The Book of Resting Places

by Thomas Mira y Lopez

  No longer in use, National Cemetery was classified as defunct. The category on first consideration seems puzzling. Does the space of the dead itself die? What happens when the land meant for preservation rubs up against the space marked out for the living?

  On a late summer’s day in downtown Tucson, just past lunch, the construction site for the new Pima County Courthouse is hushed. No heavy machinery rumbles; no trucks beep in reverse; the busy yells of workers have ceased.

  Alone in the still air, the county courthouse appears almost complete. Its seven stories of glass and steel reflect nothing but sky. Little evidence remains that here one of the largest mass exhumations in American history took place.

  One Friday afternoon, I locked my bike and walked along the chain-link fence running around the new courthouse, hoping to visit what I could. Unlike a cemetery, a construction site does not exactly welcome visitors. Sundt Construction, the contractor who won the bidding for the job, had posted the usual signs along its fence: violators will be prosecuted; not hiring at this jobsite; no trespassing, hard hat area. A three-foot poster of the model worker was stapled to the fence, each piece of protective gear labeled and explained.

  Then I saw another sign: visitors must check in at sundt offices. This seemed an implicit invitation—it didn’t specify which type of visitor must check in, only that this obligation awaited if you considered yourself one. And wasn’t I visiting? I walked to where the fence’s gates were pulled back, took a look around, and stepped inside.

  Not ten steps later and I came face-to-face with a worker, the first I had seen. He was in full compliance with the poster on the fence—orange vest, hard hat, safety glasses, and the name Jason stitched across his Dickies shirt. I told him I was looking for the Sundt office and was hoping to take a tour. He asked why. “I just found out this was a cemetery,” I said, and suddenly afraid that idle interest was not enough, that I must have some personal stake in the matter, I mentioned that my great-grandfather had been buried here. Did he think it was possible to pay my respects? It was a lie, but it worked. Jason nodded and pointed to a trailer behind me: “Tell them what you told me and I don’t see why not.”

  It should come as no surprise that a cemetery once sat in the center of the city. “The city of the dead is the forerunner, almost the core, of every living city,” writes Lewis Mumford, the architectural critic. The burial of their dead encouraged prehistoric humans to occupy permanent sites, so much so that the philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer argued burial “is perhaps the fundamental phenomenon of becoming human.” Metropolis and necropolis are obverse and reverse; a city grows and so too must its dead. The stores that cycle in and out of my old neighborhood in New York are really reminders that the people in the apartments above live and die and are shuffled out as well.

  Walling off a space for the dead then becomes a civic function, no different than providing the infrastructure for sewage, electricity, or running water. At the same time, a cemetery is more than just functional: it disposes of the dead, yet also provides them a home. It’s built of the dead, but for the living. Visitors—potential inhabitants, after all—both pay for and provide its present sustenance as well as supply its literal future. Think of it as the grandparent who has you by the ear—a cemetery needs an audience to pass along its memories of a city’s past occupants, yet it’s also there to send a message, a basic inevitable truth: a city of the living one day turns into a city of the dead. Though we all die, with the proper record-keeping and a bit of endowment, we might not all be forgotten.

  I climbed the steps to the Sundt Construction office, a white plywood trailer on the vacant lot. A woman looked up from her desk when I opened the door. Nervous, I spat out the story I concocted on the walk over. “My great-grandfather just up and moved to Tucson,” I told her. “I think he traveled by train to prospect. But he died and I was told he was buried here.” The woman cut me off before I could hash out any particulars of his death. “They did all the reburials at Fort Huachuca and All Faiths,” she said, as if she had heard this before. “The most you can do is see where he would have been. But you’ll have to ask Ben first.”

