Letters From The Grave

by Jeanie P Johnson

  Emma shook her head to clear her brain, and slowly turned away from the mantle that was now, back to normal again. Slowly she walked back out to her car and headed in the direction of the graveyard. She was almost afraid to look in the cubbyhole, but what else could she do?

  A new letter was there, and she pulled it out slowly, turning it over in her hand several times before finally breaking the seal.

  April 16, 1859

  My dearest Emma,

  I am disturbed to learn that you doubt that we are communicating across time. Yet I can understand why you have your doubts, because I felt the same way when I first found your letter in my wife’s tombstone. Now I am looking forward to finding your letters there.

  The way I knew someone from some other dimension was writing to me, was the fact that a letter appeared there, while I was sitting with my back to the door of the cubbyhole. There was no way for anyone to place it there while I was sitting against it, and the letter had not been there when I first leaned against the tombstone. Perhaps, if you do the same thing, you will discover that the letters appear there mysteriously, and no one brings them.

  My brother-in-law, and his wife, and their son have come to stay with us since my wife died. I welcome the company. His wife is about to bring another child into the world, and I only pray that what happened to my wife, does not happen to her. I suppose you are related to these people from the past, since you claim that my wife was an Aunt of yours, long before you were ever born.

  I have been giving a lot of thought to what you said about the upcoming war. There are already rumors of a war in the making, so it does not surprise me. These rumors have been circulating since the forties, so I am not surprised that they will eventually come to a head. Yet I fear, because you claim my plantation will be burned, and advise me to save our valuables so they are not taken from us by one side or the other. It has occurred to me that since you claim the church is still standing, that it would be a good place to hide our valuables. There is a secret room beneath the floor of the church, where I shall store them. I just wonder why the plantation was never rebuilt, because if I am still alive, after it is burned down, I know I would use every power and ability within me to build it back again. Therefore, I wonder if I will be alive then.

  I am not telling anyone where I will store my property, until the time comes, just to make sure they remain safe.

  Don’t stop writing to me, Emma. Your letters give me hope that someday, in some future time, I will find you again. So if you do run into my future-self in your time, please do not forget about me, still stuck here in my time, who looks forward to reading your letters.

  Lovingly, Doran.

  Emma sat motionless, staring down at the letter, trying to get things straight in her mind. She finally got up and went to her car, where she still had her writing material and composed a letter of her own. It was simple and to the point.

  Dear Doran,

  If you are truly from my past, then you will remember my nineteenth birthday, and tell me about it. I think I may be remembering it on my own, but I want to confirm my memory. This way I will know for sure if you are from the past, and I am starting to remember events from that past.

  Always, Emma.

  Emma put the letter in the cubbyhole, and went back to her car, to get her etching material. If she wanted to sell more of her work, she had better start getting to work, she decided, and what better place to do it than in this abandoned graveyard? She had promised herself she would start caring for it anyway, and she could do that as she discovered more gravestones to turn into artwork, she decided.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  March 1979

  Doran was beginning to feel anxious. It would be a week or more before Emma found the letter in the tombstone that would start the wheels of the future moving in his favor. She was still planning to marry David on her twentieth birthday. Even though her letters to his great, great grandfather indicated that she never married David, she had mentioned the reason was that David thought she had been unfaithful, and apparently the gift Doran had given her on her nineteenth birthday hadn’t disrupted their relationship enough.

  He had to take more drastic measures, he decided. Perhaps it was up to him, after all, to stop her from marrying David, and the universe seemed to know it. Even if the universe didn’t know it, he seemed to know it, and it was then he decided he would discover where David was having his bachelor party, and make sure he attended it. Luckily they were having it at a local bar where there were exotic dancers, and anyone could show up.

  It seemed hypocritical that it was okay for David to ogle half naked women just before he got married, but if he thought his bride to be was ogling have naked men, he would probably have something to say, Doran thought. Well he was going to make sure David had a lot to say, he smiled to himself.

  Doran waited until the group was half drunk, and then approached David. “Hey, David, I have been trying to keep this to myself for a long time now, but I decided I had better break it to you before you make a big mistake by marrying Emma,” he said, putting his arm around David’s shoulder and pulling him aside.

  “What do you mean? Who in the hell are you, anyway?” David wanted to know. “We have been planning to get married ever since we first met, which was back in middle school,” he pointed out.

  “Well, a lot can happen between then and now. Don’t you remember me? I was the guy dancing with your girl at the senior prom, when you were off talking to your buddies. I’m the one who gave her the Globe on her birthday, whom she claimed she didn’t even know. I am Doran, and I have been seeing her for almost a year now, only she feels obligated to marry you, since she promised you she would. Don’t ruin her life, David. She and I are soul mates, and somewhere in her inner being, she knows it. She is just torn right now.”

