As a child, I spent a good amount of time in cemeteries—especially considering that no one in my life would die for a long time. The dead arrived before me, but we visited often.
Our city cemetery was a short drive from home, but kitty-corner from my grandparents’ driveway. I invented cemetery games and played in the grass. I gathered the scattered, polyester flowers and divvied them between the barest headstones. I tracked the similarities in differences between the stones. I liked to read the names. I still do.
In childhood, my large family rarely traveled. When we traveled, we only went as far as Utah’s corners and edges. Our family trips were family trips. We drove south for family reunions. We stopped in towns our dead had settled, lived and died in. We read pioneer monuments, mostly big rocks, and historical markers, their long lists of names. One of the most memorable of these stops was to the cemetery in Pinto. It was a small, rocky cemetery at the end of a long gravel road.
Years later, I was writing poems about my great-great-great grandmother, Martha, and her marriage to her stepfather, David. This marriage made Martha’s mother, Alice, Martha’s sister-wife. When David married Martha, Alice and David had a small baby together. Martha and David had twelve children. The three of them lived together in polygamy until Alice’s death.
I was drawn to Martha’s life because I knew almost nothing about it, because I was reading and thinking about sexual abuse, gendered violence, family memory, the meanings of “daughter” and “place.” Martha could reportedly read and write, but in the years I worked on these poems, I never found any words she recorded. So I also became interested in silence and forgetting, documentation and imagination.
When I returned to Pinto Cemetery, in the middle of my research on Martha’s life, I was struck by weathering. Many of the headstones were already cracked, missing, aging. Many older headstones were red or pink sandstone. Time and weather had entered, carving a new face into the rock.
It was difficult to know where the graves began and ended. I walked gingerly on uneven ground.
Headstones symbolize permanence. This might be particularly true for Mormon graves—if you walk around any old Utah cemetery, you’ll finds hands carved into headstones. Hands clasped and shaking, sometimes framed by curtains. These hands reflect eternal covenants adult members make in the temple. More contemporary headstones have an image of a temple itself, a powerful symbol and place, linking this world and the next. Typically, the particular temple on any given headstone is where that couple were married and sealed through life and death.
In Pinto, I found my dead by reading names. I knew that David had married Alice first, even though Alice was buried in another area of the cemetery, far from David, next to her first husband. Her headstone gives no hint that she married again, had another baby. David and Martha’s headstone also looks monogamous, and lists Alice and David’s baby on the back, with Martha and David’s babies, a list that begins “Our Children.”
These Saints are Stones was an attempt at locating, ordering, trying to tidy my way into understanding what I could not comprehend—Martha’s experience of life and marriage. In “Pinto Cemetery,” quatrains are part of this attempt at creating order, a squaring away. They are also probably headstones.
Working on these poems, I learned how to read a cemetery directory, how to map the name I brought with me to its stone. I learned how to draw my genealogy out. I can tell you what a second cousin twice removed is. I can draw you the diagram to explain it.
But what ordering is there to actually understand the relationships I am born from? This sixteen-year-old pioneer girl married her stepfather. This is one of my beginnings.
What I do know about these origins is a privilege. I can drive from my hometown to all the graves of all my Mormon dead. I can find information about them online, for free, from my phone, thanks to a huge network of extended family who believe doing the work of family history is divine.
But what I uncovered could never eclipse what I did not know, what no one living remembered, what no one dead wrote down. I am grateful for the records that were kept and frustrated by the details. I am angry about how little I can uncover about the lives of my dead Mormon women. I am angry when I read the same details to describe the insides of these women’s days: she was a good mother, she did good deeds, she kept a clean house, she had a good garden. Most family narratives paid details to men’s lives, placed women’s plots in orbit to their men.
Polygamy makes this structure acutely visible. Years after I went back to Pinto, I was researching another polygamous pioneer family. The man had married one woman in his youth, and then two much younger women, close in age. These younger two were sisters. For a short time, he was imprisoned for living with multiple women. A family story recounts how a guard teased him about polygamy, asking which wife was his favorite. He replied, drawing a diagram with his cane, a circle in the dirt, “See this circle? Put me in the center and my wives any place on the edge of it. l like the one nearest me.” In polygamy, there is always one man, centered.
Mormons are a record-keeping people, and I took fieldnotes for all the cemeteries I visited. In Pinto, I recorded the opening of Lorine Neidecker’s “Lake Superior”: “In every part of every living thing / is stuff that once was rock.” I counted children and photographed rocks. The wind blew. I recorded I was cold and walked around the cemetery again to warm up. At Martha’s grave, the toe of my boot broke through the hard shell of topsoil.