  Ben, it turned out, had just walked in behind me. The site foreman, he seemed the kind of man whose curfew you wouldn’t want to break when taking his daughter to prom. His face was more saddle than skin, his buzz cut an extension of his chin’s stubble. I followed him into his office and he stood behind his desk. “So you want a tour? Can’t do it. You need the proper equipment.” He pointed down to my canvas shoes and up at my bare head. “Steel-toed boots, safety glasses, a hard hat. It’s a safety-code thing. Walking around, you never know what might fall on you.”

  I nodded and said I understood, that I had some steel-toed boots but they were a three-mile bike ride away. Still I lingered and Ben didn’t kick me out. I took this as another invitation. I worked my way through a revision of my story—how my great-grandfather abandoned my great-grandmother on the East Coast and wound up in Tucson only to die shortly thereafter, how I had never known this until my aunt mentioned it the other day, how this was the last shred of him I had left.

  Ben sat down, took off his hard hat, and ran his thumb and forefinger along his forehead. “Was he military?” he asked.

  I paused, considering whether this was ever in the cards for a family member of mine. “I don’t think so,” I said.

  “And this was your great-grandfather?” Ben let that hang in the air. I look like someone whose great-grandfather had been born in 1900 at the latest.

  “Well, great-great really. It’s just easier to say great and mean great-great.”

  Ben nodded and opened a file on his desktop. He traced his finger along an aerial photograph of the construction site, outlining the perimeter where National Cemetery once lay and the three construction sections it had become—courthouse, parking garage, front lot—each with a swath of overturned land next to it like a smudged finger painting. Then he pointed to the roof of a brown building in the southwest corner. “There are still bodies underneath there. That’s the only part that wasn’t excavated.” He stopped and thought for a second. “I’ll have to show you round myself, seeing as you don’t have the right gear. Just keep your sunglasses on and grab those.” He pointed to a bin full of hard hats and orange vests, the proper safety equipment that had been sitting behind me the entire time.

  It turns out a defunct cemetery is a fairly common occurrence. A state of rest has its transitions like any other. If graves are houses of the dead, then they too must submit to the practical—the mortgages, payments, and installments needed to retain a desired, inhabitable space.

  In Tucson, there was the smattering of two-thousand-year-old burials at the base of Sentinel Peak, the saguaro-strung hill just west of the interstate emblazoned with the University of Arizona’s red, white, and blue A. Then there was Presidio San Agustín, built by Mexican settlers in 1776, where more than a thousand bodies still remain downtown, and where each November thousands of costumed gatherers parade along Alameda Street to celebrate All Souls Procession, Tucson’s version of Día de los Muertos. On All Souls, the city turns upside down and the living dress as the dead until one does not know which is which. People build floats with giant skeletons and scythes, creep down darkened streets on stilts, paint skulls on their faces, and carry pictures of dead family members. A crowd of strangers comes together in embodiment of what they’ve lost, marching over the San Agustín cemetery underneath.

  Then there was Court Cemetery, the graveyard that replaced National’s civilian portion in 1875, a half mile north of the railroad tracks. It’s a cemetery described in an 1877 Arizona Weekly Citizen editorial as a “drear, bleak, desolate place,” where it would be “cruelty in the highest degree to compel parents, kindred, and friends to entomb and take final leave of their dear departed ones.” Though the cemetery closed in 1909 and homes sprouted over it by 1915, up to six thousand bodies still remain unma
rked and underground in the residential neighborhood of Dunbar/Spring. In Dunbar/Spring, a post hole for a mailbox strikes a grave; excavation for a sewer line yields two coffins stacked one on top of another; an eleven-foot-long, half-foot-wide crack appears in the earth after a rainstorm and when the earth falls apart, it opens up two more graves layered on top of each other like bunk beds, the dead bleeding into the living and the once defunct springing improbably back to life.

  As Ben and I walked around to the dirt lot in back, he told me that the genealogy bug had bit him as well. He Googled his last name a few years ago to discover that his ancestors came from Chihuahua, Mexico. “My own great-grandpa,” he said with some pride, “was a Jesuit priest. He traveled up to Sonora, met a Native woman, and that was it.” He winked. “No more priesthood.” Ben searched his great-grandfather’s name and found a match in Hermosillo, Mexico. “My great-grandfather’s brother’s great-grandson.” He tried to puzzle out the connection. “Now let’s see, what does that make us?” He paused. “Cousins, I guess,” he laughed. “It gets tricky, you know?”

