So instead of blogging I've been reading, you know, books. And let me tell you if you hadn't heard - books are awesome, and way more rewarding to read than blogs. With that in mind, I decided to usher out the season with the first ever Q at Parkside "Fiction Issue." Out of the many, many entries I chose a terrific story by an up-and-comer named t.t. cummings. Okay, I'll admit it, that's a nom de plume. This is his first effort at fiction in about 30 years, so I guess you could call it a debut. It's called...
ENGRAVED
Nearly all of the headstones in the
Danforth town cemetery have born-on and died-on dates, with one
notable exception being the slab of gray granite bearing the name
Esther “Etty” Stiles. Etty's text ends at the hyphen, a hyphen
awaiting letters and numbers to make its sentence complete. And
that's not even the headstone's most remarkable feature.
The tax logs at Danforth Town Hall list
438 current residents, give or take in the summer and winter, the
winter being the take and the summer the give, this being New
England, but the town cemetery counts 884 dead folks resting interred
on the picturesque mossy green hill just past the Danforth United
Methodist Church – the only surviving Christian congregation within
seven miles. As a result its become fairly more ecumenical in
observance and outlook than its name might imply. Three years ago a
Jewish family from Boston attended without incident.
The cold hard facts on view at the Town
Hall reveal that the dead of Danforth outnumber the living two to
one, though just 50 years ago the ratio was reversed, and 100 years
prior a whole industry of shoe peg manufacturing and logging had led
to 12 separate schools, three hotels, two taverns and even stiff
competition in the hardware and farm equipment businesses. Currently
there is no storefront business in Danforth, ever since the Ormsbee
feed store closed. That was winter of 1983, and the store building
has since been removed by the current owners, summerers from
somewhere in Canada, who favor privacy to commerce.
For more than fifty years a person has
had to set foot outside of Danforth town lines to purchase even a
loaf of bread or the county newspaper, the Stanton Wind. The paper's
circulation is just under 6,000 and dwindling, though the uptick in
online readership holds some promise for the future of the Wind's
operation and the mortgage payments of publishers Jane and Jim
Starkweather, self-acknowledged hoarders whose absurdly long ranch
home lies at the 90 degree bend in the Rootkill River favored by
young swimmers and partyers drawn to its seclusion and unusual depths
and a 20 foot long rope swing that had claimed the life of (just) two
teenagers in its roughly twenty years of thrill-serving.
Danforth is a small town in a sparse
county in a mostly rural state in the northeastern region of the
America. It has no special properties or industry, no claim to fame,
no tourist attractions or specialty cuisine. It is as one summering
regular calls it a Historic District without the sign or designation,
and even the residents knew they were holding on by sheer will to an
agrarian and stubbornly seasonal way of life. You were either poor
and scraping by, or you had plenty of money but preferred to live
like you didn't. No one drove a fancy car. It would look ridiculous,
even comical, and anyway most fancy cars weren't very practical in
frequently perilous winter weather.
As with other towns in rural New
England, many of the surnames on the headstones match those of the
living – Skinner, Harrison, Utley, Thompson and Thomson, so one
could be forgiven for not remembering which relatives of which family
were dead or alive at any given time. Walking about the cemetery
offered a glimpse into the past embellished by the present's rumors,
weddings, mischief and tragedies. One could almost imagine the ghosts
of ancestors weighing in on the day's events and the exploits of
descendants.
Etty herself often took note of the
ages of various Danforthers at death, figuring how long the living
Utleys and Skinners and Thompsons and Thomsons might reasonably
expect to live. She had even written down her guestimates and kept
the paper pressed in a book of proverbs, but had recently decided to
destroy it lest it be found on estate sale and the town's estimation
of her character suffer for it. She could keep the information in her
head anyway, and referenced it frequently.
Midway through one particularly cold
winter it became clear to Etty that she might very well become number
885 on the mossy hill due to a bout of influenza, then walking
pneumonia and a persistent cough. Everyone knew that Stiles' lived
long, so despite the arthritis, bad back, overweight, acid reflux and
the more acute ailments only Etty seemed concerned with her possible
demise. Despite the physical hardships, she still made it to church
on Sunday, the Ox Roast each August, and continued to make twice
daily trips to the Wayside General Store in Grisby – coffee and
newspaper in the morning, various and sundry late in the afternoon.
