The Marker
It was a tall thin, gray marker
tucked away in the front corner of the cemetery. It wasn't much
different from many of the grave markers in the oldest part of the
cemetery. But ever since he first saw it, he was drawn back to it.
Again and again he visited it
without any idea of why.
John Danzeg was a banker in the
small village of Hobart, just south of Lima Ohio. If you had asked
his neighbors to describe him they would have said he was a practical
man, not given to fanciful thinking. But there he was standing in a
cemetery, where not a single one of his relatives was buried, on a
Saturday morning looking at a grave marker he couldn't even read.
He watched the tufts of crabgrass
flutter in the breeze. He saw cracks forged by the freezing and
thawing of so many snows, the holes board by long dead beetles, and
he saw a glossy spider web engineered into the largest of the cracks
near the ground on its right side.
The
old man's hands were gnarled and stamped through with the evidence
of his hard life. Small nicks and scared peppered the spaces between
the wrinkles and the larger scars. He pushed and twisted the blade of
his pocket knife in an attempt to widen one of the letters he was
carving. The dull old blade slipped. As it ratcheted across the
weathered face of the hardwood it caught in a craves and snapped off,
cutting the old man's hand.
He didn't take any notice of
the wound or even wipe the blood away. It ran slowly down the heel of
his hand and dripped onto the ground.
The light was fading and soon the
dark it would force him to stop. He would sleep in the great room of
the log house, next to the fire. He would not bath nor undress, but
simply lie down on the straw mat and cover himself with his one
ragged wool blanket. In the morning return to his work.
At
first John had stopped to look at two large marble monuments that
stood just
inside the front gate. They had
been erected by a man named Ezra Wright for his wife and himself.
Tall and beautiful, each had a six-sided Georgia marble base that
held a column of red granite. Each showed the birth and death dates
of Ezra and his wife.
John had paused at them for only
a minute. On this Saturday it wasn't them that had brought him back
here, but this small undistinguished looking wooden marker, hidden
among the weeds at the back corner of the churchyard. He ran his
hands across the top, then its face. He felt the warn away ridges
that had once been letters and tried to make out with his touch what
he couldn't with his eyes.
The
old man woke early the next day. He was stiff and sore and getting up
was
difficult. He rekindled the fire
and fixed himself a pot of coffee and a slice of stale bread. He
looked down at his injured hand. He flexed his fingers and when he
was satisfied it worked well enough he finished the last of the
coffee and walked outside.
He sat down on a small
three-cornered stool near the doorway. He had made the
stool from a tree he had planted
behind the log house. He had come with him from Pennsylvania when he
brought his five children west after their mother died of the fever.
The tree lived only fifteen years
but it had grown well enough to yield sufficient wood for the stool,
for the table inside and a little more. It was a piece of it he now
carved. It had slowly air dried in the rafters above the fireplace
and it was stone hard. It had taken so much effort to fashion the
first short word that he wondered if he had enough strength left in
his old body to finish the job.
He ran a weary finger across the
carving. It was cut deep into the heart of the board. As he gazed at
it, its meaning cut just as deeply into his own heart.
John's
fingers traveled back and forth across the remains of what had been
the first word on the marker. It must have been important to whoever
carved it because, after so much wear, its remains were still faintly
visible. He could tell there had been six lines carved into the gray
wood. Each one had contained but a single word. The first letter of
the first word had been a "B". and the first letter in the second
line was still recognizable as a "J". He ran his fingers along
each word. There was a "z" in the third line and that word ended
in a "g".
Time and weather had erased so
much of the other letters they were unreadable. Even so he felt a
strange sense of familiarity with them.
The
summer sun was hot and had climbed high into the sky when, on the
tenth day, he finally finished his carving. The end of his work
brought only a dull ache to his soul. All the while the carving had
occupied his entire mind, but now the weight of what had happened
crushed his spirit. He dropped his knife. It disappeared into the
marigolds that grew near the porch.
He closed his eyes and leaned
back. His arms and back ached. There would be
plenty of time for digging the
grave, it would be so small. He would have this one last night with
the little one.
A breeze caused the candle to
flicker. Even though the child was long past hearing the story his
grandfather would tell, the old man would tell it anyway. He sat by
the fire, pulled the tiny cradle near and began. He looked down at
the small bundle and spoke in a whisper. He told it of the ocean
voyage he had taken to get to this country and of the hope he had
felt. He spoke of the beautiful girl he had met in New York, of their
marriage, and their five children. A far-off sadness clouded his
voice as he spoke of her death and of his move to the Ohio territory.
He told it how he had managed to
rear the children and how they had married and moved away. He told it
of its aunts and uncles and of the marriage of its mother and father.
There was a sadness to his voice as he told of its mother's death
the day it was born, and of its father's grief that had driven him
away.
In the end the old man's voice
trailed off and he stopped in mid-sentence. He sat
there by the cradle long after
the candle had burned down and the fire had gone out.
John
bent down and pulled the weeds and crabgrass away from the base of
the
marker. He grasped the top with
both hands and straightened it. Then he wedged several field stones
against the back to keep it straight. A car crept slowly by. He
watched it for a minute, dusted off his hands and walked to his car
to get the flowers.
As
the rays of the sun warmed his face the old man rose from his chair.
He carefully picked up the bundle and went outside. He pulled his
shovel from its resting place near the front door and stepped off the
porch. He walked slowly to the rise near the stump of the tree,
placed the bundle on it, and mechanically began digging. After he had
finished he returned for the last time to his log house. He turned
and whispered a last good-by to his beloved little John.
John
Danzeg laid the flowers on the grass in front of the marker. The
sight of the
flowers eased the sadness that
had overtaken him. Another day, even though he didn't know why, he
would bring more flowers. He thought that he might even plant some
there this Fall. Maybe marigolds. John had always liked marigolds.
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