  I nodded in commiseration and told him, truthfully this time, that on my father’s side of the family in Brazil, my uncle had recently exhumed my grandfather and had him cremated after more than half a century in a cemetery in Petropolis, a small mountain city an hour’s ride from Rio de Janeiro. My uncle sprinkled my grandfather’s ashes alongside my grandmother’s at the sitio, the house my grandparents built in the 1950s and where my father and his siblings were raised. My uncle did this not just to reunite both his parents on the same land but also to receive a healthy sum from selling the plot.

  What I told Ben, however, wasn’t as simple as all that. My uncle had exhumed his father and scattered his ashes a year or so after what was left of our family buried handfuls of my grandmother’s ashes at the sitio, a little at a time, each in a particular spot she loved: beneath the birds-of-paradise by the pool, by the Adirondack chair my father had brought down from New York to assemble, at the base of the jaboticaba trees down the drive.

  But my uncle also wanted to save the sitio and so he bought the place, using most of the inheritance he received from his mother after fifty-nine less-than-patient years of waiting. His plan was admirable: if he preserved the land, he would preserve the memory of those people who also loved it yet could no longer care for it: his parents and my father. Like my uncle, I too regarded the sitio as a magical place—growing up, I would make the twelve-hour flight down to Rio with my parents, spend a few days in the city’s swelter, and then climb the winding route through the mountains and jungle until we entered what seemed another, more vertiginous world—bromélias and cachoeiras springing from cliffs, clouds curling over mountains to bring sudden thunder, a breeze that, at the right time of night, could rustle your bones. Like my uncle, I daydreamed that, when I grew older, I would end up there as well.

  Yet my uncle was also in equal measure a fool. Soon after he bought the sitio, he borrowed even more money he couldn’t return and found himself forced to sell the house and everything that came with it. He lost the garden, the birds-of-paradise, the greenhouse, the hummingbirds. He lost the dirt soccer field out back where my grandfather used to practice his shot put. He lost the orange and lime trees, the fruit growing on the bark of the jaboticabas, the dark marble berries to be turned into jam. He lost the dead wasps scumming the surface of the pool and the spiderwebs stretched taut across the back walkway, stronger than fishing line. And I lost the back ridge where my father fell thirty years ago and broke his ankle. I lost the dusted-over Ping-Pong table and the television where our family watched Baggio shank one over the net in ’94. I lost Maria Comprida, the mountain my grandmother would gaze up at every time she sat in the Adirondack chair my father positioned for her, the mountain whose outline I tattooed onto my forearm so that I may never lose it again.

  What saddens me most is not that I had allowed myself to believe one of my uncle’s long drawn-out flights of fancy, but that there’ll come a moment when whoever buys the place stops at the foot of the jaboticabas and notices the overturned dirt, appearing as a darker stain than the rest of the deeply watered and lushly green earth. The impostor (for who else could this person be who bought the house my grandparents built?) will dig through the dirt and rock, and then through my grandmother’s and grandfather’s commingled ashes, some volcanic and fine, some coarser and chipped. Then the new owner, planning some grander landscaping, will prepare to yank everything out by its roots but first sift through the earth, letting his fingers run through it to wonder, if only for a moment, what ghosts might now be strangers in their own home.

  Ben and I walked behind the courthouse and stood at the edge of a pit, mounds of bulldozed earth piled around us. A worker, a lanky older white man, walked past us carrying two buckets of dirt, his shoulders sagging under the weight.

  A crane sat idly on the far side of the hole, and beyond that ran Sixth Avenue’s traffic. This would be the courthouse’s parking garage, the only structure left to build. “We’re standing where they uncovered most of the bodies,” Ben said. “So chances are your great-grandpa was buried here.” I nodded solemnly and peeked over the edge.

