The Weird

by Ann

  I came upon two youngish men at the end of the first row of graves. On the ground between them was a new coffin. Its lid was open, and I saw that it was empty. One of the men nodded a hello at me.

  ‘How’s it going?’ I said.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘it is going.’

  I gestured vaguely around. ‘These’re all my relatives.’

  They looked at me as if I’d caught them doing something naughty.

  ‘Well,’ said the one who’d spoken before, ‘we’re taking real good care of everyone. Mister–’

  ‘Riddle.’

  The second man pointed away and said, ‘Most of the Riddle family’s still located over on that side.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I know.’ I did know; it was all coming back; I could have found the Riddles blindfolded, and the Riches and the Bassetts, too. I had seen both of my maternal grandfather’s parents buried here, then his wife, finally his own self. The first Riches and Bassetts had been laid to rest here in the 1850s; Riddles came along after the war, when a lot of ruined Southerners were moving around and resettling. Relatively speaking, the concentration of Riddles wasn’t great – Riddles, it once was explained to me, tended to die young and tended also to have wanderlust. My father had been orphaned when he was barely into his teens, and members of his line had come to rest in odd places throughout the South, the West, and as far away as the Coral Sea. The first graveside service I’d attended in the Gardner cemetery was for a young cousin of mine, Kermit, who one summer day had succumbed to the fascination of a fallen power line. The last one was for my grandfather.

  I nodded at the new coffin. ‘Who’s this for?’

  ‘Whoever,’ one of the men said. ‘We try to keep everything together, even the box somebody was buried in. Some of these old graves, though, you find a few splinters of wood and some rusty nails, nothing you could still call a coffin.’

  ‘Is Doctor Taylor here?’

  ‘He’s somewhere around here.’ He looked about and nodded off toward the south end of the cemetery. ‘I think he’s over that way.’

  ‘Thank you.’ The two men seemed glad to see me walk on. When I was a child, I’d sometimes been sent to spend the summer with my grandparents. My grandmother and great-grandmother had visited this cemetery often. Between them they must have known seven out of every ten people buried here. They always brought flowers, and usually they brought me. They’d move among the graves, place the flowers, murmur secrets to the dead or prayers to Jesus, murmur genealogy to me, life histories, accounts of untimely, often horrific, deaths – most of their anecdotes were imbued with pain and tragedy. Sometimes I was interested and listened. Sometimes I was bored, drowsy from the heat, and instead listened to the cicadae. The sound of those summers was one long insect song, cicadae and honey-bees by day, crickets and mosquitoes by night, punctuated by gospel-piano chords, hands clapping time, voices singing, ‘I’m gonna have a little talk with Jesus, I’m qonna tell Him all about my trouble.…’

  It kept coming back, coming back.

  It came back as I passed Dr. Sweeny’s headstone, which lay in the grass by the edge of the driveway. Nearby, a man wearing a faded plaid shirt was excavating the grave with a shovel. As headstones in this cemetery went, Dr. Sweeny’s was pretty fancy, with some decorative cuts and a longer inscription than most.

