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Living Among Headstones: Life in a Country Cemetery
by Shannon Applegate
Published by Thunder’s Mouth Press, © 2005 by Shannon Applegate

BURYING MY FRIENDS

Make much of your own place. —Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1836

When I told my father I would take responsibility for the cemetery I did not reckon on having to bury my friends. There is a hollow place in the pit of my stomach. I feel vaguely disoriented and the pull of something, an emotional undertow. I know from past experience these feelings are connected to the loss of a friend.

But there are other feelings, new feelings that add to my discomfort, such as the sense of pretending to be something or someone who I am not. I am dismayed by my ineptitude.

When I agreed to take this all on a few weeks ago I had no idea what I was in for. Ever since, Dad has been bringing more cemetery records, looking relieved as though I have taken quite
a bit off his mind. My back room is filling up with shoeboxes full of scraps of paper--notes written on corners of envelopes, pocket pads, and cafe napkins in the indecipherable masculine scrawls of various caretakers since the 1950s. Then there are the earlier records: hundred-year-old dog-eared ledgers, and water-stained notebooks from the 1930s and 1940s revealing Aunt Hazel's and her mother, Lucy Samler's, dainty writing describing plot sales, money paid out for maintenance, etc. Yellowing obituary clippings are tucked between the pages. On these are terse notes in inky finality: "Buried here." There are also rolled up plat maps, legal descriptions of the cemetery, and survey notes. The more recent records are in three-ring binders with accompanying recipe boxes filled with alphabetized note cards showing cemetery blocks and individual plots.

As time permits, I have picked my way through the paper wilderness that seems to be my lot in life. Indeed, "lot" and "plot" are the operative words, lately. If this was all there were to my new job as cemetery sexton, things would be fine. I've actually enjoyed lingering over letters that the cemetery has received in envelopes sometimes as simply addressed as: Pioneer Graveyard, Yoncalla, Oregon.

Some of these letters pose practical questions: "To whom it may concern: None of us lives in Oregon anymore and we would like to see if you could sell the unused western half of our family plot (Block X, Lot X) and send us the money." Others pertain to genealogy and family history: "We are looking for the grave of our great-great-grandfather so-and-so who supposedly settled in the Yoncalla area after the Spanish-American War and went into the fruit growing business before his second wife left him."

Until today, in terms of cemetery business, the leisurely putting in order of this paper parade is all I've accomplished--if "business" is the right word for this family enterprise that started over a century ago.

Of course, I've made the most of telling my friends about my new endeavor. My "new job."

"A sextant?"

"No. Those are used on ships to determine longitude and latitude. A sexton. It's sort of Old English. A country sexton. I run a cemetery. Only it's not in a churchyard."

It's a real conversation piece, a place to begin a good story. But today, it is much more ponderous than that.

However, sprinkled lightly, as to be barely discernable, I will give myself a little credit: At least I have risen to this particular occasion, albeit slightly listing, on account of my broken foot. Here I am leaning on my crutches, at the gravesite Lee and Dana Whipple chose not too many years ago. I am waving good-bye to Dana. She is headed back to Whipple Tree Lane with a relative who has come to help her prepare home and, I dare say, heart, for her husband Lee Whipple's memorial gathering: in today's parlance, "A Tribute of Life."

Watching her retreat as she makes her way to the car, I notice her osteoporosis seems more pronounced than it was a few months ago but for all that she still has a get-on-with-it-ness in her steps, especially as compared to her much heavier and younger companion.

The cemetery caretaker before last--who sometimes cared less--sold Lee and Dana these sites at one hundred dollars each. Before the most recent caretaker moved away, he advised me to stick to sales in this relatively empty southeast corner of the cemetery where Lee and Dana have their plots.

"That way," he said in his Louisiana drawl, "you won't get yourself into trouble."

It is the trouble I have come to dread. The trouble I've even dreamed: I am marking a grave in the wrong place. They are digging where someone already is. I awaken imagining I am hearing the thud of backhoe blade against coffin.

