Ghosts of Graveyards Past (10 page)

“No,” he answered. He wasn't scared—not of the graveyard, anyway. It was his father's wrath, should the man ever find out about this or any of their activities, which caused a slight breathlessness in his reply. He climbed over the fence before he could lose courage, his jacket tearing on one of the iron spokes as he dropped to the ground.

They didn't start defacing the stones right away but instead leaned against them smoking the cigarettes Marcus had bribed from his college age brother.

Noticing Con's was unlit, Liane passed him hers. “Try it.” A playful edge warmed her voice as she urged him.

He pressed it between his lips, aware it had been against hers moments before. A taste of mint was followed by smoke scorching the back of his throat, a cough escaping before he could bury it.

She didn't laugh but continued watching as he practiced taking drags. Her hand gradually crept through the grass to touch his, sending surprised shivers up his spine. “Good, isn't it?” she said.

“It is.” He didn't say which he meant—the cigarette or this new connection between them. Instead, he let his fingers twine with hers, confusion rivaling the warmth he felt from her hand.

Across from them, Marcus stubbed his cigarette's orange glow against one of the monuments. There was an edge of darkness in his expression as he gripped the handle to his bat, telling the group, “Let's do this, all right?” Had he seen them?

Stone cracked beneath the impact of metal, shards of rock mixing with dust to litter the grass below. Con's arm swung to shatter a small stone engraved with a lamb. His hands froze at the sight of its severed body, jagged rock replacing the curve of the neck. A blow from someone else's bat filled the tomb with cracks that snaked from the base to its top.

“Don't start something you can't finish,” Marcus warned with a smirk. His heavy boot kicked the remains to the ground, where he crushed them repeatedly with his heel.

The youngest of the group, a kid named Bradley, spray painted a hexagram over the Bible verse on another tomb. The paint stained his fingers and the ground around them a lurid red that nauseated Con.

“Help me with this one,” Liane shouted, tugging his sleeve in the direction of a couple's shared memorial. Her flashlight revealed a simple scroll design, the words of John 3:16 etched upon it.

The air around them rang with the others' yells of excitement, the sound of stone splitting apart beneath heavy blows. Con touched the couple's monument, its surface cool despite the summer heat. He could feel Liane's expectant gaze, his fingers tracing the promise carved into the stone. This was wrong, a sin even…but turning back seemed pointless now.

Until another voice joined the shouting. One deep and angry in its timbre as it told them, “Stop right there—don't move a muscle!” A local deputy, his flashlight beam sweeping across the scene of destruction. He was upon them in what seemed no time, the guilty teenagers vaulting over tombstones as they fled.

Only Con hesitated to move, one hand still clutching the baseball bat, the other resting against the monument.

By the time he decided to follow the others it was too late. A hand clamped onto his shoulder. He didn't resist as he was pinned to the ground, a pair of cuffs fastened over his wrists. The scuffle of the other kids' shoes had died away, metal clanging in the distance as they jumped a back fence somewhere.

A long night had followed, first at the police station where he managed to protect his friends' identities for reasons even he couldn't explain. Then at home, where his parents were enraged by both the vandalism and the thousands of dollars it was likely to cost them.

“What if we can't afford it?” his mother worried, her voice drifting from his parents' closed bedroom door.

Con lay fully clothed on his bed, restless and sore from the night's events. Was it the girl that made him shoulder all the blame—or was she just the reason he participated in the first place? No answer came as he turned on his side, staring into the darkness.

Waking at noon, he heard voices conversing downstairs, his parents and a man, one whose gruff tones seemed vaguely familiar in his sleep blurred state.

Still dressed in his rumpled clothes from yesterday, he trailed down the stairs to find them seated in the dining room. Con had seen him before.

The town's stone mason, an older man whose business shared a gravel lot with the tire store. Dark skin was faintly lined with age and silver hair was cropped short beneath the flat wool cap he often wore. He offered Con a short nod from the other side of the table, busy showing Con's father something on a piece of paper.

