Stones
© 2005

I stopped the car in the overgrown drive. Waist high weeds covered the unreadable rusted out sign. The churche’s roof had collapsed, the front door hanging half open, an invitation long ignored.

Another cemetery on a long list I’d downloaded from a genealogical search site. It was brutally hot, the sound of locusts filled the mid-afternoon air. Anyone with a lick of sense was sitting in front of an air conditioner.

I had no idea of the number of small cemeteries in rural eastern Oklahoma until I’d begun looking for my great-great-grandfather’s grave. I knew it was somewhere in the area, but not which one. Most early rural churches had their own cemetery, many now long abandoned. As the young adults moved to the city the elders had slowly gone to their reward, leaving fewer and fewer to care for the final resting places of ancestors dimly remembered, if remembered at all. Eventually the resting places of farming generations fell to the encroaching wild.

From the look of it I was the first to visit in quite a while. I managed to get a good look at most of the overgrown stones. No luck.

I saw the unusual granite pillar in the far corner, half covered be weeds. Curious I made my way through the johnson grass and bitterweed to see what it was. Keeping a close watch for copperheads or rattlers as I went. No use becoming the newest inhabitant.

The pillar was about five feet high, lichens and moss slowly eating away at the gray stone. ‘Dust to dust’ applies to even the hardest of rock.

Squinting to read the eroded inscriptions I managed to decrypt the engraving. Carved into the surface was a list of names, not overly long, maybe five or six on the side I could see. What little was visible of the other sides were covered with elaborate Victorian scroll work. It was a simple list, not much information, likely a hardscrabble farming family’s best attempt to honor fallen sons and fathers. In those times the mortuaries charged by the letter. Gravestones tended to read fairly short for the poorer denizens of these places..

The names were similar;

Alfred B Harmon CSA First Regiment, 1863

Cecil A Harmon CSA First Regiment, 1863

George C Harmon USA Seventh Calvary, 1863

Marvin F Harmon USA Seventh Calvary, 1863

Bradford H Harmon USA First Brigade, France,1917

Cecil D Harmon USA Second Regiment, France, 1917

Standing there in the overwhelming heat of the Oklahoma afternoon I thought about those names. Two names with Confederate army notation, two with Union, two from WW I. All with the same last name, and date of death the same year.

Was it the same battle? Did Alfred look down the sights of his rifle to see his brother or cousin? Was Cecil shocked to see his kinfolk’s face when he made that fatal bayonet thrust?

Perhaps, with a great deal of research, I might discover the stories behind those names. Then again, maybe not, in the greater scheme of things it would matter little, just a middle aged man feeding his curiosity.

But, there on that small stone obelisk was a microcosm of American history. Two in the Confederate Army, two marching under the Union banner. The shameful American family feud of the 19'th century condensed in four names.

I wondered about the other two, surely not sons of the first. Nephews? Grandsons? Another mystery I would let lie quietly.

Some shadows are best left alone, parts of our past should left to rest in the weedier parts of the Stone Gardens we plant and forget soon enough.

I left the stone there to the weeds, ticks and chiggers. That story was not mine to discover, maybe someone surnamed Harmon would come by someday to find the place where an sextet of their ancestry was remembered.

No, it was not my place to pry.

But, yet, I could wonder.................