We'll be out of town for a week, so I thought I'd run a short story, the first story in a collection of mine titled Up the Hill. It's a story with a history, an incident in a cemetery one early morning, when I was "up the hill" in the Doon (IA) cemetery where I bumped into someone I didn't expect. The story is based on the discovery of the stone of a young woman who played a significant role in a Manfred novel that plays a significant role in my life.
The photo I want is a long shadow created by a sunrise coming through the old stones in a town cemetery up on a hill above the river. It’s winter, and old snow stretches out in crusty quilts on the frozen earth.
The sun is up, far south on the horizon, and I look hurriedly for the kind of tall stone—one of the ancients—that will throw just the shadow I want. The broad sky’s colors shift quickly, and, still not finding what I’m looking for. I step back against a stone and frame a shot—still no good. I turn around. “Van Engen,” it says, “Jennie, wife of Gerrit Van Engen.” Then “BORN Sept. 15, 1899” and “DIED December 6, 1920.”
I know her. I swear it. I once knew this woman. She was just a girl.
I met her in a novel, the work of the old novelist who is right here too, same burial ground, up in the northwest corner he’d chosen before anyone else had been put back there to rest. For too long she tried to hide her pregnancy, but nothing stays hidden long beneath such broad and open skies. I know her only because I know the novel, a secondary work by a giant of a man, a book that birthed the writer in me. Jennie Van Engen is alive in me even though she died in childbirth and had no descendents.
She was here when he was buried, I’m thinking. She must have seen the burial, even though there were very few. Was she angry? Was she afraid? I wonder how she felt once he was there with her, with them, once again citizens of same town, as they were years ago when he heard her story.
I’m thinking she knows he’s there, but she waits for weeks, maybe months, time being of little concern to her, to them, after all.
He had died in the fall, when the maples were drenched in orange, and to the north those sharp lines of shorn soybean rows looked knifed into the land. She thinks he chose the right time of year—autumn is so beautiful, and there’s relief, the corn finally out although harvest is much easier now with those lumbering machines. Sometimes she wonders if anyone remembers how they used to pick corn, the way snapping ears wrenched your wrists, your lower back in constant pain until the work was finally over or snow clogged the fields.
The way I imagine it, she knew who he was the moment that pine box—how strange, a pine box!—was lugged into the neighborhood. There it stood above the ground. Everyone saw it. It was white and big—huge. Word had gone around that he was dead, that he would be buried in the cemetery above the town he loved, a town that sometimes hated him for what he wrote. She knew who he was, only too well—everyone did.
But she was a Brink, and the Brinks were timid by nature. Soon enough she’d heard how some of the others had walked over to look, gawking as if his being there was some freak show. Made her laugh to think about it, but then people had always been afraid of him.
They said at first he was sitting against a fencepost—his stone wasn’t up yet— those long legs stretched out before him. He seemed to love to look out at the fields west and north. Some remembered that time too when he’d come to the neighborhood to choose the site. That was years ago. They said it seemed as if, since his arrival, he’d rather enjoyed being alone, far in the corner, staring into the openness. Not angry either, but looking over the land as if something was right there, something the rest of them didn’t see.
She thought she knew, but she didn’t say.
No one spoke to him. But then, he had a reputation.
There were others with reputations too, but not like his.
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