The Whipple grave is on a gentle downhill slope that characterizes this portion of the cemetery, which, on a good day, receives the gift of sun. Just beyond the fence, perhaps one hundred yards south from here, broad open fields are cattle-dotted and brushed butter yellow with ash trees that are always first to announce autumn in this country.

It was typical of Lee Whipple to have picked a "resting place"--the way he put it--with contrasting attributes: open space and shelter, sunlight and shadow. It was his reason in the first place for being drawn to this little country graveyard with its immense old trees. He told me this back when I could still sit down with him and Dana under their hospitable roof, sipping tea, talking philosophy, and now and then pouring my heart out.

Before that came the remarkable experience of having this couple of nearly fifty years together in the writing class I taught where they explored their lives on paper. "Come and see us," they said after four years of trying to agree on what happened when. And I did.

I knew so much about all their "whys and wherefores," Dana said later, that they invited me to say a few words at their golden wedding anniversary.

Lee, a retired Church of the Brethren minister, and civil rights leader, was a rosy, dome-browed gnome of a man, who knew about shadows. During the 1960s, Lee, Dana, and their children participated in an experiment in ecumenical living at the York Cooperative in Chicago. The Church of the Brethren conferred on Lee the special title of Minister of Peace when he began working with Martin Luther King and Andrew Young, going into towns where peace marches were planned and attempting to smooth the way with officials in advance.

Lee had seen faces contorted with hate in the Southern towns he visited. He met people who swore the streets would run with blood if marchers came. Later, alongside the black men who were his friends, quaking in his shoes and sweating profusely as one of the few whites marching, Lee saw the dark side: mild-looking churchgoing mothers and suit-wearing town fathers spitting, cursing, and hurtling brickbats at him.

But light, Lee insisted, always accompanied him, following him to the last days and even after, it seems. When I went to see Dana just after Lee slipped away, I stood at their kitchen window, taking in rows of grapes, gardens, fruit and nut trees flagged scarlet and gold with the season. Beyond was a landscape tiered with rain where the mountain stood--Mount Yoncallamy mountain. Only it was Lee's, too. He saw its opposite side in the lovely valley where he made his home for some twenty years just four miles or so from the cemetery.

Truly, I've never seen the like: two rainbows. I stood watching them arching high above the summit--one glowing over the other, colors luminous and splendid. Then light flooded over Lee's valley and through the window.

I realized this morning, driving into the cemetery, as mist and sun sifted through high solemn columns of cedar, fir, and madrone, that it is no longer possible to see across the expanse of these five acres. The shaggy, thigh-thick bough of Douglas fir extending over the spot where Dana intends to bring Lee's ashes is an example of a problem that is emerging all over the cemetery. Some black-green lower branches of these giants are drooping low, some in candelabrum curves touching the ground. They sway and break during high winds that sometimes lay siege to Cemetery Ridge as if to say, "You old fellows up here are too proud and tall for your own good."

The tree by Lee's grave, the only large tree in the southeast section, is stout enough that three little girls could not link hands around it. This spot now feels far too sheltered. Besides, the lovely view is compromised. Why are so many of us concerned with the view in a cemetery? Whose view? Our own, I suppose.

When Dana stood here a few moments ago taking in this shaggy gloom, she shivered a little, brushing the tip of this offending bough as though inspecting too-long hair on some youngster she was about to hustle off for a haircut. She said, "Let's just give this a trim, shall we? It's too much. Lee liked it, but it's overgrown now."

"Now Shannon, do I assume correctly that it is up to you what goes on now? I mean you have the say-so, don't you? Or do you have to go through your father?" Then she added something that made me wince, "It's all overgrown, isn't it? A rustic, natural look is one thing, but..."

Perhaps she saw my face. Never, ever play cards, people tell me.

She looked me over and sighed, saying, "Well, I'm sure you'll take care of all this as you are able, Shannon. All these trees are beautiful, but they are going to need some care."

Then she asked me which way "the head goes." Grandchildren were looking for a perfect sandstone boulder on the farm to bring to the cemetery to serve as a headstone for their grandpa. But at which end of the plot should it be placed?

