By Jacob Simmons
Signs that death is imminent: bleeding from the gills, a sword through the stomach, a bullet to the brain, aluminum rectangles thanking you for visiting Texas, a call from Mom, cheap gas, cheaper smokes, armadillos, fried hot-dogs, “M.A.S.H.” reruns, fire escapes, dirty toilets, blue false indigos, shining bluestars, oil derricks, coyote yelps, Willie Nelson bumper-stickers, broken sandals, drywall dust, oranges, bookmarks, fluorescent bulbs, the moon, bellman carts, the sun, clouds that look like crocodiles, and scratchers that win free tickets.
On my way to Mississippi one time, I had a night to kill in Oklahoma, and I ate okra, fries, and barbecue I bought at the Rib Crib in Elk City. The lady at the front desk of the Super 8 recommended the joint. She also blushed a little when I complimented the Native flowers that grew in pots adjacent to the grass and ashtrays outside the hotel’s hallway. The flowers on the other side of the glass from my whirling clothes in the rumbling coin-operated laundry machines.
Before I went to sleep, I called Dad to tell him I’d made it to Oklahoma, and while I was there, he said, I should go by and snap a picture of his great-grandpa’s grave. He’d never seen it. “Charlie Richards,” he said. “Buried somewhere near Glencoe.”
The next morning, I used my truck key to scratch a scratcher while gas poured into my tank at $1.58 a gallon. As I scratched, a little reindeer revealed itself on the cardstock under the candy cane-colored latex. A reindeer means a free ticket, even in July. I exchanged it for a loser and hit the road for a journey that’d take me 195 miles east to photograph the headstone of a man unknown to anyone I love who’s still alive. Death is imminent.
Charlie Richards is entombed in dust that feels the way flour feels when you mix it around with your fingers in a bowl big enough for a little chicken frying. It’s the same dust that blew into houses and into the eyes and lungs of children, making them blind and sick. It’s the dust that chased so many of their people to California to find work picking grapes and oranges, and it’s the dust that exposed their people to ridicule as powerful owners hellbent on establishing an Okie’s place among native Californians pointed, laughed, and called them trash.
Charlie, or C.W. to the folks that knew him, was my great, great-grandpa. My grandmother was adopted, so Charlie isn’t a blood relative of mine. He’s buried at the Highland Cemetery in Oklahoma’s Pawnee territory. His headstone’s east of the white oaks that line the main road cutting through the graveyard. My adoptive patriarch is there, with his own people, the ones who stayed behind while so many Okies left home for California to work in the fields, sleep in labor camps, and fry flour for sustenance.
Driving east, to Pawnee, I chain-smoked cheap Marlboros and listened to Waylon sing about outlaw shit. I rolled under a sign for Garth Brooks Boulevard and into the center of Oklahoma City. I thought of Timothy McVeigh, and about how he wanted his execution televised. I wondered if twenty-five years ago, the explosion could be seen from the freeway where I was, a flash of fire and terror.
Some things are known: the internet says that “Richards” is an Irish name. Ola’s dad, Charlie, stayed behind in Oklahoma, died with a little money, and was buried at Highland in the heart of America’s heartland. None of the Richards buried in the ground anywhere share my blood. I’m short, ugly, and mean, but these are genetic traits that Charlie couldn’t have gifted to me through generational philanthropy.
Heat in Oklahoma’s summer radiates off the road and manufactures mirages of water puddles flooded by energy and light. I drove along the “Catfish Trail” in the eastern corner of the state, where tornadoes rip alfalfa out of the ground, the siding off of horse stables, and shingles off the roofs of barns and dance halls. Just miles from the cemetery, I knew I had to be quick about things: find the headstone, take a picture, and split within the hour if I was going to make it to Lake Ouachita, Arkansas before dark.
Highland Cemetery, in Pawnee, was the quietest place I’d ever been. Not a lot of chatter in the middle of the day at a cemetery anywhere, but there wasn’t even the slightest hum or rattle of road noise. Nothing. Only the sound of my truck, and Waylon Jennings, driving on earthen avenues, looking for Charlie’s headstone. My hour was in danger; the headstones numbered in the thousands, and the chapel office was closed shut with a chain and padlock around the handles.
