D.C. Chester

In the Oregon Coast ’ s mountains, there are lost cemeteries

– a lot of them – lost, forgotten way up in nowhere places like Ten Mile, Death Ridge, Desolation Saddle – places nobody knows – except Loggers – where probably live Loggers buried mashed Loggers.

Since I got the papers, I seek those cemeteries, because everything there is the truth – birth, death, the tilting old grave markers. In those cemeteries, nobody is screwing with me. Good places to get away from life.

I was at work when I got served the papers. My wife is suing me for divorce, taking everything. I’m telling you – the knucklehead shit you pull catches up!

When I got home, the house was empty – of her, of our fouryear-old son – but full – of hot - supernatural – hell-heat. Heat that heat made the hair stand up on the back of my neck – the palpable hate. Every light on, the furnace turned all the way up, every burner on the stove glowing bright red – even the floppedopen super-over-heated oven – the washer, the dryer, the TV, the stereo repeating over-and-over again Donovan’s “Season of the Witch”. And up in the master bath – her stupid, plug-in lovehelmet curler set hot – and even the cranked-up-full wall heater in there – all of it, dangerous, burn-down-the-house hot! The whole house like full blast ninety inside, the wall paper cooked with tangible hatred, kill-you-if-Icould malice. It really shook me all up; it just wasn’t like her.

I told Dick, my Lawyer, whose pointed nose reminded me of a Dachsund, how it felt. Dick said he knew Millie’s Lawyer was just a “ crummy flat-lander” from over in Eugene – and that I didn’t know it yet, but I had hired Dick - a real “gut-fighter” and we were going to trial! So today, a realtor who uses a black cigarette holder with pearl inlays is showing our house.

But for me, it’s the Chitwood Cemetery. I’ve been there one other time in twenty years. Nearly forgot about it. You get it just off Highway 20, up the Yaquina River, just east of the old covered, artifact Chitwood Bridge. Bit of barbed wire perimeters the jumbled graves – the fence mashed on the north years ago by a big windfall hemlock.

People worry about logging and things like habitat and the carbon cycle, but the jungle of the western woods will always reclaim everything – including the Chitwood Cemetery.

Rain. I told myself I didn’t need rain gear. Won’t take long. The rust of Chitwood’s wet, cold gate resists, stops me.

Rusty after-thought live stock gate keeps nothing out. I can see in as far as the jungle’s glistening-wet, green screen. I realize with a kind of shock how little I remember of the abandoned old cemetery, how much the western woods’ jungle thickens in twenty years, how much I wish I had brought along my machete.

First trespasser in years and years, I lean against the steel gate. The rusted hinges break loose. I force in. Instantly, the tall, wet grass soaks cold right through my levis to the skin of both my shins.

Face-to-face with the soggy tanga-tanga of vine maple, huckleberry and salal, I hesitate, take a deep breath, hold it. I stumble and try to step over a big moss-covered log, but my left foot drops into space. As I fall leftways, a vine maple booby trap releases suddenly. I see it coming, but I’m too slow, and a branch about an inch in diameter whacks me hard in the left side of my face as I get down-poured by all the clinging, soaking rainwater hanging in the jungle canopy above me.

Before, I figured I’d take notes of names and dates and maybe research them later, but my eight and a half by eleven yellow legal pad is instantly soaked.

Besides that, I can’t move.

My left leg, clear to the hip, is stuck straight down in a rotting pit between the log I tried to step over and a tangled root-ball. The acrid stink of rot and contagious decay bulges up around me and up my nose. I breathe. I feel my lungs being invaded by infecting clouds of fungal spores.

The Chitwood cemetery. Everybody there is dead.

High above me in the trees, I hear the wind picking up; it’s the next squall with its slap of rain coming in. The yellow pad was a dopey idea. I just toss it away.

