January Thaw -- vi

Strangely, the two of them are of great interest now as they walk between the stones, avoiding the scattered snow drifts. They are not alone. Eyes galore are watching them. Even though he sees no one, she knows that everywhere in the neighborhood people see them together, people who also have things to say to him.

“There are more,” she tells him. “I’m not alone here.” She gestures with her arm as if there is a cloud of witnesses nearby. “Lots of ghosts around here,” she says, making a joke. She is, after all, something of a girl.

“Others?” he says.

“Lots of them will have something to say,” she tells him. “You have some explaining to do.” She squeezes his arm. “But there will be time.”

“I had no idea,” he says. “When I chose this plot, it seemed right to be where I was born and reared. When I was a boy, I looked over these fields and wanted to tell their stories.”

“It was a good decision,” she tells him. “To come here—it was a good decision.”

It’s not far, the distance from his grave to hers.

“This is yours,” he says when they come to her stone, unusually tall in this old part of the graveyard.

“Have you thought of your mother?” she asks him because she has—and often. They all have. None of them had heard from her since he came, and they’d missed her. She’d left into silence.

He hadn’t thought of her, of course. How could he? This young woman was the first who’d spoken to him. His mother? How could he think of such a thing? “She’s here?” he says. He knows where her stone stands, of course, so he turns east quickly.

“You were thinking somewhere else maybe?” she says. “You know better.”

They’re still arm-in-arm, but as if by instinct, in fear, he takes her hand. “I haven’t seen her,” he says.

“That doesn’t mean she’s not here,” she says. “We’re not yours, you know,” she tells him. “You thought so for a long time, but we have our own lives, so to speak.”

“She could have come by?” he asks. “Like you have—she could have come?” He looks back to his own stone and turns around as if to authenticate that it’s not all that far; the neighborhood isn’t all that large.

“You forget most of us here had minor roles. I was dead in what—fifty pages, no more?” She wraps her hand around his. “She’s in everything you wrote,” she tells him. “What’s more, she’s your mother.”

“I was too young when she died,” he says.

“We all know that,” she tells him.

Just behind Jennie’s stone, they’re standing on bare ground beside a tall pine that’s rustling in a soft wind, unusually warm for January, a wind that is reaching up from the south, creating the only sound around them.

“You’ll find us all more forgiving than we were,” she tells him. “Your mother too, although I don’t have to tell you that she always was a saint.”

He nods. “Can I speak to her?”

“There will be more now who want to talk to you—we are a community after all, and always were,” she tells him.

“I’ll have to wait?” he asks and she nods.

And I like to believe that had I been there just then, at that moment, middle of the night, January thaw, cold and crisp and bright, I would have seen them together right there at Jennie’s stone. “1899,” it says, and “1920,” and then, “We shall meet again.”

They are lovers in a sense he never dreamed, the two of them standing together in the cemetery above the town, arm in arm, hand in hand, in a fine and secret place, if not an Eden, amid a gathering of hundreds of shadows, maybe more, emerging from the moonlit stones all around.

A story born in a graveyard, a story no one knows but me.

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Tomorrow: the story of "January Thaw."