In general, how were graves supposed to be oriented? East to west? Because, if that were the case, many people's headstones were placed incorrectly. What about the width of the alleyways between plots? Exactly how large was a double plot, anyway? When she was ready to part with Lee's ashes, could she come up and dig a hole herself? Was it legal? What about putting Lee's ashes in a planter of some kind? And when her ashes were brought up here someday was it all right to mingle them with Lee's? Did they have to have permission? Because that was what they'd discussed. She and Lee would be in there together with lavender or maybe a lily.

Lee and Dana as fertilizer. Bone meal. That made sense. But as to the rest, I had no idea. It's better not to ask a lame sexton too many questions, I wanted to tell her.

Lame in more ways than one. My foot is hurting. I feel sad and awkward. I am a close friend of an elderly woman whose husband, a man I admired and adored, has just died. Suddenly, I am also a sexton--some sort of semi-official. At home I have a sheaf of papers that were sent to Dad when he registered the cemetery as a state corporation. Laws and statutes fatten the thick manual from the Cemetery and Mortuary Commission. Even I, a book woman, an incessant researcher, can't bring myself to read this dry stuff. It scares me. It will tell me what I have to do and what will happen to me if I don't.

A writing woman; not an on-the-ground, hands-on kind of woman. A friend once said to me, "Why, you would rather read about an adventure than have one, wouldn't you?"

As for getting these trees limbed--how many are there? Fifty? A hundred? Where will the money come from? We're not officially a non-profit but we might as well be. Thank God mowing is not upon us until spring.

Upon "us"?

How many hands will it take to eradicate poison oak whose scarlet triumvirate of leaves blaze against the gray of granite baby lambs and Eastern Stars on old headstones I'm passing, as I limp and pitch up the slope trying to reach my car.

And who will hack her way into the humps of blackberries coiling on the sagging fences I can see as I pause and turn to look below?

"Not if she can help it," I tell myself.

Then there is the matter of the plastic flowers. Is there anything quite so depressing or enduring as that bunch right over there? Those blue plastic roses moldering in a mayonnaise jar wrapped in aluminum foil. But now, close to boot and crutch, a contender appears on the grave of Agnes Peters, 1918-1975. These may well take the prize in the plastic-flower competition: astringent orange daisies poked directly into pale fish tank gravel and strand upon strand of ragged aqua ivy surely chewed by a Rottweiler.

In my mind, I see Dana's piquant face, her large glasses and close-cropped reddish hair that belies the fact she is eighty-something. A few moments ago those blue eyes ignited as she took in the spectacle of a family plot just across the way from Lee's.

She was uncharacteristically adamant saying, "Outlaw plastic flowers altogether. Anything plastic. You need rules, Shannon, and then you have to enforce them." We stood there scanning the low, white plastic picket fence pinioned along the edges of golf green outdoor carpet. Rising out of the center of a profusion of phony peonies was a sign: "Grandma," spelled in reflecting mailbox letters.

"These things just don't fit in here." Dana's lips made an uncompromising line. Shaking her head she said, "No. This is not the five-and-dime. This is supposed to be a designated pioneer cemetery."


RED DIRT

This uplifted ridge, shaped like an earthen wave rising from gently tilting valleys, is a perfect spot for a cemetery. It affords the truly long view: From here it is possible to contemplate the distance between this world and the next. Yet, as I wait for the men to arrive who will dig Elsie Patton's grave, I am not moved to consider the possibilities of the Hereafter or even of the here and now. This May morning, I am reading the epochs of the Great Before, trying to decode the ancient signs written in ridge, rock, and sediments rhythmically laid down over the course of millions of years.

The impulse began yesterday when I spoke with a funeral director who told me gravediggers were bringing the vault that Elsie Patton's family had ordered for her burial. The graveside service is scheduled for Saturday, and the gravediggers wanted to install the vault this afternoon. The funeral director said he was aware that
things were changing at our cemetery; he wondered whether we would continue to deposit our "spoils" in the same place.

"Our spoils?" Terrible images sprang to mind.

