“Oh, my Lord, look at the time! I’m supposed to be back in the courtroom in twenty minutes and I haven’t had a bite of lunch. See you,” I said and got out of there before he could start lecturing me to mind my own business and stay out of his investigation.
No sign of Allen or Jack Jamison as I hurried through the halls. He’d probably conned the deputy into buying him a real lunch.
More than I was going to have. It looked like Nabs and a Diet Pepsi from the vending machines over in the old courthouse basement again.
By late afternoon, all the routine crimes and misdemeanors of the day had been disposed of and I was left with a civil matter: Stevens vs. Johnson. Desecration of a family graveyard.
Five minutes into the case, I knew I was watching the latest episode in a long-running family soap opera.
The combatants were two cousins. Geraldine Stevens and Annice Johnson. Mid-thirties, blond, so similar in appearance they could have been sisters. When the women married, their mutual grandfather had deeded each of them adjoining building lots. Proximity had only worsened their feud.
Geraldine’s two acres made a fairly neat rectangle, slightly deeper than it was wide, with sufficient road frontage for an ample semicircular drive.
Annice’s drive was barely wide enough to let a Geo through. Her two acres looked a little like the outline of the United States if you cut off California, Oregon and Washington and squared off Texas. “Florida” was an eight-foot-wide strip that touched the road. That eight feet was Annice’s only bit of road frontage because an old family graveyard occupied a tenth of an acre where Texas and the Gulf of Mexico should have touched the road bank.
No matter who holds a title to the land where it sits, a graveyard itself is an encumbrance protected by the law in perpetuity. It may not be desecrated, moved nor adversely disturbed without a court order and the consent of the nearest kin.
According to Annice, who brought along before-and-after photographs, the graveyard had fallen into shocking condition these last eight years. Their grandfather had tended it until poor health forced him to put down his rake and hoe and pruning shears. Nobody else ever picked them up.
Once there had been only a single magnolia tree in the center. After years of neglect, volunteer pines and cedars and wild cherries had sprung up out of the very graves themselves. Honeysuckle and poison oak had overgrown the stones so badly that the men in the family had to go with bush knives and chainsaws to clear a way for the gravediggers when it was time to lay the grandfather to rest last spring.
“She was scared to do anything while Grampy was alive,” said Geraldine, “but the minute he was buried, look what she did.”
Geraldine’s suit asked for no money damages, merely that her cousin be forced to remove the new driveway that now encroached upon the cemetery.
“First she wanted me to sell her a strip of my yard and when I wouldn’t, she asked Grampy to let her take part of the graveyard. But he said no because his Aunt Sally and Uncle George were buried right there at the edge. They didn’t have a bought stone, just some rocks for a marker. Marker rocks that she moved.”
I repressed a sigh. It seems that growth doesn’t affect lifestyles alone. It governs death styles, too.
Home burials have become increasingly rare and many of the little private graveyards have been abandoned as the descendants die off or move away or are simply too distantly descended to care any longer. If they even remember.
That overgrown square sitting out in the middle of a field can get real tiresome to a farmer who’s had to keep plowing around it. “Nobody ever visits it,” he rationalizes to himself and the day comes when he simply plows right through it. The stones make good doorsteps or garden benches.
Bulldozers dispose of gravestones even more efficiently.
Every time new crowds up against old, old is what gives way.
A few years earlier, the cousins’ grandfather had drawn a diagram of the different plots, each rectangle neatly labeled in his old-fashioned wavery handwriting.
I was shown this drawing along with a copy that had all the property lines drawn in to scale. In that one, the rectangles labeled “George Patterson—d. 1894” and “Sally Patterson—d. 1913” appeared to be approximately ten feet from Geraldine Stevens’s property line.
“Here’s how it is right now, Your Honor,” said her attorney, one Brandon Frazier, who was so young that you could almost hear his shiny new law degree crackling in his back pocket. “These two little piles of rocks right there have been moved so that they’re now almost twenty feet from my client’s property line.”
Fifteen of those feet had been paved over in August.
“She’s driving back and forth right over her own great-great-aunt and -uncle!” Geraldine said tearfully. “And it’s wrong!”
“Tell me, Mrs. Stevens,” said Edward (“My friends call me Big Ed”) Whitbread as he rose ponderously to his feet. Ed Whitbread is not my favorite attorney. He’s pompous and dull-witted and he opposed me in the primary when I first ran for judge. “How old was your grandfather when he drew this diagram?”
“I don’t know. Seventy-five or eighty maybe.”
“And was he a professional draftsman?”
“No, he was a farmer.”
“A farmer,” Whitbread said portentously. “I see. Yet you claim he made an accurate drawing, to scale, with no formal training, when well past seventy?”
“My Grampy was sharp as a tack right up to the month before he died, and he certainly knew where his Aunt Sally was buried. He was eleven years old and he remembered going to her funeral.”
“I’m sure he thought he remembered,” Whitbread said genially.
As the questioning continued, Allen entered the back of the room and slid into a rear bench. He was alone and didn’t appear to be fleeing, so I had to assume that his alibi stood up to a cursory check and that Dwight had turned him loose.
But why was he here?
And why was I worrying about Allen when young Mr. Frazier was summing up for the plaintiff?
With little else to fall back on, he cited the drawing as ample proof that his client’s cousin had willfully changed the dimensions of the cemetery, thereby showing great disrespect for the dead who had a right to lie undisturbed.
“No respect for her ancestors?” Ed Whitbread snorted at the very idea. “Your Honor, you’ve seen the photographs of how disgracefully overgrown that cemetery looked before my client took it in hand. And you’ve seen the photographs of how it looks today.”
I might disdain Whitbread, but he had a point. In the earlier snapshots it was hard to even see the headstones. Now the trash trees were gone, a single magnolia’s lower limbs had been pruned so that a concrete bench sat in its shade, and the well-mowed grass made the plot look almost like a small park. Azalea bushes neatly bordered the wide new driveway. Very pretty.
“Mrs. Stevens,” I said. “In the years preceding your grandfather’s death, did you ever help your cousin clean off that graveyard?”
“She never cleaned it off,” said Geraldine. “I would’ve helped if everybody else did. But after Grampy quit doing it, nobody else ever offered.”
(What Allen thought of her answer could be read on his face. He was following the testimony like a play and her words made him roll his eyes at me. One thing—maybe the only thing—that could be said in Allen Stancil’s favor: I never saw him shy away from hard or dirty work.)
My options were clear. If I believed Geraldine and dear old Grampy’s diagram, which I was inclined to do, then opportunistic Annice had indeed moved the rocks and, in defiance of the laws of North Carolina, was now driving over the remains of her great-great-aunt and uncle. Not that much could be remaining after nearly a century.
No matter how I ruled, the animosity and hard feelings between these two cousins would no doubt continue. If I found for Geraldine and ordered Annice to remove the paving and restore her drive to its previous narrow width, the cemetery would probably fall back into a neglected state. Clearly Geraldine cared nothing about old Grampy’s final resting place. It wasn’t in her front yard. The important thing was to give her cousin grief by making Annice tear up that new driveway.