  Dr. Chester Sweeny

  d. June 30, 1900

  Erected in respectful memory

  by those he tended

  these 30 years

  Dr. Sweeny was the only doctor, the only Sweeny, and the only non-relative buried in the cemetery. I had been filled with dismay and disbelief the first time I saw his name on that stone. Until that moment, I’d thought that doctors were immune to sickness and exempt from death. Mammaw, I said to my great-grandmother, whom I’d been trailing past the rows, what kind of a doctor dies, Mammaw? ‘Honey,’ she told me, ‘doctors die just like everybody else. Everybody’s got to die. That’s why the important thing in life’s to be baptized in Jesus’s name, so you’ll go to heaven when you die.’ But why, I demanded, do people have to die? She didn’t answer, just looked at the stone, and after what was probably only seconds but must have seemed like a whole minute or a full hour to an impatient child, she said, ‘Old Doc Sweeny. I went to his funeral. I was a girl then. I was nearly as young then as you are now.’ She was in her sixties when she told me this; naturally, I couldn’t think of her as a girl or imagine that she had ever been nearly as young as anybody. ‘I remember because everybody in the whole valley come for it, and then’s when I met your Pappaw for the first time. He didn’t want nothing to do with me then, but later, well, I changed his mind. But that day everybody come to pay respects to old Doc Sweeny.’ Was he as old as you, Mammaw? ‘Doc Sweeny was as old as Methuselah. Why, my momma, that was your great-great-gran’maw Vannie Bassett, wasn’t even born when he come here. My own daddy made the box to bury him in and druv it here in his wagon, and a man over to Dawson give this stone. Doc Sweeny was just as poor as everybody else and didn’t have no money set aside. Seems like there never was so good a one as him again. He druv his buggy all over, day or night, rain or shine. Not like these doctors we got now. Poor as he was, too, he always had some candy and play-pretties for us littlens in his pockets. I remember him visiting my momma when she was sick, and when he was leaving, he give me a piece of peppermint candy and said, My child, my child. And I was a sassy thing then, just like you, didn’t have no more manners’n a pig. Instead of thanking him for the candy, I just said, I ain’t neither your child,’ and she had laughed delightedly at the memory of her own devilishness.

  Thereafter, throughout the remaining summers of my childhood, Dr. Sweeny occupied a place in my mind as special as the one he occupied in the cemetery. I soon got over his being a dead doctor, but I remained impressed by his anomalous presence in what was effectively an outsized family plot. It suggested to me that he must have been, somehow, one of us. Even now, he had power to fascinate me. Gazing down at his stone, I found myself wondering exactly what he must have done, besides giving candy and cheap toys to children, to so endear himself. Mostly just be there, I guessed, when folks needed a sympathetic ear and a few sugar pills. Doctors in Sweeny’s day had done more nursing than actual doctoring. Much of the nursing was ineffectual, and most of the doctoring was downright savage. There was no Food and Drug Administration to look over a physician’s shoulder as he dosed people with God only knew what. Maybe this particular country doctor had won his neighbors’ trust and respect simply by not killing inordinate numbers of patients.

  I tore myself away, moved on, and found Dr. Taylor and a woman squatting in shade at the end of a row. He was strongly built, balding, with a sun-burnt face. She had long, reddish-brown hair tied back in a ponytail and was covered with freckles everywhere that I could see. A map of the graveyard was spread on the ground between them, with numbers and other marks scribbled all over it. None of the graves at this end of the row had been opened yet. I noticed four narrow, squarish stones set into the ground at the feet of two graves identified by a common headstone as those of John Hellman Rich and Julia Anne Rich.

  ‘Doctor Taylor,’ I said.

  Both of them looked up, and I could tell from his expression that he didn’t recognize me. We had met only briefly, weeks before.

  ‘Doug Riddle,’ I said.

  ‘Mister Riddle!’ He stood quickly, brushed dirt off his hands, started to offer to shake, pulled back suddenly. ‘I don’t know if you want to shake hands with me. I’ve been rooting around in graves all day.’ He seemed genuinely flustered. He turned to the woman, who had risen with him. ‘Gertie, this is Doug Riddle. My associate, Gertrude Latham.’

  ‘I’m very pleased to meet you,’ she said. She seemed as ill at ease as he. She had a wonderful accent, German come through the heart of the Deep South.

  ‘Finding out what you came to find out?’ I said.

  Taylor made an attempt at a smile. ‘In this line of work,
you never know what you’ll find out.’

  ‘Some people,’ I said, meaning mainly my irrepressible Uncle G. A., ‘called this place Gardner Gardens.’

  They looked uncertain, as if unsure they’d heard me right. He ventured to say, ‘Oh?’

  ‘The planting ground,’ I said, then shrugged. ‘Small-town black humor.’

  ‘Ah. Yes.’ Taylor smiled again, more feebly than before, and tried to make up the difference by adding a chuckle, with results that embarrassed everyone. My own smile began to hurt my mouth.

  Gertrude Latham went for a save. She nodded toward Julia Anne Rich’s grave and said, ‘That headstone tells us a great deal about this young woman’s life. Do you know anything about her?’

