The Bottom of the Harbor by Joseph Mitchell

Author:Joseph Mitchell
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780307377630
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2008-06-30T16:00:00+00:00

Mr. Hunter refolded the ribbon and returned it to his wallet. Then he put the hoe back on his shoulder, and we entered the cemetery. A little road went halfway into the cemetery, and a number of paths branched off from it, and both the road and the paths were hipdeep in broom sedge. Here and there in the sedge were patches of Queen Anne’s lace and a weed that I didn’t recognize. I pointed it out to Mr. Hunter.

“What is that weed in among the broom sedge and the Queen Anne’s lace?” I asked.

“We call it red root around here,” he said, “and what you call broom sedge we call beard grass, and what you call Queen Anne’s lace we call wild carrot.”

We started up the road, but Mr. Hunter almost immediately turned in to one of the paths and stopped in front of a tall marble gravestone, around which several kinds of vines and climbing plants were intertwined. I counted them, and there were exactly ten kinds—cat brier, trumpet creeper, wild hop, blackberry, morning glory, climbing false buckwheat, partridgeberry, fox grape, poison ivy, and one that I couldn’t identify, nor could Mr. Hunter. “This is Uncle Daws Landin’s grave,” Mr. Hunter said. “I’m going to chop down some of this mess, so we can read the dates on his stone.” He lifted the hoe high in the air and brought it down with great vigor, and I got out of his way. I went back into the road, and looked around me. The older graves were covered with trees and shrubs. Sassafras and honey locust and wild black cherry were the tallest, and they were predominant, and beneath them were chokeberry, bayberry, sumac, Hercules’ club, spice bush, sheep laurel, hawthorn, and witch hazel. A scattering of the newer graves were fairly clean, but most of them were thickly covered with weeds and wild flowers and ferns. There were scores of kinds. The majority were the common kinds that grow in waste places and in dumps and in vacant lots and in old fields and beside roads and ditches and railroad tracks, and I could recognize them at a glance. Among these were milkweed, knotweed, ragweed, Jimson weed, pavement weed, catchfly, Jerusalem oak, bedstraw, goldenrod, cocklebur, butter-and-eggs, dandelion, bouncing Bet, mullein, partridge pea, beggar’s-lice, sandspur, wild garlic, wild mustard, wild geranium, rabbit tobacco, old-field cinquefoil, bracken, New York fern, cinnamon fern, and lady fern. A good many of the others were unfamiliar to me, and I broke off the heads and upper branches of a number of these and stowed them in the pockets of my jacket, to look at later under a magnifying glass. Some of the graves had rusty iron-pipe fences around them. Many were unmarked, but were outlined with sea shells or bricks or round stones painted white or flowerpots turned upside down. Several had fieldstones at the head and foot. Several had wooden stakes at the head and foot. Several had Spanish bayonets growing on them.

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