One always needed something, she observed, and 4:30-5:30 pm seemed a
good hour to get it, after nap and before supper, and the Wayside was
just a five minute drive. The weathered flyer in the window of the
Wayside accurately reads “if we don't have it, you probably don't
need it” so there was rarely a need to drive the extra 6 miles to
the Stop 'n' Shop in Bristol. Plus, Amazon Prime delivers all the
stuff she doesn't really need anyway.
Ben Ruscher drives the signature brown
UPS van up Three Corner Road somewhere from 3:15 – 4 every weekday,
and Etty listens to hear if he takes the sharp right at Utley Drive,
and if he does she rises or pivots, grabs a glass of water, puts on
her yellow Crocs and steps onto the back porch to receive him, and
she hands Ben the glass of water as he hands her the package and once
in a blue moon he drinks the whole glass, but usually it's just a sip
and frankly out of respect not thirst, as Ben is more a seltzer guy
and always has a cold one in the truck. He's usually got a half-pint
of bourbon in the glove box too, but as a general rule that stays in
the box til after the last delivery of the day.
Etty's two grown children live within
an hour but in opposite directions. Charley (Etty hates the name and
wish he'd stuck with Charles) fixes cars and Judy (a better fit than
her birthname Judith) manages a breakfast place. Both are divorced
and both are friendly with their exes, a fact that Etty is proud to
have modeled for them, as their father Ray wasn't really so much a
bad man as a dreamer, and a piss poor gambler, and when he died it
was his ex-wife Etty who gave the eulogy that brought tears to the
entire crowd of 50, a pretty sizable crowd for a man who'd never met
a bet he wouldn't make or a debt he could fully repay. Ray always
told a mighty fine joke though, and that has always counted for a lot
at the Wayside, and often would earn him a free refill on a cup of
coffee. Or a rolled eye and hand gesture from owner Nancy Wilcox. Or
both. Usually both.
The tombstone was Etty's idea alone.
Always frugal to a fault and quick to pounce on a bargain, Etty had
noted the business struggles of Arthur Kaster, seller of monuments in
Roscoeville just over the state line, and without mentioning to
Arthur the remarkably accurate rumors she'd heard at the Wayside
about his financial position, she offered Arthur half the cost of a
mid-priced stone that had been slow to move anyhow, and if she were
willing to pay cash, might he just happen not to mention it to “the
Governor?” That was her way of respectfully protesting sales taxes,
which Etty found egregiously excessive, and that firmly held opinion
was pretty much the primary reason she'd been an unaffiliated voter
in the past several elections, siding more often than not with the
Republicans, though she really didn't care much for any of the
Republicans serving her currently, on down from president to state
representative to county comptroller who she knew to be a weasel of
man both a drunk and dating a much too young waitress in Canton. Etty
asked Arthur if he'd accept her offer and complete the task by
Easter. And she told him that in the next few days she would decide
what he should engrave on her headstone, preferably something to
match her personality and dry wit.
Arthur agreed to the price and took
half of the agreed to cash on the spot, though he ultimately missed
the Easter deadline by more than a month. Still, before Memorial Day
the finished headstone was loaded on the back of Cal Kindred's pickup
truck and hauled to the top of cemetery hill and placed next to
Etty's mother and father's joint tombstone, but far enough from any
of the Utley family to help ensure the continuation of a decades-long
feud over a farm accident well into the afterlife.
The exact cause of the accident with
the hay baler was in dispute, but there was no denying that Junior
Utley bore the brunt of the deal, having broken his back and lost
everything from the elbow down on his left arm. And while no one was
laughing that day or for weeks after, Junior was soon quipping that
the Good Lord must have been smiling on him that day not to take the
hand he wiped his ass with. After hearing that joke a dozen times,
most locals just ignored it, but visitors always got a chuckle and
probably took the line home to add some local flavor to their
vacation stories.
The stone itself was low to the ground
– stocky you might say – as was the case with most of the stones
from the last 40 years or so. Early in Danforth's history – late
18th and early 19th century – the graves were
thin and tablet-like, sort of how you'd imagine Moses with his
commandments, though if those tablets were truly made of limestone
there's little chance Moses would have been able to lift even a
single tablet, even if he'd been buff, and Etty thought to herself
that there's no mention in the bible of Moses being ripped or even
particularly strong. The tablet-like gravestones must have seemed
immutable in their day, but after the first hundred years, most had
fallen or broken in half due to one storm-of-the-century or another
or to the general clumpiness of the soil, or maybe bugs and worms,
but anyway it was clear that a modern tombstone should be prepped for
the elements, with its center of gravity as low as possible.
