Begin With The End
Everyday, I walk among the dead.
Morbid? Maybe.
Quiet? Definitely.
What am I doing in the cemetery every day you might ask...
I am looking for a grave.
My name is Marilla and I am meant to be sometime else. But I'm here- in the modern now. Something isn't quite right with my history but I still haven't found the answers to my own... well, oh dear- mystery.
There. I said it. I didn't mean to rhyme.
So, I will begin with the easy.
The simple.
I will begin with... the end.
I am headed to the town cemetery... with a shovel in my trunk. It is exactly what it sounds like.
I am about to dig up a grave. His grave.
His grave.
My shovel.
Henry.
Not the dead body.
My shovel’s name is Henry.
Henry and I are about to grave rob, for the good of the future... er, my past. I still am not sure how this really works. But I know it has worked and maybe I can make it work again. If I can find some answers... in the dirt.
In his grave.
And evade a possible arrest for grave robbing in daylight.
My car knows the way by habit, hardly needing me to guide each turn, not that there are many turns. I mostly have to drive straight down one country road until my left turn comes along. Then its only a matter of winding along this hardly one lane road until it passes the battered pioneer-era cemetery. My favorite one.
It isn't winter any more but it also isn't summer. What does that make it? Sort of depressingly bleak. Dead grass on either side that has finally been let lose from a lengthy winter layer of increasingly dirty, crusty snow. Not the pretty white stuff anymore. Not the new spring time green.
I pull off the road and park along the fence line, close to where a worn by wind, wooden sign hangs over the people sized opening. Living people. Not corpses or coffins. It's not freezing outside but it's like fall in the reverse, still not warm enough to not want a sweatshirt. I reach in the back seat and snag my orange and purple striped zip up hoodie, less bold in color after repeated washings. It is my favorite. It is also my Da's favorite. I can be found in my orange and purple striped hoodie. I can stand out among the green and the stone and the sky and the trees.
As I brace myself, I remember to grab my snow boots and exit my car to hurry to the trunk, I search for other people. Century old mourners or random vehicles parked nearby. No one. Just me. How I like it. At my open trunk, I quickly grab Henry and slam the lid, struggling to keep back the feeling that I am about to have a melt down. Winter thaw style.
Time to find my answers. Sniff.
Time to dig deeper. Sigh. Sniff.
Time to dig up a grave.
I direct my path into the cemetery, and stop just under the dried out, arched wooden sign and over the irregularly bumpy graveyard, certain of my purpose. Taking belly deep breaths, determined to try. My method may seem morbid but, there is no other way to reach him. Except down. “Six feet or so.” I have to dig. Henry and I. It will be messy, yes. For sure. But if I am correct, “it will not get messy gross.” I begin walking again, navigating towards him.
Sitting just on the outskirts of every other headstone on the small hill, I stop at the most important one. The one I have to disturb. For my peace. My eternal rest. Either in my now or my then. I am not entirely certain. I simply know and feel deep in my being- I am not when I am meant to be. And it hurts.
Every bit of me aches.
Maybe stabbing Henry into the thawing ground will ease the ache in my chest, my tight throat, the heat in my checks. I look behind me to where I parked my car. My eyes suddenly sting. Wind blows so often in the high desert that I forget it's happening at all. I forget. I touch my cheek with a cold, too dry hand, small cracks at my thumbs. The heat might just be wind burn.
Idaho Burn.
I turn back to my purpose, grip my shovel and set to work, stabbing it into dirt and dead grass, scraping the overgrowth of grass blades and dried up weeds away from the headstone's edges. It's a place to start, a shy manner to begin robbing a grave that may or may not also hold a dead human. It freaks me out more than I imagined it would, hearing the repeated strike of metal into gritty dirt while my peripheral is smudged with gray and white stone towers angling away from the pervasive gusts.
An assault on my ears.
My senses.
My nerves.
"No. Marilla- listen. Listen to yourself. Hello? This is okay. This is normal stuff. This is totally rational behavior. Really. Umm… Truly." I speak the words I need to hear out loud within the stillness of a hillside forgotten by sorrow. No one mourns for these souls any longer. Their progeny are already dead. Their stories forgotten. "No one will mind me digging here." I whisper to myself, an affirmation of clarity. I breathe in and out, blowing the air from my lips, nearly an unholy raspberry in the quiet of the dead. The souls who no longer linger. I mean, I really hope they aren’t lingering…
"Just what are you up to with that shovel?" The words echo off nothing and everything. I am surrounded. I am haunted. I am in so much trouble.
