Being Dead (11 page)

Why such heartfelt tears for someone at least a hundred years dead?

Harrison glimpsed Mr. Reisinger's van rounding the hill on the lower road. "Mr. R.!" he called, waving his arms, though with the rain and thunder and distance, the scoutmaster couldn't possibly hear.

But he must have been on the lookout for Harrison. He flashed his headlights to show he'd spotted him.

Harrison watched the van make its way around the pond, when he remembered the woman. Should he offer her a ride? But the woman was no longer there.
Silly,
Harrison thought. You'd think she'd come to the road on a day like this, rather than cut across the back way to the old buggy path. But perhaps she'd been embarrassed to have been caught at ... whatever.

Harrison stepped onto the rain-slicked grass. "Miss?" he called over the surly rumbling of thunder. The sheet of rain prevented him from seeing far at all. He thought he caught a glimpse of a figure beyond the willow tree, but that seemed to be a man, a tall, thin, dark-haired man. And then he was gone, too.

"Miss?"

Harrison took another step. He heard the crunch of gravel as the van approached on the road behind him. "Do you want a ride?" he called. "You shouldn't be out here during a lightning storm."

There was no answer, but by then Harrison was almost to the grave by which the woman had been kneeling. He took the few extra steps.

It was a double headstone.
ROBERT DELANO ADAMS
was inscribed on one side.

LOVING SON
LONG WILL HE BE REMEMBERED
LONG WILL HE BE MISSED
HIS MOTHER GRIEVES STILL
JANUARY
10, 1874–
MAY
17, 1892

A hundred years ago today. What an odd coincidence. He did the mental arithmetic. Only a few years older than himself.

The other side bore the name
EULALIA MEINYK.
There was only one date, two days later than the other:
MAY 19, 1892.

SHE DIED FOR LOVE OF HIM

How very sad,
Harrison thought.

Mr. Reisinger beeped the horn, calling him back to here and now, and motioned for him to get moving.

He clambered in next to Spense, who made a face at Harrison for dripping on him.

"Don't know enough to come in out of the rain," Mr. Reisinger said over the noise of the windshield wipers. He shook his head, then reached under the seat and pulled out a roll of paper towels, which he passed back.

"We get enough done?" Harrison asked.

Mr. Reisinger was a professional gardener who had contracts to take care of several dozen of die newer graves, so he'd be very fussy about the cleanup the scouts had done. But he said, "Probably," and Harrison leaned back in his seat.

"You smell like a wet dog," Spense complained, friendly as always.

Harrison gazed out the window as they approached the stone-and-iron gate. How pretty the trees looked, their leaves still fresh and new, the trunks and branches stained dark by the rain, with the dramatically gray clouds as backdrop. Robert Delano Adams and Eulalia Meinyk. He wondered which one the woman had been crying for.

The next day, Monday, Harrison was riding his bike home from school and decided to cut through the cemetery.

We did a good job,
he told himself, but then he rounded a comer and saw that somebody had lopped the heads off all the tulips Mr. Reisinger had planted over Mrs. Reisinger's grave. In fact, for the entire length of this row, wreaths were knocked off their stands, ivy and geraniums were trampled. When Harrison got off the bike and walked around to the other side, he saw that someone had used a red felt-tip marker to deface the fronts of the headstones. A few had obscene messages scrawled on them, but many simply had a line drawn through the names, as though the vandals had simply held the marker out when they strolled past.

Stupid, senseless malice. And this was just the kind of thing Mr. Reisinger had complained the police were useless for. They'd take the report—they always took a report—but they weren't interested unless there was dramatic breakage. Angrily Harrison got out the linen handkerchief his mother always tucked into his backpack and spat on it. On his knees he scrubbed at Mrs. Reisinger's headstone—one of the ones that was simply scribbled on. The ink came off the smooth surface easily, but he had to scrape it out of the engraved areas of the letters.

Finished, he sat back on his heels. On the grave to the left, someone had covered the inscription
MOTHER
with a particularly crude word. The grave was not one of the ones Mr. Reisinger was responsible for, but it was a recent grave and had been well tended. Now the urn with fresh flowers was overturned. Harrison could just picture this poor woman's husband and children coming with some new flowers this weekend and seeing that obscenity. With a sigh he began scrubbing at the word.

