Entrance to Mount Calvary / Photo by Birdie Jaworski

“It’s too hot, Mom.”

My young son, Martin, lifted his baseball cap and wiped the sweat from his forehead. We’d walked two miles, almost three. The Mount Calvary Cemetery stood just out of reach.

“We’re almost there, honey. C’mon. Have something to drink.”

I held out a full bottle of water. My grandmother’s ashes coughed. I felt them lurch, three miles away in a decorative urn near my desk, felt her assemble and decay. Martin lurched forward, a robot on Mars, tiny robot with bio-skin near meltdown. He sipped.

The cemetery stole my heat, my fatigue. It rolled an acre, two, fifty, fifty acres of homegrown pain, of buried man, woman, and child. Martin chased a prairie dog, his robot battery satiated, aware. He didn’t notice my surprise, didn’t know the cemetery didn’t look like a cemetery. I lost him to the pinon, to the prairie dog, the sky of stillness and fire. I didn’t worry.

The plots didn’t lay in elegant rows. They jockeyed for position, each facing the East, facing the rising morning Christ. Tiny iron windmills. Handcarved river rock. Burned and etched slabs of pine. Dolls. Rosaries. Plastic Marys with deliberately tilted heads. A handmade garden of death, only a few granite headstones in sea of a thousand, only a few memorials of Rich Person Passing.

I knelt to consider a baby’s grave. The baby rustled beneath an uneven circle of hand-placed rocks. She danced with my dead grandmother, with my heart, with my boy chasing rodent. I couldn’t stop the tears as a woman loomed into view. Pecos resident Lucia Martinez walked, a vase of dried sage in her left hand, from her cousin’s home on Gonzales a good mile away.

“I am an old woman now. Eighty-two years old, can you believe it? I buried my mother fifty years ago but the pain’s still the same. I like to leave my mother something every few months. I can feel her watching over me. She was younger than me when she died.” Lucia set the vase on a small cement kneeler. She looked past the simple wooden cross guarding her mother’s grave toward the Sacred Heart of Jesus statue set into a sloping hill.

Memorial Cross / Birdie Jaworski

“I’m glad my mother is buried in Las Vegas. The big city cemeteries have no heart. She died in Santa Fe, but the grounds there are too well-kept. This place still has real soul. She was born here. Look at the headstones. They’re art.”

Lucia pointed to a cross. It stood sentry over a thirty-year-old grave, simply etched with the decedent’s name and date of passing along with a few gentle touches – a broad leaf, a decorative swirl. Behind her a working windmill chugged in time to the relentless wind. Beneath the twist of metal against air sat two new flower pots, each filled with living, watered mums, one on each side of a polished marble stone.

“Where do I want to go when I die? I haven’t lived in Las Vegas for many years, not since I was a little girl. I want to be remembered here, though. I want my grandchildren to find my grave and leave rosaries and flowers. What use is a cemetery if no one cares to visit?”

Lucia turned to walk back to her cousin’s house. She passed a pile of new teddy bears, one stitched with the word “Sister.” She paused.

“See? This is what I mean. It’s good to remember where we came from. This place is real.”

Cresencio Trujillo knows how real the cemetery is, knows the real love and pain loved ones feel when they visit. Caretaker for ten years, Cres felt the heavy ache of hard work pushing headstones back into place, confronting lovers at night, and decided it was time to retire.

“I heard that Josepha and Miguel Romero donated the property for this cemetery many years ago.” Cres pointed to an elegant new marker, a smooth-faced stone with rough-hewn edges. The front was carved with three photographic likenesses of a young man – as baseball player, as sophisticate, as a fresh-faced dreamer. A chiseled truck parked near a lake; another truck challenged the steep sides of a back forest road.

“This is my favorite stone. It belongs to a young man who took his own life.” Cres spoke simply, his voice as matter-of-fact as death itself. “You can see how the stone tells the story of his life. He loved to fish. He worked for the Forestry Service. His mother comes to visit him every day. She says it feels peaceful here, and I have to agree.”

Cres pointed to a thick metal post painted fire engine red. “See that post? That’s so that no one drives over that plot at the end of this row. That’s Dr. Pete Compos’ family plot.” Cres laughed. “Dr. Compos said he wanted to be laid to rest at the edge of the cemetery so he can make a quick escape. He has a nice location,” he continued, smiling. “This is a special area due to its prettiness.”

The young man on the stone smiled, his sweet eyes facing Jesus, his future, like our own futures, the greatest mystery of all. As Martin bent to pat her head, my dog smiled too, her haunches spread against dry clay, in her vibrating fur blanket. I felt the smile of my grandmother in the sun’s heat, felt the peace our earth holds bringing us rest.