  I glanced at the dates on the stone. Julia Anne Rich had died, age twenty-two, before the turn of the century, when my great-grandparents were children. ‘I remember the name,’ I said, ‘from when I used to come here as a kid. I thought Julia Anne was a nice name –’ I gave Latham an apologetic look ‘– for a girl’s name. But I don’t know anything about her in particular.’

  Latham nodded at the grave again. ‘Those are her babies there by her feet. Judging from the dates, she lost four of them in a row. The last one may have killed her.’

  If this was archeology, I wasn’t impressed. I felt sure I could have deduced as much from the information on the stones. Childbirth in the nineteenth century was perilous.

  I said, ‘There’re more babies and mothers buried here than anything else. Lots of children’s graves, too. Children used to die of everything. After World War Two, though, hardly anyone except old people got buried here. All the young people went into the service or moved to Evansville to work in the P-forty-seven factory. And they just never came back.’

  The two archeologists were staring at me. There was something like admiration in Taylor’s expression. I felt a sheepish sort of pleasure and could not help smiling as he asked me, ‘Are you Gardner’s official historian?’

  I shook my head. ‘But there was a time when I must’ve known the name on every last one of these headstones. I got to be a whiz at subtraction from figuring out by the dates how old people were when they died. And in the forties people did start going away and not coming back. My father went into the service and stayed in. And somebody in the family did go build P-forty-sevens, too. There were framed prints of the things hanging in a spare bedroom at my grandparents’ house for years. Official prints, with the Republic Aircraft logo.’

  ‘Mister Riddle,’ Taylor said, ‘we could use your knowledge to interpret this site. I’d appreciate it if you’d consider letting us interview you sometime.’

  ‘You’d be what’s known in anthropology as an informant,’ said Latham.

  Informant didn’t have the ring to it that official historian did, but I was flattered all the same. There’s little to compare with having people hang on everything you say. Anyway, I told myself, maybe Gardner was too small for a full-fledged historian. Nothing had ever happened here – nothing that mattered to anybody besides Riddles, Riches, and Bassetts, harvest time, tent meetings, weddings, funerals, somebody’s barn being raised or burning down. No one famous had ever come from Gardner, or to it, for that matter. And it struck me then, with unexpected and shaming clarity, that I’d never made the effort to bring my own children or grandchildren to this place, that I should have been murmuring genealogy and tragic personal histories to them all their young lives, teaching them about family and the continuity of life. I should have been telling them, ‘Every one of your ancestors lived and suffered and sometimes all but swam up waterfalls like salmon to make sure you’d be here today and the family would continue and the thread be unbroken. They were brave and wonderful people, and if you don’t believe it, just look here at your great-aunt, your great-something Julia Anne, who lost four babies one right after another, which isn’t even a record, and it must’ve seemed to her like the worst thing in the world to lose the first one but then she carried three more, suffered crushing loss every time, died a probably painful and possibly protracted death trying to deliver the last one –’ And, ‘Doug,’ my wife would’ve said by then, ‘Dad,’ my daughter would’ve said by now, each with that same disapproving furrow between her eyebrows. I do get carried away at times.

  I blinked the thoughts away and looked at the two scientists. ‘So,’ I said, ‘what’re you finding out?’

  Latham said, ‘We never really know what we’ve found until we’ve finished an excavation and, uh, put all the pieces of the puzzle together.’

  ‘Is there a puzzle here?’

  She essayed a smile. It was the best smile any of us had managed thus far. ‘There’s always a puzzle.’

  ‘And you always find a solution?’

  Her smile got even better. ‘This is what you’d call quick and dirty archeology. We have to excavate by shovel, get as much information out as we can, as fast as we can, and move on. We don’t have a lot of time. All we can do is figure out what the person was buried with and measure the bones. And we try to look for evidence of disease that would show up in the skeletal material.’

  ‘Is there evidence of a lot of disease?’

  Everything suddenly felt awkward again. I could tell by the look she gave Taylor that she regretted her last statement.

  I looked over my shoulder and saw Roy Rich’s grave right where I’d left it decades before. ‘Here’s a puzzle for you,’ I said. ‘What does this stone tell you about Roy Rich’s life?’

