I don’t know.”
“Oh,” Christmas said. “They might have done that? dug them up after they were already killed, dead?
Just when do men that have different blood in them stop hating one another?”
“When do they?” Her voice ceased.
She went on: “I don’t know.
I don’t know whether they would have dug them up or not.
I wasn’t alive then.
I was not born until fourteen years after Calvin was killed.
I don’t know what men might have done then.
But father thought they might have.
So he hid the graves.
And then Calvin’s mother died and he buried her there, with Calvin and grandpa.
And so it sort of got to be our burying ground before we knew it.
Maybe father hadn’t planned to bury her there.
I remember how my mother (father sent for her up to New Hampshire where some of our kin people still live, soon after Calvin’s mother died.
He was alone here, you see.
I suppose if it hadn’t been for Calvin and grandpa buried out yonder, he would have gone away) told me that father started once to move away, when Calvin’s mother died.
But she died in the summer, and it would have been too hot then to take her back to Mexico, to her people.
So he buried her here.
Maybe that’s why he decided to stay here.
Or maybe it was because he was getting old too then, and all the men who had fought in the War were getting old and the negroes hadn’t raped or murdered anybody to speak of.
Anyway, he buried her here.
He had to hide that grave too, because he thought that someone might see it and happen to remember Calvin and grandfather.
He couldn’t take the risk, even if it was all over and past and done then.
And the next year he wrote to our cousin in New Hampshire.
He said,
‘I am fifty years old.
I have all she will ever need.
Send me a good woman for a wife.
I don’t care who she is, just so she is a good housekeeper and is at least thirty-five years old.’
He sent the railroad fare in the letter.
Two months later my mother got here and they were married that day.
That was quick marrying, for him.
The other time it took him over twelve years to get married, that time back in Kansas when he and Calvin and Calvin’s mother finally caught up with grandfather.
They got home in the middle of the week, but they waited until Sunday to have the wedding.
They had it outdoors, down by the creek, with a barbecued steer and a keg of whiskey and everybody that they could get word to or that heard about it, came.
They began to get there Saturday morning, and on Saturday night the preacher came.
All that day father’s sisters worked, making Calvin’s mother a wedding gown and a veil.
They made the gown out of flour sacks and the veil out of some mosquito netting that a saloon keeper had nailed over a picture behind the bar.
They borrowed it from him.
They even made some kind of a suit for Calvin to wear.
He was twelve then, and they wanted him to be the ringbearer.
He didn’t want to.
He found out the night before what they intended to make him do, and the next day (they had intended to have the wedding about six or seven o’clock the next morning) after everybody had got up and eaten breakfast, they had to put off the ceremony until they could find Calvin.
At last they found him and made him put on the suit and they had the wedding, with Calvin’s mother in the homemade gown and the mosquito veil and father with his hair slicked with bear’s grease and the carved Spanish boots he had brought back from Mexico.
Grandfather gave the bride away.
Only he had been going back to the keg of. whiskey every now and then while they were hunting for Calvin, and so when his time came to give the bride away he made a speech instead.
He got off on Lincoln and slavery and dared any man there to deny that Lincoln and the negro and Moses and the children of Israel were the same, and that the Red Sea was just the blood that had to be spilled in order that the black race might cross into the Promised Land.
It took them some time to make him stop so the wedding could go on.
After the wedding they stayed about a month.