Short Story: “Death Without Taxes“
By David Feela
Outside the city limits a sign advertised, Gravestones: No City Taxes! I’d driven past the sign for most of the summer, a curiosity welling up from within me. Then one morning I followed the arrows and arrived at a closed gate with a dirt track heading into an old farm property. A plaque beside the gate read, Gravestones Open 1-5. The lettering was painted to appear as if it had been chiseled into stone. Way too early, I had no choice but to turn around and head back into town.
Wind had blown all the dry leaves from the trees by the time I thought to revisit my summer whim. The same sign stood beside the county road, and though I must have driven past it a dozen times since summer, it might as well have been cloaked with invisibility. Yet there it stood, No City Taxes, mounted and displayed on steel posts. I followed the arrows once more and arrived at the gate, still closed. Gravestones Open 1-5. My watch read 1:15. I waited another five minutes before getting out of my car. Attached to the wooden rail with strips of duct tape, a handwritten sheet of paper read, Closed: Family Funeral.
UNDERWRITTEN BY
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I peered down the gravel track and could see nothing but a broken-down pickup with a rusted, welded hoist attached to its bed, parked in the weeds. The rest of the place remained out of sight, behind a bend in the driveway. From what I could see of the property, the place reeked of neglect, as if city taxes hadn’t been the only commerce with the modern world the stone cutter had tried to avoid. I returned to my car and started the engine. Pent-up heat gushed out of the vents, taking the chill out of my bones, and I drove back home as slowly as I had come.
This story, like all unhappy endings, should be buried here, because I only met the carver of gravestones once. After all, my parents had already passed away, my siblings regularly called or wrote letters, and depression wasn’t part of my character. That fiber of curiosity that had tugged at me gradually went slack. Besides, I suspected the stonecutter might have been the one who died the second time I parked my car at his closed gate.
Then my sister killed herself in California, shot herself with a gun she had purchased for protection. We all wondered, that impossible question, the one that can never be answered. She’d arranged all her affairs, left a note to help the family follow her financial trail, and donated most of her household furnishings to local thrift stores before she left the pattern of her despair on the redwood deck. She asked to be cremated, her ashes scattered in the ocean.
Grief consumes so much time. The hours settle like stone. The lives beneath them grow pale. Maybe it was years, I’m not sure, but one day I got in my car and headed out of town. The gate stood open. Stopping in a cloud of dust between the house and a small open building about the size of a two-stall horse shed, I could surmise that the stonecutting must take place there, perhaps only when the weather required it. An old, rusted tractor wheel lay flat on the ground with a chain, hook, and pulley hanging above it from the building’s rafters. Bits of stone cobbled the dirt floor.
What surprised me as I scanned the property, overgrown with shrubs and trees, wildflowers and weeds, was that the grounds were littered with gravestones, some of them blank, some partially carved, cracked, smooth, though most of them monuments to a craftsman’s artistry. There was no order or arrangement for viewing the stones like a buyer would expect in a showroom. It was a cemetery for no one, for everyone. Single gravestones were leaning against tree trunks, a few tipped over, or caught in the act of falling against each other like oversized dominos. The place reminded me of a quarry gone bust, as if the stones had sprouted like teeth directly from the ground. I counted at least fifty markers before I heard a voice behind me.
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“You need help?”
“I’m sorry, I was just amazed by your work.”
“Those? Don’t worry, they’re unoccupied. You need a gravestone?”
“Who doesn’t?”
“I don’t charge city taxes, so the money you save can go elsewhere.”
“I saw that on the sign. How much?”
“It depends. I’d say a thousand will do.”
All the time we talked, the stonecutter scrutinized me, his eyes never shifting from my face, despite his habit of punctuating every sentence by spitting tobacco. He had a full beard, carefully trimmed, salt and pepper hair, a straw hat. His arms and hands were large, finely sculpted muscles, flesh and bone. When he noticed me glancing at them, he curled his fingers and shoved them into his overall pockets.
“Yes, I’ll want a stone.”
“It takes considerable time. You won’t have it tomorrow.”
I reached for my wallet, pulled every bit of cash from it and thrust the bundle toward him. His hands stayed in his pockets.