I drop my shovel to my small pile of loose dirt and amputated blades of dry grass figuring it's best not to hold a weapon while being interrogated out of the blue. Hmm. Blue... like what he called me... before now.
"I have dead people here!” I hurry to answer, turning awkwardly toward his voice, his person, his very official looking uniform. Well, utterly awkwardly. The cop's brown-haired human head angles suspiciously at me. His eyes, I can't tell their color, mine are too sensitive from the wind and tiny grave grit which I unceremoniously flick back at my own face with each shovel full I add to my dead pile. Dirt pile. Sad pile. Sniff. "This is where the bodies are." I try to explain, gesturing to the headstone I have been hacking at. Around. Into. "I mean, the body is." That isn't much better Rills. I mean, it is true, but it leaves me looking like a serial killer. "My relative is buried here." Almost true. I try the right words again, rubbing my almost numb, dirty hands along my jeans. He considers me, my lack of shoes, the bereft, slightly confused expression that must be apparent on my tear-stained face. Hmm. Yes. I am crying. Or my eyes are simply rejecting the weather and the grave grit recently thrust upon them. Into them. This is a predicament. My own, badly orchestrated half-attempt at a burial heist.
"Why the shovel?" he asks. Seems a perfectly reasonable question for a police officer to pose. Even one who shouldn't be where he... currently is. Hmm.
"Grave... maintenance. It really tears me up." I indicate my face, hoping my answer will also explain my messy face, my rumpled clothes. "But I hate to let it get out of head. His head..." I shake my head, sorting my story, trying to get it right, or legal. "I mean his head stone. Hand. Get out of hand."
"I just need to be sure. You can see how this looks." He retreats a few steps as if to take me in, my whole grim, grave-robbing scene complete with my feeling of falling apart. Emotionally compromised, resonating a danger to herself kind of vibe. He is also probably wondering if I pose a threat to others- to him- as well. Like a 5,000. Or some secret stupid code cop number. His brown hair is too long to be standard issue. I try to see a cop car somewhere within the bumps and dead grass and stone but there is no metal but the older section of pioneer-era fencing. Maybe it's along the road and he saw my car and thought it was odd. Did I not close my trunk? My eyes grow wide and sting something terrible. Did he see the mess I already made in my trunk? With Henry?
Like a grave robber-
I glance down at myself. At the death-dirt smudges along my dark blue jeans, folded up at the ankles, my orangey-red hair, tangled like a dirty fireball. "Yes." I answer, convinced of my own guilt. "I can see that."
"This is Idaho," he begins, like he and Idaho are new to each other, writing a note in his blue notebook, shaking his human head, “but even still," he stares at me, intensely like he can see what my mind words say or what my heart cabin feels are up to. I cringe back, "you look up to something." He rips his paper and holds it out to me. If this were another setting, any other day, I can imagine that he is close enough to my age, that he is handing me his phone number so we can text. Date. Eventually hold hands as we go for a walk along a fall of crunchy autumn leaves and white fencing. But my hands are chapped… dirty and cold.
I am cold. Cold inside.
Cold in my future. My past.
Nearly numb.
This isn't romantic. Here now. Staring at each other in a graveyard trying to make out each other's motives. He is handsome, in a put together kind of way, aside from his hair. But what will he look like in overalls or dirt smudged jeans and a green Henley shirt? Will he look more approachable? Will he wonder what my hair feels like between his fingers? Or if I smell like homemade soap? If I like to read or prefer drawing instead. If I live shooting arrows inyo targets of hay or prefer an axe? Will he ask if I know how to sew or plant crops? Tend babies? For the love.
"I suppose I look weird to someone not used to Idaho cemeteries." I say with snark, warning him of my extreme localness. He has to be super fresh to be standing in the one place where his uniform is unfortunately of absolutely no flipping use. Cops don't have shovels. It's time to put a little back story into my explanation. Convince this young, misplaced cop that I nearly own the cemetery he is standing in. The grave he is standing on.
