ethel moved to town, so no one heard the crash when the ceiling plaster fell, let loose nests built in the corners. When the roof goes, it all goes.
NE-31-006-16W-4 It's barely ten in the morning and already two tables are shoved together in the hotel coffee shop: four of us farmers and Ed from the garage, his nephew Raymond and the beekeeper from Nampa. The bus unloads truck parts and Ed sends his nephew with them back to the shop - home for the season and the lad's already been to three funerals. We're getting old in these parts, more heart than muscle. Ed makes a joke about how we're all going broke sitting still. It isn't really funny, but we laugh anyway, and Mandy brings a round of refills. We miss Marini most: last of the original family to settle these hills. Frank tells the story again about how that cow broke through the fence, and Marini not a week dead. Frank found the animal bawling with its fore hooves thrashed through Marini's slab: says the cow seemed somehow holy. Marini'd have had something to say about that fibreglass cover. "Don't make nothing to last. If it didn't break, we'd never need another. Whole damn world's broke. Needs mending." He should've died when the tractor flipped or when the chain slipped on the baler, tricked him in fingers to armpit kicking and squealing like a hog. Had the damn thing fixed by dark. No one fixed things like Marini: could fix the weather, some said. And around our ten o'clock table, for once we all agreed - at least he'd laugh to find a cow kneeling on his grave.
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