A Parable About Community
For Jay Martin
Men mow alfalfa with Percherons, laundry billows
on lines strung from house to barn, and at Locust Grove
cemetery, a lawn tractor hums in the distance
as we wander the rows of stones. My friend notes
a few flags and veterans’ stars marring the resting place
of the ancestors. I recognize the man on a mower,
my mom’s step-brother, a retired farmer. Hello, sorry
I didn’t see you from so far away, I wave. I knew who
you were by the stones where you stopped, he says.
After introductions, my friend asks whether there’s ever
been concern about burying soldiers in that place.
Not really a question, more like critique wrapped
in condescension, which the caretaker must sense.
He smiles, looks down, Well, no. Except maybe once.
Then he leans back on his heels and begins a story
he will tell without ever looking into my friend’s eyes.
There was a certain Urie Zook who grew up Amish
and enlisted in the Air Force during World War II.
He flew fifty missions in fifteen months as a turret gunner.
Shot down behind enemy lines, he always escaped.
He could have trained pilots, he was that good but he just
liked flying so much, he returned for another tour. Then,
toward the end of the war, his plane was shot down again
and he was captured in Germany. Boarding a transport train,
he was hit by a bomb dropped from an American gunner,
and when they shipped his body back to the Valley,
his father wanted to bury him here with the rest of the family.
But a certain young man on the cemetery board
felt the boy shouldn’t be buried here—maybe because
he liked flying so much, or because he was such a hero
in the newspapers. (It had not been easy for people
speaking Dutch during those years, and non-resistance
was a test of membership in our churches.) Others said
it was bad enough to lose a son that way, let alone
ban him from the graveyard. Finally, a compromise:
Urie was laid just this side of the fence. But look,
people keep dying. Cemeteries grow. So, now Urie lies well
inside. And lately, that one who wanted to cast him out
finally died. Then the man looks up at us and smiles.
Where do you think he’s buried? Over there, way past
Urie’s grave, up against the corn field.