“There you are.” Con's mother rose, her expression less tense than last night. Taking his arm, she gave it a firm squeeze as she steered him around the table. “Conrad, you know William Sawyer. He works for the county sometimes.”

“Sure,” he said, a sense of foreboding creeping over him with the words.

“Mr. Sawyer will be repairing the headstones,” his father explained. Pulling the reading glasses from his face, he offered his son a pointed look. “You'll be helping him.”

“Wait—what?” Con's eyes widened, glancing between his parents and Sawyer's calm expression. “But I don't…couldn't I just pay for it?” he finished, hand clenching the frayed material of his shirt in a frustrated gesture.

“Never be able to afford it,” the stone carver said, shaking his head. “You'll have to work it off.”

His whole summer had just been commandeered. After all, it would take more than a few days to repair however many stones they had smashed. Eight? Ten? He couldn't remember, though the details had been repeated many times at the police station.

“Shop opens at seven every day, ‘cept on Sundays,” Sawyer told him, ignoring the despair that must have been written on his face. “Bring your lunch if you can—break lasts half an hour.”

“I just—” he rubbed the back of his neck, at a loss for how quickly this was moving “This doesn't seem right.” He glanced at his parents again. “It wasn't even my idea. There were five of us.”

“Then turn them in,” his mother pleaded, voice dropping slightly.

“I can't.” He felt trapped, his thoughts spinning faster than he could keep up. “You can't expect me to betray friends.”

“Should've run faster then,” Sawyer advised, thumping him on the shoulder.

Resentment coursed through the teenager, though he recognized a glimmer of good humor in the mason's face.

“See you Monday,” the older man told him, lifting his cap in parting.

Sawyer's shop smelled of concrete and chalk, the odor reaching him as he wheeled his bike up to the doorway. The floors were freshly swept, the tools carefully organized on the walls and benches. Blocks of stone formed a wall, along with crates that looked ready for shipping.

“Ever worked with tools before, Taggart?” the stone carver asked, emerging from the back room with a coffee mug in hand. He wore the same faded cap as before, a navy apron covering his khakis and button-down shirt.

“Shop class,” Con shrugged, wondering if that counted. “I made a canoe.” Not a working one, he failed to add. Or so the teacher's marks led him to believe, discouraging any test runs for the finished project.

“Close enough,” the mason chuckled. “We'll see how you get on with the basics first.”

The basics turned out to be mending some of the broken headstones with screws and a can of carpenter's glue. One of them—the sculpted lamb his bat collided with—was beyond saving and would have to be duplicated from scratch.

For the other nine, Sawyer held out hope for repair. “Those friends of yours have a mighty powerful swing,” the mason observed dryly. They were reassembling a headstone with a memento mori in the form of a grinning, winged skull. “Don't suppose they're on the baseball team?” he guessed with a side glance at his new apprentice.

“No sports,” Con answered. “We try to avoid clichés.” Something Marcus had said once, that sounded much less impressive coming from Con's stilted tone.

“Rebels, then.” If Sawyer was making fun of him, it was hard to tell. The craftsman's expression was inscrutable as he joined cracks together, seamlessly forming a set of initials. “Had my own wild streak as a boy back in North Dakota. Stole a car once.” A grin cracked his features at the sight of Con's shock. “Well, could be joyriding is more like it. My cousin's old jalopy was part mine on account I handled all its maintenance. That said, he didn't want no one else driving it without his supervision.” He paused a moment, coating the edge of his brush in glue. “Christmas of ‘56 came a freeze like you wouldn't believe. Whole county was a layer of ice and snow. Me and the other boys, we sneaked that car outta the garage and spun donuts with it on the pond.”

“You could have crashed through,” Con said, amazed anyone would try it.

But then, winter freezes in Sylvan Spring were seldom enough to yield ice skating, much less a stunt like the one Sawyer described.

“Sure could have. Guess the Lord had my back that day.” Sawyer stepped away to examine their work thus far, whistling under his breath. “Good job, Taggart. You'll pull your weight around here yet.”

