The most beautiful of all beautiful rivers—bold-bluffed and crooked, darkening in shadow or shimmering in sunlight, and never yet desecrated by the touch of a wheel of commerce—is the Duck, rising among the foothills to the east and flowing through the blue limestone of this Niagara period, like the Hudson, to the Cumberland. It flows through middle Tennessee and past the town I call my home.
Many are the picturesque spots on its banks. My favorite one is a huge projecting rock, protected by large upright ones nearly as immense, and shooting out over tier upon tier of rocks, down a hundred feet below, to where the river runs like life—now in sunshine, now in shadow. On this rock, sheltered by others which form a kind of background, I love to take the lap-robe from the buggy, spread it out, stretch out and enjoy the scenery beyond—the valley rolling away, the bend after bend of the river, with the water flashing between the iron bridge that spans from rock to rock, the everlasting hills and the eternal skies.
There is only one thing to mar the beauty of this place. In ten feet of my rock is a neglected grave. The mound is sunken around it, clearly defining the outlines. Even the bluegrass refuses to grow on it, it is so uncanny. I had often wondered whose grave this was, neglected, unkept, forgotten.
“Perhaps,” I said, often to myself, “it is the grave of some Federal soldier, buried far away from home. No doubt he fell in Hood’s raid, when that soldier turned his back on Atlanta and struck out for Tennessee, sweeping everything before him to Nashville. Somewhere in the North there is an unknown grave in a human heart. Or, it is just as apt to be,” I would add, “one of those half-clad, half-fed Johnny Rebs, frozen in that November’s sleet, and thawed out in the withering fire of Franklin. Foot-sore, heart-sore, wounded and sick, he straggled forty miles from Nashville, trying to follow Hood’s forlorn hope back to the Tennessee River, and died here. Poor fellow, whoever he was!”
But not long ago an old darky whom I sometimes saw wandering around in the neglected graveyard near, told me better. It is an old graveyard, now full and neglected. Under a big tree I can see the square tombs of the father and mother, sisters and brothers of James K. Polk.
I say graveyard purposely. Nowadays, it is true, they call it cemetery. Cemetery is Frenchy, from Latin, and I suppose the name has been adopted because it sounds better than the Saxon graveyard. That other Saxon word, God’s Acre, sounds better. As if we could tone down the hideousness of skeleton death with a French cutaway! And I hope you will pardon this digression when I tell you I hate everything American that patterns after French, and I love everything English that clings to Anglo-Saxon. William the Norman was a free booter, a robber and a bully, and for my part I am sorry that old Saxon Harold did not wipe the face of the earth up with him and his parley-vouzing crowd of rakes at Hastings. England has never had a king since that was half the man Alfred was. We should have missed all the mean and villainous Johns and Richards, the devilish Henrys, the profligate Charleses and the pigheaded, blood-pudding and brainless Georges. And I would not allow a foreign grammar of any kind to be taught in our public schools. For is it not ideas which count, and not words? One flag and one language, and the man who tried to pull either of them down I would—well, you have heard the rest. Lord help us! Starving out the most glorious, the most beautiful, the strongest and the grandest language in the world, the language of Chaucer, Milton, Burns and Byron, of Emerson and Carlyle, to teach our children a mongrel mixture that tends to mongrel morals!
But, as I was saying, the old darky told me about a year ago who the lonely occupant of the neglected grave was. “Boss,” he said, as he sat up against the slab that answered for a headboard, “I thou’t eberybody knowed dis grabe was de grabe of de man dat was kicked to deff by a stallion on de public square sixty years dis spring. Dat’s all I knowed about him, an’ dey buried him heah.”
After that I would often find myself thinking of the unknown being who slept there. Did he have a family, and what became of them? What strain of horse could in those days have been so vicious? What stallion kicked him? Stump-the-Dealer? No; Stump was too lazy to kick. Kittrell’s Hal? He was a baby. Could it have been—ah, yes, happy thought! I have it. It was one of those new trotting St. Lawrences, or Messengers, that Major Andrew Polk introduced in the country about that time. The major was showing him off the first Monday on the square; a crowd of rustics gathered around, thinking he was gentle, like our Hals; one got too close to his heels—a flash of a leg—a crash—a bursted skull—a forsaken grave—and the world moves on.
No doubt of it. And the lonely occupant really holds a state record and doesn’t know it: “First man in Tennessee to be kicked to death by a trotter!”
“This thing is getting interesting,” I say to myself, “and I’ll romance on that man a little—make him up a pretty history in my mind.” I draw my lap robe a little further in the sun. How pleasant and delightful it is! How sweet the spring breeze comes from the South, and how the water, from a fisherman’s paddle, sparkles like diamonds far below.