Somewhere during the proceedings, once the cycle of rural myth had grown dull with repetition, all eyes would be upon Elena. Mae would insist that she share those things she knew of and Elena would happily oblige. My grandmother said it still used to happen when she was a girl, usually during long, dry summers when the ticks were bad and the moon grew orange as a pumpkin on clear nights. One of them would be born to a normal family and very often the mother did not survive the birthing. It was a bloody and horrifying affair. My granny said she had caught sight of it one time, just the one time. She had been where she was not supposed to be and looking upon those things she was not supposed to see. Being a farm girl she was not so naïve as city girls were about the birthing process. She had seen plenty of foal, calves, and piglets brought to term and had been present at the birth of two of her sisters. The mystery of life is no mystery to a girl on a working farm. So she peeked in a window where one of them things was being birthed and what she saw set her to running. I asked her what it was she saw and she told me what came out of that poor woman was more of a grub than a human baby. In those days, such things were handled by the midwife, a woman named either Starnes or Sterns, I can’t remember which. When one was born that was more of below than above, it was taken by her at sunset out to the Ezren field and left there. Soon enough, its cries would bring the others up from their holes. Like calls to like and blood calls to blood.
Long after the sheriff and Kenney had left, Elena sat there thinking on things. Though she was old, very old, and her time left on this earth was short, her memory was still as sharp as her tongue. Those tea luncheons were now fifteen years gone and she was the only survivor of them. Mamie LaRoche had died in a nursing home over in Ashland ten years before, and Dorothy Palequin had preceded her three years before that after suffering a stroke while picking raspberries. Mae had passed six years ago now, going peacefully in her sleep.
There was just Elena now, aged and tired, so god-awful tired, who spent her days remembering things lost past and faces long gone to ghost. Her body pained her something terrible these days and today her chest felt very tight. Too much excitement maybe and maybe it was simply time to close her eyes.
Either way, she was accepting of it.
23
They held off going back to the Ezren farmhouse as long as they could. Or maybe Godfrey did. It wasn’t that Kenney was starting to call the place home sweet home or anything, but he had a job to do. Godfrey, however, was in no damn hurry. In the sheriff’s cruiser, they drove past the Ezren place and through the high arched gates of Bayfield County Cemetery.
“There was something else,” Kenney said. “Something that Elena Blasden mentioned. Genevieve Crossen’s child. Something about Genevieve Crossen’s child.”
Godfrey nodded. “Yeah, that’s quite a tale. But I suppose, since I’ve already bared the county’s soul to you, you might as well hear about that one, too.”
Godfrey moved the cruiser down the winding dirt road, past newer sections of the cemetery with their russet- and emerald-colored headstones and brass flagholders, then over a low rise where the older areas were. And here, Kenney decided, was where the real cemetery began. It wound off over mounded hills set with oak and hemlock, a crowded city of leaning crosses and tombstones, broken slabs and ivy-covered vaults, a gray and white profusion of marble both water-stained and wreathed in creeping fungi. Family plots atop grassy bluffs were enclosed by rusting iron fences knotted with morning glory and English ivy. Ancient vaults were set into overgrown hillsides like black mouths. Monuments and shafts poked up from thick, congested stands of chokecherry and brambleberry, staghorn sumac and bracken.
“Somebody ought to clean this place out,” Kenney said. “It’s getting a little wild.”
Godfrey pulled the cruiser to a stop before the vaulted doors of a stone chapel with dark, hooded windows that were set with the gratings of bars. “Sure, somebody ought to. Got just the one caretaker here, county can’t afford no more than that. He has his hands full, it’s a big place.”
And it was.
Godfrey said they’d been burying people there since the beginning of the nineteenth century and longer, really, since just a few years back a group from one of the state historical societies located the old colonial graveyard of Trowden just beyond the back wall of the cemetery. They chopped it free from tangles of hawthorn, ash, and juneberry, exposing the crumbling flat stones to the light of day for the first time in well over a century.
Kenney sat there, staring at raindrops running like tears down lichen-encrusted markers. “Okay,” he said finally. “Let’s have it.”
Godfrey nodded. “If you want to know about Genevieve Crossen, then I suppose I’d have to tell you about a funeral and a murder. The funeral was that of Genevieve’s eleven-year-old daughter, Pearl. And the murder? Well, we’ll get to that soon enough.
“Now, we’re reaching back some here, back to 1956 in particular, the year I turned thirteen and the year little Pearl drowned out in Deep-Cut Quarry, an abandoned quarry that flooded over as quarries will do. The quarry’s still there, sure enough, though fenced off now and no one swims it anymore. Even back in my boyhood before the water turned green and filled with slime and swimmer’s itch, it was damn deep in spots and you had to know where you could dive and where you couldn’t. See, there’s pilings of limestone rising up and you weren’t careful, you could bash your brains out on them. But the quarry was full of other things, still is. People drove old cars into it, tossed bedsprings and appliances down there. You get your foot caught on some of those things and you’d never break surface again. At least… those were the stories.
“Nobody really knows the particulars of little Pearl’s death. She was fooling around out there, around the edge and must have fallen in, couldn’t climb back out. No matter. Later that day, Georgy Blasden and his brother, Franny—good kid, killed in Vietnam, April of ‘68—rode their bikes out to the quarry to catch some frogs and saw her floating out there. Georgy told me she looked like a fancy doll someone had thrown away bobbing out there… I suppose she did at that. See, Genevieve used to dress little Pearl up every day in fancy, frilly outfits, take the strap to her if she got dirty. Poor thing.
“Well, anyway, they fished Pearl out and laid her to rest here, just over aways from where we’re sitting right now. It was a very sad thing, very sad. After that, none of us kids were allowed to swim in the quarry… even though we did, secretly.” Godfrey paused there, the memory of it all filling him, making those lines on his face stand out like crevices in dry earth. “Well, as you can imagine it was all too much for Genevieve. See, that lady had suffered horribly. Her life was nothing but a tragedy from beginning to end. She’d had a son, too, Randy was his name. I barely remember him. He joined the marines and died over in Korea, October ’52. There was, as you can guess, quite an age difference between Genevieve’s children… but back in those days with no true birth control beyond keeping your legs closed and your johnson zipped up, shit just happened. You never knew when. Regardless, in the end, they both died awful, dirty deaths.
“Randy’s death had been tough on that family, so tough that Henry Crossen, Genevieve’s husband, started to drink like a fish, trying to wash the taste of his son’s death out of his mouth. But he never did. Two years after Randy came home in a flag-draped box, one December evening in ’54 Henry piled his ’48 Chevy truck into a tree out on Bellac and joined his son. He was hammered, as you can imagine, and after he hit that tree, the truck rolled over, slid down the hillside through the snow and right into Ten Mile Creek. Ten Mile wasn’t frozen over completely that year and the truck went through, coming to rest on its roof. With his injuries, which were pretty massive, I understand, Randy couldn’t get out. And that’s how he died… in a cab full of freezing water. When they found him there the next day, he was frozen solid and I heard they had to use saws and axes to cut him free.