Undead (2 page)

Think of all the people who have lived and died and will never see the trees or the grass or the sun any more.

It all seems so brief, so worth…nothing. Doesn’t it? To live for a while and then die? It all seems to add up to so very little.

Yet in a way, it is easy to envy the dead ones.

They are beyond living, and beyond dying.

They are lucky to be dead, to be done with dying and not have to live any more. To be under the ground, oblivious…oblivious of hurting, oblivious of the fear of dying.

They do not have to live any more. Or die any more. Or feel pain. Or accomplish anything. Or wonder what to do next. Or wonder what it is going to be like to have to go through dying.

Why does life seem so ugly and beautiful and sad and important while you are living it, and so trivial when it is over?

Life smolders a while and then dies and the graves wait patiently to be filled, and the end of all life is death, and the new life sings happily in the breeze and neither knows nor cares anything about the old life, and then it in turn dies also.

Life is a constant turning over into graves. Things live and then die, and sometimes they live well and sometimes poorly, but they always die, and death is the one thing that reduces all things to the least common denominator.

What is it that makes people afraid of dying?

Not the pain.

Not always.

Death can be instantaneous and almost painless.

Death itself is an end to pain.

Then why are people afraid to die?

What things might we learn from those who are dead, if they find the means to return to us?

If they come back from the dead?

Will they be our friends? Or our enemies?

Will we be able to deal with them? We…who have never conquered our fear of confronting death.

At dusk, they finally spotted the tiny church. It was way back off the road, nearly hidden in a clump of maple trees, and if they had not found it before dark they probably would not have found it at all.

It was the cemetery behind the church that was the objective of their journey. And they had hunted for it for nearly two hours, down one long, winding, rural back road after another—with ruts so deep that the bottom of the car scraped and they had to crawl along at less than fifteen miles per hour, listening to a nerve-wracking staccato spray of gravel against the fenders and sweltering in a swirl of hot, yellow dust.

They had to come to place a wreath on their father’s grave.

Johnny parked the car just off the road at the foot of a grassy terrace while his sister, Barbara, looked over at him and breathed a sigh intended to convey a mixture of both tiredness and relief.

Johnny said nothing. He merely tugged angrily at the knot of his already loosened tie and stared straight ahead at the windshield, which was nearly opaque with dust.

He had not turned off the engine yet, and Barbara immediately guessed why. He wanted her to suffer a while longer in the heat of the car, to impress upon her the fact that he had not wanted to make this trip in the first place and he held her responsible for all their discomfort. He was tired and disgusted and in a mood of frozen silence now, though during the two hours that they were lost he had taken his anger and resentment out on her by snapping at her continuously and refusing to be at all cheerful, while the car bounced over the ruts and he worked hard to restrain himself from ramming the gas pedal to the floor.

He was twenty-six years old and Barbara only nineteen, but she was in many ways more mature than he was—and through their growing-up years she had pretty much learned how to deal with his moods.

She merely got out of the car without a word, and left him staring at the windshield.

Suddenly the radio, which had been turned on but was not working, blurted a few words that Johnny could not understand and then was silent again. Johnny stared at the radio, then pounded on it and frantically worked the tuning knob back and forth, but he could not get another word out of it. It was strange, he thought, and just as puzzling and frustrating and tormenting as everything else that had happened to him in this totally disgusting day. It made his blood boil. If the radio was dead, then why did it blurt a few words every once in a while? It ought to be either dead or not dead, instead of being erratic or half-crazy.

He pounded the radio a few more times, and worked with the tuning knob. He thought he had heard the word “emergency” in the jumble of half-words that had come across in a squawk of static. But his pounding had no effect. The radio remained silent.

“Damn it!” Johnny said, out loud, as he yanked the keys out of the ignition and put them in his pocket and got out of the car and slammed the door.

