Free Having Everything Right by Robert Michael; Kim; Pyle Stafford

ponder the visible artifacts of religious belief my people hold. I did all that. The study is in the archive. The memory works on me.
    But now it’s dusk at Camp Polk, and I’m visiting old friends. Here’s Ray, by the champion juniper gnarl he loved to paint. His name in my mouth brings up a riff of banjo jangle I heard him play. There’s a snow-swirl dancer over his place now.
    I remember my discovery ten years ago, that graves everywhere planted heads to the west. This marks a Christian readiness to rise up facing Christ as He will bloom from the east on Judgment Day. And I remember how many of the thirteen cemeteries marked the end of a dead-end road: the Ashwood plot up a dirt track with no sign. The Grizzly cemetery at the ripe heart of a wheatfield with no road at all, forgotten like the town of Grizzly itself, which some prosperous corporation had bought. I drove around and around that field, knowing I was close, my map fluttering from my hand in the heat, until finally I squinted my eyes past the shimmering wheat and saw the cemetery fence out there roadless in the middle of the standing grain.
    Somewhere near the cemetery here at Camp Polk, a hundred odd years ago, the U.S. Army buried a cannon before fleeing from the Indians. Treasure hunters have sought it, as if it were a memory they owned by rights, as if that brass body might be raised up and carried away. You have to brave a series of “No Trespassing” signs to get toCamp Polk. Ten years ago there was a sign to invite visitors on toward the cemetery on its little hill beyond the most handsome of falling barns. This evening, there is no sign. You have to know.
    Driving into Shaniko, on my cemetery route in 1975, I remember slowing the car to ask directions of an old-timer crumpled easily beside a shed, whittling steadily at a stub of wood. I didn’t realize until too late the impertinence of my opening question: “Excuse me, sir, could you direct me to the cemetery?”
    There was a tremendous pause, as he turned slowly up from his work to unroll a vacant smile. No answer was on the way. I thanked him, and drove on to the Eat Cafe. This time, I tried to be a bit more discreet, making my request in hushed tones to the waitress as she came rollicking across the room with half a dozen steaming plates along her arms.
    â€œExcuse me, I’m trying to find the cemetery—for research.”
    She lurched expertly to a stop without jostling a plate, and shouted to the long table of white-haired ladies at the far end of the room, “Hey girls, we got a cemetery?” They vaguely shook their heads.
    â€œMister,” she said, “we ain’t got one. Try Antelope.” I explained that I had already been there, and learned what I could.
    â€œWell,” she said, “then I don’t think we can help you. We don’t figure to do much dying in this town.”
    If you lie on your back to watch the snow come down, you will hear little rustlings in the grass, and you seem to see a long way up into the sky. You can try to be as still as everyone else, as hopeful and content.
    I remember the gravestone at Agency Plains, the one with the sheriff’s badge carved deep into the marble beside one name. Neighbors told me later he had never been Sheriff, but that was his life-long wish. Deputy, yes. Sheriff, never. Until then.
    Religion in the desert has a lot to do with patience, and patience has a lot to do with silence. Beyond my feet where I lie at Camp Polk, thereis a stone with an infant’s oval ceramic photograph fixed to the pedestal. Someone sometime has used it for target practice, and the gray print of the bullet shies away low and to the left. There are so many children, and they are all so silent they are a chorus. The desert is big enough to hold that wind.
    At Ashwood in that ten years back I heard a wind coming. All was still where I crouched, but I heard that wind. Hot. There was a permanence to