The voice, low and smooth, became faintly patronizing. "That's right, you haven't been at this too long, have you? The spoils: the dirt that is leftover after the grave is dug. A vault displaces quite a bit of dirt and the gravediggers will want to deposit it in the right spot."

"We haven't changed that," I said briskly. "They can put it where they always have."

But the fact is, before yesterday I hadn't thought about how much dirt is leftover after a grave is dug. I've only had the experience of dealing with a few burials, and one of them was not a burial but what, according to the law, is an "inurnment." The family took care of actually burying the ashes in an urn.

Now that I know about "spoils," I understand that the pile of dirt, so surprisingly red, deposited in a low part of the cemetery near the southeast corner, is not merely fill dirt but instead the residue from numerous gravesites over the years.

As for the vault: My sense of what that might be is pretty vague. I came up here to see whether it lives up to my Gothic imagination, and to introduce myself to the gravediggers, who know their way around this cemetery better than I do.

This red dirt: It seems disrespectful, and even profane, to refer to it as "spoils." When wet, it sticks to the shoe, and although it is always red it is distinctly redder after a deep rain. The exposed part of the ridge where I am standing wears red dirt like an old topcoat, or more aptly, like a fireman's dusty windbreaker.

Fire, however, was not a significant part of what shaped this long view I am relishing--unless one counts water-silenced lava extrusions, sending undulant shock waves throughout the warm Eocene seas of some forty million years ago. These extrusions, although volcanic, were not emitted from great lava-spewing cones like Mount Etna, or, much closer to home, Mount St. Helen's, which, even in the 1980s, left ashen pyroclastic footprints over much of Washington. Instead, the volcanism that formed portions of this landscape came from molten basalts oozing through fissures and vents beneath a semi-tropical sea which quickly doused the fire.

As for ice: Cycles of glacial cold missed this place entirely. It is true that, just thousands of years ago, remnants of the ice-hurtling Missoula Floods managed to push broken ice and careening waters all the way into Oregon's Willamette Valley--the southern tip of which is just twenty miles north of here. To say that these floods were vast would be an understatement. It is estimated that at their height they carried icy waters three or four times the present day volume of all the rivers in the world.

Water is the mother of this landscape. An ancient extension of the open ocean once reached as far to the east as today's Cascade Range until it eventually receded, leaving the Pacific Ocean we know today. The seafloor exposed to chastening winds and rains gradually took on the familiar aspect of the hills and valleys spreading before me. The landscape's contours are still changing in ways imperceptible to my short span, but changing nevertheless, subtly altering this comfortably rumpled landscape with its melange of rough ridges and smooth-sided hills; its creek-coursed wetland swales knuckled with hummocks.

I am picking up a handful of red dirt, ruddy from a smidge of iron and millennia of oxygen. This dirt tells it all. Along with the tinge of minerals, I am holding sea sediments and the pulverized evidence of volcanism at work. And as I let go, feeling it spill through my fingers, this dirt testifies fathoms.

But if this truth concerning primordial waters seems a bit abstract, I can always go back to Fred Applegate's find of a decade ago. Just a few miles from here, he found a fossilized "seashell" atop his sheep hill. Yes, a seashell on top of a sheep hill. How fast can I say it?

When Fred died, the fossil was not among his effects, so we will never know whether the mollusk Anomia, Acila, Crassastella, or Solena was the decapod that made him shout, "Eureka!"

And now Fred is up here in the cemetery awaiting future geologic epochs, resting in red dirt.

I always bring a little of the cemetery home with me. I've just finished cleaning the rubber hobs of my "graveyard" shoes that are really meant to be gardened in and have wandered sock-footed into the kitchen where I've settled down at the table with a cup of peppermint tea. I'm thinking about the two brothers I just met: Jerry and Terry, the gravediggers.

They arrived driving a pair of gargantuan pickup trucks, emphatically changing the meditative quiet of the cemetery with the slamming of doors and a great deal of yelling as they tried to make themselves heard over engine roar. One truck carried a backhoe, the other a large rectangular object shrouded in black plastic and tied down with ropes.