Neither Etty nor Arthur tipped anyone
off, but within a couple days the whole town had seen the picture,
emails flying back and forth just hours after Sue Rickles took it.
Etty had chosen to forgo words on her headstone altogether, and
instead opted for an engraved picture of her greatest and most prized
possession – a gray GMC Sierra 4x4 with extended cab, a truck she
bought the month of her retirement from Grant Guthrie of Guthrie &
Sons. Grant's youngest son Bentley (after the car, though he goes by
Benji) served ably if drunkenly as best man at Etty's son's wedding,
and the elder Guthrie promised to add a few extras to sweeten the
deal, at no cost of course, as the Stiles' were like family and “you
don't charge family for leather upholstery, you just tuck it into the
sales price.”
She'd had her eyes on this truck for
years, though another similar American model would've done in a
pinch, and in a rare burst of spontaneity she splurged the next
Monday after her last day at the Tindex Apparel factory came and
went. She'd spent the weekend forecasting the rest of her life and it
was clear she had little use for her pension and social security
money besides necessities and occasional splurges on her grandkids.
She was too old (in her estimation) for traveling the world and
frankly a little nervous about planes and foreign languages anyway.
The party for her retirement had been a subdued affair on the account
of the accident in the finishing department just three days prior,
when Anne Graybald had essentially sewn her hand to a blouse after
suffering a stroke. Her hand would be fine, but she was unlikely to
regain her full range of speech, and there was a chance that she
might have lost more than that. Anne was well-liked, never had a
harsh word for anyone, and the consensus was that there was a certain
injustice that such a terrible thing hadn't happened to someone less
agreeable, like maybe Libby Stanton or the new girl.
Etty absolutely loved that truck the
minute she drove it off the lot. A great feeling of power and
prestige came over her, riding high with her gaze a few inches above
the farming men in their much smaller pickup trucks and a couple feet
above the Bernie Backers and ex-City ladies in their Subarus, and she
took particular pleasure in looking down on the “Mayor” of
Danforth, Judge Rickles (he wasn't a judge; that was his name). And
it wasn't long before Etty started calling her truck all manner of
nicknames, assigning the truck the sort of anthropomorphic qualities
usually reserved for dogs and cats. Most often she simply called her
Old Lady, or The Old Gray Lady, a reference she recognized but
couldn't place until she met the unexpectedly nice family from
Brooklyn who'd Airbnb'd the Junior Utley place after he died and they
noted that the Old Gray Lady was another name for the New York Times.
This ticked her off for at least a week or two, since she was no fan
of the NY Times, though she had been known to borrow the Sunday
crossword from the recycling box at the Wayside and occasionally
cheat by looking something up in her 1979 or 1984 World Book
Encyclopedias. In the end, she decided, the reference to the Times
was ironic, and she didn't care if anyone took it the wrong or the
right way.
Increasingly this was how Etty viewed
the world – amused indifference - and it may explain why she felt
more content and comfortable in her own skin that she had since her
youth growing up less than half a mile away. In a manner she'd
replaced her old skin with that of her truck, and the Old Lady was a
roomy and warm skin, even if the bed of the truck hadn't seen so much
as a fishing rod or bale of hay since she bought it. It was always
good to go if needed though, and that's what really mattered. There
are times when only a truck will do.
It was on one of her morning trips to
the Wayside that Etty first thought of getting Arthur Kaster to
engrave a picture of her truck on her tombstone. That was also the
first time she'd thought the word “tombstone” in reference to
herself. The thought of the truck on her tombstone tickled her silly,
though she slept on it for three straight nights just to make sure it
wasn't a passing fancy. During those 72 hours she also toyed with the
idea of engraving a favorite saying on the stone instead. One in
particular made the top of the list - “nothing is written in stone”
- and she got many a silent chuckle out of that one. She figured
she'd seen it somewhere before, on a stone undoubtedly, but there was
nothing on the cemetery hill that even hinted at humor, let alone
something as funny as that saying or the image of a prized
automobile.
