Nobody Knows Your Secret

45

Humpty Eldon was making his annual trip to his mother's grave. It was something he made himself do. Like cleaning his toilet once a week, whether it needed it or not. It wasn't that he hated his mother. To the contrary, Humpty and his mother had enjoyed a good relationship over the years.

But Humpty despised the thought of wandering around among all those dead people. Even six feet under and skeletons and dust, Humpty wasn't so sure that some element of living matter from the cosmos did not still linger over their last resting places. And he wasn't alone.

Beanie Fugate felt the same way. Of course, Beanie's perspective on things was a little this shy of vertical since his accident at the pulp mill, but still, Beanie wasn't a total idiot. He was wise in many ways, if you could read between the lines and figure out what Beanie meant, minus how he said things.

While weed-eating around the innumerable headstones, Beanie had time to mull over some of Life's toughest questions. If Milo Rex hadn't fallen into that well hole he was digging for Mozelle Novella, would his wife, Jettie, ever have found out that Mozelle and Milo had been carrying on a love affair that had lasted over 40 years?

Why did Oran Merton buy eight extra burial plots just so that his wife's kin would not lie within spitting distance of Oran and Delphine? 

This all occurred before 1927, as the Mertons and Delphine's family, the Clodfelters, were all interred in one of the cemetery's oldest sections. Beanie did not have the privilege of personally knowing Oran, Delphine, or any of the Clodfelters, but he wished he had.

Beanie would have given his eyeteeth, if he still had them, to ask Oran what the Clodfelters did to make him want to be isolated like that. Did Oran love Delphine so much that he wanted to keep her all to himself for eternity? Did Oran's feet stink so bad that he wanted to wall himself and Delphine away so none of her family would have to smell foot odor? Dead was forever, and that's a long time to be holed up in a tiny grave inside a rotting coffin with foot odor filling the nose holes of your skull.

These questions ate at Beanie as he took care of the quiet lodgers in MemorialGardens. The headstone markers were fantastic works of art to a man like Beanie Fugate who had never done much of anything except eat, sleep, and work hard his whole life. The inscribed messages on some of the stones were comical, tragic, sad, or simply indecipherable.

MemorialGardens was constructed during the times when many mountain folks buried their loved ones on their own land. Bucking tradition, the cemetery had, nevertheless, been quite successful because it offered its clientele perpetual maintenance and an ornate headstone at half the going rate within 250 miles.

Bargain basement prices on headstones that were large and intricate enticed many to chose the Gardens as their final resting place. There were urns in stone, trees in stone, life-size angels in stone, a cow, a cabin scene, a still – anything imaginable in stone could be found there. It was like having your own blank chalkboard to summarize whatever was important.

A person could leave a message behind for his loved ones, describe his life in stone letters, or babble about nothing. It could be in three dimensions or two. His message could be rendered on any creation the stone mason could model. 

It was totally up to the buyer what design the headstone held or what inscription was rendered on it. Scrape up the cash and get creative. That was the cemetery owner's philosophy. And many of the customers took him up on his offer.