And he did, though for a while it was more piecing and gluing, along with such tasks as sweeping up and cleaning the tools.

Sawyer was precise in the care for his carving equipment. “You can judge a craftsman by the condition of his tools. A serious one, he'll never let the rust take hold or dull the blades with bad storage.”

He learned to clean the steel files with special brushes, to wrap them spaced apart in canvas rolls. Sometimes he would pick up supplies from the hardware store or arrange the shipping for one of Sawyer's out-of-state commissions. In between all this, he practiced sketching the lamb engraving, an exercise meant to prepare him for the carving stage.

“Gotta get to know it, think about it from all the angles,” Sawyer told him, tacking the photographs of the original monument to a cork board on the wall. It was a plain enough tomb, the only inscription being
OUR LETTIE
. No last name and no clue as to when its occupant might have lived, a common trait for nineteenth-century stones, apparently.

Leafing through manuals on gravestone carving became as routine as studying for an exam. In one of these, in a section concerning gravestone symbolism, Con made a discovery that caused his stomach to lurch.

“Children's graves,” he said, his tone semi-accusing as he glanced up. “That's what the books says the lamb carving is used for—infants mostly.”

The mason was quiet, contemplating the slab of stone in front of him. After a moment, he said, “Could be right. No way to know for sure, without the proper dates and all.”

Con was stunned, staring at the manual with a sense of regret stronger than the moment he first shattered the monument. With a sigh, his instructor placed a hand on his shoulder. “Don't matter whose it was, son,” he urged gently. “Not so long as we do our best to honor them with a new marker.”

Words that weighed heavy on his conscience as he began to practice shaping the stone, soaking it down with a spray bottle to search for cracks and fissures and then taking his first tentative
ping! ping!
with the chisel and mallet. It was difficult with only the air-powered hammer to aid him, modern machinery and lasers being foreign objects to Sawyer's shop. He was too eager with the mallet as well, his chisel digging deep and leaving blemishes that made his instructor shake his head with disapproval.

“Remember, you're making art, not pounding nails,” Sawyer told him as they used a file to smooth the flaws away.

“When did you learn to carve?” he asked the older man, thinking some allowance might be made for both age and inexperience.

“About your age, I guess. My dad and granddad were both in the trade, and it just seemed natural I carry on the tradition. Looks like it'll stop with me, though.” The carver rarely mentioned family, though it was common knowledge that he was a widower. No children were referenced, only nephews and nieces. He still wore a wedding band. His wife's picture remained in the leather wallet he sometimes pulled bills from to send Con for supplies at the hardware store. He showed Con her headstone when they began to reset some of the repaired markers at the cemetery.

A simple dove in flight was etched into the marble, the epitaph reading, ‘
Long did she suffer in sickness on earth; now her gentle soul rises to meet the Redeemer.'

“Cancer,” he explained, one hand resting against the stone. “Harriet weren't the kind to complain, though. Just not in her nature.” Those were his only words on the subject, undoubtedly a painful one. Instead, he talked about his boyhood in North Dakota, of his first time to carve a tombstone on his own. “Didn't know the fella it was for,” he admitted as they packed gravel around the newly entrenched stone. “But I heard he wasn't a Christian and felt a sadness for it. Carving the lost soul's monument is a different matter altogether from carving the believer's.”

Con knew nothing about the owner of the lamb stone, other than the symbolism listed in the book. Frustrating at first, the project began to consume his thoughts until he found himself sketching or making notes on it even when he wasn't at the workshop. For someone who slept through art class, it was suddenly his chief interest, and he even stopped caring that Marcus's group had abandoned him after that night in the cemetery.

His fingers grew slowly attuned to the craft as if he were learning to play an instrument. Chisel and mallet traced the ridges and curves in the stone like a bow running over violin strings. He felt as if the tools were an extension of himself, shaping his thoughts into reality on the blank canvas of the stone.

“Not bad, Taggart,” the carver told him, examining the lamb's raised outline, the letters engraved boldly below.