Darling Lauretta Duerrstein is dead. She died before her eighth birthday. Nearly a hundred years later I sat on her grave trying to sketch her stony likeness. She holds a headless dove on her left arm, while her right hand rests on a petrified stump. A bonnet and flowers lie strewn at her dainty stone boots. Her eyes stare beyond the shadows that shift across her long hair.
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I sketched quickly, ignoring the schoolboy as best I could. He was vaulting over low headstones, pretending not to notice me. My pencil jerked in queasy strokes, knowing too well that curiosity always overtakes boys with time on their hands, especially when they would like to see how accurately a girl can sketch a rock. My drawing was doomed. A thump hit the sod directly behind me.
“That’s pretty good,” he said. “Did you know her?”
Bumper stickers fell from my sketchbook when I held it up to make a rubbing from a mausoleum gate. The stickers said “The Daves”–a rock band from Philadelphia. Christopher asked me if he could bring one home to his father because it was, coincidentally, his father’s name. Yeah, right.
“What’d he say to you?” Christopher asked as the cart drove away. I had hoped for a wild diversion, but I couldn’t come up with anything better than “Not much.”
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photos/Kathy Richland.
