Infant Son

When I lived back across town, I used to jog down a little country road to get to the park. At the bottom of the hill on this road was a small stream with a two lane bridge. I've always been a water nut, after having grown up on a farm with a small creek running through it, and am not able to pass over a stream without at least a casual glance to see if the water's clear, muddy, any fish, how deep, etc. I'd been running across this bridge for month's, maybe even a year and never noticed anything other than a narrow clear water stream running over some rocks and moss. This day the covering of trees aligned their branches just right and allowed a shaft of sunlight straight down on something as I passed, and it caught my eye. It appeared to be a partially covered license plate, nothing of terrible interest, although I did slow to see if I could make out the year. What I saw stopped me in my tracks.

INFANT

That's no license plate, I thought. Later that day I came back with some boots on to cut through the brush surrounding the creek on either side of the bridge. Dropping into the creek somewhat abruptly, I almost landed on the object. It was a stone. Cut stone, almost immediately recognizable as a head stone. I didn't really do anything for a while. I just stood there wondering how the hell a child's tombstone wound up in a creek bed. The bridge behind me had scary looking graffiti under it. Maybe this was some sick satanic thing, I thought. Maybe this was where the child was buried?! No, it couldn't ever have been anything but a creek bed. Someone had thrown this off the bridge, perhaps stolen as a prank, then discarded. I had to repatriate it. I began digging and soon found that the stone extended deeply into the creek bed. It took perhaps five minutes of digging to even get the stone loose enough to rock in its bed. Another couple of minutes to get it to move, slowly, sliding up out of the muck. The part of the stone that lay beneath the water and mud was blackish green with algae, but words could be made out.

INFANT
SON OF
MR. & MRS..
B. F.
GILLENTINE
1918

I felt a strong wave of sadness pass over me. A nameless infant. A son. Was he the only son? The only child? Did Mr. and Mrs. B. F. Gillentine still live, and if they did, did they lay at night, just before sleep, wondering what sort of son he would have made?

I cleaned up the stone that night and made some internet inquiries into the name. The closest I could ever come - and I thought I had hit it on the head - was a Benjamin Franklin Gillentine in far West, Texas, hundreds of miles from the Dallas area where I live. I got him on the phone, a very old man, somewhat gruff and either not comprehending what I was asking, or simply thinking I was trying to sell him something. In short, I gave up, and put the stone in my garage, where it's been for nearly ten years. Perhaps I'll restart the search for a relative, a grave, a cemetery. In the intervening years, the internet has burgeoned, and perhaps more genealogical information is there now to help me find a resting place for the stone.

1918 was the year of the Great Flu Epidemic. It swept through Texas as well as the rest of the world, killing the young and old alike. I found a guy through the local library who tracked all the headstones in all the cemeteries in Arlington, Texas, and he couldn't find the name. He said there was dozens if not hundreds of nameless infant graves from that year.




It's a sad thing to have lying around the house, and I feel a little like a vandal myself, just having it here, like the remnants of some bad Halloween prank. And it may in fact be just that.

I'll try again. This headstone belongs somewhere. My daughter suggested we just take it to one of the little country cemeteries around here, but that doesn't seem right, either, like taking a child to the park and leaving him there. I'd rather have the stone here.

Later