My left leg stuck down in that hole, a giant, four-foot-tall sword fern bushes right in my face. Right-handed, I grab onto a bunch of the wet blades and, hard as I can, I haul myself up onto my right knee and pull my left leg out of the hole. I end up in the exact same position as an altar boy at Mass – bent at the waist, face a foot from the jungle floor.

I couldn’t have missed it – the first grave marker - laying flat. Looking down at it close-up, I see the marker is hewn out of a piece of the dark grey basalt of the Pacific Northwest. Cheap, common rock, but way back in 1938, somebody chiseled-out just the initials “M.E.K.”, and below the dates, “Feller”. I can’t tell if Feller is a last name or what he was doing when he got killed. I console myself that I’m not getting shot at and I don’t have cancer and besides, I AM looking at what I came for.

Above me, a gust blasts in and sheets of rain hose down through the trees. I don’t even get up. The underbrush’s too thick to walk it. I’m already soaked and I start to chill.

I just keep my head down and crawl, looking for more hidden graves. And I find them. I spot a concrete headstone tree-shovedover to the right like sixty degrees out of the vertical by a spruce maybe thirty years old. Concrete doesn’t hold up to time, but somebody is buried there, probably spruce roots growing right through his brain. Somebody - but I can’t read who. Oddly, leaning against the cement headstone’s front like it was used as a vase five years ago, is standing a little screw-top Starbuck’s bottle.

Here’s one of those markers with the broad slab-base and erect, slender tower on top. It’s still really pretty beautiful – made of a soft, white marble. And the gentle acidity of constant Coast Range rain has etched away to unreadability everything but a year –probably of death – 1887.

My whole grave crawl goes that way: I find eighteen – never newer than the 1930s. Makes me wonder what happened in Eddyville, the nearest thing to a nearest town, after the 1930s. But then I start to really shiver in the wet.

Up in the trees above me now, the sound of the wind is a constant, loud rush and clunk of trunks and branches. I think about the forty-fifty-year-old hemlock that blew down long time ago and mashed the north section of the cemetery fence. I could get myself chilled and killed both in Chitwood Cemetery. She’d get everything –probably even my Social Security. Probably deserves it. I needed to get out of there. But I didn’t.

What did I really have to lose?

When I saw the level spot and the little fence and the carpet of little spring-green, two-inch-tall plants – each with a single, sweet little heart-shaped leaf – when I saw the rusted, long ago lovelavish of the little cast iron fence... I couldn’t move.

It was a little, fenced-off shrine with a little white headstone up close to one end. There were actual flowers carved into the little diaper-white head stone. There were actual little nine-petalled pink flowers growing in amongst the little green hearts. The plot wasn’t over four feet square. It was just cute. I could still read the date easily – in detail – “August 19 th , 1914”. Only that one date –whether birth or death, I couldn’t tell. Then I realized with a thud that, oh man! It’s a little baby’s grave – born/died same day. It made sense – except – over and over, I kept reading it. The initials didn’t really work on a new-born’s grave.

The little headstone read – “D.C. Chester”. All I could figure was, what the hell kind of a parent could’ve been so coldly impersonal as to cap off such wrenching, sudden loss – the loss of their little, bald-headed baby and its tiny little pink finger tips that never lived long enough to get sucked on - with just initials?

I spent another hour systematically combing the Chitwood Cemetery. I didn’t find anybody else with the last name Chester buried there. It made me feel slightly better. D.C. Chester. At least D.C.’s mother had survived the birth. Her poor little baby’s death was heart-break harsh enough! It was cold enough. I was cold enough. To hell with it.

I got out of there and I went back to a cold, empty house. And I just stepped out of a hot shower when the realtor called. How soon could I move out? When could I sign the Earnest Money? I could hear it in his voice – the way he talked – teeth clenched on his mother-ofpearl-in-laid black cigarette holder and grinning like somebody on a ridiculous old TV show.

Standing there, damp towel over my shoulders, I was getting chilled again. I felt harshed, cold. I thought about poor little D.C. Chester again.

