At Grandfather's Grave, Again

FEATURED AUTHOR—MEMOIR At Grandfather's Grave, Again Michael McFee What sort of anxious slow-motion dream is this? I'm walking away from a country church graveyard way out in the mountains: I'm carrying something very heavy in my black briefcase, but Idon't want anybody to know I've got it, so I'm trying to look like a guy justfinishing up a casual stroll among the departed, which is hard to do because thehidden weightI'm carrying makes me list to my left, and I'm afraid somebody is going to notice and shout, "Hey, what you got there?" This is no dream. I'm actually doing this. I'm stealing my grandfather's footstone. Back in my hometown Asheville on a hazy August day, I turn onto Leicester Highway, looking for the place where my dad's folks are buried. I'd visited these McFees a couple of times with my father many years ago, but couldn'tremember where the graves were; neither could any of my other living relatives. So I e-mailed the reference desk at PackMemorial Library, which—thanks to a thorough cemeterycensus— promptly placed them at a Baptist church out in northwest Buncombe County. Like most suburbankids, I didn'tcare muchfor calling onkin, quick or dead, in far-flung coves or in cemeteries. Iwasn't especiallyinterested in maintaining the family tree. That changed when I got older, particularly when I started writing poems based loosely on family characters and stories. Some of those turned up as "Imaginary Elegies" in my second book, Vanishing Acts, about which my dad accurately said, in the only commenthe ever made on my poetry: "Well, son, it just didn't happen that way." This year, with my fiftieth birthday looming bluely in the near distance, a mountain I must climb, it seems important to know exactly 15 where my grandfathers are buried. What triggers this ancestral urge is simple subtraction: flippingthroughfamily genealogies one day, looking at dates of birth and death, calculating ages, I realize for the first time that my grandfather Farmer—my mother's dad, a creative man whose four children all had strong but mostly-unfulfilled artistic impulses, especially the desire to write—died just after he turned fifty. It's time to pay him tribute while I can, and my granddaddy McFee as well. It's time for me—a gray-haired near-half-centenarian, in appearance and age increasingly grandparental—to make my pilgrimage. For the first four miles or so, Highway 63 is a typical multilane muddle, a jumble of trailers and fast food joints and flea markets and abandoned farms and used car lots; after that, it becomes more of a real country road, a couple of narrow lanes bordered by fields with baled hay, passing through or over Newfound Creek Watershed, Dix Creek, and Goughes Branch. Then: "Welcome to Leicester Community." And then, just over seven miles from where I turned off congested PattonAvenue in Asheville, there it is, at 2583 Leicester Highway, right after the little local P.O. and bridge over Newfound Creek: Newfound Baptist Church, its cemetery crowning a hill in front. I creep up the cracked asphalt drive looking for some shade to park in, on this hot Tuesday afternoon. There's no sign of life at the brick churchwith the trim white steeple; in fact, not a humanbeing is in sight anywhere out here in the valley, except for people speeding by in their air-conditioned cars. I look west across the road, toward Waynesville twenty-five miles away, where my maternal grandfather isburied inGreenHill Cemetery downtown. Its oldest loftiest sections enjoy overarching ancient shade trees and fine mountain views: the surf of tourist traffic on Walnut Street below seems very distant. —At least, I assume he's buried there, among other scattered members of his clan. Because there's no record of his interment, nor is there a stone of any kind to mark the final resting place of Howell R. Farmer, May 25, 1886-September 12, 1936. 16 "There could be several reasons for this," says the president of the Haywood County Genealogical Society, "but the death certificate provides one possible...