Decoration Day will soon be here–just next month, in fact. Attending Decoration Day has been our family’s custom for many years–well, actually, I guess for more than a century. It is a celebration of those we’ve loved who have died before us. We go to the cemetery to place flowers on their graves, not because we think their spirits are still there in the ground, but to show our respect and to honor their lives. And to remember.
This annual gathering is also a good time to meet family and friends that I don’t see any other time. People come from many different towns and states. Caney is the place that brings us together.
A writer writes more authentically about things she knows and that’s why I incorporated a chapter on Decoration Day into Barbara’s and my first book, The Cemetery Club. In fact, it was one of my favorite chapters. Here are some excerpts from that chapter:
Decoration Day dawned as lovely and serene as only a May day in Oklahoma can. Goshen Cemetery basked beneath an early morning sun. Droplets of dew sparkled like emeralds and rubies on freshly cut grass. Birds sang in ancient cedars, undisturbed by the groups of people moving quietly over the cemetery with their bouquets of flowers.
Goshen still bore scars of that fierce storm that had roared through. A gaping hole and sawdust marked the place where the oak stood. The storage building had not yet been replaced.
Tradition was important to my family and I imagined how this cemetery scene might have looked eighty or a hundred years ago; women in long dresses and bonnets, men carrying their hats in their hands which respect demanded they remove from their heads. Instead of rows of cars outside the cemetery fence, teams of horses switched flies while they waited, hitched to family wagons.
The little stone building, the chapel at Goshen, held memories of the last time we were there, shivering from rain and shock. Who was the person who had gone out the back door as we came in that day? Was he here now in this group? Were we rubbing elbows with a murderer? Taking a deep breath, I sat down beside my mother in the second pew from the front, south side of the aisle.
A noise like the roar of an enraged bull interrupted Hiram. The young noodler from my grandmother’s acres jumped up beside Patricia. He almost over-turned his pew. “You all had better not go accusin’ my mother of doing anything wrong, Tom Bill, nor you either, Mis Prender. You all just shut your mouths!” Jasper reached over a pew, grabbed Tom Bill by the shirt collar, and drew back his fist.
A piercing scream echoed and re-echoed from the surrounding hills. The hairs on my arms stood up. What or who was that? When I was able to move, I sprinted toward the creek.
Anyway, this is part of the Decoration Day chapter. Something shocking happened that day and the reason for the piercing scream figures largely in complicating the plot and, at last, its resolution. I hope you enjoy reading The Cemetery Club as much as I’ve enjoyed writing it.
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