Grandma Kern is buried next to Fred, her husband, who died as I turned 19. I recall seeing the medics trying to revive him on the stretcher at the Fenwick Apartments on Loch Raven Boulevard. That serene retirement community is now a gated enclave, surrounded by thug-hunted streets which yet look habitable but are no place where one could walk with such an obvious noncombatant as Mom, without having to fight a gang of those victims of some other white man’s privilege.
But here, on this green, grassy hill, walled toward the decaying streets of East Baltimore and fenced toward the besieged Yards of Baltimore County, things remain the same. The sky today was a carnelian blue, the clearest sky I can recall above this bricked and paved expanse. The red maples and green arbor vides waved in the gentle gusts that seemed to push their tops this way and that over the obsolete iconography of another age.
I mused at what a paradise this graveyard would be by night for one of the homeless men hunted by the children of government subsidized drug addicts who emerge from their state housing like beasts from so many lairs to nip at the heels of Civilization’s foundering sheep.
Mary and Fred are buried under twin arbor vides which we had trimmed back two years ago. The many evergreens like them rustle like autumn leaves as they sway.
Caressed by the rustling breeze, Mother and Sister water the flowers in their marble vases.
Looking about, one sees distant treetops, green-crested hilltops, waving red maples, green oaks and these lush spear-point shrubs, seemingly made of green coral hair, all framed beneath an unusually clean sky, with but one human perturbance, the family monuments.
These come in numerous varieties, all eye-catching and imposing in an inward way.
Some are etched in upright marble slabs weighing more than the four of us.
Others are arched shrines of black marble, like inverted hearts.
There is a bust of a Mister Wagner under a pillared shrine.
There are statues of these people’s benign savior transmitting God’s Grace with an open hand—him again as the sufferer bearing his cross.
Most notable are the many pagan angels in a variety of attitudes, standing solemnly as if in another age, when something was thought due the Dead.
On this waving green hill under the clear blue sky, the earth does wage its man-obscuring war, as the tamed guardian plants of extinct families encroach and obliterate their monument’s view. Mother takes note of the smothered state of Thomas and Laura’s headstone, raised in their memory the year before I was born, and resolves to call the caretaker and have the twin arbor vides trimmed back.
In the meantime, I stand with the French lemonade bottle she used to water Mary Kern’s flowers. Musing as she cries, I imagine myself, homeless—this would be the place for a homeless man to seek at night—sleeping here as the savages beyond the gate, beyond that beautiful hill, imbibe the last fortune of a faltering civilization as intoxicants that serve no greater purpose than to ease their descent through a life that has no such angel-guarded hill at its skittering end.
