Daddy

In March 2020, Linda LaSut posted this beautiful photograph of a gravestone, on a Facebook page, and kindly gave her permission for me to use the image and asked me to write a story about it. Which I did.

Joseph wasn’t a gravedigger, technically he was memorial mason, or as he preferred to refer to himself - “a sculptor.” Among the townsfolk in his community he was appreciated as an artist who created wonderful tributes to their dead. In fact, when the mayor of an adjoining city passed away, that city council commissioned Joseph to create the mayor’s headstone. That didn’t deter Madeline, his daughter, from joking with people when asked, “What does your daddy do for a living?” from misquoting Shakespeare. “My daddy builds stuff better than a mason, shipwright, or carpenter, cause the houses he builds last till doomsday!”

No matter how many times he tried to correct her – he didn’t follow in “Adam’s profession” as a gravedigger -  he failed. As he was doomed to do so, because, the truth be known, the day he held her tiny soft hand in his strong calloused hand, he was smitten. Perhaps because he had never seen anything so pure and angelic, perhaps because his wife had died in childbirth and Madeline was all he had left of that first love.

When Madeline turned twelve Joseph started teaching her his trade. He wasn’t sure if that was the right and proper thing to do for a young girl, but she had all the makings of a tom-boy, and it was all he knew how to do. She was worse than he was in the kitchen – she had actually caught toast on fire once and thought it was “the bees knees.” Whatever that meant…

Besides she was more strong willed than he was, and the only thing stronger than her will was his love for her. That she had a delicate touch with granite and marble, and a natural affinity for bringing out the “angel in the marble” convinced Joseph that he was raising her right. While Joseph didn’t want Madeline to grow up and be one of those damned Republican suffragettes, he wasn’t going to make her be someone she wasn’t. He didn’t know as much scripture as Reverend Trueblood, the local Baptist pastor, did; but when he read about raising up a child in the way they should go and then they’ll never veer from it, he figured God had given his daughter more “masculine” gifts, and he wasn’t going to try and correct God.   

In many ways their life together was idyllic, until the spring of 1917 when President Wilson send the American Expeditionary Forces over there. Many of the boys died in rat filled trenches in No Man’s Land, cut down by machine gun fire, or mustard gas, and were buried in foreign places like Flanders Field, Oise-Aisne, and the Somme. But every time Joseph heard of a gold star family among his neighbors he carved a headstone for them to erect in the Baptist cemetery as they were the only local denomination to have a cemetery.  

Joseph wasn’t a good Baptist; he was known to play cards with the Methodists, had been seen dancing with his daughter at a Fourth of July celebration, and rumor had it that when a local moonshiner’s son had been shot dead by a revenuer, he had accepted payment in moonshine. And the only time he and Reverend Trueblood met was at funerals. Many of Trueblood’s congregation prayed for Joseph’s salvation. And all of them said Joseph was a good man. In the time of their greatest sorry he would show up with a headstone. Some paid him with chickens and eggs, some in cash, and some, if they were broke, with just a promise.

When Madeline would fuss at him for not being a better businessman, he’d hold her face in those big rough hands and tenderly tell her, “We don’t profit from our neighbor’s sorrow.” Which, when word got out about that, put a bee in pastor Trueblood’s bonnet as he was very firm about collecting a two-dollar cash fee for officiating at a funeral.  

In 1918, on November 11 at 11 o’clock the Great War ended. Privately Joseph sighed a sigh of relief – his business would quiet down and he’d have more time to attend to Madeline, who was now a very independent businesswoman of twenty years of age, and his partner in the headstone business.

And then the Spanish Flu epidemic began.

Hospitals filled to capacity, schools and churches were closed, and people were encouraged to wear masks or risk a $5 fine. In Philadelphia a “Liberty Loan Parade” to raise funds for war bonds was allowed to go on – a two-mile assembly of Boy Scouts, soldiers, marching bands, and city dignitaries. Three days later all of the city’s 31 hospitals were full. By the end of the week 2,600 were dead from the epidemic.

Joseph and Madeline worked till they were exhausted trying to keep up with the demand for headstones. The sheer volume of deaths overwhelmed mortuaries, funeral homes, and casket makers. As the death toll escalated, in a desperate measure to bury the dead, local governments ordered the use of mass graves.

Exhaustion, age, and being in such close proximity to so many corpses made Joseph very susceptible to the flu. He passed away in the winter of 1919, and the man who had made so many headstones for his neighbors was buried in an unmarked mass grave.

And then, in the summer of 1919, the flu had run its course, and ended.

 But not for Madeline. She would grieve for her father for months. One early morning the milkman saw her standing by an ancient oak, a grieving tree, hitting it with a broomstick and wailing, “My Daddy, my Daddy! Why did you take my Daddy?” No one thought anything about it, as so many had lost so much, and never had a chance to mourn. Eventually grief gave way to a plan. Madeline would make a marker for Joseph. For hours she worked the stone – it would be simple, and natural like a water stone made smooth by a river of tears. It would not have Joseph’s name or dates, because it would be a stone for every son, and every daughter, who had lost their father in the Great War or the Spanish Flu.

She took it out to the cemetery and gently laid in the ground as solemnly as if it had been a casket going into the earth. To this day it still lies there, sometimes obscured by leaves in the fall. To this day people still clear the debris and wonder who was this man who evoked such love, to warrant being known only by the dearest title a man can be addressed by.

Daddy.