Daughter of Ashes

SEVENTEEN

‘The woods were made for the hunters of dreams, The brooks for the fishers of song; To the hunters who hunt for the gunless game The streams and the woods belong.’

Sam Walter Foss, Dreams in Homespun, ‘The Bloodless Sportsman,’ 1897

In the 1960 classic, I Hate to Cook Book, Peg Bracken wrote a chapter entitled, ‘Leftovers: Or, Every Family Should Have a Dog.’ The same might be said for walks in the country. For long walks back home in Quiet Waters Park, I often borrowed my daughter’s labradoodle, Coco, but on that particular morning several days later, with Paul stuck back home in Annapolis, tied up with some endless government paperwork involving sexual harassment awareness training, I was dog-less and on my own.

After polishing off a bagel with cream cheese and my second cup of coffee, I inverted the mug over a peg in the dishwasher, exchanged my cozy slippers for running shoes and set off.

First stop was the end of the dock where I checked Paul’s crab pot, like he’d asked me to. I hauled the wire cage up by the rope which attached it to the dock, but all I found in the one-way trap was a waterlogged chicken neck.

I dropped the trap into the water and continued exploring the flora and fauna along the shore until the ground grew marshy and started sucking greedily at my shoes.

At the surveyor’s pipe that marked where our property ended and the neighbor’s farm began, I made a ninety-degree turn, sighting along the property line to a small grove of trees where another ninety-degree turn would take me along our boundary to the main road. As I walked, I was grateful nobody had enclosed either property with barbed wire or chain-link fencing; the cornfields on my right delineated our land from the neighboring farm clearly enough for me.

About halfway along, I was surprised by a doe darting out of the corn and bounding across my path, swift as a gazelle. In its turn, the doe startled a wild turkey, which spread its wings and flapped out of the weeds and into the sky. I paused to marvel at them, breathing in the summer air, heavy with the scent of rich Maryland earth and new-mown hay.

At the grove of trees, the cornfield made a curious detour. I wondered why the trees – a cluster of ancient oaks – hadn’t been cut down to maximize the land available to crop. I dived under the low-hanging branch of a lone sugar maple and stopped in my tracks. The dense canopy shaded a cemetery about the size of a two-car garage enclosed by a rusted fence of iron piping, looped together with ornamental chains. Eight large headstones were scattered about, tilted at odd angles as the ground around them had settled or been disturbed by hungry tree roots.

That the cemetery was old, I had no doubt. A few of the headstones dated, I was sure, to colonial days. The round-faced angels, their eyebrows and nose carved into the slabs by a stonemason in one deft, U-shaped stroke, told me that. I knelt before one crooked stone and deciphered the first inscription, partly by feel as the years and the weather, as well as the moss had taken their toll on the porous limestone:

Albert Anthony

Only child of

Albert C & Harriet A

Hazlett

Born in Salisbury

Oct 19, 1848

Died at Elizabethtown

May 18, 1851

Aged 2 years &

7 months

Rest, sweet child, in gentle slumber…

The remaining inscription had been covered by the encroaching earth. A maple seedling had taken root at the base of little Albert’s grave. I pulled it out before it had a chance to send out roots to further disturb his tiny bones.

This was no formal cemetery of modern oblongs lined up in precise rows, yet someone had been caring for the graves. No weeds grew inside the enclosure; what little grass there was had been neatly mowed. A vase of plastic flowers – roses and carnations – their color not yet faded by exposure to the elements, had been placed in front of another headstone which read:

Mary Charlotte Hazlett

1890-1950

Sleep on, sweet Mother, and take thy rest

God called thee home, He thought it best.

This had to be one of the Hazletts mentioned in the land records dealing with the sale of Our Song to Liberty Land Development Corporation back in 1952.

Just beyond, my eyes were drawn to a stone planter about the size of a window box, overflowing with black-eyed Susans, the state flower of Maryland, and very much alive. It marked the grave of a Samuel Hazlett who had shuffled off this mortal coil in 1845. Samuel had rated an urn with a flaming finial, draped with bunting. A half skull peeped out from under a tasseled curtain carved into its base, surrounded by broken columns and a few twists of ivy.

All the residents here seemed to be Hazletts, the family that had originally owned the land upon which Our Song and the farms and homes of our immediate neighbors had been built.

To my right were a cluster of three smaller headstones. I cringed: infant graves. Two children had lived only days, the other less than a year. I thought about Baby Ella, who had lain so long in our chimney and had no grave. An epitaph on one child’s stone simply read: II Kings, iv: Is it well with the child? It is well!

Ugh. Our ancestors were certainly much more sanguine about death than we are. Most of the epitaphs were along the lines of ‘Life was tough, now yay! Dead at last.’

Behind the mound where the children lay, another larger headstone caught my eye.

Nancy Hazlett

1934-1952

Beloved Daughter & Sister

Nancy Hazlett had been only eighteen when she died. My thoughts drifted again to Baby Ella. The dates fitted. Was she yours, Nancy? If so, she should have been buried beside you.

I decided to research the people who had once walked over the land Paul and I now owned, whose graves I could visit every day, if I chose. I knew that by the early 1950s, vital records in local Maryland courthouses had been moved to the new Archives in Annapolis, the shining accomplishment of Maryland’s first archivist, Morris Leon Radoff, who built the Hall of Records in Annapolis in 1935 and persuaded the counties to transfer their records there for safekeeping. In the days before the construction of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, this would mean researchers would have to travel long distances to Annapolis from the counties, some by ferry from the Eastern Shore, so the canny Radoff had partnered with the Church of the Latter Day Saints to microfilm the important records and leave copies in the care of the counties.

Thinking about the moldering records that Kim Marquis had found in the courthouse basement, I wondered if they’d been missed in Radoff’s general roundup for the Mormons.

I slipped my iPhone out of my pocket and took pictures of the tombstones, being careful to capture the dates on the inscriptions. The next time I visited the courthouse, I’d see what I could find out about them. I wanted to check out the county library, too.

But first, we had work to do. Now that Kendall Barfield was dead, Kim feared that the rental on the office space wouldn’t be renewed. Before the lease expired, Fran and I needed to clear out the storage room so that the mold could be abated and the room thoroughly cleaned, ready to welcome back the records Kim had decided to keep to their forever home.