“No need to pay until I’m finished and you’re satisfied.”
“I’ll pay up front, take all of it. I’ll mail the rest tomorrow, without the tax.”
“You’ll still need to choose a stone, color, style. It takes planning.”
“You decide, all of it. That’s what I’m paying for.”
“I’ll at least need an inscription. A name. Dates. No mistakes.”
“Just a first name. Nothing else.”
“Can you write it down so I spell it right?”
“It’s for my sister, Patty. It ends in a why.”
A month passed before the phone calls started and another month before they quit. I still drive past the sign, tempted to stop, but I never do.
David Feela’s writing has appeared in hundreds of regional and national publications, including High Country News, Mountain Gazette, Small Farmer’s Journal, Utne Reader, and The Denver Post. Published collections consist of three poetry volumes, a Colorado Book Award finalist collection of essays, and a massive chain of online links. He lives in Cortez, Colorado, and his website can be viewed at www.davidfeela.com.
Poetry: “the i that grows unseen in the desert“
By Kirbie Bennett
angelthreads of green with sunflower dots
are waving through
red earth in midsummer
beneath a sun-faded heaven slumbering in the sky
the seeds return to the soil
& there is a shadow hiding behind my mouth
begging me for the sound of defeat
& black mold colonizes my insides
asking if i am giving nazi salutes in my sleep
sometimes in dreams
i am reborn with earthprayer
the seeds return to the soil
& there is a shadow behind the phantom limbs
I carry in my skull
so i shape the dream into a bundle
& i boil water & i feel the heat on my unraveling skin
this is where i bring water to the green music
waiting in a cup:
the seeds return to the soil
when the awe of heat showers herbs, the grassy scent
transports me to the undamaged years:
i’m a child sitting with great-grandma in her house,
there are cats and crossword puzzles and the calling kettle
(it’s a room in my heart that i never leave)
teacups full of days in the everlasting arms of naakidi nánálí
teacups full of wisdom i’m still trying to recover
beneath a sun-faded heaven slumbering in the sky
i bring medicine to my mouth,
flood death with life,
i put teeth to a language,
i put tongue to a name:
the seeds return to the soil
Kirbie Bennett is a writer and audio producer from the Southwest. His print and audio work has appeared in High Country News, KSUT Public Radio, The Durango Telegraph and 68-to-oh5, an online music journal. Kirbie is a member of the Navajo Nation and Durango, Colorado, is another place he calls home.
Essay: “Learning How to Be a Good Ancestor“
By Amorina Lee-Martinez
I grew up in the Mancos Valley, Colorado, with mountains to the north and east, desert to the west, and the Ute Mountain Ute Reservation land to the south. Just down the road from where I grew up lived a Mormon family. They had a daughter who was the same age as me and we played together outside often, returning home in need of a bath regularly. My friend would say, “God made dirt and dirt don’t hurt,” and I agreed. Even though we would get dirty playing outside, I never felt dirty. I felt like we were adventuring in an unspoiled land.
When I moved to Boulder for school, I felt the difference in the land. The dense, concrete, litter-ridden world of urban blight had been a distant concept to me as a child in rural Colorado. The much larger and faster growing population of the Front Range felt like a flood of intensity. While in the Environmental Studies program at CU, I came to think of Western migration as a tide that hasn’t stopped rising since the first trappers and goldrushes brought waves of newcomers in the 1700s and 1800s. The Rocky Mountains are like a seawall. The swells of people coming West splashed up against those high peaks and crashed backward into themselves settling at the foot of the peaks. Now Denver and the whole Front Range is filling up with the sea of folks moving in. Some early Euro-American citizens trickled further into the mountains to trap beaver for high dollar furs, mine for precious ores, or to uphold the pastoral way of life promoted by the Jeffersonian ideal and the Homestead Act. Today whole streams of people follow in those first strenuous footsteps to travel west of the Front Range and settle. After I finished school in Boulder, I followed that westward flow back to Montezuma County to live in Cortez in lands that appear far from the fray.
