Crapalachia: A Biography of Place Read Online Free

death might come to get my ass.
     
    I stepped over a big fossilized cow paddy and then I stepped over another as Uncle Nathan laughed at us from the truck.
    Earlier that day she fed me peanut butter fudge she made and told me nothing lasts.
    Now we walked past the graves of all the people she knew.
    There was Grandmommy Goddard and Daddy Goddard and Great Grandmommy Goddard and Virginia Goddard.
    And there was her Aunt Mag Goddard who starved herself to death. Ruby stood in front of the grave and said, “No one knows why. She just locked herself in her room and starved herself to death.”
    Then there were other graves and she started walking through them.
    She said: “I don’t think they’ve been mowing it very nice out here.”
    Then she stopped in front of one.
    I asked her if it was her mother.
    And Grandma said, “Yeah that’s Mommy. The day of the funeral they tried putting her in the ground facing the west. I just hollered and carried on ’cause she was facing the wrong way for the resurrection.”
    Then she was quiet and smiled a gummy grin.
     
    Then she walked on.
    “Oh look at all the little graves,” she said, walking past the grave of her uncle.
    She turned to it and said, “They had to bury him on his stomach. He always said he never could sleep on his back. So he had them bury him on his stomach.”
    Then she said she never could sleep on her back either.
    She had me pull away some tall grass from the graves.
    She said that it seemed like all there was to do anymore was die. That’s all people did in this day and age. She said she couldn’t even get the ambulance to pick her up anymore when she needed them. Of course, I knew that they stopped coming because she called everyday claiming she was dying. When they got her into the ambulance, it seemed like she was always feeling better and just needed them to take her down to Roger’s and get a gallon of milk. Finally one of the ambulance people told her: “Now Miss Ruby, you call us when you’re having an emergency, not just when Nathan runs out of 7UP. The tax payers can’t be paying for your trips to get Nathan’s 7UP.”
     
    But I didn’t say anything about it. She walked away from the graves and I noticed all the tiny plots beside her mother’s grave. There was a grave here and then there was a grave there—the stones all broken off and covered up by the grass.
    “Whose graves are these?” I asked and then I wondered. “Why all these little graves?”
    I knew the answer. They were baby graves.
    I walked away, looking at the end where Ruby was.
    And I thought about her own mother losing baby after baby after baby after baby after baby and still going on—surrounded by the graves of sons and daughters, brothers and sisters who never were. They were in this ground—all this great big lump of flesh we call earth.
    I had even looked in the back of Ruby’s mother’s Bible with all of it written in the back. There was a date and then—baby died. There was a date and then—baby died. There was a date and then—girl baby died.
    So I said, “You want me to put the flowers down here? Are these the graves you wanted to see?”
    But Grandma just shook her head.
    She pointed to a couple of graves at the edge of the mountain and said, “That’s where I want to put them.”
    I thought, THANK GOD .
    Ruby moved her walker and started moving closer to the graves, past the grave of her own little baby who died, and then past her husband, my grandfather Elgie who died of his fifth heart attack when I was three.
    I heard my Uncle Stanley from far over at the edge of the field say: “Daddy would have shit himself if he knew you put him up here with all these goddamn Goddards.”
    Ruby got mean and said: “Well I figured I wanted him where I wanted him. And I put him where I put him.”
     
    She hobbled along some more and I walked behind her.
    She said: “This is the grave I wanted to see. This is the grave.”
    I asked: “Whose grave is