Who was I expecting? Pockmarked, toothless fellows straight out of a Dickens novel? Or maybe I pictured narrow-faced, liquor-swigging gravediggers from a Bela Lugosi movie? I certainly was surprised to meet these pleasant, robust-looking men, both bearded, very well fed, indeed, but muscular and fit as they surely need to be in their line of work. Considering that they had work to do, they were quite talkative. As they took care of the business of unloading equipment near the site of Elsie Patton's grave, they took turns answering my questions.

A poet named Douglas Jerrold once referred to Jerry and Terry's vocation as "...the ugliest of trades..." Still, the brothers have apparently been happily digging graves for some eighteen years. Except for slack periods when, I gather, Death, thank God, takes a holiday, and the fact that the brothers must be perpetually "on call," they both claim to like the work.

I didn't ask them if they concurred with something else Jerrold wrote, "Now, if I were a gravedigger...there are some people I could work for with a great deal of enjoyment."

The brothers work exclusively in rural locales in cemeteries similar to ours. They are hired by small "mom-and-pop" funeral homes and don't go to big commercial cemeteries, many of which are owned by large corporations. "Those places have their own gravediggers, and they carry markers and headstones, flowers and everything else, right on the premises. They don't have much use for independents like us," Terry volunteered.

The brothers work in three adjacent Oregon counties and claim that they know how to reach each and every cemetery no matter how tucked away amidst hills and fields. Surprisingly, in this geographically large county (Douglas) sprawling over some five thousand square miles where the total population is only slightly more than 105,000, there are more than two hundred known cemeteries, many of which resemble ours. In Oregon, weighing in at only a measly 3.5 million--smaller than the city of Los Angeles--there are at least three thousand cemeteries.

I can only imagine how many tens of thousands of small and medium-sized rural cemeteries are scattered all over the United States. Strictly speaking, many of these cemeteries may no longer be found in rural areas since in much of North America, as in many parts of the world, cities and suburbs have surrounded graveyards of all sizes. What was a rural burying ground as recently as a decade ago may now be next to a Wal-Mart parking lot or even under it.

Because of later urbanization and what seemed an endless availability of open land until the latter part of the eighteenth century, U.S. cemeteries located in burgeoning metropolitan centers did not experience the overcrowding long prevalent in Europe and the British Isles. On both sides of the Atlantic the traditional location of burial grounds adjacent to churches was at the root of overcrowding. It began to occur to city officials, members of the medical community, and more enlightened citizenry in various parts of the world that it was time to remove cemeteries from urban centers, and away from the long arm of ecclesiastical authority.

Ironically, before the advent of Christianity, many societies, including those of the Greeks and Romans, declared it unlawful to bury the dead inside of city walls. It was the Church that brought cemeteries into urban settings, insisting that the dead be buried in churchyards. In England, and various parts of the continent, it was not unusual for a choirboy to find himself gagging as wind brought fumes through the choir loft's clerestory from the decomposing dead buried in an adjacent cemetery. Conditions were even more odious in old cathedrals, where cemeteries had been established literally underfoot. The church granted their most influential and well-to-do members the right to bury their dead in stone vaults located directly beneath the sanctuary floor. In warm weather, churchgoers swooned in their pews.

These unpleasant conditions were not limited to European churches, however, since American parishioners were also seated atop burials in various eighteenth-century churches located in the heart of cities. To have been a passerby, parishioner, or worse, a gravedigger, at New York's Trinity Church in 1822, for example, when officials demanded that the church burial ground immediately be covered with fifty-two huge casks of quicklime because of the offensive odors and danger to public health, is almost too terrible to contemplate.

Perhaps Jerry and Terry would have not answered the call to become buriers of the dead--the result of Terry reading an ad saying "Gravediggers Wanted" a few days after he'd dropped out of high school--if they had been forced to put up with the overcrowded conditions experienced by their historical counterparts.