  “What do you mean you have been seeing her?” David growled, as he pushed Doran’s hand from his shoulder. “Seeing her how?” he demanded, standing back and eying Doran with angry eyes.

  “You know, in secret, when you ignore her for days at a time.” What he was saying so far was not a lie. He had been seeing her in secret. The only thing was, she didn’t even know about it. “You should have been more attentive, David. Is that how you are going to treat her once you are married? It is like you only want her around when you need her, not when she needs you. Like the time you took off on that camping trip with your buddies, and forgot you had promised to take Emma to Saint Louis for the week end. She was so upset, she cried for hours, so I just had to comfort her,” he lied.

  It was true Emma had cried for hours, and he knew it, because he had stood outside her window listening to her, wanting so bad to be the one to comfort her.

  “Yeah, and how exactly did you comfort her?” David wanted to know.

  “You know, I let her feel loved. She needs someone who makes her feel special, and you don’t make her feel that way. Do you ever care about her artwork? Do you ever go to the graveyards with her to look for tombstones to etch?”

  “That is morbid stuff, and once we are married, she will forget about her need to visit graveyards,” he announced.

  “She’s going to become a famous artist someday, and you are going to try and prevent her from doing it?” Doran asked. “Don’t you care what she wants?”

  “What she wants is to be my wife, and once she is my wife, she will settle down to taking care of the house and having kids. She won’t have time to go traipsing out looking for dead people to paint. Sure she has talent, but a mother’s place in in the home. It is just a hobby with her anyway.”

  “Is that why she visits Sal’s studio, showing him her work and asking him to show it for her?” Doran asks. “That doesn’t sound like a hobby to me.”

  “She has been trying to sell her artwork? She never mentioned it to me,” David sneered.

  “Because she knows you won’t support her in it,” Doran stated. “She knows I support her in everything she does,” he continued to try a
nd make his case, and get David to doubt Emma.

  Emma was so blind, Doran thought to himself, she didn’t realize that once she married David she would end up being miserable. Even if he never ended up marrying her himself, he had to save her from making the mistake of marrying David, he decided, regardless of what happened in the future. “And what about the times you asked her where she wanted to go, when you were going to take her out, and when she told you, you weren’t even listening, and ended up taking her someplace else? Remember when she wanted you to take her to a live play, and you insisted she come to the football game with you instead? Or when she wanted to see a musical and you took her to a horror show? Little things like that start to add up.”

  “She never complained to me,” David insisted, “and how did you know about it anyway?”

  “Cause she complained to me,” Doran lied. “It was true she had complained, but only to her mirror once she returned home and she wanted to vent.

  “She complains to you about me?” David grumbled.

  “I wouldn’t be here talking to you about it, if she hadn’t. If you marry that girl, she will end up hating you, and you will eventually get a divorce, so why not just save you both the trouble? Besides she loves me, more than she could ever love you,” he added.

  “That’s not true!” David yelled.

  “Why don’t you ask her? Ask her about the present I gave her on her birthday. The card said ‘remember our love’, or had you forgotten?”

  “She claimed she didn’t even know you,” David shouted.

  “You think she is going to admit to you she had been seeing someone else, on the day you announce your engagement?”

  “You were there?” David gasped.

  “Yeah, she told me not to come, but I couldn’t help it. She gave me quite a scolding afterwards. I told her she was making a mistake sticking with you out of a sense of obligation.”

  “So if she loved you so much, why did she stick with me?”

  “That’s what I can’t understand. She needs to really make up her mind, because I can promise you, even if she does marry you, she will still see me on the side. I am the only one who really knows how to make her happy.”

  “You’ve been doing it with her, haven’t you?” David accused, as he grabbed Doran’s arm.

  “I can’t divulge that to you,” Doran said, shrugging David’s hand off his arm. “You should ask her about it.”

  “You’re damn right I will!” David growled, and then he hauled off and slugged Doran on the chin. Doran didn’t bother to hit him back. He deserved that slug, he told himself, as he turned and started to walk out of the bar, while David’s friends held him back.

  “What’s going on David?” Doran could hear them asking.

  “That little slut Emma, was sleeping with that creep,” David fumed, as he pulled away from his friends. “The party’s over, and the wedding is off,” David announced. “I am going to hunt Emma down and give her a piece of my mind!”

  His friends all stared at him in disbelief. They hadn’t ever seen that guy before. Surely if Emma knew him, they would have seen him around someplace, they reasoned. Doran smiled to himself. Now all he had to do was wait five more years, and Emma would be all his. Anyway he hoped that was the case. Even though he knew from Emma’s letters what she would be doing for the next five years, he didn’t know what was going to happen right after that.

  All he knew was that after Doran of the past died, she would never be able to write him again and he would have to take over where his other-self left off. The thought shook him. Had he actually been his great, great grandfather in a past life? What if he screwed up Emma’s chances of marrying David, and then Emma never ended up falling in love with him? If she found out, she would never forgive him, he realized. That alone would make her hate him, he thought.

