Idyll Banter (2003)

by Chris Bohjalian

  The holiday is still called "Decoration Day" here by the elderly who can remember grandfathers and great-grandfathers who helped quash what Memorial Day founder General John Logan termed the "rebellion." It has metamorphosed into an opportunity to honor all the grandparents and parents and uncles and aunts who have come before us. It doesn't seem to matter whether they served the country as warriors or served the community by plowing the roads in winter.

  The kids, more times than not, simply place the dandelions atop the graves of the names they know. And while Decoration Day may have been proposed by a general, it seems appropriate that the long-dormant tradition of visiting the cemetery in Lincoln was resurrected sixteen years ago by Phoebe Barash, a school principal who spent her adolescence at a Quaker boarding school in Pennsylvania and rallied against the Vietnam War while at Wheelock College, in Boston.

  A century ago, it wasn't uncommon for Vermont schoolchildren to be taken to the village cemetery to decorate the headstones of veterans with flowers and flags. Dorothy Canfield Fisher, a Vermont author and one of the first members of the Book-of-the-Month Club selection committee, observed the ritual in "Memorial Day," a short story she wrote just before the Second World War:

  Flags lay flat on the wreaths of flowers held by the little country boys who filled the car to the brim. When it stopped at the gate of the cemetery, the little boys spilled themselves out. Like the grass and trees and other growing things, they were quivering and glistening with vitality. Their small bodies were clad in their Sunday clothes, their hair was smoothly brushed back from their round, well-soaped faces. Everyone wore a necktie. Everyone carried on his arm a wreath to decorate a soldier's grave.

  The irony of Fisher's tale is that while it's clear the author appreciated the pomp attending the cemetery visit, the story offers a decidedly antiwar message. As the boys fantasize about the heroism of the men beneath the ground, glamorizing their deaths, the ghosts of the dead soldiers are screaming silently for them to go away, wishing desperately that the living could hear them. The presence of the children has awakened them from their sleep, and once more they are feeling the bullets and bayonets that killed them.

  Barash--like Fisher, like me--once had a decidedly love-hate relationship with the holiday. On the one hand, Barash recalls, when she decided to resurrect the tradition in Lincoln, she wanted to be sure that she wasn't deifying battle; on the other hand, she wanted the kids in her charge to have a sense of history. "Children who went to elementary school in the 1970s missed out on the part of our heritage we call patriotism," Barash explains, "and so bringing back the visit to the cemetery was a way to give them a taste of it. It was an opportunity to honor people who've come before us."

  No one is sure exactly why or when the Lincoln school stopped decorating the graves on Memorial Day. In all likelihood, it was simply logistics: Today, Lincoln has a single large, centrally located school, but at one point, the 1,063-person community had five tiny ones spread out among 26,000 acres of dairy farms, woods, and dirt roads. Pure and simple, most of those schools were too far away to have the children walk to the graveyard.

  Might other Vermont communities have given up on the ritual for a similar reason? Perhaps. Some may have grown too large for the practice, while others may have grown too small. In some towns, the fathers and mothers and teachers who would have had to coordinate the tradition may have grown indifferent once the last surviving Civil War veterans died.

  Or maybe the tradition simply faded when the adults discovered they could have a parade instead. Parades, after all, are considerably less morbid than a visit to a graveyard, especially if you muster the local firefighters in their trucks and put a few aged veterans in convertibles.

  Today, as many as a quarter of Vermont's 251 towns may have a Memorial Day ceremony or parade, but no more than a handful have an organized school visit to the cemetery.

  Clearly, however, the Lincoln children do not find their excursion to the cemetery frightening. Nor do they find the rite hollow. Alice Leeds, a fifth- and sixth-grade teacher at the school, has noticed that once the children have found their share of G.A.R. stars and American flags, they begin what is for them the real work at hand: They visit their family plots. Sometimes that means running their fingers over the name of a distant aunt or a grandfather they barely knew. But sometimes it means something more.

