Little Thurber Girl Story

“Daddy, I’m scared.”

My little daughter’s voice comes to me, always in my sleep. Awakening, finding her piercing blue eyes seeking the safety of her parents’ bed, safety from some noise, some bad dream. Sharing sanctuary restores peace.

Saturday was different.

Walking up unexpectedly that day on the final resting place of another family’s daughter twisted my insides as few tragedies have. I’m guessing she was six or eight. A wild guess, I admit. She lies alone in an area of the Forgotten – a sea of faceless burial plots sleeping atop a quiet hilltop, above what was once one of Texas’ most bustling boom towns – Thurber, Texas.

            Thurber Cemetery crowns Graveyard Hill, a lonely place halfway between Fort Worth and Abilene just off Interstate 20. The cemetery is nearing the mid-point of a restoration project, marking the graves of the Forgotten with headstones, awaiting their full return to the pages of history.

            One has a lot of time to think, working alone in remote cemeteries. This day, cold, wet, clouds low on the horizon, I come across this grave.

“Daddy, I’m scared.”

            Some days discoveries like this make sense to me, almost like the cemetery is teaching aloud whatever lesson her Story finds needful. Though it may be a writer’s romantic delusion, such days often lead to months-later discoveries, the genesis of which cannot be empirically explained.

This little girl’s eternal nap lies below a tangle of gray-blond dead winter grass. A white PVC cross lies on its side in three pieces, a freshly-driven wooden survey replacing it. The stake stares back, “FC” written in black marker announcing this grave’s rediscovery – Female Child. Within months, a backhoe will set a new stone marker where this hammered wooden stake marks time. Hundreds of nearby 1888 - 1930 graves will also receive these memorials.

Several days of bitter winter rain stopped yesterday. The ground is spongy. Uncertain. I hear some melancholy bird in the distance. I hear the distant hum of Interstate 20, plowing through what was once a dense maze of company-owned Thurber homes, each three rooms, each like the other, each renting for $6 a month.

This girl lies about 75 yards from the Protestant Gate. There are no graves to either side of her. I don’t know how long she’s been here. She isn’t in the mood to talk. Her final resting place is situated mere feet inside the Catholic fence, where the fence used to stand anyway. Thurber Cemetery was divided into African-American, Catholic, and Protestant cemeteries, each separately fenced, each accessed by different roads through different gates. The path to Eternity required a map.

This daughter’s nearness to that fence suggests that her family planned on its use as a landmark, to find their lost child later. When they could afford a more permanent marker. One can imagine a freshly-painted white wooden cross, consumed years later by wildfire, or a misguided bulldozer, blading parts of the cemetery in the 1960s.

Restoration run amuck.

Twelve feet from this girl’s grave lies Lillia May Burch, Daughter of  A.W. & Jessie Burch. Born March 27, 1893, died August 8, 1894 if I am reading the worn white stone correctly. Her birthday approaches. A dove is carved at the top of her arch-top monument. A poem below: “Our darling one has gone before, to greet us on the golden shore.”    

Lillia May’s headstone was broken in half, left to right, then sometime later pieced back together. We know who she is, at least her name.

Twelve feet away from our girl.

Enough width for two more graves between them.

Or a jump rope.

Two gravesites that stand empty.

Thurber Cemetery’s current restoration will repair the cowardice of vandals, and give markers to the estimated 1,100 souls who now sleep beneath dark brown sand rocks, or fat red bricks or mostly, nothing. There are three known mass graves in this cemetery, thought to be from the epidemics that swept this town in the early 1900s. No fatal mass mining accidents ever occurred here. The remains within one of those mass graves are interred with bodies overlapping, the haste of panicked burial, to thwart further contamination, one surmises.

Other parts of the cemetery host children’s plots clustered together as close as geometry allows, to keep each other company, I hope.

To keep each other safe.

I take frequent breaks, working these sections. These kids played with toys bought down the hill at the Thurber Mercantile. Our girl may have gotten a small doll, apples, oranges, maybe pecans for Christmas that fateful year. There was a company school, and if she was Catholic, she likely received additional training from parish catechists.

The Italian families sang loud happy songs, drank dark grappo wine, baked fine Italian bread outside in ovens, washed clothes over open fires. They were a joyful people, these Italians, at home with the 17 other nationalities that populated this town.

