In The Graveyard At Dawn by Paul Whybrow
Chapter 2—Grief
Approaching the spooky corner of the cemetery, the boy and his dog slowed to peer into the gloom. This patch was always darker, it's burial plots shaded by a dozen sentinel yew trees. The boy knew that this ancient tree was traditionally associated with the transcendence of death, and that it's wood had been prized by archers to make bows. The far section of the graveyard was reputed to be the most ancient. The church dated from the Saxon era, though there was now little sign of those times. Its location, high on a hill overlooking the town must have attracted pagan worshippers once.
The graves here were once separated from the original chapel by a walk of one hundred yards. The bodies were brought up a steep track from the lane, trundled on a wheeled bier. The clay soil was leavened with sand to ease the progress of narrow wooden wheels, and though this track was only used by walkers now, the ground still had a golden hue, revealing incongruous sea-shells scattered and crushed.
Old family names dominated the stones here, with many generations interred in some plots. The boy wondered at the remedial alterations needed to make this happen. The gravedigger would have to dig down how far to make a space for the newly deceased, trying not to disturb the present occupants, or didn't that sort of thing bother him? Presumably the stone-mason visited the graveyard to carve new names into the stones, which were too heavy, gripped by the ground and irresolutely immovable to stray into town.
The boy and his dog walked quietly up to the cross-path, the hackles rising on the dog's back in anticipation. A few weeks before, on a sultry late-summer afternoon they'd been startled by the sudden presence of an old man lying atop a horizontal stone set flat in the grass thirty feet away. The dog barked at the man, and the boy feared that he was dead, though at the warning the man sat up as if hinged at his hips, rising like Dracula from his coffin. He looked across and gave a mirthless chuckle, which the boy immediately recognised as being sad not humorous, before bursting into tears and crashing back onto the tomb-marker with a hollow 'thwock' of his skull. The old man raised claw-like hands to his face and sobbed loudly, scouring dirty nails down his cheeks as if to obliterate himself.
The boy hurried home to tell his mother what he'd seen, and to ask if there was anything they could do. She reminded him that he knew the man, at least to say hello to as they passed him on the road out of town. The old gentleman came from a well-respected local family. He and his wife of forty years lived modestly despite being of wealthy stock, and liked nothing more than walking the countryside with their little rough-haired Cairn terrier. The boy remembered seeing the three of them walking along the straight Roman road that ran past his house. He'd liked the straw hat with dried flowers in the brim that the old lady had worn. The man used to look down at his petite wife and smile, while their dog leapt happily between them.
The old lady and her dog were run over while crossing the high-street on the zebra-crossing by a drunk-driver. The old man was distraught with grief, and took to wandering the area at all hours and in all weathers, talking to himself—or to his wife, still. The boy's mum warned him to be careful around the poor old man. She didn't think that he was dangerous, just, “not quite right in the head anymore, so steer clear of him and don't answer if he says anything to you.”
Apparently the grieving man was found several times by his wife's burial-place, soaked through in the rain and plainly distressed. He disturbed other mourners, who complained to the vicar. The police got involved at one point, and he'd been held in a mental-hospital for his own protection and treatment. He was out again, but the boy's mother didn't think that he was taking his medicine.
The boy felt a little wary of meeting the old man on his walks, for he'd spotted him in many different places, though most of them led directly to the church. He'd once seen him sitting on a swing in the old playground, which was where the pupils used to play who attended a Victorian infant's school, which was demolished five years ago. He'd been very still on the seat of the swing, but his arms flapped about as he gesticulated at a school which didn't exist, saying something that the boy couldn't make out.
Mothers pulled their toddlers away from the playground when they saw who was sitting on the swing. People were afraid of him. The playground was only a mile away from the church, a walk up an avenue of oak trees. The boy attended this dilapidated school until he was eight and the place was shut. The school was moved to brand new buildings four miles away in the new town, so the boy commuted by coach. The church swiftly lost its influence over the school—just as well, the boy thought—who wanted to be admonished in assembly for not having attended church-service on Sunday?
Why was the old man talking to a ghost school in his mind? The boy remembered that the school's opening date was 1834, from a date inscribed over the entrance-door. It was possible, likely even, that the man was a pupil at the school when he was young. Perhaps his wife too—they might have met there. It was hard to imagine them as children.
The boy didn't know how people got old, changing as they did so. His parents didn't look that different now to how they were in photographs of them sixteen years ago, when they'd first fallen in love. Mum said that he looked a lot like her dad, but that granddad had been dead for five years, and anyway he'd been largely bald and was afflicted with the shakes. The boy remembered an old sepia photograph of him, taken in a studio before he went away to fight in the Great War. He did have a similar block-shaped forehead, he supposed, as well as a rather perplexed expression about the eyes—as if something horrid had happened which was beyond his understanding—a real innocent in the underworld look.
The boy was wise enough to know that he didn't want to become too knowing about life, as he didn't like cynical people, so he wouldn't mind continuing to look at things with benevolence. The best things in life came from Nature anyway, and there wasn't a lot of calculated nastiness there. How you thought about things must affect how you looked, surely?
The old man appeared altered from how the boy remembered him. When he'd been with his wife the man looked joyful, wore a nice linen-suit with a red carnation in his button-hole and a straw Panama hat set at a rakish-angle. Now he wore a dirty khaki raincoat, which was tattered at the hem, and his hair was raked back in thinning greasy strands—no stylish hat anymore. His face altered the most. Once he'd been bright with laughter-lines, as he'd said hello to the boy's mum. These days, his sallow cheeks were as pocked and ridged as a tree-trunk, his mouth sagging in despair from a face gaunt through lack of eating.
The boy didn't know what to make of the old man's state-of-mind. His only experience of dealing with elderly male relatives came from scarcely knowing his grandfathers, who were both violent drunkards. He hadn't seen much of them because of this, and they'd died long before their time due to illness brought on by their alcohol intake. Mum and Dad muttered something about them having troubles from being in the war, which affected their nerves. The old man in the graveyard had troubles too, from losing his wife and dog. Would he never get over them?
The boy didn't understand grieving. He'd been sad when his mum's dog, a corgi, collapsed and died on the dining-room floor. And he'd been confused that they didn't bury the dog in their garden. Instead dad took the corgi, wrapped in an old sheet, down to the vets to 'be disposed of', which sounded like taking something to the council-dump, though the boy was later told that this meant cremation.
He was a polite young man, so thought that he should say something that could be of comfort to the old man, but he was mindful of his mum's warning. Children were done away with all of the time—he'd seen the stories on the news and in their daily paper. He was glad that he carried a pen-knife in his pocket and a walking-stick too, a bent hazel branch which he used to brush nettles and brambles aside on the rougher tracks he explored. His dog was big and fierce-looking, and even if he was a neurotic softy he could summon up an impressive throaty growl.
Their caution was not needed. No one was on the grave, or lurki