  In the case of Rebecca Wedge, now fourteen, it meant visiting the spot where her father was buried. Leeds will always remember the way Wedge's friends had wrapped their arms around the young girl as they approached the grave site. Likewise, Leeds will never forget the way Matthew Miller's friends had stood like an honor guard before Matt's father's plot. "It's more about ancestry than warfare," Leeds says of the school's tradition. "For the kids, it's one more way of discovering their connection to their community."

  Building contractor Terry Farr and his dog, a golden retriever that he calls The Boss, will wander up and down the rows of Lincoln's Maple Cemetery this Saturday, looking for veterans' graves. Whenever Terry finds one, he will stick a small nylon flag into the ground beside the tombstone.

  Farr, forty, is a member of the Sons of the American Legion, a group that includes anyone who is not himself a veteran but is a direct descendant of one. (Farr's grandfather fought in the First World War.) The Bristol Post of the Sons of the American Legion takes responsibility for decorating the cemeteries for Memorial Day in Bristol and the surrounding communities, which includes Lincoln.

  It will take Farr a little more than two hours to comb the Lincoln cemetery. Altogether, he will find the graves of close to 150 veterans, including 101 from the Civil War. But he will also find five from the Revolutionary War, two of whose names still resonate in Lincoln: Briggs (on a hill) and Burnham (on the town hall). There are veterans in the cemetery who fought in the War of 1812, the First and Second World Wars, the Korean War, and in Southeast Asia.

  Douglas Gordon Orvis, a first lieutenant in an air cavalry division, was twenty-six when the patrol he was leading in July 1968 was ambushed in Vietnam, and he was killed. His marker is one of the most visited in the cemetery, because engraved on a plaque on a rock beside it is part of a letter he penned when he was only twenty-one: "There is something infinitely strong in a mountain. If only a man could mold and nourish something of it within himself." From his plot, there is a magnificent view of Mount Abraham, the giant toppled peach of a mountain that towers over the village of Lincoln.

  What seems to matter to the children, however, is less the notion that Douglas Orvis may have been a hero than the fact that he was an Orvis--a common name in the town and a link between the present and the past. Once I listened to a group of older elementary school kids as they stood by his plot, and the focus of their conversation was not upon the war but upon his family. Everyone knew someone who was related to Douglas.

  Once the children have had a chance to roam the cemetery, they gather near the flagpole west of the entrance, where a member of the Bristol band plays taps on a cornet and the Rev. David Wood, the pastor of the local church, speaks briefly about the meaning of the holiday.

  For him, Wood says, the meaning of the day has changed over the years. While there will always be a certain wistfulness to any genuine Memorial Day commemoration, Wood believes that "the holiday is as much about life as it is about death. It's a way of celebrating the life of anyone who has come before us, regardless of whether they were in the military."

  Indeed, on a morning at the very end of May, when the sun is high and the sky is cerulean--when the grass is neon green and the dandelions are brighter than lemons--one can't help but look to the future with hope. This may be a holiday that began with the request that we stand beside graves and remember the dead, but when those graves are surrounded by children, it's impossible not to focus on the living as well, and to leave the cemetery with a smile.

  Chapter 2.

  A PASSING OF HISTORY AND HOSPITALITY

  THE FLOWERS WERE yellow and white
along the southern tip of Marshall Hutchins's casket (lilies and daisies), and pink and blue toward the north (delphinia, larkspur, and roses). This wasn't the result of anyone's design or chosen aesthetic, it was simply the way the flowers had arrived.

  Marshall's funeral began just after lunch on an overcast Monday toward the end of September, but the clouds were drifting east throughout the service. By the time the choir stood to sing "How Great Thou Art" toward the end, sunlight was sluicing through the thin tunnels of stained glass along the sanctuary wall: forty-five-degree angles of light, each an ethereal buttress that seemed to support the structure, but was, in reality, sustaining Marshall's family and friends.

  Marshall Hutchins was seventy-eight when he died, and we were only acquaintances. To imply we were more would be unfair to his memory.