  Latham glanced at it. ‘He died at age fifteen.’

  ‘He was lucky to live that long,’ I said. ‘Or maybe not so lucky. I remember Roy. He was deformed. Not “differently abled,” not even “physically handicapped.” Deformed. His sister Betty, too.’ I pointed to Betty’s headstone, next to his. ‘She died at age twelve. Those two had everything in the world wrong with them. I guess you’ll see for yourself when you open the coffins.’

  The two scientists were silent. It was very hot, and sweat gleamed on Taylor’s pate and beaded on Latham’s forehead and upper lip. I felt slimy inside my clothing. The cicadae would not shut up.

  At last, Taylor said, stiffly. ‘We’ll write a report when we finish the excavation. If you like, I’ll send you a copy.’

  ‘I’m sure it’d be much too technical for me. Tell me something about my ancestors that I can go home and tell my wife.’

  Taylor looked about as unhappy as any human being I’d seen lately. Latham looked as if she were trying to wish somebody away – me, of course. The more ill at ease they became, the pushier I felt. Maybe it was the gene for devilishness, handed down from Mammaw.

  ‘It doesn’t necessarily have to be something nice,’ I said, ‘if that’s what’s holding you back. Nothing you tell me can be any more horrible than some of the things Granny and Mammaw told me.’ I looked over the rows. A truck pulled away from the gate, bearing some of my dead away to strange soil. ‘Doctor Taylor, when we met last month, you said this ground’s full of history, and this was a one-time-only chance to get at it.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, slowly – warily, I thought. ‘Yes, I did say that.’

  ‘This is the last time I’ll ever see this place. Living or dead, everyone’s being scattered. I know it’s true I’ll be able to visit my relatives’ new graves over in Dawson, but they’ll be, they’ll seem out of place over there. This is where my grandparents and great-grandparents were buried. This little spot in the road was their home. It was my home, too, for a while. Next year, it’ll all be gone, the whole valley’ll be under water. It’ll be like Gardner never existed. So please indulge me. I’m not going to gum up the works for you, I really don’t want to be in your way or bother you a lot, but I need…I need to carry away everything from here that I can this time.’

  ‘We try,’ Taylor said, ‘we try very hard to be careful of the feelings of living relatives of the people we exhume. It’s been my experience that relatives shouldn’t, well, watch. And that despite what they say,
they don’t really want to know everything.’

  ‘Look. There’re a few chicken thieves buried here. There’s even supposed to be a horse thief. And one of my cousins stabbed her husband with a big sharp kitchen knife when he beat up on the kids. He isn’t buried here, but the point is, I don’t have many illusions about my family. I’ll try not to be shocked by anything you tell me.’

  He manifestly wasn’t convinced. ‘It’s not illusions I’m talking about. I’m talking more along the lines of –’ he couldn’t look at me now, so he compelled me not to look at him by pointing down at his map of the cemetery – ‘grislier facts. Most people don’t find it pleasant to contemplate, ah, physical abnormality.’

  Pleasant or no, I almost said, I contemplate it with every step. I could’ve gone on, mentioned my children’s and grandchildren’s congenital problems, too. I did say, ‘I’m not squeamish, either.’

  He gave me an okay-but-I-warned-you look. ‘There’s evidence of pretty high incidences of birth defects, of bone disorders. Many of them are kind of gruesome and unusual.’

  If he was expecting me to flinch, he was disappointed. If I was supposed to react strongly in any way, I failed. The only reaction I noticed in myself was some kind of inward shrug, meaning, approximately. Sure, of course, so what? In a community like Gardner, with no medical facilities and not even a resident doctor since Dr. Sweeny, there had been no avoiding the raw proof that flesh is weak, treacherous stuff. The maimed, the hideously diseased, and the genetic misfires had at all times been at least semi-present and semi-visible.

  I said, ‘Unusual how?’

  He exhaled a soft, exasperated sound and said to Latham, ‘Gertie, would you please take Mister Riddle over to where Dan and Greg are working and…show him.’

  She almost managed to conceal her distress at finding herself appointed tour-guide. Anger flashed in her blue eyes, but she answered, ‘Sure, Bob.’