Will Jones
Staff Writer
I first heard about Grassy Cove Methodist Church from a table of old ladies at the restaurant where I work. They were planning their funerals with the same glee young girls plan their weddings, tittering nervously on the edges of their chairs about the hymns they wanted sung and the appropriate shade of burgundy for the casket velvet. One said that she wanted her funeral to be a party because she would be in heaven “partying with Jesus,” and all the other ladies sniffled into their clam chowder. Their traumatized waitress came back to the kitchen for the entrée not knowing whether to laugh or cry — she told me that all these strange conversations were giving her serious reservations about growing old. She also told me that one of them had expressed a wish to be buried in a little churchyard with a view of the mountains, a place called Grassy Cove. I told her that all sounded very nice but that her table’s green beans were getting as cold as her feet would be in 70 years. And that is when I decided to visit.
Grassy Cove is a little farming community north of Spring City, a deep bowl of pastureland surrounded by the craggy Crab Orchard Mountains. I had driven through it many times and each time had been staggered by its suddenness — State Highway 68 winds narrowly around the contours of Walden’s ridge, takes a bend and deposits you in a cove several miles wide, open on all sides to sheep and cattle pastures. The mounded peaks and wrinkled coulees which characterize most of the Cumberland Plateau open to acres of empty fields within a few seconds’ space.
It’s enough to cause anyone to swerve a little — even the red-eyed big rig drivers who thunder through on their way to Atlanta or Tampa. The untidy hardwood forests of the escarpment flatten and order themselves into squares, ringed by little fences and rimmed with orchards and ivied oaks, all undressed for the winter. When we enter it, there are still crusts of snow clinging to the mountainsides and hawks perched in the bare tree-limbs surveying the stubble for movement. We miss our turn and I curse — we are already late.
I don’t even wait to see him flash his lights before I pull over. I’m going well over the speed limit, and there’s no other reason a state trooper would do such a theatrical U-turn on a Sunday morning. I just park on the side of the road and wait for him to pull behind me, which he predictably does.
“You know why I stopped you today, sir?” It’s a silly question — I had practically pulled myself over — so I answer that yes, I did know, and that no, it will not happen again, never ever.
“Where are you going in such a hurry?” he asks me, as if 20-year-olds needed a reason to speed.
“We’re going to Grassy Cove Methodist Church for the service,” I say, maybe a little piously. My roommate, who is sitting in the passenger seat, smirks.
“The Lord wants us to go to church; He just wants us to do it the legal way,” the officer says seriously. “You go off now, and slow down.”
Grassy Cove Methodist Church is a small and unassuming chapel just off of Highway 68 that sees 20 parishioners on any given Sunday. It is actually one of the oldest churches in East Tennessee, built in 1803 by John Ford, a veteran of the Revolutionary War (there’s a bronze plaque to this effect, anchored in the red brick next to the door). This building, of course, is more recent, but the crumbling quartzite headstones in the graveyard attest to just how long there has been a church here standing on this ground.
The building itself stands on Kemmer Road, named for the biggest landowners and one of the oldest families still living in the cove. The Kemmers have their name on just about everything, including both country stores and half of the headstones in the graveyard, going all the way back to the mid 19th century. There are maybe 30 people in the sanctuary when we walk in, split fairly evenly between families and blue-haired old ladies. There are two elaborate arrangements of silk flowers on the chancel — dusty tulips and calla lilies — and a picture of a robed Jesus praying and looking very sad. Maybe He had seen me speeding.
The service is short and informal. Pastor Monica begins by exhorting us to be like Timothy and not let our youth keep us from doing great things for God, which is funny because most of the congregation seems to be at least 65. Seen from this perspective, her homily is actually quite poignant — whatever young people there are in Grassy Cove probably leave their town and their church as soon as they are able. There are many times more stones in the graveyard than there are congregants. It’s an old church in an old town, carried by old people. It has survived Cherokee raids, the Civil War and numerous hauntings, but it will die when its old ladies do.
We sing the hymns a cappella, and the older man in the pew in front of us sings a half-step lower and a quarter note slower than the rest of the congregation — he carries himself like a veteran and smells like Brut and bay rum. He laughs when the offering is taken up grandly by a very little girl and her older sister, who steers her from pew to pew, in between the old ladies in their crisp Sunday coats and cameo broaches.
The passing of the peace lasts for nearly 10 minutes, and everyone shakes our hands and kindly introduces themselves. “You can almost feel the old ladies sizing us up as potential husbands for their granddaughters,” my roommate whispers to me, half-joking. When the service ends, most of the congregants smile as they file past us into the cold bright morning but not before inviting us to a chili supper that night in the fellowship hall.
We chat with the old man in front of us for a moment before heading back. He asks us where we normally attend church, and I say that I’m a Presbyterian and my roommate a Baptist. He’s a Seventh-day Adventist. “We’re all a bunch of cultists here, I guess,” he laughs as he leaves.
I think we all should be. The world is too wide to swallow whole. We must content ourselves with one valley or cove at a time. This is one reason old people stay in their little towns with their little churches long after their children have left — they know how many decades must be spent to know even a single hill or stream or pasture well. It is good to earn the knowledge of a single house, a single field, a single church, and to hold on.
Within the intersecting fence lines of East Tennessee there is a commitment to place and a contentment with knowing only one. This may occasionally be due to provincialism or poverty or some combination of the two, but sometimes it reflects the knowledge that places and people and churches are not interchangeable, and that whenever you leave one there is an irrevocable loss associated with that leaving. You are one body set down in one place, and you alone must decide if that ground is worth rooting to, and maybe being buried in. The people of Grassy Cove did, and this is why there is still a church meeting of 20 odd congregants after more than 200 years.
We leave the valley in the late afternoon to the high trill of migrating sandhill cranes cresting Black Mountain, almost too high to see. I have lived in East Tennessee for all my life, and I no longer distrust my own sentimentality for it and for its people. I love these places more than I have reason to because I know them like I know no other place — and when I leave, I will lose something I can never get back. We choose where we will be buried long before we die.