  But the paths of our lives crossed once, and they met at the clearing in which I now sit. And type. And remember.

  I am writing in the room that was the bedroom Marshall shared with his wife, Louise. A room away--across an entry hall and a stairway--my daughter's troll house rests on the spot where Marshall's easy chair once sat.

  Upstairs, I hear my wife at work in the room in which I discovered my two favorite antique newspaper clippings. One marks the perfect game that New York Yankees pitcher Don Larsen hurled in the 1956 World Series (an achievement that is remarkable not because it was in the World Series, but because Larsen was an unremarkable pitcher at best). The other is a front page story from the newspaper describing the incredible possibility that Montpelier and Burlington might someday be linked by a four-lane "super highway."

  Those newspapers were laid on the floor underneath a linoleum rug that Marshall--perhaps Marshall and his then young son, Roy, or Marshall and his brother Martyn--had laid.

  I live in the yellow house in Lincoln that for almost four decades belonged to Marshall and Louise. I've lived here ten years now (ten years, in fact, this month), but to this day when I meet elderly people for the first time in the nearby supermarket, they are likely to nod and say, "Oh, yes. You live in Marshall's house, don't you?"

  I do indeed, and I am glad. Marshall and I first met in the summer of 1986. I was a young, presumptuous New Yorker in a gray suit. He was an older, wiser retired state legislator, selectperson, and volunteer firefighter.

  Marshall was not the sort who would ever have pointed out to me the tremendous amount that--to paraphrase Disney's Pocahontas--I didn't even know I didn't know.

  Instead, when it was clear that my wife and I were buying his house, he phoned the cubbyhole I was renting in Burlington one September evening and asked, "You lived in New York, right?"

  "Right."

  He then extended to me one of the most important invitations I've ever received in my life: "Want to come down here Saturday? Have a glass of cider and some doughnuts? This house runs pretty good, but there are a few things I can show you."

  I don't know if my wife and I would have survived our first winter here without that autumn Saturday. I still have the yellow legal pad filled with my notes about the furnace and the kitchen heater, the water tank and the fuse box. I still have memories of those doughnuts, my first in the fall in Vermont.

  And I still have--and will probably have always--the sense, thanks to Marshall, that houses have histories. Sharing his with me was not merely a pro forma part of the process of selling a house.

  It was a ritual of transition. A gesture of hospitality. It was his way of welcoming me to Lincoln.

  Chapter 3.

  AN ELEGY FOR THE STATE'S FINEST RED SOX FAN

  VERMONT'S--PERHAPS New England's--greatest Red Sox fan died the other day.

  He died at the age of eighty-one, as peacefully as anyone can who has watched an endless litany of pennants and titles and world championships slip away.

  His name was Ken Hallock, a farmer from Waltham who lived the last fifteen years of his life up in Lincoln. He was certainly not the most famous Red Sox supporter, nor was he the most articulate when it came to that special, heartbreaking kind of masochism that links the fans to the team. You won't, for example, find his poems about Fenway Park in collections with Donald Hall, nor will you find his essays about the game reprinted with those of Bart Giamatti or George Will.

  But he was aware without question that to root for the Red Sox--to root with knowledge and passion and patience--is to root as an act of faith. It is to love people who you know will disappoint you, but to forgive them and to love them just the same.

  It is to know people are human.

  I met Ken Hallock when I sat behind him in church. My wife and I had arrived in Lincoln only three days earlier, and she steered us to the pew behind the "nice older couple" who had brought her a Christmas cactus our first day in town. He spoke to me at the end of the service, after the minister had given the benediction. Taking my hand and shaking it vigorously, he exclaimed, "God loves you, and so do I!"

  The jaded New Yorker in me said--for lack of anything better--"Thank you." But I was nonetheless touched and flattered to be accepted without judgment by both him and his God.

