December 9, 2007
Sunday

Then Judas . . . repented himself . . .  And he cast down the pieces of silver into the sanctuary . . . . And the chief priests took the pieces of silver, and said, It is not lawful to put them into the treasury, since it is the price of blood. And they took counsel, and bought with them the potter’s field, to bury strangers in.
                          — Matthew 27: 3-8

Entrance to Potter’s Field, Willow Grove Cemetery,
Buffalo, Wyoming

I visited Buffalo again this morning, this time to attend services at St. Luke’s Evangelical Lutheran Church. Once again I was accorded generous hospitality, including a place at the table at the congregational pot-luck following a service that included the cardamom-flavored bread used for St. Lucia Day (coming up on Thursday) as the communion bread.

As you can see from the picture above, it was another big blue Wyoming sky day. The snow lay round about, crisp and even and sparkling, but not too deep. I’d worn my heavy boots so that after church, after the fellowship, after the cardamom bread and the red jello salad with marshmallows, I could visit the Willow Grove Cemetery on a hill above the town.

I took a turn through the cemetery on my first visit to Buffalo last week. It has the typical look of a cemetery begun in the nineteenth century, with monuments resembling obelisks and urns of flowers and angels, some family plots encircled by fences of iron or of shrubbery. The original part is dotted with tall fir trees that give deep shade. Driving through, you move into the newer part, into sunlight unobstructed by thick forest, markers more uniform in size and style.

My time away from my writing studio is limited, constrained not only by the writing work that calls me but also by the cold, the snow, and the fact that it takes a full hour to make the trip from Jentel and then back. In Cheyenne in June of 2005 I spent nearly a whole day in the historic Lakeview Cemetery, a taphophile’s delight. I’m certain Willow Grove in Buffalo has its attractions as well, its stories told in the stones, but this trip wasn’t the right trip for me to discover them. Today I had time only for the Potter’s Field.

The Potter’s Field is at the edge of Willow Grove as you drive through the entrance gates. It’s outside the forested area, facing a not particularly attractive part of town, mostly weedy vacant lots, and it looks a little windblown and forlorn. It is entered through a typical western ranch gate, two wooden uprights with the name of the property on a bar across the top. When I got out of the car I could see that the snow lay unbroken except for animal tracks from the road to the Potter’s Field fence. The snow was mounded up over what appeared to be burial plots. Faded red fabric flowers poked through the snow at the mounds.

I walked through the gate, carrying my snowbrush and my camera, and stopping to say the blessing that I created when I studied Jewish prayer and spirituality: A Bracha Upon Entering a Cemetery. As I wrote of my visits in 2005 to some historic cemeteries in the Wind River Range, “the prayer helps to remind me that all things come from God, that the pleasure or intellectual stimulation I am taking in examining the site comes from the labor and lives of the people who built it and used it.” And, of course, the people who lie buried there.

I brushed the snow off a large boulder and read the plaque: “. . . Burials were made here from 1893 to 1914. These include one infant, one woman, and eight men. These graves were unmarked. In the 1970s the local Rotary Club arranged to have the area fenced. In 2002 a committee proposed replacing the fence and marking the graves. Funds from the Johnson County Historical Society, including a generous bequest from the Rev. Stuart & Rebecca Frazier were used to purchase materials for the project. Volunteers provided the labor.”

It’s a large plot, designated “Block 35,” and it was used for twenty-one years. It wasn’t clear to me if the ten graves marked were the only ones in the block, or if they were the only ones whose identities could be determined. I walked carefully among the mounds, brushing the snow off and photographing the markers. Who were these people, what were their stories, that they died strangers in a strange land in Buffalo, Wyoming, their final disposition left to the care not of family nor of friends, but of good citizens who do the right thing because it is what good people do.

The manuscript I brought to Wyoming is about the dead, about what those of us who love them do for them, about what happens to them, to their bodies and to their souls, about how we grieve, and about how we remember. It’s possible that no one has visited the ten graves in Willow Grove’s Potter’s Field since 2002, save for the maintenance worker on a John Deere who keeps the weeds away, and for people like me, driven more by curiosity than care.

I wrote all the names down tonight, on a page in my notebook, and circled each with a different colored pencil. I drew connecting lines and placed other decorative elements around the circles, a collage such as I learned to make from reading Praying in Color. “For as long as you remember me, I am never entirely lost,” says Frederick Buechner. Nor are, I hope, Gus Berg, Thomas Kendall, Gertrude Gagnon, O. H. Holstein, Jay Moore, Robert Johnson, Thomas Haresnaps, T.J. Richardson, the Harmon Baby, and Archie (The Chinaman). 

 

Love it? Hate it? Just want to say Hi? Leave a comment, or e-mail me:
margaretdeangelis [at] gmail [dot] com (replace the brackets with @ and a period)