This girl’s alone grave suggests her family must have moved away, perhaps to Illinois or California when Thurber’s mines shut down. If they went up the hill to Ranger, there would be a rock here, a crude concrete headstone.

Something.

Here lies some coal miner’s daughter.

She could have had long dark black hair, dark brown almond eyes. Could have been northern Italian as most were in this area of the graveyard. Obviously Catholic, baptized down the hill at the parish church, now across the highway below New York Hill.

I look for meaning in these stories. One has many chances, if one will but open his eyes and see. More commercial writers call these tales sentimental. One loses points for these “trite writing conventions of the past”. This girl’s daddy was almost certainly a coal miner. Perhaps the ore carts of black rock he shoveled the day before her death fueled a Texas and Pacific Railroad locomotive pushing settlers hard across the adolescent southwestern American prairie.

Their people’s story was bigger than each individual.

Their story helped settle this great country.

I try for a moral, and fail.

It’s hard to reframe some family’s daughter’s demise in a positive way. She probably died of influenza, smallpox or some other silent thief. My notes have sulked quietly in this writing spiral for three days, stubbornly refusing to give me my happy ending.

This girl’s story likely haunted her parents’ last breaths. Her brothers and sisters carried their parents’ hurt touchstones in their hearts’ pockets, though their sister’s memory surely dwindled with time. Her nieces and nephews, the generation behind hers, the five generations since she passed have probably lost her completely – unless there is a family Bible, a diary, or a torn photograph tucked inside a metal bread box in some too-hot summer attic, in some half-off antique store.

I type this in the warmth of the Arlington Public Library, two hours til my next appointment. I receive a text message on my phone from home: “Got Savanna from school. She tired. Had soup and now juice. Tucked in our bed. Keeping close eye on, as Shelby and Lillie both went to doctor today. Mrs. Dugan said there is something going around the school.”

My own daughter Savannah, six-years-old, slept fitfully last night, coughing, having trouble breathing. Her hacking cough deepened with each passing hour. We propped her up on a pillow. We give her medicine that some “evil pharmaceutical” invented within the last five years. If she’d not been better in the morning, we would have taken her to her doctor.

Just like always, she would get better.

Not like always.

“Daddy, I’m scared.”

Eleven decades ago, this newfound Thurber daughter’s family might have listened to that same cough, to their daughter’s labored breathing. Might have sat up with her, prayed over her, covered her forehead with cool cloths. The Catholic priest, able to speak seven languages, might have been called out in the middle of the night. The faith that I feel in our family’s doctor would for these people have felt like bottomless dread, perhaps for her mother – soaring panic. These hardworking people would have whispered prayers, likely in Latin, to the same God that watched over my daughter last night.

They would have prayed in faith, in hope.

They would have felt a jeopardy I have never known.

Ora pro nobis, sancta Dei Genitrix, Ut digni efficiamur promissionibus Christi. Pray for us, O holy Mother of God, that we may be made worthy of the promises of Christ.

My own littlest daughter gets tucked in for her nap. I look at her sleeping – so peaceful, so at odds with the full-out curiosity that fires her explosive energy. When Savannah awakes, I will hear her words, by the thousands, machine-gunning every Little-Girl-Thought that passes through her zip code.

When she awakes, I will know her better.

When she awakes.

I write to a little Thurber daughter, may you never be forgotten. I wish I had more to offer you. I wish I had an explanation. I hope that your family made it to their next home. I hope that they wrote down your name, perhaps a word or two about your sweet little girl nature. I hope that your parents’ words pass in front of me someday soon.

That my eyes are open, to meet you.

If your family someday comes looking for you in the Thurber Cemetery, based upon some scrap of tattered something they’ve hand down, your hilltop resting place, though your name still unknown, will be easy for them to find. I hope they help protect these hallowed places.

Someday, someone will come looking to reclaim you. Though silent, I heard you whisper at last. Now, like my own two daughters, you never stop talking.

I like that, about little girls.

I hope that other Thurber families, that other families from all over Texas, when they see the crudely-wrought nameless tombstone you will shortly receive, that they will remember their own family’s long-ago, lost little girls.

That they will remember you.

That they will protect you.

LITTLE GIRL LOST

LITTLE GIRL FOUND

Thurber, Texas

FC