It showed in about thirty-seven minutes – the in-laid cigarette holder did. I signed our house away. I had thirty days to get out.

I shivered. I felt like hell. I got myself a beer. I thought about the Chitwood Cemetery. I thought about all those neglected graves. I thought about D.C. Chester and during my second beer, I got really frustrated and went into the bathroom to drain my lizard and barefoot, I kicked at her little embossed underwater-scene tin garbage can under the bathroom sink, but hit the edge of the bathroom door instead and it rattled stupidly on its hinge pins and my big toe started bleeding and my red blood got to staining the white grout on the floor, and on my hands and knees, I used beer and my dirty underwear and tears of frustration to clean up the blood.

All I had left by now in the world was coffee. I taped-up my toe. I shod myself. I was going. I was getting out of there – out of the sold damn house. Not our hose any more. I could start packing tomorrow or the next day or the next week as far as it went.

Alcoholics get frowned upon. But not coffee maniacs. Thinking about really good coffee, I felt my heart take a little leap of relief. I’d even get to feel fifty-cent magnanimous and tip the kids working there. I jumped back in my van and feeling really pretty hopeful, I drove to Newport to a place called Panini, my coffee fave.

Like usual, it smelled wonderful in there, and the heat of the allnight-long baking that went on in the back kept it warm. I hugged my molasses-thick Sumatra and let the warmth and the personalness of Panini osmose through my skin. Perfect coffee again. Perfect heat again. Ahhh.

Many times, I’d studied the buildings out Panini’s front windows across the street. Many times, I’d sat there on a stool, my back turned to the world, hugging my always perfect coffee, mindlessly examining the shingle work on those buildings, expecting to spot flaws in the shingle work – and I had. One more time, I was marveling now to myself that the installer had screwed up right there at the front door.

The building was really quite nicely trimmed-out turn-of-thecentury style – pale green, fluted side casing on the front door –wide, crowned casing over the top – but all the shingle courses were about an inch lower to the right of the door than the left.

I chuckled knowingly to myself. I knew just how to make that same mistake: you ’ re compensating for the bottoms of the windows on either side of the door and you ’ re measuring carefully and thinking it all through so circumspectly and you ’ re so proud of your work and it’s all bright new shingles and passers-by are all admiring and complimenting, so you take a break and you stand back and sip coffee with immense satisfaction and your ego is all stoked and wham! You realize with a stab, you’d made a basic incorrect assumption – that the windows both right and left of the door were framed-up exactly same height – but you can see it now that they’re not – that they’re an inch and a quarter different and so your shingle courses are out by the same amount and where it’s going to show is right smack at the front door!

And so – I’m steeping in Panini’s warmth and I’m sipping my perfect coffee and in my imagination I’m commiserating familiarly with the long gone installer’s downer when suddenly, D.C. Chester is back and for a moment, I think about that little cast-iron-fenced plot again and all I feel is oh, good grief! Do I really have to go over it all again? Now?

It reminded me suddenly of Bob Dylan and his haunting lyric about life being nothing but a joke. D.C. Chester. The implausibility of it! It got worse. When I’d arrived at Panini, I hadn’t had the sense to power-off my phone and it rang right in my perfect coffee. It was the realtor. He wanted to know who D.C. Chester was. He said that’s how I signed the Earnest Money Agreement. He was pretty jacked. He actually yelled he could really sympathize with my wife. For some bizarre reason, I found myself smiling and hoping the smile wasn’t coming through in my voice as I talked to him.

It was ridiculous. All of it. Just stupid. After we got the Earnest Money Agreement all squared away, sitting back at the house, I sat there just smiling at the realtor, him scowling and frowning and stuffing another cig into his holder.

“What are you smirking about, Joe?” he wanted to know. “Reeahl-tee,” he went.