No Richards, anywhere in sight. Lots of American flags and flowers, though. Teddy Eppler: US Army. I drove up one avenue and down the other, tires traipsing dangerously close to plots of strangers stranger to me than Charlie Richards. Alberto KC Gonzales: SSGT US Marine Corps. Hundreds of people not named Richards. And one, not named at all.
In Pawnee, there’s a person buried in the ground who has an epitaph that looks like this:
We know the person unknown only to God was a traveler, either from the clouds or from Washington or Mumbai or any other exotic place. Utah. The person buried in the ground had a family of four; five, if you include the rottweiler named Axel. Her kids hated her, or loved her, or one of them hated her for the way she screamed at softball games, and one loved her for the way she sang Sunshine in the morning. Her husband despised her questions about the affair to which he hadn’t yet admitted. His wife loved him for his service to the country during the Vietnam War, and he wasn’t spit on or called a “baby killer” like Rambo was when he journeyed to Oklahoma from Southeast Asia.
The person buried in the ground spoke three languages she learned pouring through Rosetta Stone tapes on the way to work in the Bay Area before moving east and driving the I-40 in a Taurus painted in flat red. The person buried in the ground spoke no languages, but only guttural mumblings of madness to nobody nowhere. His face was plastered on wanted posters that flap in the wind, busted loose from an anchoring staple on a power pole. Once he found refuge and sanctuary in Oklahoma, nobody ever recognized her again.
The person buried in the ground played for the Pittsburgh Pirates in 1893 and spent time as a Dallas Cowboys cheerleader after that. The person was a doctor and a writer and a teacher and drove a tractor every day during the summer when hay grows highest. He never found time to finish the novel he’d started, but she managed to publish obscure graphic novels about Dresden and Hiroshima and the crusades that lionized King Richard. He never saw the Holy Grail, but she got even closer to the door than Lancelot did, and she had a rabid affair with Guinevere while Arthur sat at a round table talking about war and heaven before Desert Storm got rolling in 1991, and long before Oklahoma became the 46th United State.
The person buried in the ground could have been an astronaut if NASA hadn’t required all applicants to stay in an isolation chamber for forty-eight hours. She was a hairstylist and a polo player and a veterinarian specializing in large animals. He juggled and swallowed swords and pulled rabbits and doves out of a top hat for money on street corners and in concert halls. He painted the mural on the wall in Exeter, California, and tended sheep and longhorns in a pasture while fire trucks rolled by and rattlesnakes nestled in the orange groves. If she hadn’t been bitten in the hand trying to move a smudge pot, she might have never left home for Oklahoma.
Unknown? Hardly.
In the distance, I heard a lawnmower fire, and saw a heavy-set fellow in a red hat drop the blades and mow with precision as he rode and steered between headstones. An expert, I thought. Someone to tell me where to go to find Charlie’s resting place. I drove his way and got close enough to him to make out the look of abhorrence on his face before I stopped. He threw the mower in neutral and looked at me like I had an arm growing out of my head. I got out of the truck, called him “man” after saying “hey,” and asked if he could tell me where I’d find my adoptive great-great grandfather’s grave.
“Richards,” he said, wiping some sweat from his eye orbit, slowly and deliberately. “Was he a white man?”
I’d never been asked to think about it before, but I guessed he was. My grandma’s white, and Charlie’s son adopted her.
“I’m not sure, man,” I replied, wearing a smile dismissive of his question. “I assume he was.”
“Well, if he was white, he’d be buried east of the oak trees. Over here’s all Pawnee.”
At this, like the payoff in a Magic Eye book, epitaphs became clear to me in a swirl of sudden awareness.
Chee saah thaa theex (Miss Truth) Myra Lone Chief Eppler.
Charles C. Lone Chief, US Navy, World War II.
Emma Lone Chief McGuire. Teddy Lone Chief.