He looked around for Barbara. Then he remembered the wreath they had brought with them to place on their father’s grave, and he opened the car trunk and got it out. It was in a brown paper bag, and he tucked it under his arm as he let the trunk bang shut—and he looked for Barbara once more and experienced a burst of fresh anger at the realization that she had not bothered to wait for him.

She had scrambled up the terrace to take in a view of the church, which was tucked back into a hollow among the trees where a place had been carved for it out of the surrounding forest.

Taking his time so he wouldn’t get mud on his shoes, he climbed the grassy terrace and caught up with her.

“It’s a nice church,” she said. “With the trees and all. It’s a beautiful place.”

It was a typical rural church; a wooden structure, painted white, with a red steeple and tall, narrow, old-fashioned stained-glass windows.

“Let’s do what we have to do and be on our way,” Johnny said, in a disgruntled tone. “It’s almost dark, and we still have a three-hour drive to get home.”

She shrugged at him, to show her annoyance, and he followed her around the side of the church.

There was no lawn, no gate—just tombstones, sticking up in the tall grass, under the trees, where a few scattered dead leaves crackled under their feet as they walked. The tombstones began in the grass just a few yards from the church and spread out, among trees and foliage, toward the edge of the surrounding woods.

The stones ranged in size from small identifying slates to large monuments of carefully executed design—an occasional Franciscan crucifix or a carved image of a defending angel. The oldest tombstones, grayed and browned and worn with age, almost seemed not to be tombstones at all; instead, they were like stones in the forest, blurred by the darkening silence engulfing the small rural church.

The gray sky contained a soft glow from the recent sun, so that trees and long blades of grass seemed to shimmer in the gathering night. And over it all reigned a peaceful silence, enhanced rather than disturbed by the constant rasp of crickets and the rustle of dead leaves swirling in an occasional whispering breeze.

Johnny stopped, and watched Barbara moving among the graves. She was taking her time, being careful not to step on anybody’s grave, as she hunted for the one belonging to her father. Johnny had a hunch that the idea of being in the cemetery after dark had her frightened, and the thought amused him because he was still angry with her and he wanted her to suffer just a little for making him drive two hundred miles to place a wreath on a grave—an act he considered stupid and meaningless.

“Do you remember which row it’s in?” his sister called out hopefully.

But he neglected to answer her. Instead, he smiled to himself and merely watched. She continued going from stone to stone, stopping at each one that bore a hint of familiarity long enough to read the name of the deceased. She knew what her father’s tombstone looked like, and she could remember also some of the names of the people buried nearby. But with the approaching darkness, she was having trouble finding her way.

“I think I’m in the wrong row,” she said, finally.

“There’s nobody around here,” Johnny said, purposely emphasizing their aloneness. Then, he added, “If it wasn’t so dark, we could find it without any trouble.”

“Well, if you’d gotten up earlier…” Barbara said, and she let her voice trail off as she began moving down another row of graves.

“This is the last time I blow a Sunday on a gig like this,” Johnny said. “We’re either gonna have to move Mother out here or move the grave closer to home.”

“Sometimes I think you complain just to hear yourself talk,” Barbara told him. “Besides, you’re just being silly. You know darned well Mother’s too sick to make a drive like this all by herself.”

Suddenly a familiar tombstone caught John’s eye. He scrutinized it, recognized that it was their father’s, and considered not telling Barbara so she would have to hunt a while longer; but his drive to get started toward home won out over his urge to torment her.

“I think that’s it over there,” he said, in a flat, detached tone, and he watched while Barbara crossed over to check it out, taking care not to step on any graves as she did so.

“Yes, this is it,” Barbara called out. “You ought to be glad, Johnny—now we’ll soon be on our way.”

He came over to their father’s grave and stared at the inscription briefly before taking the wreath out of the brown paper bag.

“I don’t even remember what Dad looked like,” he said. “Twenty-five bucks for this thing, and I don’t even remember the guy very much.”

“Well, I remember him,” Barbara said, chastisingly, “and I was a lot younger than you were when he died.”

