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Smith, Jewell Ellen, 1915-1998

"Great Jehoshaphat and Gully Dirt"


There he could always rest in the shade.
I glanced up at Aunt Vic and knew she wasn't going to stop.
She didn't have any flowers with her, and she never walked among
the tombstones unless she had a bouquet for Uncle Hugh's grave.
Uncle Hugh didn't have a lamb on his headstone. Lambs are for
children. His stone, and the one at the head of Grandpa Dave's
grave, had both been made to look like trees turned to rocks and
then chopped up and stacked up, one short log on top of another.
Mama had said that showed both Uncle Hugh and Grandpa Dave were
Woodmen of the World.
I decided not to ever, ever be a woodman. I wanted a lamb,
not logs, on my tombstone.
The road became narrow and more and more crooked as we passed
into the thick woods below the graveyard. The long shadows of so
many tall pines made it seem like twilight, Aunt Vic said. Then,
in a few minutes, we came out into a big clearing, and Aunt Vic
turned the buggy onto a straight stretch of lane where there were
cornfields on either side. She said they were Old Man Hawk's
fields.


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