My grandmother, Ida, loves to talk. She’ll tell stories for days, but she only told me this story once, and never spoke about it again.
There’s an abandoned steel skeleton on the other side of the cemetery where Ida grew up. It used to be a cell tower, or maybe it was for power lines; there’s no way to tell now. The blackberry plants are still there, though. They twist around the places where the metal still disappears into the dirt, the beams sunk deep into the ground despite the way the whole structure has fallen sideways into the grass. The graves are in almost the same state of disrepair, with most of the names scrubbed away by the rain and the wind. But there’s one heads tone that still gleams like it did on the day it was made, the marble cast with shifting shadows from the sugar-maple tree that looms over it. Charlotte Telor is etched into it, along with beloved.
Charlotte’s mother, Ida, is eighty-three now. She can barely walk from all the cancers that have left her body weak, and she hobbles along with one hand on her husband’s shoulder and one hand on mine. She kneels in front of Sharon’s tomb and prays over it, then puts down new flowers to replace the old ones. She comes here so often that the previous flowers still look almost fresh. When Ina gets up, she has a stinging nettle rash on her right knee and an oak gall stuck to her sweater.
They’d pick the blackberries, Charlotte and Ida, back when the tower was still standing proud over the cemetery. Charlotte loved to gather up a handful of berries and put one at the foot of every grave, with a pause between each to eat one herself, of course. She thought that each patch of dirt contained an angel, and she could gain their favor by feeding them. She picked up bits of tombstones and tried to fit the puzzle pieces back together, even when the graves looked like nothing more than a bare patch of dirt.
Ida goes to church every Sunday and puts her whole heart into it, singing as loud as her throat can manage, even when it hurts her. She bakes bread once a month to share at the community dinners, donates candles for Christmas service, and is generally a pillar of the Spartanburg community.
“They all came over when Charlotte died,” Ida told me. “All of my friends, every single one of them.” She didn’t spend a moment alone, and she didn’t have to cook for herself for a month. There was a collection sent around, the following Sunday, to pay for Charlotte’s medical bills.
It started when Charlotte started walking around hunched over, her arms wrapped tight around her stomach. When she started vomiting and didn’t stop, Ida took her to the emergency room in their old car, rattling over the potholes at seventy miles an hour. They were sent away at the emergency room, though, because Charlotte wasn’t crying and it was busy. Another day passed. Charlotte grew more and more sick. They went back to the emergency room, and finally talked to a doctor.
The doctor looked her over, pressed on her belly, and then went silent. He picked her up and took her into the next room without a single word, except to brush off the secretary.
“They need to sign in,” the secretary said.
“No time,” the doctor answered, his voice still deathly quiet.
Ida doesn’t remember what happened after that. It’s lost to her in a haze of grief and people running. All she knows is that her baby died from a burst appendix because she was sent away the first time they went to the doctor. Charlotte was two years old. She was buried in the same cemetery that she used to hunt for blackberries in.
“She didn’t cry,” Ida said. “The whole time, she didn’t cry. The doctors told me that she must have had such a massive tolerance for pain.”
But my grandmother tells me something different.
“I saw them take her,” Ida says. “The demons. They crawled out of the graves and killed Charlotte’s blackberry angels.”
According to Ida, she didn’t cry because the demons had stuffed their claim into her mouth, gagged her on their rotting flesh and planted their poison in her.
“The God that I know is a loving God,” Ina said. “I don’t know how he could let that happen. It just slipped by his notice, I guess.”
She is eighty-three years old and losing a child is still the worst thing that has ever happened to her. Her confession to me, in an ashamed whisper, is that she can only keep going because she knows that she will see Charlotte again, one way or another. She’s been catching glimpses of the demons out of the corners of her eyes for decades.