Of Graves, of Worms, and Epitaphs

Of Graves, ofWorms, and Epitaphs Dale Rigby No matter where. Of comfort no man speak! Let's talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs. —King Richard II I. One Halloween thirty years ago, I went trick-or-treatin' as Daniel Boone, cul-de-sacking down Cumberland Gap Court. Other lovestruck boys in the mid-1960s suburbs of Los Angeles were equaUy speUbound by Fess Parker's improbable television series about the mythic frontiersman, but I bet I had the only grandmother who giggled when her grandson proudly covered his pointy ears with a piece of roadkiU from Woolworth's department store. "Pumpkin," she debunked in a gentle chide, pronouncing each word in a steady saunter, "Daniel Boone would not have been caught dead in a coonskin cap." In this, the season ofmy fortieth year, finding myself sUding into middle age, and missing my maternal grandmother's presence more than I ever thought possible, I traipsed through the cemeteries of Missouri's Femme Osage tracking down the Utde-known history of Daniel Boone's roUing gravestone. "Cemeteries," I would learn, comes from the Greek word for "sleeping chambers," because they were considered temporary resting places during the wait for Judgment Day. I would eventuaUy discover some irony in this etymology, but there I'm way ahead ofthe journey. I no more knew my traipsing would lead me to the grave of tiny Angelina Hardin, or the ashes ofGrayce Hardy Burtt, than I knew, thirty years before, Daniel Boone wouldn't have been caught dead in a coonskin cap. I started, as is my custom—and my bane—from a book's remove. A legion of previous sextons have exhumed the Boone legend. Rousseauian noble 142 Dale Rigby143 savage? Land speculator? Jeffersonian yeoman farmer? Wife deserter? The Great Voluptuary in WiUiam Carlos WiUiams's famous attack on American Puritanism? What new epitaph could I carve for the bones ofDaniel Boone? During my travels, though, I gradually unearthed the suspicion that these necropsies eUded some salient detaüs. As befits a legend, I remember Fess Parker dwarfing even ex-footbaUer Rosy Grier in the television series (he didn't reaUy), but I would learn that Daniel Boone's frame, at his death, was only between 5'8" and 5?0" (nobody knows for sure). Instead ofriding Uke Shane into the sunset, Boone died febrüe and enmeshed in legal squabbles, terrifying neighbors near the end of his days with his habit of"taking many a nice nap" inside his coffin ofhand-picked black walnut. No doubt I'm too much the grandson ofa debunking, literal-minded grandmother, butWiUiam Carlos WiUiams's claim, that Boone "has since remained buried in a miscolored legend and left for rotten," is open to some small disputation. His bones, contrary toWiUiams's figuration and Boone's own wishes, most decidedly did not remain buried. Their disinterment is indisputable (if open to interpretation ). Even Boone's belated footstone got rousted from its sleeping chamber, though not before faUing over and cracking into bits and pieces, an ignominious image befitting a fractious history of exhumations and restorations. II. Some papers that were considered exemplary a quarter-century ago—papers in which students compare their grandmothers tol954 Fords ... or describe an event that changed their lives—are not part of the curriculum. —from a 1998 English Department's teaching philosophy I can't imagine my grandmother holding the reins of a 1954 Ford. Sure, she worked in the airplane factories ofWorldWar II, but her model was of nineteenth-century frontier vintage. Raised on a large Montana sheep ranch, she could braid a functional lasso out of horsehair, but she never did learn to drive an automobile. How could the chrome of a 1954 Ford compete with the gleam of her spurs against the Big Sky? Besides, Uke Daniel Boone, my grandmother, given her druthers, would naysay aU essayistic exhumations. I can hear her now, cantankerous and nononsense . "Don't go dressing me up in any ofyour coonskin tales," she'd snort. But ifdiere is one thing I learned after a season tracking down Daniel Boone's rolling gravestone, it's that the dead don't necessarily get their druthers. 144Fourth Genre...