Stagtine, 5. Mud and Her Memory

Section I, Chapter 2

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What do you remember?” she whispered, slightly above the purr of the inert embers. A remanent of this morning’s fire, at our feet. I whispered back, as though my answer may release a secret too important, too powerful, too sure to speak atop a murmur. But it was to be our secret, my mother and I, held jointly, and so we whispered together.

We sat on her bed all morning and watched the fire smolder and beat the cold, early spring. My mother religiously fed and poked the hearth and, while its flames often dwindled with the dawn, she never let it go out, fully. Kneeling, she breathed life through her soft, pursed lips and the flames roared, alive, strong.

Time passed.
The dawn expired.
Pursed lips.
Whispered memories handed back and forth. The day ripened.
The fire dwindled.
Her lips again, pursed.
Childhood.

It would often become so warm in that little basement of a house that, no matter the temperature outside, my siblings and I would escape through whatever crack would have us to endure anything but the rigid, deep heat. When our parents bought the house, only a handful of years prior, there was a pig living in what would become their bedroom and flock of chickens in their bathroom. In place of housewarming, their early work was house cleaning.

One evening after a day of rain around my second birthday, as they worked to undo the basement pigpen and its walk-out patio that served as a covered run for the animals, they stumbled over a large stone block, some four feet square. The northmost edge of the run, reminiscent of a rough, shabby shack, was constructed atop it, a cornerstone. It punctured upwards from an otherwise unmemorable landscape and the poor construction of the previous inhabitants and its time-rounded and moss-aged form seemed out of place. It was strength amid rot, stone amid mold.

My parents worked to scrape back the pig manure and piled the rusted metal and weathered, rotten boards to the side. An archeo- logical finding, history rising up to greet them. At once they discovered markings on its front. It was a gravestone. The stone was dry but its letters wet, yet holding the day’s rains, it was readable, only for a moment or two. A Union flag planted atop the words, a faded and forgotten carving of a master mason:

Warren F. Wilbur
Wounded in the battle of Chancellorsville, May 2, 1863. Died May 16, 1863.

My mother’s birthday—May 16th—but exactly one hundred years prior. There was always magic in that.

We would come to learn that Warren fought and served in the 29th Ohio Volunteer Infantry. He enlisted willingly. He walked with visions and died for values. A road one mile to the southeast was named after him, but no one ever knew why.

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