What’s the difference between a graveyard and a cemetery? A friend asked me this question Friday, and I, a lifelong habitue of burial places, large and small, had no idea. More on that in a minute. First, some context.
Thursday morning as I was dragging my kayak through the underbrush near the Lewiston Bridge preparing to launch on the Sipsey River southeast of Aliceville, Alabama, I happened upon four trash bags of household garbage.
Someone stopped here, perhaps under the cover of darkness, and gave heave ho the family trash. Mother Nature be damned.
And so it was Friday morning, armed with oversized contractors’ trash bags, I set the autopilot for Aliceville with intentions of righting that wrong.
Besides it was another opportunity to check the status of the swollen streams between here and there, in particular Lubbub Creek, a stream that runs north-south east of Reform, Carrollton, Aliceville into the Tenn-Tom.
Lo and behold, just as I was getting underway, on Pickensville Road just after “S Curve” and before the Luxapalila Bridge, was a man picking up trash. A Halloween apparition, surely.
I pulled to the side of the road and shouted thanks.
Turns out he works for the county. But it’s good to be appreciated, he said.
“It’s a shame humans don’t have any more respect for the planet,” he said.
“You telling me,” I said.
“This is the best job security you could have,” he said, brandishing his trash grabber.
On Highway 69 less than a mile past Minnie Vaughan Road comes a small, country graveyard, Murrah Chapel Cemetery.
I guess it was the massive, moss-covered post oak that provoked a U-turn. I parked at a rusty gate, secured by an equally rusty chain. Another giant oak, a red oak — it’s leaves brown in contrast with the bare post oak — stood sentinel over the small, well-tended burial place. Some of the tombstones bore dates from the mid-1800s. Lovely.
Particularly touching was the joint tombstone of Betty S. and Cecil L. Peacock. Presumably Betty is still with us; Cecil died in 2018. Betty had engraved on the back of their joint tombstone, which bears a photograph of them in what looks to be their early years, “Your wings were ready, but my heart was not.”
As I was leaving the cemetery, Lawton Harrison, a childhood friend who lives in Texas, called. I told him about the cemetery.
“Do you know the difference between a graveyard and a cemetery?” he said.
I thought for a minute. I love cemeteries and have visited a ton of them; this is something I should know, but didn’t.
“A graveyard is connected to a church,” Lawton said. “A cemetery is not.”
Yes, of course.
In Aliceville while gassing up the truck, I admired the car of a man, who was doing likewise, a Kia sedan. “Yeah, it gets 35 miles to a gallon,” he said. “All I do is keep the oil changed.”
I asked where in town he gets that done, the truck long overdue for an oil change.
“CarQuest,” he said, “they’re reasonable and they’re quick.” He gave directions.
The office manager was away delivering a vehicle, so I struck up a conversation with the only person around, Ronnie Jones, a tall, soft-spoken mechanic.
Around the corner, no more than 50 yards away, I could see smoke wafting from a cooker beside a barbecue stand, Mac’s BBQ Place. I asked Ronnie about it.
“I like the turkey tails,” he said.
And so it was, as acorns from the surrounding oaks popped like firecrackers as they ricocheted off parked utility trucks, I sat at a picnic table in the dappled sunlight savoring Mac’s barbecued chicken and turkey tails while, around the corner, a small, dusty pickup loaded with four bags of garbage got its oil changed.
When Mac came out to check his grill, I complimented him on the turkey tails.
“We’ve got pigtails, too,” he said. I told him I’d never had them.
Shortly afterwards a server brought to the table a small aluminum parcel. The contents had been cut into four pieces. A barbecued pigtail.
Birney Imes III is the immediate past publisher of The Dispatch.
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