In 1838, for example, there was a widely publicized English case in which two gravediggers died, "one as if struck by a cannonball." As the pair was working in the paupers' section of London's Aldgate Cemetery (where sometimes as many as eighteen paupers were buried in the same grave) an explosion occurred.

At the inquest, the reasons for the explosion were debated. Some blamed something called a "galvanic derangement," when galvanized energy fields were supposedly destroyed by the proximity of decomposing bodies. Others were certain the explosion was the result of a buildup of "carbonic acid gases" emitting from adjacent burials. It was widely believed that simply inhaling such gases directly could bring instant death.

That all graveyards were full of "miasmas"--toxic mists carrying poisonous effluvia from decaying bodies that supposedly polluted the atmosphere--was a near universal belief for thousands of years. Surely countless cinematic portrayals of mist-shrouded graveyards are vestiges of ancient fears that flourished in times when the nature of contagion was not scientifically understood.

The extent of overcrowding in many graveyards is exemplified by conditions in a nineteenth-century British cemetery of average size--roughly two hundred acres. St. Martin-in-the-Fields held at least sixty thousand bodies. Potential contagion, poisoning of ground water and other health hazards were obviously the result of too many corpses in too small a space.

I asked Jerry if he thought it was true that our cemetery of five acres, currently holding about fifteen hundred graves, had room for at least six hundred more burials--something my father told me that I have doubted.

"Oh yeah, easy!" Jerry told me. He also noted that in Oregon it is legal to bury a husband and wife in the same grave. "You got to plan it out, though," he added. "It means you've got to dig pretty deep when the first one goes so you can have room for another one later."

Despite the obvious overcrowding in European churchyards, church officials were not in favor of moving burial grounds to rural locales. For one thing, many clerics and sextons depended upon the income they received from the sale of plots and associated services on church property.

Church officials were also convinced that the dead would be forgotten if relegated to outlying areas; that corpses might be unsafe in times when grave robbing, on behalf of medical science, was a real problem. Equally distasteful was the fact that "pagan" civilizations such as the Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans had historically located their cemeteries on the outskirts of settlements. The word "cemetery," in fact, from the Greek koimao (to put to sleep)--was usually associated with secular burying grounds rather than consecrated religious ones. Clerics were rankled by the ideas of secularism generated during the Enlightenment; the suspect influence of romantic pantheism, and other intellectual explorations that were seen to undermine church authority.

Church objections were eventually eclipsed by health concerns in the late 1700s when various European metropolitan cemeteries were finally removed to outlying districts. Most notable was Pere Lachaise Cemetery, established on the outskirts of Paris. With its emphasis on Romantic Nature, and conscious design inspired by the ideas inherent in British "landscape architecture," Pere Lachaise would eventually influence American civic leaders who were attempting to address their own overcrowded burial grounds.

Americans put their own stamp on solutions to cemetery
overcrowding, however, by beginning what was known as the Rural Cemetery Movement. In 1831, the newly completed Mount Auburn Cemetery in Boston (now a national landmark) was consecrated by religious leaders as well as hailed by secular supporters, including horticulturists and medical authorities. America's premier Garden Cemetery, soon the principal model for many other nineteenth-century cemeteries in cities across the U.S., sought to emphasize the union of religious and secular concerns: "Eden--the first abode of the living," its founders proclaimed, "Mount Auburn--the last resting place of the dead." The Rural Cemetery Movement was launched; other major cities would soon follow Boston's lead with their own versions of garden cemeteries--among them Brooklyn (Green-Wood Cemetery) and Philadelphia (Laurel Hill).

Superficially, smaller cemeteries like our own would seem to bear little resemblance to places like Mount Auburn and Laurel Hill with their romantic accouterments of bridges and ponds, elaborate funerary statuary, and carefully landscaped "bosky dells." The roads of this little pioneer cemetery are loosely laid out on a geometric grid and do not contain the generous curves, the carefully planned meandering pathways, the deliberate scenic "surprises" designed to delight the eye so abundant in the garden cemeteries established in the mid-nineteenth century.

