The Song of David

WE ALL DIE. Eventually, that is how the story ends for all of us. There is no variance. There is no exception. We all die. Young, old, strong, weak. We all go sooner or later. I’ve come to accept that, maybe even better than most, though I don’t think I’ll ever embrace it.

When the weather permits, I like to walk to the cemetery on the rise overlooking the valley south of Levan. There isn’t much to see—a few houses on the edge of town, fields, a highway, and distant hills. In fact, the view has hardly changed at all these past forty years. I had lots of family buried here. My great-grandmother was buried here. My mother too. My little son who I’d never known in life was buried here as well.

Eli’s grave was the one I visited most. I liked to leave things for him on his stone. Shiny rocks and arrowheads, a new paintbrush and a little plastic horse. As the years passed, the gifts never changed, because he never changed. In my mind he was always the little boy, the little boy who never aged and waited somewhere for me to join him. I knew he didn’t need the things I left. I knew he didn’t even want them. I left them because I needed to, because I needed him. Still. Even though I got along without him, and even though my life was filled with loved ones, nothing filled the space where he should have been.

I had other spaces like that—little scarred alcoves that never looked or felt the same. Inhospitable places that I couldn’t fill, where nothing would grow, where the walls echoed and silence reigned. And I could match each space to a stone in that cemetery.

The Levan cemetery had grown over the years. When I’d first come back to Levan as a young man, looking for Georgia, looking for my life, there had still been rows and rows of unused plots, stretches of green grass waiting for loved ones lost. But those rows were filled now, new rows had been added, and the cemetery wasn’t so little anymore.

Georgia’s parents had both passed away and she’d lost a brother a few years ago too. Axel was killed in an automobile accident five years after Millie and Tag were married. We’d all been devastated by his loss, and when his family in Sweden never came forward or responded to our repeated attempts to contact them, we brought him here, to Levan, and buried him among family, for that’s what he’d become. I’d seen him a time or two, as big and blond and brawny in death as he’d been in life. He always smiled and showed me things, memories of time in the gym, time with Tag and the team, and bits and pieces of things I didn’t always understand but never failed to paint. They were his precious things—his greats—and I didn’t have to understand them.

Life had not been easy on the team, but life isn’t easy on anyone. A few years back, Mikey’s wife had lost her fight with breast cancer and after that, Mikey had gone down-hill fast. Their kids were raised and Mikey was tired. He was a veteran, but he didn’t want a military send-off. He lost his leg in Iraq, but found a home in Tag Team. He expressed a desire to be buried here, next to his wife, and we buried them six months apart, not far from Axel.

When Cory’s youngest son died of leukemia a decade ago, they’d brought him here too, wanting him surrounded in death by people who would have loved him in life, had they lived, had he lived. His little monument was engraved with a tree, and we buried him close to Eli, though the spot right next to Eli was already taken with a stone that bore my name. Georgia’s name too, with the years of our births, a dash, and an empty space, a date that death would someday provide.

I had grandkids now, several of them. Georgia and I had welcomed two more daughters—no sons after Eli—and all our girls were married and gone, raising kids of their own. Tag’s boy Mo went into the marines and eventually got into politics. He looked just like his dad, big and green-eyed with his dimpled smile and a helluva chin. But he listened like his mother, worked like her too, and thanks to Henry had a brain like an encyclopedia when it came to the details. Senator David Moses Taggert was a force to be reckoned with, and people had started throwing his name around as a possible presidential candidate. I just shook my head at that and hoped nobody would come sniffing around Levan, trying to dig up dirt on his family and friends. I liked the quiet.

I breathed in deep, filling my lungs with the silence and the sweet air, and stooped to pull a weed, clearing the intruder from my precious cluster of stones. When I straightened, I caught movement from the corner of my eye and turned to find Tag striding toward me, his shoulders as broad as ever, his back as straight, his smile as wide. His name rose to my lips and my heart lifted in greeting, welcoming my old friend. It had been a while, and I had missed him.