destination, a purpose, but of course I didn't. The purpose was just
the feel of motion, the car cutting through the night.
We went up through Eastport and Perry and Pembroke, turned south and
drove to Whiting. I was hardly aware of the circle moving in on
itself. To me they were just towns, all familiar and alike.
It was two in the morning when we started heading back to Dead River.
The roads were empty. We hadn't seen a car for miles. At West Lubec
we went over a wooden bridge. We passed a little country church, bone
white and bleak with disrepair.
"Stop here," she told me.
, ..
' ,
I .
She got out of the car and walked toward the church. I followed her.
Beneath the bridge the crickets and frogs were a single texture of
percussive sound.
The door was fastened with a single Yale lock. Perhaps there was
nothing inside worth stealing.
The white paint was chipped and flaking. She pulled a long strip of it
off the door. The Yale lock was rusted. I flipped it with my thumb.
"Sad shape."
"I sort of like it"
We peered in through the window. It was too dark to see much there. A
row of hardwood benches. In the distance, outlined by moonlight, what
looked like a small raised altar. We walked around back.
"It's old. A hundred years or more, I bet."
She wasn't listening. She grabbed my arm.
"Look."
Behind the church and off to the left there were about thirty upright
stones broken, chipped, eroded behind a low wrought iron fence.
"Come on."
She took my hand. We walked among the leaning headstones. We each
took out packs of matches and read the inscriptions. On some of them
there wasn't enough left to read.
Beloved wife of. Beloved daughter to.
^^^^^^1 '
Most seemed to have died in the mid-to-late 1800s. A lot of them were
women, and young.
"Childbirth," she said.
"Lydia, wife of John Pritchett. She died in childbed December
thirtieth, 1876, in the twenty-third year of her age. Sarah, daughter
of Mr. Jonathan Clagg, wife to William Lesley, who died thirteenth of
June 1856, in the eighteenth year of her age. That one too, maybe."
There was one that made us laugh. E//sha Bowman. Died March 21st,
1865. Aged 33 yrs, 1m, 14d. He believed that nothing but the success
of the Democratic Party would ever save this Union. There was some
good carving on the headstone.
I lit another match and looked it over. A skeleton inside a circle
described by a snake swallowing its own tail. The skeleton was
grinning. In one hand it held an apple, in the other an hourglass.
Beneath, two bats. Above, two seraphim. Pretty elaborate, I
thought,
After a while I found one I liked even better. Here lies the body of
Bill Trumbell, it read, dead in 1829. Been here and gone. Had a good
time.
Strange how even laughter has a hush to it in a place like that at
night. You talk as though there's somebody around. And maybe there
is. A hundred-year parade of mourners, for one thing, some of them
standing there just as you are now in the moonlight, thinking about the
past and loved ones gone. The aura of last rights given among simple
people who still believed in god and the devil and the Democrats.
And the people underground.
Dead of poison and measles and gunshot wounds and hard birthing. The
restless dead. You can hear them in the rustling leaves, see them in
the leaning slabs of stone.
"A virgin. Look."
I walked to where she was.
The stone was down, fallen heavily against the smaller one beside it.
Casey was bending low, a match about to burn her fingertips. I blew it
out and lit another.
We read the inscription. Here lyes the remains of Elizabeth Cotton,
Daughter of the Reverend Samuel Cotton late of Sandwich
Mass. who died a Virgin October 12,1797, aged 36. Who hath not ever
sinned. It was the oldest stone we'd seen there.
"Poor lady. Maybe she should have met up with Bill Trumbell over
there."
The match went out and she lit a third one. An angel was carved over
the inscription, almost weathered away. The stone was rough, pitted by
wind and rain. You could see the slight indentation where the stone
had uprooted itself, just as hallow dip in the soil by now. I stood
up.
"Let's go."
"Wait."
The match flickered away again. I'd been working so hard to read that
for a moment everything went black. Then my eyes adjusted to the
moonlight.
The pullover blouse lay beside her. She was naked to the waist, her
breasts and belly and shoulders naked, and she was reaching for
"Come on. Right on top of Elizabeth Cotton, virgin."
"It's silly."
"You think uY?"
I watched her lean back and slip the jeans down off her thighs, the
thin panties folding away with them, graceful as a snake shedding its
skin. She tossed them away and lay back against the cool earth,
reached over her head and took one side of the headstone of Elizabeth
Cotton in each hand. In the moonlight her tanned flesh looked
unnaturally pale. She smiled at me and moved against the stunted
grass.
"Come on. I want you in me."
Justa whisper. Like a razor sliding through paper. Itseemedto force
the blood through my veins and trigger a heavy pounding in my chest. I
wanted her. With all I'd seen of her tonight, I wanted her worse than
ever. I felt like a man in a life jacket who finally accepts
the water's numbing cold. This was hers. Pure Casey. Undiluted. In
the Middle Ages, they'd have burned her at the stake.
I took off my clothes and stood there a moment, naked, looking down at
her, watching myself rise. Amazed a little.
Then I went into her.
I went in hard, tickled by perversity. The smell of damp musty earth
suddenly strong around us. I pumped at her until her cool skin grew
warm again and then moved her violently on top of me, exchanging places
with her- the ground, the old crumbled bones beneath my arched back and
thighs.
She reached down. Her fingers clawed the damp soil. She took up a
handful and ground it against my chest. I felt a sudden all-enveloping
chill. She leaned over me and grasped the headstone in both hands
again and I rose up high to meet her.
I looked up into a face that was already trembling on the near side of
orgasm, past the blind-seeming eyes, and glimpsed myself as though
reflected in some dream image as clouds drifted by the moon. I saw us
as though from above, locked together, clashed in need. The headstone
behind me. I saw huge dead hands reach up out of the churning earth
and pull us down.
As she screamed, I felt those hands on me. Broken stalagmite fingers.
On my shoulders. On my neck. Lightly clutching.
Cold and sweating, I came too. And screamed along with her. While the
hands receded. Tendrils of smoky mist, climbing back into the soil.
"My god!"
I heard my own nervous "You too, huh?" "You were moving at me right up
out of the ground. I was fucking a dead man!"