There are loved ones in the glory

When my family arrived in Arkansas last summer one of the first things we all did was drive out to the cemetery to visit my father's grave. He's buried beneath a tree in Memorial Gardens Cemetery next to his mother Hazel and his brother Hollis, Jr. I hadn't been there since his funeral in 2009. I may have felt some guilt about that. I may have just wanted to start this journey here in Arkansas by stopping in on the resting places of these people as I set out to write their stories. To pay my respects, sure. But also to get their metaphysical blessing. We didn't bring any flowers with us. The children didn't have much patience for standing solemnly and reflecting on the life of their grandfather they never knew. They ran around, climbed on benches and walls and even markers, threw rocks, bickered at one another. I tried to think about what I was supposed to be thinking about. The whole ordeal lasted for maybe a few minutes before we were back in the car headed down the road for home.

Tonight is my final night here in Hot Springs. One of the last things I did as I prepared to move back to New York and started working my way down my Arkansas bucket list was take a drive out to Malvern to find the grave of the other part of this project of mine - Hollis Hill, my own grandfather I never knew. My father had never taken me to see it. He never spoke much of him or his side of the family, except to tell me how he died. One time he even took me out to the place where it happened. I was maybe seven years old when he did that. I remember thinking at the time that it was weird that he was telling me such a morbid story, showing me such a dark place.

I took Gus with me out to Malvern to the Rockport Cemetery where the Hills were buried. We didn't have a map of the place or anything. We only knew that Hollis and his momma and daddy were buried there somewhere. We weren't prepared for how big the place would be, and we didn't budget our time well. We stomped around that graveyard for so long I started to worry it might get dark on us. Gus and I tried to see who could find the oldest headstone. They went all the way back to the Civil War. Some of the markers were enormous. Tall monuments as big as a public monument but erected by some arrogant former colonel or just some rich cattle man who felt big in life and wanted the same in death. Some of the markers were just pieces of rock, the etchings so old they barely registered on the surface anymore and were now illegible.

Gus was the one who found him. He recognized his own name on the tombstone. He called me over to show me. Sure as shit, he'd found Hollis Hill in the middle of Malvern, his final resting place so near the road he'd likely been accidentally driven over time and time again. Next to Hollis was Richard and Bessie Mae, his parents, my great grandparents, and Gus's great great grandparents. The elation of finally finding our scavenger hunt prize wore off pretty quick, and Gus wanted to know what we were going to do next. So I told him the story of his great grandfather for some reason. And the whole way back from Malvern he asked me a million questions about why people would drink something that makes them sick. Or why someone might take their own life. And I understood then how my father could have told me such a morbid story at such a young age. I just couldn't understand why I had gone and done it, too.

Tomorrow we leave Hot Springs for good. We're hooking up the UHaul trailer and driving back to New York. It's been an incredible year. A strange year. A good year. I feel my family is better having spent this year in Hot Springs. I feel myself changed from when we arrived. I feel grateful for the opportunity to come home, and grateful that my home welcomed me and my family back here as if it were as much our place as anyone's.

And it is home. It will always be home. But it didn't always feel like it this year. It's funny, but this coming year will be the first year where I will have lived outside of Arkansas longer than I ever lived in it. And I was shocked all this year by how much my hometown has changed since I've been away. How different the people are. How many places have changed over or disappeared. How less comfortable I feel among my old haunts and dives. And how much I had simply forgotten - memories that slipped out of my mind and into nothing and never. Forever.

So much of this book I wrote while I was here came from the memories of others. I wasn't alive for any of the events of it. I relied on other people's memories of events or, more likely, their memories of stories told to them by other people recalling their memories of those events. I heard from interview subjects time and time again "I wish I had asked my parents more questions." So much of the history of Hot Springs is buried in those graveyards with the dead. So many wonderful stories that were never told. Morbid and macabre or otherwise.

On the third Sunday in May my mother's family has a tradition. They all gather out in Montgomery County at a little bitty country church called Mt Tabor Community Church. And it's not just our family. It's the kin of everyone interred in that cemetery out behind the church. They come from all over. Baptist and Pentecostal alike. Country folks and city folks. They bring crock pots and casserole dishes and bowls of food and pitchers of sweet tea and spread it all out on tables out in the cemetery and folks eat and socialize while they clean up the graveyard and decorate the graves. Then they retire to the church to get out of the sun and sit a spell and listen to the choir sing hymns. They do this not just at Mt Tabor, but at most every rural church in Arkansas. Some call it Decoration Day. Some call it All Day Singing and Dinner on the Ground. Some call it Homecoming.