Three hours later he'd scrubbed clean all the gravestones with actual words on them. The knees of his school pants were filthy, and his hands were too sore to do any more.
Sorry,
he thought to the others.

The scents of crushed flowers and damp earth heated by the sun mingled and hung heavily about him.
What is the matter with me?
he thought. He'd just spent all afternoon cleaning gravestones for people he didn't even know, who wouldn't even be aware of what he'd done, who might not even care. And for what? He was late for dinner, which always made his mother crazy; he'd missed die chance to go to the library to research his science paper, which was due tomorrow; and he still had to pick up a snack for the scout
meeting
tonight.

Harrison jammed what was left of the handkerchief into his pocket, unsure whether he was more sad or angry.

Somehow, despite all the times he had been here, he missed the turnoff to the exit. He was pedaling past the reconstructed Victorian gazebo before he realized he was in the old section. Rather than backtrack, he kept going. The road circled around, anyway, and came out near the old chapel. There was the grave of abolitionist Frederick Douglass. On the other side of that hill were buried the poor nameless children who had died in the turn-of-the-century orphanage fire. Over there just beyond the curve of the road was the infant son of Wild West showman Buffalo Bill Cody. Instead of going that way, Harrison turned down the road to take him deeper into the cemetery. He slowed down, unsure he'd recognize it, sure he must have passed it already. Then—just as he was about to give up—he spotted it.
ROBERT DELANO ADAMS. EULALIA MEINYK.

He left the bike by the road.

What am I doing here?
he asked himself. Surely he hadn't expected the strange dark-haired woman to still be here.

He ran his fingers across the cool marble, tracing the outlines of the letters.
ROBERT DELANO ADAMS. EULALIA MEINYK. SHE DIED FOR LOVE OF HIM.
Two days later. Had she died of a broken heart? People used to do that, back then. What must he have been like for her to be unable to go on without him? Had she taken her own life?
SHE DIED FOR LOVE OF HIM.

Without planning it, Harrison sat down next to the grave.
What am I doing here?
he asked himself again.

Just resting,
he answered himself.
As soon as I catch my breath, I'll be on my way.

But the next thing he knew, it was dark out, and Mr. Reisinger was shaking his shoulder.

"What?" he said. "What is it?"

"'
What is it?'
" the scoutmaster repeated. "It's nine o'clock at night, and your parents are frantic. The whole troop and half the neighborhood are out looking for you. What are you doing?"

"I must have fallen asleep," Harrison said. But he was still sitting up, and he'knew his eyes had been wide open, though he couldn't remember what he'd been looking at.

The groundskeeper who'd opened the gate for Mr. Reisinger told Harrison to keep out of the cemetery from now on; his parents told him to keep out of the cemetery; the police told him to keep out of the cemetery.

But his science teacher made him stay after school because his report wasn't done, and he didn't want to worry his parents by being late again, so he took the shortcut, anyway.

Everything's fine,
he told himself, ignoring the pounding of his heart and the damp feeling around the edge of his scalp. So why were his hands slippery on the handlebars?

He rode past die stone chapel and into the old section, where the trees were tall and the roads wound dizzyingly and the graves seemed scattered randomly in the most improbable places rather than being lined up in neat rows. He was aware that he was breathing with his mouth open, and still he couldn't get enough air. What was the matter with him?

He stopped pedaling, and the bike coasted to a stop. For several minutes he just sat there straddling his bike, staring straight ahead.

A woman and her dog jogged by, the dog's chain collar jangling.

Harrison finally turned his head and faced the double headstone.
ROBERT DELANO ADAMS. MAY
17, 1892.
EULALIA MEINYK. MAY
19, 1892.
SHE DIED FOR LOVE OF HIM
. Harrison closed his eyes,
SHE DIED FOR LOVE OF HIM.

