Belle’s Lost Boys
Jenna B. Morgan
A century ago, a woman gave birth to a baby boy who could have been my great uncle.
Eighteen months later, when she was three months pregnant, he died.
Charles Glennister Crigger
b. April 3, 1919
d. September 4, 1920
Six months after she buried her baby, that woman gave birth to a second son.
And eighteen months later, when she was pregnant yet again, he died too.
Iven Dean Crigger
b. March 6, 1921
d. August 26, 1922
There is not a person left in the world who knew them.
This ghost of their too-brief legacies remains: I wasn’t allowed so much as a butter knife until I was nine. But nobody can quite recall which almost-uncle was lost to illness and which bled out after a carving knife was left within his curious reach.
On November 26, 1922 a woman swamped by grief welcomed a third son into the world. When William Delbert Crigger was eighteen months old, she was four months pregnant again and unmoored by fear. The family still whispers: she was never quite right again.
But that third boy survived. He lived to see the births of his sister and four more siblings after her, the births of his own five children and twelve grandchildren.
***
A decade ago, I drove his pickup and Granddaddy rode shotgun. We followed Route 119 to Logan, Route 44 past Mountain View, Route 52 through Iaeger and Beartown.
At first, the roads wound wide and lazy. There were long hauls up steep grades and sloping downhill stretches punctuated by runaway truck ramps. As we got closer, the roads switchbacked tightly uphill and down, rarely a guardrail in sight.
Though I was born in the West Virginia hills, and visited family there every year of my life, I’d learned to drive in far-off, pancake-flat South Jersey. I kept my eyes on the next curve and my hands locked at ten and two.
Granddaddy was taking me to the old family graveyard down in McDowell County, West Virginia, a place I hadn’t even known existed. When I asked why, he said, “This is the thing that happens in this society. We’re going so fast, that people are buried, dead and buried, and nobody ever knows about it. I think it’s wrong but I don’t know what to do about it. Society’s moving too fast to try to remember, to go back.”
The final leg of our journey took us up an unthinkably narrow, deeply rutted, nearly vertical gravel road. I white-knuckled the steering wheel; Granddaddy laughed.
All the week before they buried his mother, he told me, it had been pouring like piss out of a bucket. The dirt tracks were washed out, and they didn’t think the hearse could make it up, so they loaded the coffin into the back of a pickup. The truck shimmied on the slick mud and damn near slid off the mountain more than once. What they wouldn’t have given back then for some gravel.
We stopped at each fork in the road, and Granddaddy stretched in his seat, looked one way and then the other, and gave half-certain directions. After a while he started to cuss the electric company, the gas company; they’d been up there cutting new roads damn it all. Trees that all looked the same crowded in. We dead ended at a gas well or two, passed the same tumbledown hunting shack, the same tattered No Trespassing sign three or four times. It took over an hour of backtracking to find our way to the top of Atwell Mountain.
For a few minutes we rode the ridge, the precariously narrow path barely wider than the truck, the hill sheering away just inches past the edges of the tires. I started to cuss myself, and if the vocabulary of a New Jersey teenager shocked my grandfather, he didn’t let on.
After a quarter mile or so, the road canted slightly downhill and widened. We pulled to a stop next to a rusted chain link fence and I peeled my hands from the steering wheel.
The only cemeteries I had known up to that point were manicured memorial parks: wide swaths of golf-course green, nice neat rows of identical polished headstones laid flush in the ground.
This place was not like that.
Where the grass grew at all, it was tall, weedy, and wild. The graves were humps of bare dirt. Some of the headstones stood plumb, some were prostrate, overcome by time and gravity.
Instead of neat rows, the only organizing logic was: where does the ground lie flat enough to take a body?
There were silk flowers everywhere. Not arrangements, just tiny individual bunches like you get at the dollar store. They were on every single grave, their plastic stems stuck straight down into the hard, dry dirt: garishly bright daisies, carnations, lilies, irises, daffodils.
Right alongside the bright blooms were bare spidery plastic stems bleached of color. The old petals had blown up toward the fence, and hundreds of pieces of grayed-out silk were caught in the rusted chain link, fluttering furiously in the wind.
The place felt more abandoned and untended than if it had been completely bare.
Granddaddy pointed out repeating surnames — Addair, Short, Mullins, Crigger, Muncy, Jones — and tried to explain the branches of the family. My great-great-great grandfather William Addair had owned all this land, he told me, the mountain sticking up in the middle of his acreage like a thumb. Eventually, the Shorts intermarried with the Addairs, and the Criggers with the Shorts. A handful of generations later, he was born on that mountain, lived in his grandparents’ house until he was six years old.
I asked if he’d been to many funerals there when he was a kid. He only remembered one, an aunt with typhoid who’d stayed quarantined in a separate house while the rest of the family crowded into another.