I used to think the problem was too many people when I went outside to visit places along the Front Range. I would reminisce about my little hometown where I grew up and miss that sparsely populated, pristine land and the dark star-studded skies. Until I began to pursue my college studies, I did not know how ignorant I was about the concept of “pristine” versus “not pristine”. When I first thought and used the term “pristine” about my environment in rural southwest Colorado, I was making some assumptions. First, I assumed that people and landscapes in rural regions encountered little to no negative consequences from the mass migration West compared to the Front Range. Second, I assumed that I could see, smell or taste any negative impacts from humans. Third, I assumed that my way of life was not having any negative impacts on other people or the surrounding environment. I have begun to deepen my knowing about the history of my homeland in Colorado which renders some of my previous assumptions obsolete.
First, rural regions have not been safe from the negative consequences of Westward migration. I have learned how the U.S. government aided Westward expansion by making it legal to encroach upon Indigenous people who roamed in this region in order for newcomers to appropriate land. Bands of Ute people used to thrive living nomadically all over the territory that is Colorado and the Four Corners today. They were relegated into reservations in Utah and into a small strip in the southwest corner of Colorado by government force and violence. The Diné people, after having reservation borders imposed upon them in Utah, Arizona and New Mexico, were further forced into accepting mining and power production on their land, receiving all of the pollution and few of the benefits brought by these industries (Thompson 2018; Decker 2004; “Early History” 2022).
Second, while some pollution has been quite visible to me, other pollutants are hidden in plain sight. Once Native peoples were extracted from the land, the Euro-American newcomers could extract what they wanted from the land. Where I grew up, some of these industrial activities include nearby coal power plants on the Navajo Reservation like Four Corners Power Plant in New Mexico and the now defunct Navajo Generating Station near Page, Arizona. These plants have caused mercury pollution in the Four Corners region to be at the highest levels in the nation (Thompson 2018). I learned about acid mine drainage all over the Rockies, which is mostly invisible. But, the bright yellow Gold King Mine spill on the Animas River in 2015 was a stark example that harmed the river ecosystem and people far downstream. I also became aware of historic uranium mining in Western Colorado, radioactive waste contamination at the White Mesa Uranium Mill in Utah, and plutonium processing at Rocky Flats on the Front Range. All these operations have caused environmental and public health issues but have been swept under the rug by corporate and government interests alike (Thompson 2018; Decker 2004; “Early History” 2022; Iverson 2013; Grand Canyon Trust 2024).
Third, my way of life does have negative impacts on people and the environment. I now understand the land in which I grew up playing is not rightfully owned by anyone currently living on it. A white family had homesteaded what is now my family’s property in Mancos in the late 1800s against the wishes of the local Ute people (Freeman 1958). Christian and Mormon religious worldviews suppressed the Indigenous worldviews. The statement my friend made that “God made dirt,” holds a deeper message that it was her God, a deity of the European Americans who made dirt, and for whom? And, where does that leave the Ute, who lived on the dirt for time immemorial?
These legacies of genocide and polluting operations were once invisible to me. I was able to be ignorant to the human harm and widespread pollution that still impacts this land and people. It had never occurred to me that I might be a culprit. But I benefit from historical colonialism and I need electricity and fossil fuels and high-tech equipment. The device on which I type this story requires heavy metals like lead and mercury made available by extractive mining. Indigenous homeland appropriation, power generation and mining make our American ways of life possible in the West, while simultaneously harming Indigenous ways of life.
(Excerpt)
Amorina Lee-Martinez was born and raised in Mancos, Colorado, on ancestral Ute Mountain Ute lands and now lives and works in Montezuma County. She comes from Afro-Cuban, Indigenous Mexican and European heritage. She completed her PhD in Environmental Studies at CU Boulder in 2022 researching the historical context of present-day Dolores River land and water management.
Mark Stevens is the author of “No Lie Lasts Forever,” “The Fireballer” and The Allison Coil Mystery Series including “Antler Dust,” “Buried by the Roan,” “Trapline,” “Lake of Fire” and “The Melancholy Howl.” He lives in Mancos, plays bass in two rock bands, and sits on the board of the Mancos Creative District and Four Corners Writers. He collaborated with Chuck Greaves and Lisa C. Taylor to curate the anthology “Four Corners Voices.” More at www.writermarkstevens.com.
