by Julie Prince
My grandpa died when I was barely four. A million years ago. OK, well maybe just forty or so. He's buried in the little family plot behind O'Kelly's Chapel off North Carolina State Highway 751. If you pass the county line north into Durham, oops! You just missed it.
No family visit to Durham in my youth was complete without at least one visit out to O'Kelly's. On a sunny afternoon Grandma would pick some flowers from her garden. She was a vegetable gardener really, and a good one, but had all manner of wildflowers around the edges. She'd pack a picnic and we'd pile into Aunt Babs'—Dad's sister's—station wagon. Me, Dad, sometimes Mom, and most certainly Grandma.
It was fun, always. A visit to the cemetery can be fun, really. Granted, I was only a little thing, there could have been some sadness lurking, some tears secretly wiped away that I simply did not see. But it was always a happy vibe. Grandma would brush off Grandpa's flat, full-sized granite grave marker, and lay most of the flowers there. Dad would knock around with a rake to neaten up the pine needles. It was North Carolina, there were a lot of pine needles. I'd run between the gravestones and collect pine cones for the fire we'd build in Grandma's fireplace that evening, the fire that would have a heavenly smell and the occasional, pleasingly startling POP. We'd eat that delicious food—Grandma's fried chicken, country ham on her homemade biscuits, peaches from the neighboring orchard.
Right out there, with Grandpa.
Then I'd go back around, more slowly this time, filled with Grandma's good food, and wander through and read all the names. "Who's this? Who's that?" Names repeated all over — great, great great, and even great great great grandparents were there. The grandmas from generations ago with the maiden names and the married names on the markers. Wives, husbands, uncles, sisters-in-law.
Babies.
It was a great big puzzle for me to try to put together. Dad and Aunt Babs knew who was who pretty well, but Grandma ultimately knew best, and had anecdotes, to boot.
"Sarah Herndon, that was my daddy's aunt. She took care of my brother and me one entire winter when our mama had Scarlet Fever…Florence Dell Parrish, that was your grandpa's stepmother. She was only seventeen when she married your great-grandpa after he was widowed and she raised your grandpa and your Aunt Dora."
Everette Barbee. Grandma's grandma.
"Wow, that's old, Grandma!"
“Yes, that's from a long time ago, isn't it?” Grandma said. “She was a wonderful cook, my Grandma Everette. And when I was little, I used to come out here to the cemetery with her…the same way you're here with me today. She was very special to me, my Grandma Everette. I'll never forget her.”
We had the key to the little chapel, long since out of regular use by any church-going congregation. While Grandma distributed the rest of her flowers and Dad whacked some of the weeds that lined the chain-link fence, Aunt Babs and I would walk back up from the graveyard and around to the tall doors that faced the road. She'd fish the big old-fashinoned ironwork key out of her wicker bag, and it would take her a minute or two of working that key to get the doors to open.
I always felt like we were sneaking in, though I knew we weren't. We belonged there.
There were eight, maybe ten rows of pews. Babs and I would walk in, we'd sit down, and we'd embrace the simple silence. I'd stare out the stained glass windows. I was not a regular church-goer. I was a regular Sunday-school goer when I was really little, Mom insisted. But that was more of a social thing than a spiritual thing, and I hardly ever attended the Sunday services. It was church services for the adults, Sunday school for the kids, and coffee and cookies for everyone afterward.
So the hush of the nave, this empty nave, was most unusual to me. But it was modest, uncomplicated, anything but forbidding. After we sat for a while, I'd walk between the rows, up and down, back and forth. Babs didn't mind. I respected the chapel, didn't climb on the pews or run through indiscriminately. I just wandered all around and had a good look. Paged through the hymnals. Gazed upon the altar. Let it all wash over me.
