Return to Water Valley

By Oscar E. King

The ghosts of brown-skinned warriors

haunt their former hunting ground,

across a land where once a glacial river flowed;

but now, between the fertile farms

a highroad makes its rounds;

and turning off that beaten path a narrow road

runs single-purposed through the forest overhang

to open out upon a quiet clearing where

an old, impartial church called Water Valley waits,

well-kept but empty now, its days fulfilled;

whose faithful had been carried, one by one

up the gentle slope to rest in solitude.

A graveyard is a place where memories

lie dormant till revisited upon,

bestirring only in their visitors:

as with this stranger who had come again

to stand where, more than thirty years before,

a little boy had stood to help inter

some one of them, all now assembled here.

He stood alone before the weathered stone

of a great-grandfather he'd never known

and read the aged legend graved thereon:

Peter Norrix, Eighteen-Thirty.....Eighteen Eighty-Nine.

My own achievement furthers his - he thought-

what have I done, or gained, that he had not

who fought against Bedford Forrest in his day

and left a grand plantation to his kin.

Rank on rank the silent stones keep watch

where lie his sons and daughters and their own.

All these his generations - yet not all -

the settled Second, the waning Third, but none of us,

the scattered Fourth, not even one;

they of his thinning strain and varied names.

And there, far down along the second row,

a somewhat newer stone had toppled on its face

to mark the place of one remembered best,

who reared an orphan grandson as her own.

One who, not told in time when she had gone,

now knelt and dug bare-handed in the soil

nor tried to hide the scalding tear that fell

and quickly hid itself within the stone

that he re-set in hopes that it would stay,

expecting not again to come that way.

This poem was written by Oscar Edward King, born December 5, 1904 in Cairo, Alexander County, Illinois, died December 9, 1967, Locust Grove, Mayes County, Oklahoma. Oscar is a son of Thomas E. King and Rosa Jane Norrix. He is a great grandson of Peter and Eliza Jane (Pratt) Norrix, grandson of Daniel Norrix and Millie Arabelle "Belle" Neber. Belle Norrix is "the one remembered best", who died August 10, 1939.

In this poem he is speaking about himself revisiting the Water Valley Cemetery in Union County. Peter Norrix served on the Union side, mustered into service September 11, 1862 in Jonesboro, Illinois. He was mustered out on August 11, 1865 in Springfield, IL. He first served with the 109th Infantry, which later transferred to Company B, 11th Infantry.

Donated by ©Betty L. Capps

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