Still, many of America's graveyards, particularly those established in the first half of the nineteenth century, like this one, share something of the impulse that inspired the Rural Cemetery Movement. They are not located in churchyards and have been deliberately set on the outskirts of towns. Their founders, often fraternal orders that grew out of the forces of the European Enlightenment, have located these burial grounds on hilltops and ridges to make the most of "a beautiful prospect." These burying places are formally called cemeteries as if to define their secular and civic connections as opposed to strictly religious ones. Special trees and other plants, although not chosen by an expert landscaper with a "plan" in mind, have nevertheless been selected with care, often by the families who own plots, and bring heritage roses, lilacs, and special shrubs and trees frequently associated with carefully planned "garden cemeteries."

An early brochure extolling the then suburban comfort of Laurel Hill in Philadelphia promised a place "where the smitten heart might pour out its grief over the grave of a cherished one, secure from the idle gaze of heartless passersby, and where the mourner could rear a flower consecrated to the memory and hope." Similar attributes exist not only in our own cemetery, but in other country cemeteries all over the United States.

But back to Terry and Jerry who likely don't know anything about the Rural Cemetery Movement and probably could care less as they, and their backhoe, ply the back roads in Lane, Douglas, and northern Coos counties where their services are needed.

Jerry and Terry are responsible for digging graves, setting up the paraphernalia associated with today's graveside services, such as canopies, ground covering, and simulated brass railings.

They also sign death certificates after matching them with an identification tag on the coffin, the mate of which is also affixed to the toe of the corpse bearing the same number. This procedure is the result of an Oregon law passed during the 1980s in the aftermath of a nationally covered cemetery scandal. In a mortuary garage in Lincoln City, Oregon, a well-liked local mortician was found to be inter-mixing human remains that he buried in plastic bags or cardboard boxes and warehoused corpses he had been contracted to cremate.

His crimes against the living and the dead goaded lawmakers in several Western states into changing laws regarding interment. Earlier today, Jerry referred to this scandal as "that Lincoln City mess." Terry added, "It made us all look bad."

I would have difficulty hiring the brothers on my own since they are not listed under "grave digging" in the Yellow Pages. Grave digging is a still a vocation to be concealed. The average person considers not only the task itself, but he who undertakes it, distasteful, if not repugnant. The brothers advertise as a "vault" company. Seeing such a listing, most of us would picture a bank vault not a grave.

I gather that manufacturing vaults and liners provides Jerry and Terry with a nice supplemental income. Liners are concrete slabs several inches thick that are placed on the four sides and bottom of a grave. The casket is then lowered into this boxlike structure and a top is put into place.

Jerry and Terry's vaults are concrete cast in two-piece molds. Also designed to contain the casket, they are heavier and thicker than liners. The vault's principal selling point is the fact that it is so tightly sealed. It also is more expensive. The brothers would probably argue that in addition to taking more time to manufacture, vaults are more aesthetically pleasing. They spray paint their vaults in silver or copper colors.

Why not gold? I should have asked Jerry. Perhaps it would make the vault appear too imperial and ostentatious. Maybe gold spray paint just costs more. When the plastic shroud was removed and I saw that Elsie Patton's vault was copper colored, it just seemed silly--an attempt to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear.

Terry and Jerry asked me if this cemetery requires liners in graves. They pointed out several rectangular depressions where there are older graves.

"Now that's the kind of thing that happens when you don't have liners or vaults. The grave caves in," Terry said in a serious, almost admonishing tone of voice. He added that every grave should have a barrier between the coffin and the dirt.

For a moment I felt defensive then I rallied, saying, "But graves are in dirt to begin with. We deliberately bury people in dirt. We expect that they will be surrounded by earth. That's what it's all about."

"Well, you're forgetting the moisture damage to the casket which can be prevented," Terry said.

"For how long?" I asked him, feeling as though he were running a car wash and trying to get me to sign up for the most expensive full-car-wash-deal: the super deluxe, hand-rubbed, anti-moisture-seal-deal.

Terry shrugged. "I guess you could say, longer than it would otherwise. The wet really ruins things. It happens a lot faster without a liner or a vault, you know. And there is other stuff..." Terry added, screwing up his face a little as though the topic were distasteful even to a big man like himself.