But I didn’t care. I didn’t care if the deal got to Closing or not. I didn’t care what my angry, divorcing-me wife thought. I didn’t care what anybody thought. All I could think about was everlasting D.C. Chester. D.C. Chester. D.C. Chester. I realized with a kind of crazy elation right at that moment that I was gripped by D.C. Chester –just like the obsession I once had, married or not, of owning a chickmagnet sports car.

I loved my wife. She and I stuck together like magnets. It wasn’t the chicks. It was the stupid car I wanted – bad. And we bought it and one day on Highway 34, in a hairpin turn up on the east side of Mary’s Peak, the back end of my red sports car passed me and I stuffed the beautiful front end into a dirt bank. The other side of the road was a canyon. That car was a widow-maker. My wife was so kind about it. She never made me eat any crow at all.

I couldn’t stand it. I just couldn’t stand it. Right from my coffee, I tried calling my wife again. This time, she made the mistake of picking up. “Millie?” I said.

“Wut?”

“I need help, Millie.”

“I know. So get some. ”

“Millie? I’ve been spending too much time in cemeteries. I feel nuts.”

“At least you ’ re planning ahead THERE.”

“Millie?”

“Wut?”

I started blabbering. I described the whole scene at Chitwood. I told her about D C Chester I told her it was nuts, but I couldn’t stop thinking about it. She just let some exasperated steam out her ears like she does and told me in her practical voice, “Oh, Joe. Somebody from the Siletz Res probably just buried their dog in there as a joke.”

I said she wouldn’t think that if she could see the place – the tipped-over head stones, the underbrush. I told Millie I loved her. I said I’d been a fool and I was sorry as hell and that the house’d sold already. Then, recklessly, I asked her to “please” meet me at the Chitwood Cemetery. I said, “Remember the red sports car and how it got ahold of me and I nearly got killed? This D.C. Chester's got me the same. ”

I told her where the cemetery was and asked her if ten was OK. I could tell she was crying. It was exactly like when I was a kid when just looking and listening around, I figured out once you get involved with a girl there’d be a lot of crying. Back in the 6 th Grade, though, I just never figured I’d be the cause.

She didn’t say no to Chitwood. She didn’t say anything at all. She just snuffled and I thought I could hear a cough drop clicking on her teeth as her tongue shifted it around. Probably, she’d caught cold since she left me; it told me how stressed she was. Over the phone, in the back ground, I heard a scrap of our son ’ s voice.

We’d worked hard for that kid. Something was wrong with my out-put, so we really worked hard to get Millie pregnant – if you can call obsessive-compulsive sometimes-nearly-public sex work.

Listening to Millie snuffle over the phone, I felt like a creep. Our separation was real rough on her. She didn’t say another word. She just hung up.

Only place Millie showed up was about a month later at the trial. By then, I was out of the house and basically living in my rusted-out seventy-three Ford van. It wasn’t mentioned in the papers I was served. It was only worth about two hundred bucks – but it'd been handy- back in our really-wanna-get-Millie-pregnant days. It was real tough, sleeping in that tin can without her wrapped around me.

But the trial. I showed up, too, but I couldn’t really even focus on the proceedings. During the month, I’d researched D.C. Chester at the Lincoln County Historical Society, the Newport Historical Society, the Waldport Historical Museum. I had a scratched-off list of about a hundred key-word combinations I’d Googled.

Odd thing I ran across was that a full-blood Salish from clear up in northern Washington somewhere used to live in Chitwood way back. I couldn’t figure out if his name was Smack Billy or that’s just what people called him. Reason it stuck in my mind was what my wife had said about how the justice of the casinos and somebody from the Res burying a dog in whiteman’s cemetery as a joke were the same thing.

Which brings this damn story back around to Millie. At the trial, it was real obvious she was over her cold. She glowed. She looked so hot in a tight gold on black she hadn’t worn in ten years. That outfit wasn’t about cleavage; it was about her erectness and how the high Manchu collar lifted her tractorbeam persona up on top of a tower.