So just after lunch on the fourth day
Etty had called Arthur, on a landline as there still wasn't much cell
service in the hills and valleys of southern Vermont and Middle
Eastern Upstate NY, and Arthur said he loved the idea and told her to
drive down the next day so he could sketch it for her. It was rare he
got to use his true artistic talent, and anyway he needed the sale in
order to meet alimony to wife Number 2, who was now dating the
Sheriff, meaning the law was less inclined to let it slide each time
the bill came and went due. It irked Arthur to no end that Sheriff
Bates might occasionally end up the recipient of some of his alimony
money that had gone to buy items in Number 2's refrigerator, like
maybe a six-pack of Michelob or a half-dozen eggs and hunk of
cheddar. Number 2 was one of the great omelet makers in the county,
as most folks knew, or at the very least her ex-husbands and
boyfriends who rightly considered an omelet to be the best possible
cap to a night of drinking, love-making and sleeping all tangled up
with a sweet-smelling – or in summer sweat-smelling –
woman. After six years of marriage Arthur had grown tired of the
first three of those activities, but the omelet still appealed, and
that's what he decided he missed the most about Number 2 – the
omelets and the $150 he was out each first of the month or
thereabouts.
Once the headstone had been placed, and
Arthur and the town's cemetery fund and the casket company had been
paid, and everyone at the Wayside had had a great laugh over the
engraved truck, Etty felt a wave of contentment envelop her, and it
stayed right through summer and the following winter. In fact, she
hadn't felt so good in years, maybe ever, and the fact that she would
cause no financial burden to her heirs made her beam with pride as
she sang hymns of praise at the Methodist Church each Sunday.
Life was good, and death wasn't looking
so bad either. It was that balance – an appreciation for life in
the present and the lack of fear for the future - that was the secret
to life she thought, and she'd stumbled upon it.
It was almost three years before Etty
noticed just how hard it had become to climb into the cab of the Old
Lady. Three unhelpful trips to Doctor Walden convinced her to try
acupuncture, which seemed to work a couple times and provided all
manner of great stories for her Wayside afternoons. But things were
getting worse, not just in her legs, hips and back but also in her
hands. By the time she could barely hold the plastic digital pen to
sign for her packages from Ben Ruscher, her spirits had sunk and she
had come to dread pulling herself up into the cab of the truck each
morning. The following spring she had a knee replaced. That summer it
was the hips. And then that winter her back hurt so much that even
sleeping was impossible. A special orthopedic chair from Amazon Prime
brought her some relief, but now she had to take most of her sleep in
the sitting position, with a heavy dose of Tylenol and maybe even one
of the pain killers she'd swore she'd never take after hearing one
too many stories at the Wayside about cousins, aunts, uncles and high
school buddies who'd become addicted to the heavy stuff.
And then one freezing cold day, Etty
fell backwards into the snow as she tried to pull herself into the
cab of the Old Gray Lady. It took her half an hour to right herself,
and the fact is had she been unable to do so, first on her knees and
then ever so slowly back to the house, she would have frozen to
death, unless by chance Ben Ruscher had brought a package that very
afternoon. Such was the very real consideration of every older person
living alone in the country anywhere on earth. Dying on the floor of
one's own house was not unknown to the people of Danforth, and
several of the 884 on the hill had passed in that manner.
Etty's children finally convinced her
to give up the truck, though she half expected it was because Charley
wanted it for himself, and in fact he did end up taking it off her
hands never offering to help buy her another more sensible car. Etty
never mentioned it, but she made a mental note to go light on
Charley's Christmas gift that year. The envelope was thin, he noted
at the time, and not because the bills inside were of higher
denominations.
From the near freezing scare forward,
Etty drove a used AWD Subaru, bought from one of those summer-only
Bernie backers who'd politely agreed to remove all the political
stickers for her before transferring ownership; she liked Bernie fine
but would rather walk into the Wayside in her underwear than sport
political slogans on her primary form of transport. It was three
whole years before the thought occurred to her to call Arthur Kaster
one last time and ask him how much it would cost to add a line of
text near the bottom of her monument. He offered to do it “at
cost,” which seemed a bit silly since all you were paying for was
the labor anyway. Cash of course; no need to tell the Governor.
The phrase “Nothing Is Written In
Stone” was added to Esther Stiles' headstone, in a font that looked
like Olde English. Etty never did drive up the hill to see it and
give Arthur compliments on his work, but her spirits rebounded
quickly, and endured.
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