Some of them do not have fences. No signage, few trees, little to mark them out from the surrounding fields but close-cropped grass, a few clumps of artificial begonias, and granite. They sit right beside the highway, with little to shield the headstones from the steady wear of sun and wind or the scrutiny of bored, rubbernecking passersby like me.
The back roads of the rural Midwest give the attentive onlooker much to wonder about, but few features of the countryside summon curiosity like these sparse plots. Often no more than an acre in size, far from any evident town, their grass is short and the grounds are tidy: neat gravel paths, upright bouquets, clean headstones. They appear neither historic nor abandoned, just a little wearied, like most places in these American hinterlands.
Finding these cities of the dead on rural routes always surprises me. It is as if I crested a hill on the open plains to find myself without warning in the midst of a close-packed small town, with each of the residents outdoors and looking straight at me. Midwestern landscapes, dominated by industrial agriculture, can feel so devoid of story, of the texture built up by human lives. In contrast, these plots are thick with presence.
No doubt a local funeral home keeps such cemeteries on this side of abandonment. The mortician’s nephew comes out on the weekends to mow the lawn and rake up the gravel on the drive. At the same time, the bouquets and ribbons I see each time I pass such a cemetery testify to the presence of another kind of care, not professional, but familiar. I wonder whose labor that might reflect.
I spent time in one of these musty rural funeral homes, always with pink walls, when we buried my grandfather outside York, Nebraska. At the graveside, the mortician wept too; my grandfather had been her teacher. Huddled alongside the green awning, singing hymns with my family, I looked over the leaning wrought-iron fence of the cemetery and out onto a ripening field of corn.
I have been back to my grandfather’s plot only once since we buried him, to inter my grandmother, his wife. The weeping mortician presided again. As we ate the post-funereal potluck, friends of my grandparents told me how glad they were to see me. I felt the same. Yet I have seen few of them since.
Now, far from my grandparents’ resting place, one of these fenceless cemeteries wears its way to eternity near my home in southern Missouri. Once I saw a procession pulling into it, tiny American flags and a dozen Lincolns, Buicks, F-150s teetering between the highway and the headstones.
What I did not see, but wish that I had, was a young woman with the signs of travel on her. I hope that she was there, stepping from the road to the graveside with no fence to halt her, shaking off the dust of her new home city somewhere in another state. I hope that she will return.
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Matt Miller writes from near Reeds Spring, Missouri, where he is working with his family to reforest a small patch of Ozark hilltop with fruit trees.