Viola snorted like an old horse and started up the hill.
When we arrived, half a dozen elderly men were putting a fresh coat of white paint on the wrought-iron fence around the huge cemetery. Wrought iron was a theme here; there were iron crosses and wreaths, and over some of the graves there were actual little iron houses, with roofs. Through the ups and downs of Black Mountain's smelting plant, Grace had been home to a lot of out-of-work metalworkers.
Most families divided their time between the maternal and paternal lines, spending mornings on one set of graves and afternoons on the other. Emelina and the boys staked out the Domingos plot and set to work sweeping and straightening. One of the graves, a great-uncle of J.T.'s named Vigilancio Domingos, was completely bordered with ancient-looking tequila bottles, buried nose down. Mason and I spent half the morning gathering up the strays and resetting them all in the dirt, as straight as teeth. It was a remarkable aesthetic-I don't mean just Uncle Vigilancio, but the whole. Some graves had shrines with niches peopled by saints; some looked like botanical gardens of paper and silk; others had the initials of loved ones spelled out on the mound in white stones. The unifying principle was that the simplest thing was done with the greatest care. It was a comfort to see this attention lavished on the dead. In these families you would never stop being loved.
The marigold truck arrived at ten o'clock. Women swarmed down on it like bees, coming away with armloads of floral gold. There were many theories on the best way to put them to use, or to make them go farthest. Viola, who directed the Domingos family operations, was of the deconstructionist school. She had the boys tear the flowers up and lay the petals down over a grave, blanketing it like a monochrome mosaic.
John Tucker stayed at his work but the twins wandered and Mason disappeared altogether. Emelina, wasn't worried. "He's refining his begging skills he learned on Halloween," she said, and was probably right. Grandmothers everywhere, who at lunch had set out extra plates for the dead, were now indiscriminately passing out the sweet remains of their picnics.
By mid-afternoon Emelina felt we should send out a search party, "before he eats so many cookies he busts." Viola volunteered, and I went with her, more or less as a tourist. I wanted to see what else there was in the line of beautified graves. We skirted Gonzalez and Castiliano and Jones, each family with its own style. Some were devotees of color or form, while others went for bulk. One grave, a boy who'd died young, was decorated with the better part of a Chevrolet. There were hundreds of holes drilled into the fishtail fenders, to hold flowers. It was beautiful, like a float in a parade.
The cemetery covered acres. To the west of us were collections of small neglected mounds whose stones bore the names of families that had died out. "Trubee," I read aloud, wandering toward the desert of the forgotten. "Alice, Anna, Marcus. Lomas: Hector, Esperanza, Jose, Angel, Carmela."
"Honey, we better get back to where people are," Viola cautioned, but I wandered on, as distracted in my way as Mason must have been, wherever he was.
"Nolina," I shouted. "Look, here's my long-lost relatives."
Viola looked at me oddly from her distance across the graves.
"I'm kidding," I said. We came from Illinois, as she well knew. "Here's my Aunt Raquel, my aunt...something Maria." Most of the graves were illegible, or so crudely marked there was nothing to read. Then I found one that stopped me dead.
"Viola. Here's a Homero Nolina."
"So it is," she said, not really looking. "Son of a gun."
I eyed her. "Do you know something about this?"
"What do you want me to tell you?"
"Who were the Nolinas?"
"Come on back away from there and I'll tell you."
I stood my ground.
"Honey, come on, let's leave these dead folks alone. Nobody put any plates of food out for them for a long, long time. They're not feeling so happy today."
"Okay, but you have to tell me."
She told me the Nolinas used to live up around Tortoise River, in the northern end of Gracela Canyon. There was a little settlement there that dispersed when the area was covered by mine tailings. The Nolinas had dug up what they could of the family graveyard and carried the bones a few miles to bury them up here. It wasn't all that long ago, she said. Around 1950.
"I don't know any Nolinas in Grace now," I said.
"No, they're about gone. They never did settle too good into Grace. The most of them went to Texas or somewhere, after their houses got tore up. They weren't..." She stopped and took off her shoe, cocking her stockinged foot against her plump ankle while she examined the inside of it, then put it back on. "The Nolinas weren't real accepted. They were kind of different all the way back. There was one of the Gracela sisters had auburn hair and a bad temper, and she married Conrado Nolina. They say that family went downhill."