And she had her dancing violet eyes all sparkled up so bright, she had her own Counsel all screwed up and in his opening arguments, he lost track of what he was trying to say and had to go back to the table where Millie was sitting and check his notes and when he did, he made the mistake of making eye contact with her again and flustered and dropped his notes on the courtroom floor among the chairs and there was a glass of water on the table and that fell, too, and got his notes all wet and the whole thing was just carving my guts out, because it was so killingly obvious to me how easy it had been for Millie to replace me.

Millie had unbolted me from herself like a starter motor that was activating faultily, nicking-up the teeth of the flywheel of her super-charged, big-block-V-8 girlness that long time ago she had used to pull me off my foundation. I was scrap metal to her now.

In the courtroom, I couldn’t stand that she never looked at me once, so I watched her lawyer. Even red-faced from embarrassment and bending after his dropped notes, he was magnificent: tall, chiseled, tailored suit a color nobody could name, but even I could tell perfectly matched his super-healthy skin tone. Anybody could see Graydon Jensen was a full partner in his Firm.

But Dick was exactly what he said he was. When Jensen fumbled, Dick went right for the throat. He jumped up, requested “respectfully” to be allowed to “approach the bench” where I could just barely hear him start in on some deal about a mistrial on account of the prosecuting attorney’s “apparent lack of familiarity with the facts in the Mildred vs Joe case ” , and how Dick couldn’t stand to let his fine client be “fired from the Philharmonic of his life” over “notes he didn’t even drop.”

No kidding. Dick said that. I saw the Judge’s eyes twinkle. But which only gave Jensen a chance to recover himself and so our two lawyers went at it, and yakityak yak yak, and in the middle of a hot exchange, Dick just turned away from Jensen, and about me, he said directly to the Judge,

“Look at my client, your Honor. Just look at him!”

That’s when I realized that, for the first time during that entire trial, Millie had her eyes on me. We always could. Millie and I always could look fearlessly at each other – I mean, not staring –just gazing – I mean, speaking at least for myself. Millie was more like a Sphinx – always making me wonder what the hell a girl like her was doing with me. Like the first time we had sex. At first, we just laid there on her bed in our clothes– gazing, I guess. A few minutes later, in the middle of it, I asked her directly.

“What are we doing? Just getting our share?”

The way she answered, I was never the same. From way down in her chest, she just said, “Oh, how can you even say that!”

There during that trial, facing the sphinx again, I remembered that whole thing and realized with another downbeat that after all the years, I didn’t really understand Millie at all. She just sphinxed me about two minutes and then she used her eyes to beckon Jensen and she took ahold of the lapel of his tailored suit and she got real close to him and she whispered something in his left ear – or maybe kissed it – I couldn’t tell. With a smug, satisfied look, Jensen just stood up and requested a “lunch recess ” . I t was early, so the Judge gave us a coupla hours. Jensen and Millie – just like a couple.

I headed for work. Outside, right away, I nearly got hit by a bus. Only reason I didn’t was it was really trucking and I felt it shake the street and I looked up in time. Coupla blocks away, I found a dive bar called the “Wishing Well”. It was before- lunchempty - just me and the Tat-necked bartender - who said, “Hi. My mom calls me ‘The-odor’, but I go by Toxic Teddy.

For myself, I said, “Hi, I’m ‘In-Need-of-Whiskey’.”

Toxic Teddy said he had “ a supply of that”. The place still had a juke box. It had nothing on it but Fleetwood Mac, all of which just forced me to think about Millie’s gypsy magic – the magic she’d never ever again work on me. I got back to the Courtroom early. Pacing fast back and forth like the caged wolf I once saw alongside a highway in Arizona, Dick the Gutfighter was ahead of me. He yanked the cuff of his right jacket sleeve with his left hand, snapping the sleeve straight.