  When I learned from Mr. Hallock that he was a Red Sox fan, I wasn't at all surprised--not because he was a native New Englander, but because of his confidence that the meek someday will indeed inherit the earth. I only knew Mr. Hallock from church, and I only knew him in the context of church, but I believe the same optimism that served as the foundation for his faith in God, served also to buoy him through the hard times with the Red Sox.

  I know, for example, that every year he would make a pilgrimage down country to watch the team play, and almost every time it lost. Sometimes in the last inning.

  I know that although he listened religiously to their games on the radio, it was not uncommon for the reception to disappear. Usually in the midst of a rally.

  And I know how well he handled what had to have been the most astonishing Red Sox collapse of his life: the 1986 World Series loss to the New York Mets. He was undaunted. He was completely undaunted, even though the team managed to let its first title in almost seventy years slip away when it was only one out from victory. One out! A cluster of bloop singles and a ninety-foot squibber was all it took to dash the team's--and Mr. Hallock's--dreams of a championship.

  From the pew behind him, I witnessed Mr. Hallock bear this defeat with his customary courage. The Sunday after the Red Sox had lost he turned to me and said, "As awful as that was, it'll only make next year even sweeter when they win!" And if I had any doubts about the sincerity of his faith, they were dispelled by the way he sang our last hymn, raising his arms and uttering and repeating the words, "How great Thou art, how great Thou art."

  Ken Hallock was buried in a small family plot in Waltham, wearing the Red Sox warm-up jacket that helped him to remember that no cause, not even the Red Sox, is so irrevocably lost as to be beyond hope.

  Chapter 4.

  HOW A FAMILY COPES

  WITH LOSS: BUILDING LOVE ON LITTLE WHITE LIES

  THE WORLD IS rich with elegies for mothers, so I will spare you one more. Besides, my mother was never particularly good with good-byes ("See you," with a small salute was about as good as it got), and I believe she would prefer that the idiosyncratic privacies of our parting and her death were preserved.

  But amidst those moments last month, her last in this world, was one that will endure for me as both a wondrous illustration of the love my family shares, and the weird ways our little clan functions. Or malfunctions. Or--to take grammatical license with an especially popular little adjective--dysfunctions.

  On July 5, my father was flat on his back in a Florida hospital, awaiting an angioplasty. My mother was home alone with her cough, hoping desperately that the hack was the result of radiation, pneumonia, or a virus that had besieged her body after months of chemotherapy.

  At that point she had been battling lung cancer for eight months, and she still clung to the dream--evaporating a bit with each rasp--that she was getting better.

>   My mother's oncologist was making his rounds at the hospital that morning and saw my father. He shared with him some bad news: The X-rays he'd taken of my mother's lungs the previous week showed, to use his words, "a significant infiltration." He wouldn't know for sure until a CAT-scan was done, but the prognosis was bleak.

  My father had been an extraordinary cancer coach: part dietitian, part nurse, part-Knute Rockne. The day after my mother had been told of her cancer, he'd bought a Vita-Mix blender for broccoli shakes and carrot juice. When my mother decided she'd prefer not to wear wigs, he bought her hats and scarves and turbans with the care he had once reserved for blouses and jewelry on her birthday.

  He called me from his hospital bed with the news, unwilling to share it with my mother on the phone, but unable to keep it solely to himself. The doctor had said he would tell my mother some version of the truth that afternoon when he was scheduled to see her in his office to discuss the X-rays. He had added that he would be gentle, possibly evasive, and my father needn't fear my mother would get the worst of the news while he was unable to comfort her.

  My brother and I agreed we would leave for Florida: He'd leave immediately from New York, and I'd fly down the next day.

  My father's angioplasty was not scheduled until the evening, and so he called again that afternoon. He sounded tired but peculiarly happy: He must have misunderstood the oncologist that morning, he said. My mother had just told him of her meeting with the doctor, and while there was a spot on the X-ray, it might be just a pneumonia scar. They'd do a CAT-scan to be sure, but we needn't despair just yet. More important, he said, I had to get a message to my brother, who was 35,000 feet off the ground, and tell him that he should not convey to our mother our fear that her time might be short.