Marty's thoughts

Friends Meetinghouse Cemetery

On Thursday evenings, when the week has begun to lean toward darkness and the long fields of Washington County lie quiet under the fading light, I drive toward my Bible study class in Greenwich, New York, that small old town east of Saratoga where the roads still seem to remember horses, wagons, prayer, snow, war, and the slow passing of generations.

From my place I take the back way up from Valley Falls, climbing through that hilly, broken, back-country land where the road twists and rises, dips and turns, as if it had been laid down not by surveyors but by farmers, weather, and stubborn necessity. After a few miles, after the fields and ridges and stone walls have had their say, I come to Meetinghouse Road.

And there, off to the right, lifted slightly above the road on a grassy knoll, stands the little white building.

It is not grand. It is not famous. No tour buses come there. No crowds gather. No one sells tickets or postcards or little polished souvenirs. It is only a small, white, wood-sided Quaker meetinghouse, plain as bread, plain as silence, plain as the old faith of people who believed that God did not need stained glass, incense, thunder, or gold to be present among men.

They called it Friends Church.

And the name itself has a kind of tenderness in it.

There are no tourists up here. There is only the farm country, the sheep, the smell of grass, the long roll of cornfields, the lost traveler now and then who has missed the road to Albany and is looking for a gas station. The place belongs not to commerce, not to spectacle, but to memory.

A gravel road climbs the knoll. Beside the meetinghouse lies the cemetery.

Often I stop there before Bible study. Sometimes I sit and read the lesson. Sometimes I walk among the graves. Sometimes I do nothing but stand in the quiet and let the old stones speak in their worn and broken alphabet.

Some of the gravestones are older than the Revolution. Their names have the deep music of early America: Joshua. Abraham. Names out of Scripture, names out of the wilderness, names that seem to carry in them both the Old Testament and the axe-stroke of the frontier.

There is a granite monument near the grassy edge of the road. It says: Visser.

And near the entrance stands one of those blue New York State historical markers, the kind we pass a hundred times without reading, though they are often the only public voice left for things that once shook the earth.

This sign tells of Indians who came along this trail on their way to Bennington, where American rebels were defending stores of ammunition and supplies during the Saratoga campaign. The Indians stopped here to camp. The Quakers fed them. Welcomed them. Offered them no weapons, no threat, no resistance.

And the Indians, seeing this strange and defenseless peace, did not harm them. They took nothing. They left them in peace.

There, on that hill, for one night or one day or some brief measure of human time, the violence of empire, rebellion, hunger, and war paused before the mystery of passiveness.

I have stood there many times and thought about that.

Looking out beyond the monument, there is a small grove of hardwood trees, gathered almost like witnesses. Behind me, across the road and down the hill, the cornfields spread along Meetinghouse Road until the road meets Route 40 and runs north toward Greenwich. The place is quiet.

Very quiet.

Not empty. Quiet.

There is a difference.

For the dead are there. The old farmers are there. The wives and children are there. The Quakers are there. The Indians passing toward Bennington are there. The Revolution is there. The silent meetinghouse is there. The whole buried republic of forgotten lives is there beneath the grass.

And among the stones there is one monument that always catches my eye because it still has polish on it. It gleams in a way the older stones no longer can. It bears the family name and the names of those who came and went, who lived and worked and vanished into that little hill of earth.

At the bottom is the name of James N. Visser.

Killed in World War II.

Haguenau, France.

Age eighteen.

Eighteen.

That is the word that stops me.

Not France. Not war. Not even killed.

Eighteen.

Here, in this Quaker cemetery, among people who had once fed armed men and survived by refusing violence, lies the memory of a boy who crossed the ocean in the uniform of a nation at war and died in the frozen, ruined distance of Europe. Here is his name, brought home to Meetinghouse Road, to the fields, to the knoll, to the white meetinghouse, to the silence.

His grave has an American flag. It is the only one I notice decorated on Memorial Day and Veterans Day in that cemetery of Friends.

And so I stand there, caught between two American truths.

The peace of the Quakers.

The death of the soldier.

The Indians spared the unarmed Friends because they could not understand such gentleness, or perhaps because they understood it too well. And generations later, one of the sons of that same quiet earth went armed into the furnace of Europe and was killed at eighteen in Haguenau.

The road is still there. The meetinghouse is still there. The corn grows. The sheep graze. The lost drivers still wander by, looking for Albany, looking for gasoline, looking for the way out.

But I stop at the cemetery.

I look at the stone.

I read the name again.

James N. Visser.

And in that quiet place on Meetinghouse Road, where the past does not shout but waits, I feel the terrible nearness of history: the old faith, the old war, the young dead, the silence of the fields, and the strange, enduring question of what it means for a man to live peaceably in a world that keeps calling its sons to war.