Childhood's dark ditty came to mind: "The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out, the worms play pinochle on your snout."

"But liners don't stop anything," I wanted to say. "Or vaults either." Not in the long run. Dust to dust. Everything goes, eventually--though in the right conditions the bones themselves outlast other parts of the body.

I stopped myself because I realized there were some economic considerations underlying our discussion. The brothers manufactured liners and vaults, after all, in addition to installing them. Of course they thought liners and vaults were a good idea. I did ask them whether the "casket protection" they installed was required by law. They admitted it wasn't. Such things are left to the discretion of the cemetery.

I might have added that there is nothing in Oregon law that states human remains even need to be placed in a casket. If a cemetery wanted to use a biodegradable papier-mache coffin such as those patented by a pair of Australian women a few years ago, it would be perfectly legal as long as other rules regarding the disposal of the dead were obeyed.

"You should really think about requiring liners," Jerry advised. "People like knowing they are protecting their loved ones. It brings them peace of mind."

It's only been ten years or so since Terry and Jerry began using a backhoe. Grave digging by hand is laborious; they strain the same muscles those assigned to burying the dead have always strained since Neanderthal times. But if a cemetery prohibits use of heavy equipment, digging by hand is what they do.

Watching them, I could see that there is a certain amount of craft involved in the proper digging of a grave. I watched as pieces of plywood were carefully laid down so that the backhoe, and the truck hauling the concrete vault, would not leave tracks over adjacent plots. Jerry told me that when the ground is as hard as concrete they are obliged to use a jackhammer. Jackhammers can collapse liner roofs or vault lids on adjacent graves.

They tamped an iron rod into the earth, prodding until they struck a bordering liner, in order to be sure they were digging in the right place. They proceeded methodically, at an almost leisurely pace. If the prod hit something, Jerry said, they moved far enough away so as not to disturb the neighboring site regardless of what the cemetery sexton's grave markers indicated.

It takes the better part of a day to bury someone in the accustomed way: The site is prepared so that the "opening" of the grave, which is how the funeral industry euphemistically refers to grave digging, typically occurs on the morning of the funeral. "Closing" refers to the burial. Opening and closing: It sounds a bit like buying a home. As I think about it, buying and burying are only one letter apart, and I suppose that buying a grave plot is purchasing a home, in a sense--the final real-estate transaction.

If the weather predictions are good, or something else has come up in their personal lives, Jerry and Terry dig the grave the day before the funeral, as is the case today. It means they will need to make another trip down here tomorrow. Weekend funerals are more expensive, these days, but that is what the Patton family wanted.

I told Jerry and Terry I wanted to charge a fee of thirty dollars for driving to the cemetery, locating, and then flagging, the gravesite--something I do in all kinds of weather and sometimes at very short notice. They looked blank. Then I assured them that I would use the fee for cemetery maintenance.

Earlier on the telephone when I informed the man at the funeral home that from now on we would be charging a location or marking fee, I could hear him sneering. He said coldly, "Commercial cemeteries charge for marking graves, of course, but I thought you were not-for-profit." Then, he tried to shame me further, saying he would "let the family know that your cemetery has decided to charge a fee in addition to all their other funeral costs." He suggested I should bill the family directly.

I asked the brothers if they thought thirty dollars was unreasonable? After all, I must mark the grave so they can find it. After consulting my records, I drive up to the cemetery and, regardless of the weather, take care of the job.

I also told them the cemetery had recently doubled the price of individual plots from one hundred dollars each to two hundred dollars.

Terry considered his answer for a moment. "Instead of nickel-and-diming folks," he said, "why not raise your plot price to four hundred dollars?"

He added that small- to mid-sized commercial cemeteries in nearby towns charge from six hundred dollars to eight hundred dollars per plot. "And the bigger ones," he named a largish cemetery in the city south of here, "charge closer to one thousand dollars or fourteen hundred dollars if they are perpetual care, endowed cemeteries."

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