Babs would get up and join me after a spell, and point out the hymms in the book she remembered singing as a child. We'd walk together and we'd pause at the organ, and Babs would open it, and play a little. She was good. “It's nice to know how to play an instrument, if even just a little bit,” said Babs. “It makes for a well-rounded person. Your father never practiced as much as I did,” she'd wink. Then she'd slide over and let me play. There were so many knobs with so many exotic names: Viola, Cremona, Clarabella. She'd pump the foot pedals that I couldn't reach, and let me press a few keys and we'd listen to the the big sound resonate in the little room.
Then we'd leave, Babs locking the door and dropping the key back into her wicker bag.
Years later I was grown, and living in Manhattan, when we heard Babs died. Mom and Dad and I had plans to visit Babs, who was recovering from a broken leg, a silly fall. Our flight was the next day when we received the call from her close friend and neighbor that Babs had died in her sleep. An aneurysm…a "ruptured berry aneurysm." I pictured a blackberry floating through her veins.
We traveled down on the flight with the reservations we already had, never dreaming that the tickets would be tickets to a funeral. Dad, stunned, worked his way through hasty plans. A service at the college where she was a beloved administrator was attended by hundreds.
Grandma had died some years before, also in her sleep, but more in her time. She was already at rest under a flat granite marker, next to Grandpa. Babs was laid next to them as we sat in folding chairs on that heavy August day. The preacher's name was Crate, I remember Dad telling me. Crate Somebody. He'd known him since childhood. Crate. Only in the south.
Soon Babs would have her own granite marker, a marker I wouldn't see until a couple of years later when I made my way down there again. I was pregnant, far along, with my first, a girl.
I couldn't even look at Babs or at Grandma for too long. I hadn't grown up with them in the ground, and coming back and seeing granite markers instead of Grandma with her wildflowers and her biscuits and her stories and Babs with her funny hat and her wicker bag and her ironwork key was too hard. The familiar ones were the ones who had been in the ground back when I was small, back when I ran around collecting pine cones, back when Dad whacked the weeds by the chain-link fence. The great grandmas, the aunts.
The babies.
I'd known Grandpa almost solely through my family's stories and the visits to his grave, when we stretched out by his granite marker and ate country ham on home made biscuits and peaches from the neighboring orchard. He called me to his grave and I sat down and rested. I needed to rest.
I knew him the least, really. But here, I knew him as well as I knew anybody in the world. It was a comfort. It was the right place to be. I tried to imagine his voice, his voice from so long ago.
I wished I could sit there all afternoon. The sun felt so good and it was so peaceful. But I couldn't stay long. I picked myself up and walked around and visited for the few minutes I had with my folks, the Parrishes, the Herndons, the Barbees, the Picketts.
Everette Barbee, farther in the back of the little churchyard than I remembered. Grandma's grandma. The one she pointed out to me because she was so special to her. The one with the unusual, eye-catching name. I imagined she carried that unique name with aplomb, and that it made her strong. Was it an unusual name, back then, for a girl?
I liked it.
What a perfect name for my baby girl.
I looked at that "e" at the end.
Everette. Everette. Everett? Everette?
Everett.
Let's change it, just a tiny bit, but in a big way, and make it my own, for my baby.
Everett. An interesting name, a unique name. But a real name, a solid name. A strong name for a strong kid. A name to live up to.
Everett Barbara. "Everett," in memory of the woman who so influenced one of the most influential women in my life, and "Barbara," for Babs, who carried the souls of the family past in her wicker bag.
I walked out and latched the gate behind me. I left quickly; there was no other way to do it. But I knew I'd be back one day, with my Everett.
We'll go down there, Everett and I. It's been this long, a much longer time than I ever expected to let pass before crossing back through that gate. I hope the grounds keeper still tends to it, the man my dad still writes a check to every month after all these many years. He's got to be ninety, that grounds keeper, and one has to have faith.
I'll show Everett that stone. And Grandpa's and Grandma's. And Babs'.
We'll walk around and I'll show her all the names and I'll try to remember how all those puzzle pieces fit together so I can tell her. I hope it's a nice day, because we'll have to stay outside.
I don't have the key to the chapel.