They both looked at the wreath, which was made out of plastic and adorned with plastic flowers. At the bottom, on a piece of red plastic shaped like a ribbon tied in a large bow, the following words were inscribed in gold: “We Still Remember.”

Johnny snickered.

“Mother wants to remember—so we have to drive two hundred miles to plant a wreath on a grave. As if he’s staring up through the ground to check out the decorations and make sure they’re satisfactory.”

“Johnny, it takes you five minutes,” Barbara said angrily, and she knelt at the grave and began to pray while Johnny took the wreath and, stepping close to the headstone, squatted and pushed hard to embed its wire-pronged base into the packed earth.

He stood up and brushed off his clothes, as if he had dirtied them, and continued grumbling, “It doesn’t take five minutes at all. It takes three hours and five minutes. No, six hours and five minutes. Three hours up and three hours back. Plus the two hours we wasted hunting for the damned place.”

She looked up from her prayer and glowered at him, and he stopped talking.

He stared down at the ground, bored. And he began to fidget, rocking nervously back and forth with his hands in his pockets. Barbara continued to pray, taking unnecessarily long it seemed to him. And his eyes began to wander, looking all around, staring into the darkness at the shapes and shadows in the cemetery. Because of the darkness, fewer of the tombstones were visible and there seemed to be not so many of them; only the larger ones could be seen clearly. And the sounds of the night seemed louder, because of the absence of human voices. Johnny stared into the darkness.

In the distance, a strange moving shadow appeared almost as a huddled figure moving among the graves.

Probably the caretaker or a late mourner, Johnny thought, and he glanced nervously at his watch. “C’mon, Barb, church was this morning,” he said, in an annoyed tone. But Barbara ignored him and continued her prayer, as if she was determined to drag it out as long as possible just to aggravate him.

Johnny lit a cigarette, idly exhaled the first puff of smoke, and looked around again.

There was definitely someone in the distance, moving among the graves, Johnny squinted, but it was too dark to make out anything but an indistinct shape that more often than not blurred and merged with the shape of trees and tombstones as it advanced slowly through the graveyard.

Johnny turned to his sister and started to say something but she made the sign of the cross and stood up, ready to leave. She turned from the grave in silence, and they both started to walk slowly away, Johnny smoking and kicking at small stones as he ambled along.

“Praying is for church,” he said flatly.

“Church would do you some good,” Barbara told him. “You’re turning into a heathen.”

“Well, Grandpa told me I was damned to hell. Remember? Right here—I jumped out at you from behind that tree. Grandpa got all shook up and told me I gone be demn to yell!”

Johnny laughed.

“You used to be so scared here,” he said, devilishly.

“Remember? Right here I jumped out from behind that tree at you.”

“Johnny!” Barbara said, with annoyance. And she smiled to show him he was not frightening her, but she knew it was too dark for him to see the smile anyway.

“I think you’re still afraid,” he persisted. “I think you’re afraid of the people in their graves. The dead people. What if they came out of their graves after you Barbara? What would you do? Run? Pray?”

He turned around and leered at her, as though he was about to pounce.

“Johnny, stop!”

“You’re still afraid.”

“No!”

“You’re afraid of the dead people!”

“Stop, Johnny!”

“They’re coming out of their graves, Barbara! Look! Here comes one of them now!”

He pointed toward the huddled figure which had been moving among the graves. The caretaker, or whoever it was, stopped and appeared to be looking in their direction, but it was too dark to really tell.

“He’s coming to get you, Barbara! He’s dead! And he’s going to get you.”

“Johnny, stop—he’ll hear you—you’re ignorant.”

But Johnny ran away from her and hid behind a tree.

“Johnny, you—” she began, but in her embarrassment she cut herself short and looked down at the ground as the moving figure in the distance slowly approached her and it became obvious that their paths were going to intersect.

It seemed strange to her that someone other than she or her brother would be in the cemetery at such an odd hour.

Probably either a mourner or a caretaker.

She looked up and smiled to say hello.