Among the Stones

John Cohassey

      “Spend too much time in there, and they’ll get familiar with yas,” warned a gray-haired poorly dressed woman passing by the spiked iron fence. Len smiled, thrusting his shovel in the loose earth. “Hear that? I guess she’s worried about us makin’ too many friends. Cain’t have too many, even if they’re dead.”
      “Look, Len, over there,” whispered his younger friend. Under the shade of an oak tree, a squirrel, pleasurably squint-eyed, lay on the scrolled top of a granite gravestone. “Guess he knows how to escape this heat,” observed Len, his shovel momentarily idle from spreading the fill-dirt. Bounded by acres of corrosive industrial land, this lush expanse of hearty oak trees and earthen beds offered a glimmer of another time, when horses brought the dead to their resting places. Bill looked at a stone asking, “I wonder what Mr. Walter Timmons--1822-1897--would say about a tree rat making himself at home on his monument?”
      “That ain’t a bother compared to the stiffs whose bones the groundhogs have been diggin’ up around here.”
      “Hey Len, you want to know how you can tell if a city has ever been prosperous?” Not waiting for his friend’s reply, Bill continued: “By their cemeteries, the size and age of the stones; only the wealthy could have afforded a dirt nap in here. Just the other day, Jose the Mexican stone mason said something that made more than a little sense. “I’ve come to understand,” he said,” that the richer you are, the bigger the stones. But for me it’s not something I would wish, because when Jesus Christ my savior comes back the people buried under the big stones will be trapped. I would rather have a wooden cross on my grave.”
      Len’s aged face brightened. “That’s some sound thinking to me.” Retired from the city’s auto plant, closed recently from the onslaught of recession, Len still pridefully wore his old shop shirt with the oval namepatch over the pocket and liked to tell of his forty-nine coupe that was made, “every nut and bolt, knob and spring, at that place.”
      “It’s a shame the city can’t keep up this place, that we have to come out here and do their job,” complained Bill.
      “If we don’t, though, the place‘ll go to pot. Some say they’re gonna help, but I don’t trust politicians for a damn thing these days. The trees are comin’ down and breakin’ the stones. So we gotta trim ‘em and cut down the dead ones. I have grandparents in here, and I ain’t gonna let their headstones be destroyed or oversized rodents dig up their bones, either. Anyways, Bill, did I ever tell ya about the guy who come in here to return something that was missin’ from that mausoleum over there?”
      “No, I don’t think I’ve heard you mention that.”
      “Well anyways, one afternoon some guy approached me and had somethin’ in a bag. He opened it up and showed me a skull with a hole drilled in it. Seems someone, he never said who, had stolen it and was smokin’ dope out of the thing.”
      “No . . .”
      “I’m tellin’ ya the God’s honest truth. We have a lot of decent people in town, but obviously a lot of fallen souls, too. I just wish the grave robbers would get their comeuppance. Imagine some angry spirit comin’ to your door lookin’ for his head.”
      Bill caught sight of a young woman sitting on the grass, shoeless. A light breeze stirred the crisp leaves and tossed about her long, dark hair. She crossed herself in Catholic fashion, adoring the stone and looking as if she wanted to embrace it just as she had the person who once lived by the name on its inscription.
      Moved by this scene, Bill wondered why he cared so much for the gravestones, for the fact of their being stones bearing people’s names he had never known and would never know, at least not in this life. He felt comfortable here, at least during the day, and he looked up at a bronze angel smiling invitingly. “Len, I have to tell you that if there is a heaven, I think maybe we’ve earned some points in gettin’ there.”
      “How’s that?”
      “I figure that some of these bodies lying in here had to make the journey heavenward. So when it comes our turn, if indeed we were ever meant to ascend to that paradise, some of these souls might put in a good word for us.”

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