  Ben said he had heard stories from the excavation team about the bones they found: a mother holding a baby on either side of her; a skeleton with bullet holes in the rib cage and sternum. “It’s quite a structure,” Ben said, looking up at the courthouse. “You know why they had to exhume here? The foundation’s twenty feet deep, deeper than any other building built before here. We’d have poured concrete onto all those bodies.”

  Ben turned back to the pit. I wanted to ask him what he thought about working here, whether he felt unsettled, whether he too supposed himself a transgressor. The city had decided, after all, to bring in a priest to bless the site before construction began.

  As much as graves provide a second home for the dead, it’s a home we don’t want them to leave. Look at the beginnings of any burial practice and you will see the steps taken by the living to stop the dead from returning. The heavy stones and menhirs first used in Western Europe don’t just mark a burial place; they physically keep the dead from rising. In France up until the late eighteenth century, bodies suspected of being likely to come back to life were disinterred and decapitated. To prevent the dead’s resurrection, people have burned them, eaten them, carried their ashes in small pouches around their necks. They have rubbed out the dead’s footprints so they could not find their way home, blindfolded corpses and led them out from their houses to their graveyards by unfamiliar routes. They have sealed up the dead body’s orifices to keep the soul from leaving. Corpses have been tied down, their bones broken, barriers of fire lit between grave and town. Families have urinated along the doorways of their houses so that if a ghost were to enter, he would drink the urine, spit it out, and leave. People have danced on graves to crush the body underneath. Even the Dance of Death, that Middle Ages allegory on the universality of mortality, was meant to tamp down the earth so the dead couldn’t seep out.

  We miss the dead, we mourn them, we dress in their visage and try many means to preserve their memory—but is all this done because we want to bring them back to life or because, in some sense, we want to keep them dead? To remember someone is not the same, after all, as wishing for that someone’s return. Perhaps a grave is just a means of assuaging guilt, a way of fooling us into thinking we can hold on to a place or person, so that when the neighborhood sewer line is struck or the courthouse built or a house’s new occupants decide to do some light work around the yard, the earth does not open upon our ancestors only for us to hear of the wrongs we’ve done and the ways in which we’ve left them behind.

  Before Ben and I walked back, he pointed across the lot to the building from the bird’s-eye photograph. “That’s where they didn’t dig. Check it out when you leave. There are bodies still buried there. Just slip in the alleyway up Stone.”

  A year
after I visited National Cemetery, I met John Hall. Doughy, invariably friendly, and dressed in baggy, waterproof clothes as if just returned from the field, he waited for me in his office down and around a long corridor of SRI’s headquarters in East Tucson. After a chain of intermediaries and months of over-the-phone stonewalling from the SRI secretary, I had found him, John Hall, the lead field archaeologist for the excavation at National. His office had no windows. A map of the excavation site, each burial a slightly pinched rectangle, was tacked to his wall.

  “I’m always happy to reminisce,” John said, swiveling his chair between me and his desktop, where he had pulled up photos from the excavation. “This was probably the biggest project I’ll ever have in my life.”

  SRI’s excavation was a massive, painstaking, year-and-a-half-long undertaking. In order to find a grave, a backhoe stripped away foundation and overburden—the layer of rock and soil overlying the cemetery—and then sifted through the dirt for bones. John and a team of seventy parsed the dry, stubborn caliche to catch sight of the darker dirt and decomposed wood that indicated grave and coffin. To reach the densest part of the cemetery, they dug through sewers and building foundations, cut gas lines and water pipes, and scattered burials. Upon finding remains, SRI took cranial measurements to determine each skeleton’s ancestry. They collected what artifacts remained in the graves—rosary beads, crosses, buttons made of metal, wood, and shell—and recorded each burial’s position so that its arrangement could be recreated upon repatriation.