The tradition of Decoration Day followed the Appalachian people, who originally brought it to the U.S. from Scotland, as they migrated through the south and southwest. It's different than the Northern tradition of Decoration Day, which was a yearly event to honor war dead that eventually meshed with Memorial Day. The Southern Decoration Day was a day for isolated rural communities to come together. The focus was on the cemetery and the dead, but not solely. There was in that act of remembrance an attempt to tell the story of their family, to insure their history wasn't forgotten, to bond a community together in their shared relations and connections. The focus was on the dead, yes, but the day was for the living.

As a kid I remember feeling incredibly bored at Decoration. I'd eat my fill of fried catfish then catch lizards in the cemetery. I remember thinking each year that the little church's choir was getting older and older and smaller and smaller. Til one year there wasn't any choir anymore. And then there wasn't any fried catfish, either. As members of my mother's family grew older, moved to different cities or states, or passed on, their numbers at Decoration dwindled. And they weren't the only ones.

This year I took my family to Decoration at Mt Tabor. We met up with my great aunt Eutha and my mom and sister. The crowds I remembered were long gone. There were only a handful of folks. There were still tables of food, but not much, and it seemed you were only welcome to eat what you brung yourself. The choir was now silent. The church empty. But those of us who showed up did our part to decorate the graves. And the Lord did his part by blessing us with clear skies and sunshine in which to work.

My mother told us stories about how our ancestors donated the land to the church for the cemetery, and how anyone who wanted to be buried there could be buried free of charge. Eutha told Gus about how his great great great great grandmother was the first person buried there. She took him in search of her grave. They found it in a stretch of stones that dated back to Reconstruction, some of which were no more than jagged lumps of quartz or smooth and round hunks of slate. There were no massive monuments to self-important rich men at Mt Tabor. There were few markings of Freemasons or Confederate honors. There were only the humble and hardscrabble headstones of these simple mountain folks like Matilda Mitchell and Enoch Elijah Tallant, dead and in the ground as they had lived - unassuming and with little fanfare.

Until Decoration Day 2017, however, when Gus and Eutha stood over Matilda's grave and told her story with pride and reverence. Then wandered the rows of graves and heard the stories of many more. War deserters and rascals, working stiffs and preachers, farmers, mothers, children and babies. On Decoration Day they all loomed large. We honored them for the lives they had lived. We showed them gratitude for giving to us our own lives, our own families, our opportunity to make our own stories.

At my father's funeral some friends of his played some old hymns on an acoustic guitar during the service. One of the songs they sang was Will the Circle be Unbroken. It's a funeral standard. You've probably heard it if you've ever been to a funeral in the south. But even if you haven't you've probably heard one of the dozens of covers of it performed by everyone from Johnny Cash to Moby. It's a haunting song that recalls how much death is experienced by an entire family, and not just in the immediate grief, but even long after. Even by later generations. Even by those who never even knew them.

There are loved ones in the glory
Whose dear forms you often miss
When you close your earthly story
Will you join them in their bliss?

You can picture happy gatherings
Round the fireside long ago
And you think of tearful partings
When they left you here below

Will the circle be unbroken?
By and by, by and by
Is a better home awaiting
In the sky, in the sky?

One by one their seats were emptied
One by one they went away
Now the family is parted
Will it be complete one day?

By and by,

David

P.S.

It's true that by the time you read this, we will already have left Hot Springs. We are so sad to leave and feel such gratitude to the community of Hot Springs for the hospitality and kindness they showed us this past year. If you were someone there we knew and we didn't get a chance to say goodbye, I apologize. I'm known for pulling Irish goodbyes. Just know that we will miss all of you dearly and we will without a doubt be back again to visit, hopefully soon.

If you're worried that this means the end of Letter From Hot Springs, don't! I have a lot of stories from this past year still to write. I had to take a break from these letters while I finished the book, but hope to get more of these stories out to you over the summer, even though from here on out I'll be sending my Letter From Hot Springs from New York.

And as always if you like these letters, please subscribe with your email address. And if you already subscribe, please tell your friends about it.

Thank you again to Hot Springs, from myself and my whole family, for this past year. We will never forget it. Wherever we go, whatever we do, you will always be home.