Who is he to even linger where my path is usually the only one being trod? What is he up to in such a forgotten place? And why now? I have never seen him hanging out at my fav graves before. "It's just- you see, my dad put me in charge of keeping up with our family graves and sadly, I ignored them all for a while. I sort of just decided to ambush myself and get it over with today, all at once. But emotionally, it's overwhelming."
"Yeah. Okay. Just be careful with the bare foot thing. Maybe put your snow boots back on. Even though there's no more snow." He tilts his head toward my out of season snow boots and zooms back in to my feet, like my bare toes with chipped midnight blue metallic nail polish are a rare sight. Or somehow inappropriate in modern society. Or like my toenails have mattered much in a white world where snow can be death. He really doesn't seem like he is from Iona. Or possibly- any part of Southeast Idaho. Or Idaho anywhere.
"Ah yes, feet. Toes and such. Henr- er, my sharp shovel. Okay, will do." I quickly spill out pieces of coherent sentences that are still missing their other halves. Why does he care if I hurt myself? I am trying so hard to figure him out, his reason for hiding out in a typically morbid locale, without flowers for a grave or being the person on the mower.
It is that kind of unvisited.
This kind of unusual. Which, I am beginning to accept, is my kind of thing.
My kind of haunted. Except for him in a modern uniform, I can see myself falling for the age of stones standing like soldiers of time and weathering and wind which tilt toward eternity all around me.
Haunted. Forlorn.
Abandoned through the decades.
And yet it has the sweetest footbridge over a soft and green stream of delicately trickling, brisk mountain runoff in the springtime, and an ethereal view from the small hillside down across the expanse of tilting headstones, as though they are grasping, hoping, reaching toward the distant Tetons.
The world can whisper here. Whisper the words I long to hear. I allow my head to drop, my chin wobbling, tucking into my chest. A soft sob catching in my throat. I long to hear him speak his words. Words... I am beginning to forget.
Please Crowley... be here…
The cop hikes away a few steps, giving me a moment to be alone, maybe thinking I am only feeling a gush of human emotions because mydead family surrounds me. But that is not the case. I should be buried with them. That is my secret sorrow. I don't feel like I belong now. Alive in my now. I need to be back before. With Crow. But I don't know how.
I swipe my face nearly free of tears and snot onto my slightly dusty orange and purple sleeve. Feeling human and horrible, I try to concentrate. Crow told me that he kept keepsakes in a special place.
What kind of keepsakes? I never saw him hide anything in the cabin. It had to be somewhere on his land- our land. He wouldn't have had time to leave his acreage just to stash some keepsakes in hiding. Not with all the planting and washing and chores and cooking and cleaning. Where was his special hiding place?
Where is his hidingplace?
"Crow... where... where do I look?" I ask thecemetery, the sky, hoping for inspiration. For a whisper of a word. Maybe morethan one word. Maybe a sentence. Maybe some work gloves and rain boots too. Ametal detector. Some tissues. A clue.
I sink down onto my knees in my small dirt pile, pushing myhands into dirt, cool and soft, grounding myself in this moment beneath a blue,still cold sky. In my now. I squeeze two handfuls of dirt against my skin,breathing and not thinking. Only feeling.
Then Da's story hits me like a metal snow shovel to the backof a head. My head. I open my fists and let the dirt fall. Da said that his family placed the deed to the land inside a wooden box under the big tree. Thebig tree... The lightning tree? His family's tree? The Campbells? Did Crowley use it too? If he knew about it? I'd never noticed anything other than the headstone when I was-
“WHAT!” Oh dear!
It couldn't be. It can't be! There was no way! There is no way! I shake my head, disbelief enveloping my glimmer of hope.
Too easy! Too obvious!
But Crow, he would have wanted it to be findable. He would have wanted me to find it. I know hewould. Or I knew he would. Or- for pity's sake! This time thing was circular. Is circular. My speech tenses were all twisted around. Are! Are twistedaround. I need to conjugate in the proper time. It feels imperative to mysanity.
I glance over my shoulder. He is still in my cemetery, waiting for something.
I gasp in a chilled breath, knowing my peculiar visual cues are being observed by one lone and lost police person.
Okay then. Keep to the present. Even if the present doesn'tfeel quite... right.
A wooden box. Da had said.
Not a treasure box, certainly.
But a coffin... just maybe.
