Entry 7

As it's a beautiful, mild early spring day, I decide to walk from my home in Shadyside to Allegheny Cemetery, in Lawrenceville. It's a walk that takes me through East Liberty, Friendship, and Bloomfield—neighborhoods that either didn't exist in or were distinct villages from Pittsburgh at the time the cemetery was established in 1844. Originally free grazing land east of Pittsburgh, East Liberty (a "liberty" being a plot of common land) developed into its own town thanks to the commercial and infrastructural efforts of Negleys, Mellons, and Winebiddles, family names that have since become ingrained in the geography as well as imaginary of Pittsburgh. Friendship and Bloomfield were once streetcar suburbs, after the Winebiddle clan divided and sold off plots of land to develop into rowhouses and, later, larger houses for more prosperous families. Lawrenceville itself was founded by William Foster, father of the famous Stephen Foster, Allegheny Cemetery's most famous resident. The two-and-a-half-mile journey to the Butler Street gatehouse is a journey through the city's history, the seamless meetings of neighborhoods today belying the fact that, once, there were open fields here, empty plots of land where both industry executives and industrial workers made their homes, when the iron and coal began to pour in and the steel began to ship out.

While the trees in the city have yet to fully leaf, many are in bloom. The dogwoods with their thousands of tiny, four-petaled white flowers, the pastel pink of weeping cherries. The red maples have already shed their crimson flowers, now sticky and bloated, littering sidewalks and catching in the treads of my sneakers. The faint yellow of poplar blooms are giving way to early leafs, oblong, the size of thumbnails. Bright, sporadic splashes of color in the afternoon sun. Clusters of tiny red berries dangle from the wild cherry trees planted along the sidewalks of Liberty Avenue, berries that will drop and rot, uneaten, come autumn.

In a book on Allegheny Cemetery published by the Pittsburgh History and Landmarks Association, I discovered that, a few months ago, I had misidentified the grave of Margaretta Bayard Briggs, the cemetery's first interment. The picture in the book does not look the same as the grave I had believed was hers, so I'm on a hunt to find the right one. Surely I'm not the first person to misidentify the dead—voiceless, so many headstones effaced by time and weather. Families, joggers, cyclists, and amateur photographers have all come for an afternoon jaunt in this wide, quiet green space, now that the sun is out and there's not yet enough pollen in the air to stir up allergies. I climb to the top of a hill in the oldest part of the cemetery, Lot 2, where Margaretta is buried (I found the "impostor" Margaretta in Lot 1). It's a large and densely populated lot, and I have a hard time finding the right stone, but eventually I find the Bayard plot and Margaretta's small, rococo stone. In the picture in the book, the engraving on the stone is still legible—not so today. In the twenty-seven years since the book's publication, the text on the stone is all but erased. I feel an odd kind of sympathy both with and for Margaretta, her worn stone, no plaque to mark the significance of her grave as there is for every one of the past mayors of Pittsburgh buried here. I wonder who the last person was to purposefully seek her out, to spend time with her here.

Other Bayards are buried here, too, and there's a wide, shiny new headstone beside Margaretta's that I suspect was commissioned recently by whoever remains of the Bayards, commemorating the members of that apparently illustrious family. This being originally Col. George Bayard's farmland, I suppose they have a right to do so. Remarkably, however, none of the Bayards listed on this stone are actually buried here, save Margaretta, whose name is carved in clear, crisp lettering.

The scion of the "de Bayard" line, it would seem, was Pierre Terrail de Bayard, identified on the stone as "Chevalier Sans Peur et Sans Reproche" ("The Knight Without Fear and Beyond Reproach"), 1473-1524. An Internet search reveals that de Bayard was, in fact, a remarkably accomplished, chivalrous, and all around well-liked knight with who served three kings and is buried in France. A medieval French knight honored, here, in Lawrenceville. Also listed on the stone is Col. Stephen Adams Bayard, 1744-1815 (whom one would presume fought in the Revolutionary War), and the founder of Elizabeth, PA, thirteen miles south of Pittsburgh on the shore of the Monongahela. Beside him, his wife, Elizabeth Mackey Bayard, after whom he named the town, and identified as the "First White Child Born in Fort Pitt" in 1767. I wonder about this clarification, "White," and who, then, was really the first child born in what would become Pittsburgh—an African child? Native American? Or what would have been called a "mestizo" or "mulatto"? And where do they lie buried, unmarked, unnamed?

The loud, rhythmic call of a bird I do not recognize startles me out of my reverie. I look around at the many trees around me and spot what looks like a woodpecker gripping the trunk of a bare-branched oak. It lets out the call again—wik-wik-wik-wik—and another bird swoops in toward it, and they both fly up into the tree's branches. I walk closer to get a better look, but they keep flitting from tree to tree, calling loudly all the while. Then, they both spread their wings and soar right over my head, and I almost gasp as I catch sight of their cadmium-yellow bellies and underwings, a color I don't think I've ever seen before in nature, banded with dark brown. With the help of the handy "Merlin" smartphone app, I identify the bird as a northern flicker—what a terrific name to match that flickering bright glimpse of their undersides. Some further probing on the website of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology reveals that this particular call is a territorial call heard in the spring and early summer, when pairs are forming and establishing their territories. That would explain the antagonistic chasing about and insistent vocalizations.

I've barely covered any ground on today's walk and have already seen and learned so much. Ahead of me, further into the cemetery, wait a herd of young, bandy-legged deer, geese and mallards wading in the no-longer-frozen ponds, robins scurrying in the green grass. I walk on, hoping to catch another glimpse of the flickers. But it seems they've moved on, staking and battling out the borders of their territories, where they will, for the season, find mates and raise their young. So I leave their province, wishing them the best, hoping I'll meet them again when I least expect. Because it seems that the flicker should always come as a surprise.