What he did remember was playing there, walking half a mile straight up from his grandparents’ front door into the green open space, into the sun.
I took pictures with a tiny digital camera, of the worn gravestones and faded, fluttering flowers.
I made my way to the back, where the graves stopped and the trees started and the hill fell away. The view was all horizon, the ridges receding endlessly.
When I went to look for him, I found Granddaddy pacing back and forth toward the front of the graveyard, walking slowly on the uneven ground and leaning heavily on his cane.
“I can’t find them,” he told me. “They were right here.”
What did he mean he couldn’t find them? He couldn’t find his own parents’ graves?
He moved away from me, bending and standing at each plot, cussing under his breath.
“They were right here! They moved the damn fence!”
Nobody moved the damn fence. It was older than I was with the rust to prove it. But how mad would he get if I said so? I ventured: “I’m sure they’re here somewhere…”
“They moved it! They moved the goddamned thing!” He leaned hard on his cane and gripped a fence post with his other hand; he yanked it toward him and pushed it away, loosening it in the rocky ground. Granddaddy had always been a big man; you could pass a quarter through his wedding ring. And even in his eighties, if he got good and mad enough, that fence didn’t stand a chance. He grunted with each pull and push. His face was turning red.
And I was flooded with panic. What if he had a heart attack up here? A stroke? Would my cell phone even work? How would I get him into the car? How would I find my way down the mountain? To the nearest hospital? I could not for the life of me remember any goddamn thing I learned in the fucking lifeguard CPR class I had just taken.
And then we found them.
The dormant viburnum bush had been a bundle of sticks barely the size of a basketball when my Uncle CD planted it, last time they’d been up he told me. Now it towered ten feet high in full bloom, exploding with fluffy snowballs as big around as cantaloupes.
It wasn’t planted on his parents’ graves, but adjacent to them, right between Glennister and Iven’s headstones. Their modest limestone rectangles were covered in lichen. The letters of their names were so smoothed by time that had we not already known them, we would hardly have been able to guess.
But the indelibly carved names of my great-grandparents were clearly visible on the granite headstones Granddaddy had paid for.
Mary Belle Short Crigger Charles Grant Crigger
b. November 1, 1898 b. March 16, 1892
d. January 20, 1989 d. July 19, 1992
In 1989, I was three and my mom was pregnant with my brother Grant. The roads were so bad that only the preacher and men enough to lower the casket went up. No sisters or daughters or granddaughters were there to watch Belle go into the ground.
In 1992, I was seven and Grant was nearly three and Mom was pregnant with my brother Jared. Gramps was buried next to his wife just three years after he lost her.
But Belle, she had waited a whole lifetime to be laid to rest next to her lost boys.
***
Just a year after he took me up there, we buried Granddaddy next to my Nannie in a neat and tidy memorial park near Charleston, West Virginia.
He was gone and I was left with the same inscrutable advice he’d given me my whole life: “remember who you are and where you come from.”
I was born in West Virginia, raised in New Jersey, and educated in Virginia. I live in Tennessee now, and even though I’ve set down some roots, I’m more certain than ever that I’m not from anywhere.
So who am I?
I am a woman who probably couldn’t even find the old family cemetery on a map.
A woman who is the eldest of three siblings who all survived.
A woman with two children of her own, both so young they only understand dead as it applies to the batteries in their favorite toys.
I imagine the short lives of those two other children and wonder if their names have faded completely from their headstones. I wonder if I am the last person who will ever imagine their mother’s pain.
I come from a faded-but-not-gone legacy: when she helps me cook, I make my daughter put her hands on top of her head as I chop vegetables. When I lay down any kitchen knife, I put it right up against the backsplash, as far from the counter-edge as it will go.
And I come from some indelible truths: I am the cherished granddaughter of the third-born son who survived. Who was also a brother and a husband and a father, a World War II medic, a family doctor decades in practice who sometimes took payment in chickens. Who had an antique cane with a saber inside he snuck through an airport just to see if he could, a snaggle-toothed dog whose farts could clear a room, a penchant for phrases like hotter than the gates of Hades and faster than Snyder’s hound.
When I asked him that day why he wanted to go up to the graveyard, he said: “I go up there once in a while... I don’t know why. You just need to go.”
I might not go, Granddaddy, but I promise I’ll remember.
Jenna B. Morgan’s nonfiction has recently appeared as part of Akashic Books’s Terrible Twosdays web series and her fiction has previously appeared in Wild Violet, Kestrel, Floodwall, and Soundings East. She has an MFA in Fiction from George Mason University and currently teaches at a community college outside Nashville, Tennessee. Find her on Twitter and Instagram @byjennabmorgan.