They had us ride in the hearse. No, that's not right, we had our own car, the grandchildren: me, my brother Josh and our cousin, Kandy. He was in the hearse of course, in the casket, we rode in the next car behind him. You always remember the first one close to you to go, it is in this way they give you a gift. I think the service was in Brainerd, out by my Aunt Patsy and Uncle Lloyd's. We wound up coming down by Erlanger hospital, which is where countless Blancetts and Gants have entered into this city. I don't remember what all we talked about on the way to the cemetery, it was on 23rd st. where I noticed two old timers sitting on metal folding chairs in the open bay door of an old brick garage. They both took off their mesh-back baseball hats as our procession passed by. Twenty-third is a big four-lane there and traffic in the opposite lane pulled to a stop. I remarked about it to Kandy, did this always happen? She said she thought so. I asked the guy driving, was it a law to pull over? He said actually no, it was against the law, it was something people just did out of respect. We had been in Virginia about eight years by then, I couldn't remember seeing anything like that happening for a funeral procession in Virginia.
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St. Elmo is a working class neighborhood at the foot of Lookout Mountain. It is categorized as being the oldest "bedroom suburb" in the city. My grandfather used to ride the trolley to his foreman's job at Crane Porcelain. In the seventies they built a project directly over the hill behind it. There is a company there that built wooden horses and carriages for carousels. There are horses at the windows, still. The neighborhood holds the lower station for the Incline Railway, a train that goes up Lookout at a maximum grade of 72 %. Forest Hills, the cemetery which holds my grandfather and many others of ours was established in 1880. It is Gothic and serpentine, it's roads winding up hills and falling into hollows. Like the rest of the neighborhood it has been burdened and neglected and revived over decades. We buried him facing northeast, I believe, and years later, my grandmother next to him, at the foot of a hill, across from the train tracks that roll over a bridge separating St. Elmo from the rest of the city. The arched stone bridge there forms a sort of a gate for St. Elmo.
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I don't remember feeling much of anything the day we put him in the ground. It would be four years later before the grief fully landed on me. Thus the gift to be carried with you always. I remember most being shaken by the sight of his twin brother grieving openly, sitting graveside in a metal folding chair alongside others of our family now gone. I don't remember his brother's name.
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I have no reason for recalling any of this now other than my mind has lately been turbulent with memory. My therapist says is it is due to grief.
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My dad used to say he would burn a quart of oil in his GTO to go see my mother in St. Elmo from East Lake. A couple of summers ago me, him, mom and Henry went to Chattanooga for a Harley Davidson rally. Dad and I took the bikes out see Pa-paw's old place and got lost heading back in to town. We wound up coming around the back way to East Lake, to the house he grew up in. The neighborhood wrecked, I remember an engine block hanging by a chain from the lowest branch of a dead oak tree, surrounded by emptied carcasses of other machines. The porch of his mothers house fallen in, the porch I once sat on. The collapsed porch of my fathers story that he is only now beginning to tell me.
