Memphis Blues Again: Book I, Chapter 5.

Copyright © 2012 Bob R Bogle



Behind him, high up in the crisp afternoon light, the red white and blue snapped smartly in a stiff breeze, its ribbons like rivers rippling over the wide land.  Though about seventy yards away, the flag's assertive popping and ruffling was easily heard where Max knelt on the green turf.

The air felt cold to him.  His throat was raw.  His hands were balled up in the pockets of his jacket with its collar turned up.  The black felt hat helped keep his head warm.

He lifted his eyes to peer eastward.  It seemed to him that the lawn had been stretched taut across the spongy, clayey soil underfoot.  The soft soil was unlike the compacted, sun burnt caliche of the desert Southwest.  That hardpan was so different from here.  A few hours in a plane and the whole world had shifted.  He was still trying to get his bearings.

No one else was here.  He was alone on this quest.  Flynn, yes, but no family.  No friends.  No one else to feel what he felt.

Numerous deciduous trees denuded of their leaves were scattered across the grounds.  They bore millions of brown fingering branchlets and twigs up against a sky turned a muzzy blueberry color from remote dapples of stratospheric frost.  Pools of last season's golden brown oak leaves lay damp on the surrounding hills. 

He knew what his friends said about him behind his back.  He's changed.  Lost his sense of humor.  The Max before and the Max after.

Friends.

The river must curl along down there not far away, he knew.  But it was not visible from where he squatted before one of the hundreds of white markers that were arrayed with perfect geometric precision in the groves of the dead.

Ghosts might have purposely guided me to this place.

He imagined the walls of an invisible maze shifting and moving across months, across years, to insure his tracks directed him here.  The long hours that preceded discovery of the grave's location flittered across his consciousness.  Digging through old documents.  Piles of papers, and trying to keep track of them all.  Order.  Eyes blurring over page after page of nearly illegible census records.  Reconstructing a long-extinguished human life.  Or reigniting it, like a snuffed out candle.  The weeks Flynn and he had lost down blind alleys, often expecting them to prove fruitless but determined to positively exclude false leads.  It was scrupulous work, up close and blinkered, while outside a forgotten and neglected world whirled along in the troubled present, well removed from his concern.

The ashes of uncounted hours lay behind him.  Genealogy.  It wasn't the sort of pastime you could explain away.  It wasn't a hobby, although others could see it no other way.  It was the discovery that the past is no less immediate than the present.  Neglected memories of white bleached bones.  Present and past are one.  You heard the faint hint of a Siren's song calling from far away, calling to something in the blood.  Once you heard it, once you could pick it out against the din, it became irresistible.  No use anyone bothering to call your name.  Those people of another century had determined who he was.  They had made the crazy world in which he found himself.  Could he owe something to them?

Maybe.

The new Max.  Fiction or nonfiction?  Nonfiction.  Sports or philosophy?  Philosophy.  The Dark Knight or Schindler's List?  Take a guess.

It doesn't matter what anyone says.  Things happen.  The person you are dies and a new person emerges.  But you can't tell them about it until it's happened to them, and then you don't have to.  Like Larry Darrell's transformation in The Razor's Edge.  The Bill Murray movie, not Maugham's lousy novel.  Tuned in by accident on the late-late show in college.  A jolt to the old Weltanschauung.

He was glad to have found this place.  He was glad to be here.  His heart was light.  He imagined he could feel it beating.

Happiness in a graveyard.  Try explaining that to them.

No one else was visiting the cemetery this afternoon.  He guessed no one came on many afternoons.  When places of mourning become museums.  Except for the breeze ruffling the flag at his back and the soughing of the trees, it would have been very quiet.  He felt strangely connected to all things, to the flag, to the unseen river flowing as it had flowed for centuries, to the brittle, fallen leaves that had endured less than a single year, to these rows and rows of voiceless headstones.  Especially he felt connected to the body that lay under a few feet of mud before him.

He lowered his eyes again to the marker.  He reached out with his fingertips, running them over the letters and numbers raised against the buff-discolored soapstone.

THOS. BAINBRIDGE, CO. I, 43 MO. INF.

Max thought of the body as a physical object, a desiccated and withered remnant cast aside by dispassionate time.  Whatever remained could hardly encompass more material substance than a few handfuls of wind-blown oak leaves.  A few pounds, maybe.  But human remains, even severely decayed scraps, were a significant physical fact.  This grave, near a river gliding along under fallen hills, held locked away tangible proof of a human being's passage.  Once upon a time a man had lived and breathed upon the earth.  Not half a mile away from where his body now lay interred he'd once been stuffed into a crowded steamer, leaving St Joseph behind, chugging forward to meet his fate.  Driving onward into unknown danger.  It was Heart of Darkness drama.  It didn't come through in old census records, maybe, but Old Tom too had possessed a beating heart within his chest.  Surely he had loved and hated and feared.  He had seen marvels and endured tedium.  He had been born, expelled naked past uterine walls; he had grown up in a childhood's bright and shining world; he had been touched by tragedy, wounded in love; he had lived and fathered and aged; he had experienced humiliation and solitude; he had suffered and he had died.

Flynn and he knew and understood Old Tom better than anyone else.  With the exception of Old Tom himself, and maybe the woman who had been his wife for a few years, Max believed he understood Old Tom better than anyone else ever had.

But that heart beats no more.  His bones are cold as the ground around them.  Does some other drum, Max wondered, beat for the dead?  Does a wraith of Old Tom watch me now, appreciating this improbable conjunction across the years?  Maybe looking down from up around the whipping flag.  The United States.  United.  That wasn't always a foregone conclusion.  Could Old Tom ever have had the faintest notion that one day his fourth great grandson would pay homage at his gravesite?  Impossible.

Sometimes life bites into your body and chews you up for a while before moving on to more lively prey.  It happened to Old Tom, too.  You'd be foolish to look for justice at a time like that.  Justice is just like any other human invention, like an iPod, or the barcode, or the zipper.  Or the Minié bullet.  Not a law of nature restoring balance for the benefit of overly sensitive human beings.  The law of the jungle rules the natural world with an iron fist.  Eat or be eaten, no warranty given or implied.  How can you reconcile that with a conscience?  A conscience is about as useful as an appendix or wisdom teeth.  Do what with it.  Forget it.  Rationalization is the preferred method for getting through the day.  Rationalization is reliable.  It's the most popular approach, and there's always strength in numbers.

Old Tom died in 1919.  How many decades separated them?  2010 minus 1919, hmm, the difference between 1919 and 1910 ‑‑ that's nine ‑‑ less than a hundred.  Ninety-one years.  That's right?  Yes, because 1910 would have been a century.  Twenty, forty, sixty, eighty. . . .four score and eleven years ago he died.  More time than separated Lincoln from Washington.  Bloodlines halved by spouses, and halved again, and again, and again.  In terms of genetics, after enough generations your ancestors are statistically indistinguishable from strangers.  Strangers share more commonality with you than you might think.

It was unclear to Max whether anyone from the Bainbridge family had visited this grave.  Ever.  He might be the first.  Perhaps Old Tom's son had; then again, perhaps not.  Old Tom had almost been erased from memory.

Max thought:  Never again.