Charlene Lonechief, who died the day she was born, and Charlesetta Lonechief, who lived for three years.
Pearl Young Eagle.
Mother Irene Knifechief Gonzales.
Rhoda G. and Thomas W. Cline who were married for 63 happy years.
Vance Horsechief, Jr. Let Da Ka Steh Da Ga Doot.
Elizabeth F. Justice Goodchief-Horsechief who was a beloved mom and grandma.
Cikskara’ Sut (Princess Good Home) Darwina Valene Goodchief-Yellowmule: Here rests our beloved mother; she was everything to us; we love you mom.
Dollie Sherman Justice Moore Stee Lah Lhooh Lee Lah Looh Peta Hau Re Lhat.
Fred Williams, US Army Air Corps, World War II.
Dedicated to the memory of our father and grandfather Henry Thomas Moses: Member of the 101 Ranch Wild West Show.
Simon Adams Dog Chief: Pawnee Indian Scouts.
Jan Paul Adams, PVT US Army, Vietnam. Beloved husband, missed by all.
Ralph Weeks Toahty, Jr.: Peace.
Libbie Juanita, Daughter of PVT 1 CL R.W. Toahty, US MCR.
Charles Lee Wilde, US Marine Corps Vietnam.
James Oscar Wilde Sr., SGT US Marine Corps, Korea.
Sherman Herbert Wild Sr., PVT US Marine Corps, Vietnam. Forever in our hearts.
Maude White Chisholm Gee-sah-dee Chah-hicks (Indian Princess).
Oo-pid-dif Deh-sah (Star Princess).
In loving memory of Grandfather Robert P. Curley Chief.
Harold F. Curley Chief: Gone to a better land.
Turner Brashears Turnbull III, MSG US Army, Bronze Star: De Opresso Liber. Vietnam.
Some of the research I got from the Oklahoma Historical Society looks like this:
Once Oklahoma was safely in the Union, the first legislature wrote segregation into law with Senate Bill Number One after first defining all people with any degree of African ancestry as black. Over time, legislators segregated everything from hospitals to housing to cemeteries. (Okl)
The unknown person was a hilarious giant, a murderous bastard, a long-lost sister, a savior, a dear friend, and a champion. The person was a lying cheat and a gracious winner, a conscientious extravert, an agreeable neurotic, an optimistic and needy authoritarian, a Machiavellian radical, and a lover of peace. Known as anyone can be. And in Oklahoma it was against the law for someone with skin like mine to be buried anywhere near a person like that.
Though death is imminent, I am the eternal, unbidden interloper. I’ve come to Pawnee to drive on burial grounds and flick cigarettes out the window on the Fourth of July holiday looking for Charlie Richards, a man I’ll never know. America’s Independence Day is a particularly important holiday for the Richards who moved out west.
Among all the flags on the graveyards of segregated veterans, I think of a patriotic time at home in California. My grandma is coming to eat hot dogs and seven-layer dip off of a star-spangled paper plate and drink Pepsi in a seasonal can. My dad is spending money in stacks at the Phantom Fireworks booth in the parking lot of the Kingsburg Supermarket. Flower-pot fountains. Pyrotechnic Motherlodes. Red, White, and Booms. Uncle Sam’s Aerial Assortments. Silver Salute Shows. And he’s going to try to keep all ten fingers as he lights them and watches them sputter and spit sparks into the twilight over Tamarack street; that’s my street. A street in a neighborhood full of people who will tell anyone who’ll listen that freedom isn’t free.
I stopped looking for Charlie’s epitaph after I was told where I was by the man in the red hat. But it’s somewhere, there in Pawnee, at Highland Cemetery on the other side of the oaken guards standing against our togetherness. The other side of the white bark and bite set on otherizing in the name of preservation. A fence of rooted keepers, protectors of the toxic social order that governs the dead and buried. Charlie’s underground, on the opposite side of Robert P. Curley Chief, US Coast Guard, World War II. On the other side of Star Princesses and Horsechiefs, and someone unknown but to God.