Short Stories

My 85 year old father was asked the question, "From your travels during WWII what is the prettiest place you've ever seen?"  Below (in my words) is basically his answer...

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As you can tell family is precious to me.  Read below and find out why.

"145 year old Photograph"

On Memorial Day I woke up with an idea.
 
On the wall just as you walk into the front door of our house in Tulsa, OK is a 145 year old photograph hanging in a conglomerate of special pictures that are haphazardly arranged and do not match at all. The photograph, as well as some of the other pictures hanging there, is not the original but rather a first or second-generation copy. It is not beautiful and is not in a very special frame, and if you did not know the story behind it you would think it, as well as the other pictures surrounding it, were out of place.
 
I grew up in the middle of New Mexico, graduating from the same town of 750 that I was born in. I was the third or fourth generation of McMath's that lived in the same county in which more than one set of great-grandparents had homesteaded. McMath's have been involved in leadership in that county for many generations. My father was the Sheriff, my Uncle was on the school board, my Grandfather worked with the WPA, and on and on -  today the sixth generation of McMath's are going through the school system. The McMath name is known as coming from that county, as is the case with many family names in many rural counties across the nation. Even though I have been gone for over 25 years I can still go back to, or meet someone from, that same county and be instantly recognized and accepted just by saying my last name. I have been represented well by all those generations of McMath's. I should hope to do the same for them.
 
The McMath's were a southern family, as I discovered when I married my wife and realized that her family had never drank ice-tea. Her ancestors had migrated across the northern part of the United States. At every meal we southerners drank ice-tea, usually made in a gallon jar on the front porch in the sun. Southerners drank ice-tea. Northerners drank milk. That's just the way it was! Now that I look back on it, I wonder if that wasn't the problem all along? If we could have just shared a drink or two together maybe things would have been differently.
 
I had a great-great-great-great-grandfather, W.H. McMath, who was born, married, and had children in Greenpond, Alabama. When the Civil War came along he and his son, W.P., who was my great-great-great-grandfather, went off to fight in the war. When they returned everything was gone: home, barn, fields, wife, children, brothers and sisters, all of it gone. Apparently devastated, they moved west. W.H. Married a widow from Mississippi, W.P. married the widow's daughter, and the four of them relocated to Charleston, Arkansas. They made a new home, farmed, had more children, and eventually died right there in Charleston. I never knew where Charleston was, other than being in Franklin County, but now here it was Memorial Day and I had an idea. You see the 145-year-old photograph in my front room is of W.H. and his second wife Amelia. I grabbed a map and found Franklin county Arkansas. Sure enough, it was right across the Arkansas-Oklahoma boarder. Ft. Smith is the county seat, home of "Hanging Judge Parker" out of the Indian Territory days. The same time frame that W.H. and W.P. were living and dying in Charleston. Today was the day to return and see if anybody still recognized the McMath name in Franklin County. I woke up my two daughters, took the photograph off the wall and climbed into the Jeep with them and my wife, and we set out for Arkansas.
 
Charleston is just 16 miles the other side of Ft. Smith on Highway 20. I knew from the writing on the photograph, and conversations with my parents, that W.H. and Amelia were buried in a private cemetery just east of town. As I drove through Charleston I imagined them doing business on main street, coming in and out of the stores and climbing into the wagon to go home. My daughters looked on with intent as we wondered which old ran down wooden house, which by now were falling off of their crumbling foundations might have been theirs. We looked up and down the streets as we drove; looking for any sign of McMath "memorabilia" that showed that we belonged there. I would get out of the Jeep with the photograph in hand showing it to people, thinking, "I don't know. Maybe someone will recognize them, (145 years later)." Of course the picture stirred up a lot of interest, but no one recognized even the name.
 
After visiting two businesses, four farmhouses, and a call to the funeral parlor I found myself standing on the front porch of an old ran down shack. Inside lived a man who was so old and feeble that he could no longer get out of bed, but I was told that some of his children would be there to come to the door. It took several minutes but eventually a young lady in her mid twenties came to the door and as I told her what I was looking for she said, "sure, just go over that cattle guard and follow the road up the hill. You can't miss it!"
 
I said, "thank you," and as I turned to walk back to the Jeep she said, "It's pretty overgrown now that I don't keep it up anymore." To which I replied, "I'm sure it is," as I thought to myself, without any condemnation at all, "I'm sure she has never 'Kept it up.'"   I understood her statement to be only a general statement, just as you would say, "How do you do?" to a person walking down the street. Even though none of those buried on top of the hill are her relatives she still felt responsible. It was something that she needed to say out of respect for the dead, something that she heard her parents or grandparents say to different people who came by once a decade or so looking for the same thing. The cold reality was that the cemetery, and the people buried up there, had long been forgotten. One man in my search even told me that he had lived in Charleston for seventy-five years and never knew the cemetery was up there.
 
I climbed into the Jeep and as we drove over the cattle guard my youngest daughter said, "Make sure that you pick up your feet." The girls began to reminisce learning the need to do that from a rancher's wife in Colorado where we used to live. I thought to myself, "I learned the same thing growing up on a farm in New Mexico." I wonder where that idea came from?
 
As we drove up the hill and around a corner there stood the cemetery on top of the hill just like the young lady had said. The fence around it had a gate held shut with a bungee chord, to which I told the infamous joke about the fence being around the cemetery because people were dying to get in. Of course no one laughed.   The weeds had grown two to three feet tall with around 200 headstones popping out over the top scattered like cacti on the desert floor. It was obvious that no one had come by this cemetery in the recent past or even on that day, even though it was Memorial Day. As we walked through the weeds looking intently at the headstones I stopped to use my cell phone to call my mom, who was back in New Mexico. While I stood there telling her that I was standing in the middle of the cemetery my youngest daughter yelled, "Daddy I found it!" Sure enough, a headstone standing around four feet tall, shaped like you would picture the stones that the Ten Commandments were written on baring the names:
 
W. H. McMath          A. S. McMath
Born Dec 1820         Born Dec 1827             
Died Aug 1893         Died Nov 1895           
 
While we were in town searching for this spot my wife and children had purchased a couple of plastic flower arrangements. When I reached the headstone they were already placing flowers on a second headstone just to the west and north of W.H. and A.S. This headstone read:
 
W.P. McMath              Mary McMath
1846-1920                1850-1943

We stood around, talked, and admired the scenery for a few minutes and then went back to the Jeep to leave.
 
As we drove off my oldest daughter, who is 15, was looking at the photograph of W.H. and Amelia to which she said, "Daddy, I think I have his eyes." My youngest daughter, who is 11, asked if I thought they could see her placing the flowers on their graves and if they were happy that she did it. To which I responded that I was sure that they could look down and see her, and were very thankful that someone remembered them on that day. As I looked back at the cemetery one last time, noticing the weeds that had overgrown the long forgotten place I thought to myself, "Is this all it comes to? Do we just live and die just to be placed on a hill somewhere and eventually forgotten?" At that point I heard my youngest daughter say, "Today was great! I think I made a memory that will last the rest of my life."   And I heard a voice inside of me say, "That out there is not what it all amounts to. This that is happening in your car right now is what it all amounts to. Because they lived, you live. What they left behind is what you are responsible for. It is because of ancestors like W.H., Amelia, W.P. and Mary who lived, laughed, worked, and played, and eventually died that you have a chance to live, laugh, work, and play, and eventually die. Because they passed their heritage down to their children you have the right to pass it down to your children. The sounds you hear now are theirs!
 
Gene McMath
Memorial Day 2003