He left the bike and approached the gravesite. 1874–1892. Robert had been eighteen when he'd died. Of what? And how old had Eulalia been?
SHE DIED FOR LOVE OF HIM
. A hundred years ago today. Had they been engaged? Was that why they were buried together? If so, she was probably a little bit younger than Robert Maybe about Harrison's own age, since people back then married young.

Harrison had lived near the cemetery for as long as he could remember, but he'd never thought about dying before, about being dead.

He thought about it now.

He put his hand on the stone and tried to imagine what Robert and Eulalia had been like. It was they who had been here Sunday afternoon, he was sure of it He had seen pictures of people of the late 1800s skating on the Genesee River—the men in top hats, the women with fur muffs. He imagined Robert and Eulalia skating on the river. Had they come to the cemetery for Sunday picnics, the way the cemetery tour guides said Victorians used to do, sitting perhaps on that hill there, overlooking the pond? Harrison imagined them laughing together, their voices clear as angels' song, so much in love that one couldn't live without the other,
SHE DIED FOR LOVE OF HIM.
Nobody loved Harrison that much. Nobody ever would.

"Kid?" the breeze seemed to whisper. "Kid?" Then, more insistent more human, "Are you all right?" Harrison opened his eyes and found that he had somehow ended up kneeling on the ground. He blinked in the bright sunlight Birds were chirping. In the distance, at the farthest edge of hearing, someone was mowing a lawn. The woman jogger with the dog stood poised on the grass between him and the curb as though unsure how close she should approach. She held on to the dog's collar to keep him from bounding over to Harrison.

"I'm"—his voice sounded so husky and unused—"taking a shortcut home so I won't be late." He ran his tongue over his parched lips.

The jogger hesitated before nodding. "Oh." Her jaw twitched, perhaps an attempt at a smile. She took a step back toward the road.

Harrison pulled himself up by leaning on the gravestone.

The jogger tugged on the chain collar until she and her dog were both on the road. Harrison checked his bicycle's wheels and chain and handlebars and seat while the two of them disappeared over the crest of the hill. Then he got back off and knelt by the grave.

SHE DIED FOR LOVE OF HIM
. Harrison didn't think he could bear the incredible sadness of it. That they had lived and loved and died before he had even been born. Before his parents had been born. History had always seemed unreal to him, as though everything that had ever happened in the whole of the world had been leading up to him, to whatever moment he was experiencing. Now he felt unreal. Surely things had peaked here, in 1892, for Robert and Eulalia. Surely
he
was superfluous, extra, unneeded. Not smart Not loved. Worthless. Nobody would ever grieve at his grave.

We would,
a voice whispered into his ear, a voice as warm and beautiful and clear as the singing of angels.
We have enough love left over for you. Come to us. Trust us.

Harrison lay down on the grass and closed his eyes.

We're the ones who care for you,
another gentle voice whispered.
Only we. No one else.

But then a shadow fell across him, blocking out the sun, so that he shivered. "Hello,
Harrison," a
quiet voice said.

Harrison looked up and blinked several times to get the tears out of his eyes. Tears for himself. Tears for Robert and Eulalia. They were waiting for him. They'd make everything better.

"Remember me? Charlie Sonneman?"

SHE DIED FOR LOVE OF HIM
. Slowly the vision retreated; the voices retreated. That was all right. He'd be able to call them back. "Hello, Mr. Sonneman," Harrison said. This was Mr. Reisinger's partner in the gardening business. Or at least he had been. Vaguely Harrison remembered hearing that Mr. Sonneman had retired last summer for health reasons. Why was he bothering Harrison now?

"How are you doing, Harrison?"

"Fine," Harrison said, still lying flat on his back.

"I was wondering if you could give me a lift to the gatehouse."

Harrison would have thought Mr. Sonneman was too old for riding double on a bike, but apparently Mr. Sonneman didn't think so. Harrison was annoyed at the interruption, but he figured he could always come back.

"Hasn't your father ever told you," Mr. Sonneman asked as he took hold of the edge of the seat behind Harrison, "not to talk to strangers?"

"You're not a stranger, Mr. Sonneman."

"I'm not talking about me. I'm talking about those two: Robert Adams and Eulalia Meinyk."

Harrison slammed on the brakes hard enough to jerk them both forward.