Flash Fictions from Web Del Sol


BONEMEAL

Robert Hill Long

      The river was good enough for dead sheep and deer--not for dead white people. But dig a grave? That was waste labor. Everywhere water lay waiting six inches underfoot. Earth burial meant having to bore holes in the bottom of the coffin, set it afloat in the waterlogged hole, make a slave or two stamp on it until it started sinking. A colonial trader might choose an old Indian shell mound barely grassed over: his corpse would fill it like an enormous spoiled oyster.

      After the revolution citizens were buried aboveground: in hives of sealed and whitewashed brick if they had money; if they didn't, in shallow, stacked ovens built into the city's ramparts--rented long enough for the flesh to decay. To pacify the swarm of souls awaiting judgment, survivors brought chrysanthemums on All Saints Day. In new winter fashions, the well-to-do received callers before the family tomb. Sausages, pickles and orange wine were laid out on white iron tables and benches; aunts and great-aunts took turns bedding mums in marble urns. The poor were limited to cheap glass vases in which they stuck paper roses colored with pokeberry juice.

      Fear of yellow fever made young people create burial societies. Members held raffles and dances to finance tombs big enough for a hundred bachelors, a hundred spinsters. Less and less frequently, a backhoe bites into a layer of bone marking where the fever wagons dumped other epidemic victims. After the civil war, the racetrack bankrupted and was reformed into the biggest necropolis: Vermont granite, Carrara marble, stunned angels on every other roof.

      Here, conchs flank the doorways of the vaults, the oyster-shell paths are bordered with overlapped scallops. Here, like calls to like--as in the oyster bar where a cabdriver leans back, teeth parted as though for a kiss, and lifts oyster after tongue-soft oyster onto his tongue. His grandfather's grandfather died at Shiloh; he in turn had a grandfather killed in Napoleon's autumn campaign, 1809. In spring 1810, Austrian farmers harvested thousands of skeletons. A London manufacturer bought the whole lot, ground it into feed for English cattle and corn.

      A spoonful of bonemeal and the chrysanthemums fill their squat white urns with bronze blooms. So a pregnant woman swallows white calcium pills to rebuild the strength the unborn child sucks from her bones daily. So birth takes death into its mouth and eats, and is nourished. In each cemetery, a century of southern light has turned the cheap, once-clear vases violet: the color of humility, repentance, of love united with pain.


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