A Thoughtful Drive

(This post garnered the “Best Writer” award at the 2021 Writers and Artists Night sponsored by the Hollister, Missouri, nonprofit State of the Ozarks. An expanded version was published in the Summer, 2019 issue of Lightnin’ Ridge Publications’ Journal of the Ozarks.)

Leaving U.S. Highway 65 at Leslie, Arkansas Highway 66 meanders through the Ozark hills toward Mountain View. It winds past communities whose dominant—or only—feature is a gas station or a tiny post office, alongside the occasional country church. Gently sloping from the north side of the highway, a half mile before the tiny hamlet that gives it its name, is the Alco Cemetery. It has been there for as long as I can remember. Judging from the gravestones marked “Arkansas Infantry, Confederate States of America,” it was there long before that. 

My earliest memories of Alco Cemetery are from the back of a pickup truck with Sis, or squeezed into the cab with Daddy if it was raining. We lived in a little white house a couple of miles down the dirt road off Highway 66, past the cemetery to the north. Most of my aunts and uncles, plus both grandpas, lived somewhere along or near Highway 66 or in Leslie, so we went back and forth a lot. As we passed the cemetery, grown-up conversation turned to last names like Clark, Richardson, Martin, or George, depending on which relative had most recently been laid to rest. 

I never knew Grandma Hazel Martin Richardson, but I could walk right to her grave. She died in her late twenties, her youngest child just two years old, the grave marked by a roughly lettered hand-cut stone. Some of the great-uncles and cousins rested under government-issued headstones from WWI and WWII. Aunt Lorene’s little baby boy had only lived one day. Mama seemed sad when she talked about them, but she said we’d all be together with Jesus someday. 

Mama was closer to that point than I knew. Daddy had left his job in a Kansas airplane factory to return to the little farm closer to family after Mama had an operation. She spent a lot of time resting, and on July 12, 1961, Mama passed away, one month after my fourth birthday. A few days later, I found myself standing at the east end of the cemetery with Daddy, Sis, and all the relatives, wearing my best pink dress while our Assembly of God pastor from Kansas spoke the funeral sermon. 

Ozarks tradition designated a special Saturday clean-up for individual cemeteries, followed by a Sunday decoration and dinner on the grounds. Each little community cemetery had its day, reserving Memorial Day for those who died serving their country. Preachers from surrounding country churches took turns giving the sermon. Alco Cemetery’s decoration was the second Sunday in July, just a few days before Mama died. Now big bunches of flowers on the fresh dirt of Mama’s grave, including her favorite pink roses, joined the fresh new flowers other families had brought to honor their departed. 

Daddy and Sis and I spent the next months in our little house, stopping regularly to visit Mama’s grave. Sis cried, but Daddy just stood with his hands on our shoulders for a few minutes before saying we needed to get on home and do the chores. 

That fall, an Assembly of God preacher named Brother Campbell decided rural Stone County needed a Pentecostal church. To jump-start things, he pitched a deer hunter’s tent in a small parking area near the main gravel parking lot of Alco Cemetery, so it could be seen from the highway, and held a week of revival meetings. 

Since Mama had liked Assembly of God churches, Daddy wanted to get involved and we went to the revival every night. One night it was raining. The sides of the tent were rolled up, and the rain ran down the pitched tent roof to collect in the rolls and folds. During the long, loud sermon, I watched as one of those rolls became fatter and fatter, like a sausage. 

Finally, the sermon ended. Somebody started playing the accordion, and Daddy went forward to pray at the wooden altar bench. He told me to sit still and wait for him, but the temptation was just too much for a bored four-year-old. Spying a stick lying nearby, I slipped over and got it and poked that nice fat roll of canvas. The sausage collapsed as water shifted and poured down, right on some people standing near the tent pole. A lady screamed as the cold fall rain gushed down her dress, and a man jumped and yelled. I, of course, dropped the stick and hid behind a big suitcase full of songbooks. I guess the people up front thought the Holy Spirit had fallen on the back row, because they kept right on praying. And I guess at that point I realized there must be a God in heaven who cared about me, because the angry lady didn’t see who had caused the trouble, and Daddy never found out. 

The church moved into a new concrete block building, and there weren’t any more tent revivals that I can remember, but to this day I can’t help smiling as I drive by the spot where that tent was pitched. I laugh out loud if it happens to be raining. 

Over the years, the cemetery gathered more special reminders. When Grandpa Richardson died, the family chipped in for a nice new double headstone and moved Grandma Hazel’s old one to the foot. Daddy married Mama’s youngest sister who had lost a significant other in WWII. We moved back to Kansas and his factory job, but I was always glad when Daddy’s vacation coincided with Decoration Day. I liked to wander among the stones thinking about relatives I had barely known or only heard about. The oak tree where we gathered for the sermon and dinner grew huge and spreading, moss growing on the rough benches built underneath. 

Two of Mama’s sisters joined her in the east end of the cemetery. Later, an eighteen-year-old cousin’s grave became a tragic reminder of the responsibility of having a driver’s license. Another cousin’s wife left us far too soon, my first encounter with the impact of clinical depression and anxiety. 

As the years have slipped by, Decoration Day has become sparsely attended, and it’s harder to get anyone to clean and mow. The memories of the older graves have grown distant, fading like the flowers and crowded out by busy lifestyles even as weeds choke the morning glories along the fence rows. Around Memorial Day, new flowers show up on the more recent graves. Like me, people have good intentions but also jobs and health challenges of our own. 

So we go on, chatting occasionally on social media and making our contributions to the cemetery maintenance fund instead of gathering to do it ourselves. Thanks to modern technology and a cousin who tackled cleaning and photographing some of the oldest gravestones, it’s possible to browse historical websites if someone is curious about a name or date. 

But inevitably, we gather for the funeral service of another family member and Alco Cemetery once again brings us together. My stepmother has joined her sisters in the family plot, carefully leaving space for Daddy in between her and Mama. Daddy, the last living uncle on both sides, is no longer physically able to attend. Standing among our dwindling number, we express our intentions to plan a get-together before another funeral does it for us. We share pictures of kids and grandkids who couldn’t make it to the service, and as the grave is closed, we wander off to reminisce once more over the inscriptions on the surrounding stones.

Occasionally I travel over that way to see a cousin or go to a special event. I always slow down, or actually stop awhile if I possibly can, because Alco Cemetery is the perfect pause to reflect. I think about all the folks waiting for me in heaven, and I resolve to do the best I can with the time, however much or little, I have left. 

The author with her father and sister, July 15, 1961, Alco Cemetery