The Little Girl I Wasn’t Looking For

Most people think I restore headstones.

I don’t.

I introduce people.

Sometimes they just happen to be a hundred and sixty years late.

I spend enough time in old cemeteries that my family has quit asking where I am. If I’m not home, they assume I’m somewhere in Mississippi talking to dead people with a pressure washer in one hand and a tube of stone epoxy in the other.

Truth be told, the dead are easier to get along with than most folks still paying taxes.

A while back, a man from Florida called me.

He’d never lived in Mississippi.

His daddy hadn’t either.

Neither had his granddaddy.

But somewhere up his family tree was a fellow named Bushrod Washington Gober who came here before the Civil War, married a girl named Irene, raised a little family, and got himself shot to death in 1863.

The caller wanted to know if I could restore Bushrod’s headstone.

I told him I’d go have a look.

Now, I’ve learned something about old cemeteries.

They don’t give up their stories all at once.

You have to earn them.

Pleasant Ridge Baptist Church sits on a hill in Union County that has seen just about everything Mississippi has had to throw at it. War came through there. Raiders came through there. Time came through there. Then in 1920, an F4 tornado came through there and finished what everybody else had started.

It didn’t just knock over headstones.

It picked them up like they were playing cards.

Marble that had stood through sixty years of weather suddenly weighed no more than a paper plate.

When the wind finally moved on, husbands weren’t beside wives anymore.

Children weren’t beside parents.

Pieces of people were scattered all over that hillside. Penny,.pdf

Bushrod was one of them.

When I found what was left of his monument, it looked less like a headstone than a jigsaw puzzle nobody expected anybody to finish.

So I cleaned it.

Piece by piece.

Crack by crack.

The funny thing about restoring marble is that somewhere along the way, you quit seeing stone.

You start seeing people.

I wondered if Irene stood right there crying.

I wondered who carried Bushrod up that hill.

I wondered whether those little boys understood why Daddy wasn’t coming home.

You ask yourself things like that when you work alone.

Then something happened I wasn’t expecting.

A few feet away, under a pile of broken stone that everybody had walked past for years…

…was a little girl.

Not really, of course.

Just her headstone.

Her name was Mary.

Bushrod’s daughter.

She’d died before her father did.

Nobody had mentioned her.

The gentleman from Florida didn’t know she was there.

I didn’t know she was there.

For all I know, nobody living did.

I brushed away the dirt until I could read her name.

Then I did what I had come to do.

I carried her home too.

When both stones were finished, I called the family.

They drove all the way from Florida.

I met them at the church and probably grinned bigger than I should have.

“I’ve got something I want you to see.”

We walked across that old cemetery without saying much.

Some places make conversation seem disrespectful.

When we reached the hill, there they stood.

Bushrod.

Little Mary.

Together.

White again.

Whole again.

Standing side by side for the first time since that tornado ripped them apart more than a century earlier.

The gentleman didn’t say much.

Neither did I.

Turns out joy doesn’t always have much to say.

Before he left, he placed a Confederate Iron Cross beside Bushrod’s grave.

I watched him kneel there between a father he’d never met and a little girl he never knew existed.

That’s when it hit me.

People think history disappears.

It doesn’t.

Sometimes it just falls over.

Sometimes it gets covered by weeds.

Sometimes it breaks into twenty pieces and waits a hundred years for somebody willing to kneel in the dirt and put it back together.

I still restore headstones for a living.

But every now and then, if the Lord is feeling especially generous…

He lets me reunite a family.