The house loomed behind them like a blind sentry, the windows boarded up like two eye patches. Hannah walked up the front steps and tried the door, touching the heavy metal lock, and turned back toward the front yard. Pastor Lett motioned to Hannah. Molly watched from the bushes. Crouching further down, a twig snapped beneath her feet. Hannah’s head snapped in Molly’s direction, and she moved toward her. Pastor Lett reached out and touched Hannah’s arm, saying something Molly could not hear. Molly closed her eyes, hoping she hadn’t been spotted. When she opened them, they were nowhere in sight.
After waiting in the bushes for what felt like hours, Molly snuck back down through the woods and decided to visit Pastor Lett and lay it all out on the table. She was going to get to the bottom of the situation one way or the other. Surely Pastor Lett would have a good explanation for the lights in the cellar. Molly trusted Pastor Lett, didn’t she? Yes, she decided, she did. She drove the short distance to the church and pulled into the empty parking lot. Newton’s minivan pulled in along side Molly’s car. Molly waved. Newton climbed out of the van, “Molly. How are you?” “Great, thanks. Just looking for Pastor Lett.” “She’s not coming in today.” Newton replied.
“Oh,” Molly looked perplexed. “I just saw her,” she caught her mistake, “earlier. I saw her earlier today. Just thought I might catch her here.”
A skinny, old black man walked out of the cemetery and toward Newton and Molly. His army jacket was zipped to his neckline, and he had a woolen hat pulled tight over his head, though the weather didn’t call for such warmth. He moved slowly past them, as if each step took great effort, and Molly cringed at the odor that followed. “Hello, ma’am. Mr. Carr,” the man said in a raspy voice. “Good day, Walter,” Newton said. Molly turned and watched him walking across the parking lot toward the road. His jeans dragged along the asphalt with each step. Newton whispered to her, “You know Walter?” Molly shook her head, guiltily feeling like a gossip.
“Walter Meeks. Seventy years he’s lived here. Thirty of it right off of Peachtree Road. He, um, he’s always kept to himself. Had a wife and child—a girl. Doesn’t drive, you know, afraid of cars.”
“Why?” Molly asked.
“Not really sure why, just is. Walked to and from work each day when he worked for the mines. Came home one day and his, uh, his house was burned to the ground.” “How awful.” “Some people thought it was arson, but they never figured it out. His wife left him right after that. Took the child with her.” “That poor man. He lost his house and his family?” Molly followed Newton as he walked toward the cemetery.
“She just up and disappeared. When the house burned down, they went to his aunt’s house for the night. In the morning, she and the girl were gone.” Newton was uncharacteristically forthcoming with Walter’s background. Molly paid full attention. “He was married to a white girl. Their daughter was, um, light skinned, too—dark hair, prettiest little thing.” He stopped walking, and stared into the cemetery, thinking. “If I recall, his house burned down in the late sixties, somewhere ’round there. A real shame. His wife was a loner, too. She was real sick.” Newton shook his head. “Her father passed away from an asbestos-related cancer, meso-something-or-other, and she was exposed as a little girl.” Newton put his hands in his pocket, then pulled them out again, fidgeting. “Said she could cure anything herself. Some said she was into voodoo, witchery, that type of thing. Not sure I believed it, though. Surely never saw any of it.” He looked at Molly and said, “Sorry. Too much information, I know.”
“And all this time I thought that he was just some old guy that never made anything of himself. Now I feel badly,” Molly said, always amazed at the font of information that was Newton Carr.
“Well, he wasn’t the brightest tool in the shed, that’s for sure, but he was dependable. Yes, ma’am, the mining company was really unhappy when he left. He worked for them for over twenty years. Had a big party for him, in fact, right in the field across from the gravel lot, behind that cornfield.” He pointed to a field on a hill behind the church.
They walked silently through the graveyard, and Molly realized that Newton knew far more than just the history of Boyds.
“You know about the quarry, right, Molly?” Newton asked, clearly changing the subject.
Molly was oddly relieved. “Well, I know there was a community battle to keep it out of Boyds, and that it ended when a local resident bought the property.”
The simplification of the story brought a smirk to Newton’s face. He asked Molly if she’d like to walk with him through the cemetery, where he was headed to check on the upkeep of the graves. She anxiously agreed. “That property there,” Newton pointed toward the fields, and then in the direction of the railroad tracks. “The mining company that was trying to put the quarry in? They used to own all this land. The tunnels were over there,” he pointed, again, to the fields. “Until, uh, Martin Chambers scooped it up.”
“Tunnels?”
“Well, there’s debate about if the tunnels ever really existed at all. Rumor has it they dug tunnels clear through Boyds as a means of trucking their gravel without causing problems on the roads. The roads, they were the big issue back then. I suppose they thought that if they alleviated that worry, then the residents wouldn’t mind them being here. Anyway, they owned seventeen or eighteen hundred acres. Come to think of it, I believe there’s an old abandoned mine shaft in the Black Hill Park area, too. That area used to be called Gold Mine Farm back when the Wicks owned it.”
“Chambers bought all eighteen hundred acres?” she asked.
“Yup, sure did. He put about eight hundred acres into conservation land right away—the Hoyles Mill Conservation Park and Trail? We have him to thank for that. He really saved Boyds, if you ask me. Yup, we’re mighty fortunate that someone like him would come to our little town and be willing to tie up so much capital to preserve the area.”
They walked along in silence, Newton bent down to pick up bits and pieces of debris along the way. They came upon a small grouping of graves. Newton pulled a few weeds and straightened flowers that had been left on the graves. He crouched over a pink headstone, which was unreadable, cracked, and weathered. He looked sad.
“This here is Colonel James A. Boyds’s grave. He was born in Ayrshire, Scotland, December 22, 1823. Died here in Boyds, December 21, 1886.”
Molly crouched down next to Newton and dragged her fingers across the gravestone’s dips and valleys. It was easy for Molly to envision Newton as a younger man, just back from his stint with the army, and wondering how else he might serve his country, his home town
He led Molly up a hill to another group of headstones and stooped by the grave of a child. He ran his hand over the headstone. The sun beat down on them. In the distance, a soft drone of cars from the nearby roads hummed. The headstone bore no name, only dates: 1979-1979.
He tilted his head toward Molly. “There’s no baby here, just a headstone, in memory of a dear friend of mine’s child. Didn’t live more than a few minutes.”
“I’m sorry, Newton.” Molly touched his shoulder, thinking of Amanda’s funeral, which she’d watched from her car across the street—the way Amanda’s mother’s shoulders had hunched and shaken from her sobs, Amanda’s little brother’s spindly arm hanging onto his mother’s dress, thumb in his mouth, and the tiny coffin, perched and ready to be lowered into the ground forever.
Newton turned, and Molly followed him further up the hill to the rear of the cemetery where the grave of Cathy Mall overflowed with photographs, trinkets, flowers, and stuffed animals. A metal frame cradled an eight-by-ten photo of Cathy, standing in that very spot, with her arms reaching toward the sun, or was she reaching for heaven? Newton told Molly that Cathy had been the founder of the preschool, and that when she was told her breast cancer was malignant, she had chosen that particular grave so she could watch over the children. He explained how Cathy had asked that her insurance money be used to build the playground behind Kerr Hall, a church-owned building that was built just behind the church. Molly wondered if children still played at the simple playground with the massive Adventure Park just five minutes away.