Evergreen trees flank the old family plot, giving it the same feeling of grandeur the family home had. A home, not a mansion, but a home built big to accommodate families in a time when the air was conditioned by windows and ornate fireplaces and the kitchen was the place to bathe and dress in the winter.
My great grandfather fought in the Civil War. His wife was an old maid school teacher of twenty one when they married and their first son was buried so soon that the only picture they had of him was in his coffin. A raccoon eyed infant with delicate bones and long hands encased in his christening dress.
All of these people, as well as my grandfather and great uncle and their wives, are buried high on the hill by these ancient pines, so tall they creaked in the breeze when we stood in their shadow looking down for a place to bury my mother. She wanted to be buried with the family.
But there was no room. There appeared to be room, but the cemetery manager said there were other family members buried in random, unmarked graves all around them and to try and bury anyone else risked unearthing these forgotten people.
We picked a place below the hill. A place we could see while standing in the family plot. It was down at the bottom of the hill and across the cemetery road, but close. As close as we could come to honoring her wishes.
A few months later the rain began. It poured.
Bottom land fields filled up with water, corn drowned where it was planted, but the cemetery was high up, even it's lowest plots above the water line. Still it rained and rained and rained. Almost as if my mother were weeping with disappointment, not understanding why she was separated from those she loved, those she had faithfully visited, whose headstones she had sat by while talking to them all her life.
We kept the flowers fresh in spite of the rain.
Even as the mud began to leach out onto the cemetery roads, the family came to see her, to talk to her, to keep up the traditions begun so long ago they seemed normal in every way.
And then, one day, I drove in the cemetery gates and meandered through the twists and turns, the tree tunneled roads to the top of the hill and on around. Down past the children's tombs with their lambs and hearts, then around the bottom of the hill where I froze. My car stalling at the quick stop I made.
Before me was a sight from Charon's own boat. An abyss created by the whole side of the hill collapsing downward. Broken coffins, bits of wood, ribs and skulls, femurs and unidentifiable bones tumbled in among the mud and branches of a landslide created by the rain. A hill caving in from water and too many burial sites crammed atop this prized piece of cemetery.
It stopped short at my mother's plot, as if she had called them down. One by one until there was a mass tumble of family rolling down the hill like demon children on a bright Fall day. I sat there staring for some time. Then I got out of my car and tried to pick my way around it to Mom's grave.
I stood there looking from her headstone to the horror beside us until I heard the keening, or perhaps just the wind winding through the pine trees up above. Thunder rumbled, the wind picked up and one red rose blew down the hill, over the carnage and lay gently before my mother's tombstone.
It began to rain and the rose quivered amidst the scent of a thousand roses. No flower can be that strong. I felt the hair stand up along my arms and suddenly found myself sprinting for my car. Slipping, sliding, caring only to be inside and away.
I don't remember backing up. The next thing I knew I was exiting the cemetery. Shaken, wondering, and wanting to attribute everything to that rainy Autumn season that followed my mother's death.