Fast, he did the same with his right hand. He repeated. He just paced like a wolf and yanked. I couldn’t imagine what was going to happen – not to mention that I was “lickered-up” enough to be seeing two Gutfighters. Watching Dick, I began to fear Dick’d get ruthless and pull some ugly personal stuff on Millie. I have to admit I didn’t oppose very hard, but I never did want to go to trial – for Millie’s ask – but then I’d remembered the hell-heat –the supernatural hot – in the house and how it’d made the hair at the back of my neck stand up and I re-realized that I was the possessor of faulty judgment and decided to ‘let ‘ er rip’ – as my dad would’ve said. The end came quick. Millie came through the door by herself. From up in her tower, she swung into the Courtroom not looking at anyone

She walked straight over to me, bowed to Dick and grabbed at my right hand. She looked in my face and I don’t know what she was seeing, but I saw a kind of anguish in hers. She said, “Let’s get out of here.” Outside, only thing she said was, “I suppose you parked the van your usual mile away. ” Besides walk fast, the only thing she did was squeeze my hand like she wanted it to grow onto hers. It wasn’t a mile. Sometimes Millie exaggerates. I’d parked in one of those spots that’s right at the out-bound end of a busy bus stop and I guess there was some kind of bus service interruption because there were about twenty impatient people bunched right there close and fiddling with their phones and re-touching their make-up or trying to read or escape conversations absolute strangers had victimized them with.

I let Millie in on the curb side. I went around and by the time I got in, Millie was other side of the green and white-striped sheet that hung behind the seats and she was out of her gold-on-black. That van had two bumper stickers. One declared it not to be an abandoned vehicle. The other warned, “If this vehicle’s rockin’, don’t bother knockin”. I don’t know why, but nobody there at that bus stop did.

And somewhere in what Millie did to me next, I heard a coupla buses thunder in and take the world away. Somewhere else, I got all bold and I asked her the same question I had so many years before, “What are we doing, just getting our share?”

Millie answered different. She said after I’d invested twenty thousand bucks without telling her and then never paid any attention and lost it all, she was really mad and I said, “Yeah. I got that.” She traced my lips with a finger tip and she said back, “So I decided I had to blow the lid off everything and see where it all landed and find out all over again how I felt.”

I didn’t ask Millie any more questions. I could tell how Millie felt. Even me. I could tell. We just laid there for quite a while, listening to passing traffic and more buses coming and blasting off from our bus stop and a loud guy evidently telling whoever that, “The wind might be alive!”

To Millie and me, the patterned rust on the sheet-metal ceiling of our van was like constellations in a starry night sky we’d watched a lotta times years before and laying there right in the middle of downtown, we found out we both remembered it – real wellall of it.

But what do you think she did then?

She drug out bloody D.C. Chester! I was flying so high and Millie was dragging

D.C. Chester back! But that’s Millie. She’s a package. She said one day after I asked to meet me at Chitwood, she drove over to the Siletz Res, to the Tribal Office.

She told me, “She didn’t say anything at first, but when I started naming names I knew from my growing-up years over on the Warm Springs Res”, the young woman at the front desk, “really wanted to chat me up. She told me nobody really knew the facts any more, but that Smack Billy pretty much made people on the Siletz Res nervous and he seemed to take pity on them and moved off-Res to Chitwood with his ‘tame’ bobcat ”

Millie said she talked to that woman at the Tribal Office quite a while. People got curious and a few wandered in and listened, but didn’t say much of anything – just listened – straight-faced. Somebody in the back of the group kept coughing and hacking real loud When Millie asked directly if somebody didn’t just defiantly bury a dog over in the Chitwood Cemetery, a coughing old man with long grey hair shouldered forward and just stood right up to her and stated, “That’s ridiculous. Then the headstone would’ve had to say ‘D.D. Chester’. Before he left the Res, Smack Billy’s bobcat killed my dog DeeOHgee.”

-Joe C Smolen