  He sat down on a bench, since he had walked to the Bar, just in case he decided to start drinking, and he was now passing through the park. Doran sat with his head in his hands, hoping he had made the right decision. However, if he hadn’t done that, Emma never would have found the letter. She would have been on her honeymoon, and David wouldn’t have let her go looking for graveyards after he married her.

  There was a sudden pain in his chest, and he grabbed it. What was happening? Everything seemed to be in a fog. He hadn’t remembered the fog when he had set down on the bench. He thought he heard gun shots. Was there someone in the park shooting at him? It was then he realized he had been shot, as he felt blood oozing between his fingers. Now Emma would never meet him, he thought fleetingly. He managed to look around him. He could see people running. The plantation was on fire! His beautiful plantation was burning. Emma had been right, but she hadn’t told him he would be shot. That was why he never rebuilt the plantation, he groaned to himself. He had died, but what about his son? Who would raise him? He saw his mother, with Matthew in her arms, running in the direction of the woods. He prayed that she and his son would be safe.

  The pain was unbearable, but as he lay there, listening to the sounds in the background, he opened his eyes, and he could see Emma standing before him. No. She wasn’t standing… she was kneeling in front of a tombstone, putting something inside. It wasn’t his wife Emma he was seeing, he realized, but the Emma he had been writing to these last five years. “Emma!” he called. He saw her raise her head and look around, and then he saw himself walking towards her, and she stood up.

  “Doran, is that you?” she asked, as though she could not believe he was there.

  He could feel himself growing weaker, as he reached out towards Emma, and then suddenly he felt himself falling, and when he opened his eyes, he found himself on the ground in front of the bench. He grasped his chest, but there wasn’t any blood anymore, and the fog had lifted. He must have been dreaming, he thought, and fell off of the bench in the middle of the dream. Only it seemed so real. The letters were getting to him too much, he decided. All of this was getting to him too much. He needed to slow down. He should just keep his distance from Emma for the next five years, he vowed, but he knew it was going to be hard to do.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  1859

  As soon as supper had ended, Doran excused himself, leaving it up to his mother to entertain their new guests. He took his writing material to the graveyard, since it was still light. The new letter he found in the cubbyhole was short and to the point. Why did Emma want to know about her nineteenth birthday? Had she truly remembered her past with him, when he had given her the globe? That globe remained on the mantle, where Emma had placed it, a year ago on her birthday. Every time he passed it, he would lift it and turn it over, remembering the wonder on Emma’s face, when she had opened his gift to her.

  The memories came flooding back with happiness and pain, as he recalled that day, while he began writing down the events of that day, in a letter to the future-Emma. He wondered what made her remember that birthday, and why she was so anxious for him to relate it to her.

  Finally, he sealed the letter, and put it in the cubbyhole, anxious to discover if she really had remembered that day? His thoughts were troubled, though, because of the Doran of the future, who could break the spell between him and Emma, if he somehow met her in the future. Would she still wish to write the husband of her past, if she actually met him in her present life? Would the need to know about him be lost when his future self may be able to tell her anything she wanted to know without her having to ever write him again?

  If she ever stopped writing, he didn’t know how he would carry on? He had been so excited about discovering not only things of the far future, but other things having to do with his own closer future. He wondered if he knew the date of when he died, if it would make a difference in his life. Would he be able to prevent it? If the date was already on his tombstone, as she had claimed, then how could that be changed? The same tombstone couldn’t exist, if the date of his death changed, he reasoned.

  More questions that he believed probably cou
ld never be answered, he mused, as he sat beside the tombstone of his wife. He shrugged, and got to his feet. Too many things to do, now that his brother-in-law and his wife had arrived, he realized. He would have less time to spend at his wife’s grave. He had to start preparing for the future.

  The war was going to start in only a couple more years and then he would have to start storing anything of value under the church, along with food to use if it turned out that the plantation really was burned down, as Emma claimed, and they had no way of furnishing themselves food. Emma had mentioned that anything of value would be taken for the cause, by either side, and he was sure food would be a valuable commodity, during a war.

  They would probably take all his livestock, or just kill it to use as food for the troops. War was always an ugly venture. He just couldn’t believe that Americans would fight among themselves, killing off their friends and even family, for all he knew, over a disagreement between the states. If someone from the future had not informed him of the war, he never would have believed it would get so bad or last so long. It made him wonder about this new president who would break the constitution and start a war, because he refused to allow any state to pull away from the union. Was it worth losing all those lives over, he asked the unknown? Of course, the new President probably did not know what the war would turn into, and once Pandora’s Box was opened, there was no going back and starting over. He vaguely remembered Emma saying something in one of her letters about Lincoln claiming a house divided against itself cannot stand.