The Shade at the End of the Row

"Whatsoever things are . . . lovely . . . think on these things." 
Philippians 4:8

The Shade at the End of the Row
By Foy Valentine

This is a cheerful word about cemeteries.
Actually it is mostly about a special cemetery.
I`ve been there a hundred times.
Just visiting of course.

I speak of the graveyard by the meeting house of my home church, the Pleasant Union Baptist Church in East Texas about five miles north of Edgewood and a mile or so this side of the Sabine River.

The great old post oaks around the back of the meetinghouse, extending out over the cemetery, are probably well over two hundred years old. They are the very ones my deacon Daddy used to tie our team to when we pulled up our wagon and got out to go to the church services where my Mother taught Sunday School and he led the singing. (You might very well have found yourself in a fistfight if you had called him a Minister of Music or, heaven forbid, a Worship Leader. For crying out loud!) After our car was sold and our family settled into the grinding poverty of the Great Depression, that narrow-tired wagon and those two mules, Red and Steve, were our only means of getting around. Otherwise we walked. Like everybody else.

But I digress.

The cemetery never was a depressing place to me. It`s still not. It was part of life. A part of church. A part of community. A part of family. Buried there are grandparents, aunts and uncles, cousins, early settlers, scalawags, bootleggers, heroes and heroines, godly old men and saintly old women, folks who would certainly have been candidates for beatification if dyed-in-the-wool Baptists and Methodists had dabbled in such a popish practice. And buried there are my parents and, next to them our blue-eyed and blond five-year old daughter.

When I walk those grounds, as I often do, I do so in profound sobriety.

I ne9arly always stop in solemn retrospection by the grave of Clarence Spradlin. Clarence got religion in his mature years, and he used to come faithfully to the stated services held in the one-room frame church house not thirty yards from where he is now resting. He faithfully carried a big, black Bible. He always wore high-mileage blue overalls. He never wore shoes. Summer and winter he never wore shoes. He didn`t have any shoes. Trapping for mink and lesser game through those rugged creek and river bottoms, his bare feet got so calloused that you could easily strike a match on the bottom of either bare heel. I`ve done it lots of times. No "reed shaken by the wind," never cumbered with "soft raiment," not even remotely near being "gorgeously attired" (Matthew 11:8; Luke 17:24-28), Clarence Spradlin was the nearest man to John the Baptist I have ever known. With his kind of nerve, style, and smarts, he might well, under more fortuitous circumstances, have been an Amos, a Governor, a Senator, a rocket scientist, or an astronaut. He died when he was not yet forty.

Then I seldom fail to stop a while at the grave of Kenneth Jackson, a grand and godly old deacon whose words of encouragement and blessing spoken to me privately and with palsied deliberation right after I, as a boy, had publicly professed my faith in Jesus Christ as my personal Lord and Savior, still lodge in my mind after nearly seventy years.

The grave of a neighbor and an old family friend, Charlie Waggoner, is made special by a loving tribute, likely posted there by a grateful and caring daughter. The message is carried in a neat little sign by a blue plastic telephone, "Jesus Called Daddy Home." No, it is hardly on the same website as Shakespeare`s Sonnets. But it is light years ahead of the Beatles or what your average Rapper might produce. Moreover it is a quintessentially Van Zandt County kind of manifesto, not to be denied, denounced, or denigrated.

There are gravestones, of course, that speak of wasted years, trashed talents, broken promises, crippling addictions, inhuman cruelties, deferred dreams, debilitating diseases, and blood violence. Many of these came to rest here no doubt feeling like Socrates, unjustly condemned to death by lesser men, who told his friend, Crito, to sacrifice a rooster on the morning after he had drunk the hemlock to celebrate his release from "terrible life."

I will not linger in telling you of our young daughter`s white marble marker with its somber words from Job 1:21, "The Lord has given. The Lord has taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord." Nor will I wallow in maudlin sentimentality over the graves of my parents whose Texas red granite tombstone carries carvings of the irises that bloomed around our house, along with the proper names and the proper dates. They started married life together not a mile from here, Josie Helen Johnson and John Hardy Valentine; and after nearly sixty years together, they now rest here together side by side, and they will be rising together on that great Waking Up Morning. Is this shouting ground, or what?

All in all, this graveyard is a lovely place.

And it is not unlike untold thousands of other such places.

I think of Huntsville`s secluded bower in a patch of dense East Texas woods where Sam Houston rests in peace by a Sidney Lanier poem carved in stone, "Into the woods my Master went. Clean forspent . . . ."

Stratford on Avon comes to mind with William Shakespeare`s modest marker in a little graveyard by a small Anglican church, saying simply, "Good friend for Jesus` sake forebeare, to dig the dust enclosed here. Blest be the man that spares these stones, and curst be he that moves my bones."

I admire an old, old cemetery in old Mobile where giant live oaks laden with centuries-old accumulations of Spanish moss shelter the last resting places of the city`s early settlers.

Secluded little hollows in the Great Smoky Mountains also come to mind, places on narrow dirt roads where little white church houses are twinned with neat little cemeteries on green hillsides with markers bearing old Anglo-Saxon names on stones long since so weathered and lichened that God only knows who they were, or when they were born, or when their travails ceased and their impossible dreams were put on hold.

A few hardy souls are still around who know the rigors of hard labor over row crops of cotton and corn, who experienced the broiling heat of the summer sun as backs were bent under the undulating heat waves that old folks called Lazy Lawrence, and who toiled at the tiresome task of chopping and hoeing which row crops demand. Those who remember that work will remember even more clearly the blessed relief that came when the work could be laid down for a few minutes and rest could be found in the shade at the end of the row. How delicious it is to sit in the shade for a little while, hat off, with a slight breeze blowing in the face, a long drink of cool water, and respite from the burning of the noonday heat and the burden of the day. Shade at the end of the row. It is a special dispensation of grace.

Is not the graveyard, for its occupants, this world`s ultimate shade at the end of the row?

So, until death is finally swallowed up in victory for the people of God, it seems to me that it is not going to get any better than this, to rest in peace in the shade at the end of the row.

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