Chapter Text
People want easily digestible things: a good story on the cover of a magazine, a sketchy book everyone hushes about in the library and gives judging looks when someone takes it from the shelves, a social media star everyone follows but no one admits to it. All that seems bright and light, all that is just for a laugh, simple entertainment with a pinch of drama. Realising people are dumb and not caring, just feeding into their stupidity for amusement. To mock and ridicule. That’s what people are looking for – meaningless things, in most cases.
Death is nothing like that.
White roses on a freshly carved coffin. The smell of a bunch of people gathering to share their sorrow – that’s fake as well, for the gathering itself is fake, and they smell of lies and freshly sprayed cologne, fancy new clothes, the newcoming winter knocks on the door of the mortuary, and bouquets and wreaths, interestingly those do not smell at all, but the people, oh, the people, the terrible, the horrible, the hypocrite, who never knew the dead and now are here mourning someone they never truly met, they smell of cavities and mint gums and hand sanitizer. The music is disastrous. It’s Let it go of Disney’s Frozen, and All of me by John Legend, she never liked the film, she never liked the singer, but at a small town’s cemetery what else would you expect? Lucky they could only fit so many people in. Though he doesn’t understand why any of them would come. Yes, she was loved. No, they did not know her.
And maybe that’s the thing: when you don’t know somebody, how could you love them? And isn’t mourning the hurt love leaves behind? Not that he has much experience except for a few houseplants he accidentally killed off by forgetting to water them. But then it starts and he has to pay attention to the priest he most definitely doesn't want here.
Sitting first row is cruel. Listening to his sister give a speech is a blur. Lifting the coffin is the hardest thing he ever did in his short life of 28 years. Alright. 27 and a half. A bit more.
Good thing the grave is further away, so they only carry the coffin to a little van. An older man sits in, turns on the engine and with the speed of a turtle the mourners now walk after the car. It’s unreal how the coffin is lowered to the ground, how the single flowers are let down, holy water is sprinkled, in every direction, a last prayer said, then it’s burying. He should throw a handful of dirt. He feels nothing.
Not rage. Not sadness. Not even numbness everyone says you should feel at first. Just air is like honey in his lungs: it’s not sweet but sticky and unbearable – other than this, not a thing, and he is not scared. He is not desperate. He just doesn’t get it.
They go home in silence while the fake bunch stays to discuss the ‘bright and light’, the ‘just for a laugh’, the ‘simple entertainment with a pinch of drama’. What a drama – a life is lost. A mother. A wife. A leader. A new one will come for most, but for the few, for the ones who knew her, nothing will be able to fill the hole. Now that’s important. And it shouldn’t be the subject of disaster tourism, yet, it’s the most visited sight of all.
***
Digging up carrots in his jewelry box of a garden has never brought Henry so much peace. At 28, he never would have thought this is exactly what he needs: and a little Keats, a bit of Poe, a grain of Blake, occasional T. S. Elliot, a bunch of carrots, clusters of parsley, and lettuce and spinach. He stretches with a sigh and looks up the sky that’s already pinking with the near of twilight. Banging on the front door.
He dusts off his hands, grabs the basket of vegetables and goes inside the little house. He leaves the basket on the kitchen counter. Inside the cold is getting crispy – the walls are not heating up anymore like in the summer – he takes a mental note to turn up the thermostat, though he can’t help but enjoy the England-like weather for at last. A bit of home. Texas is burning hot most of the year.
At the door, a disshevelled man, darker skin, cigarette between his chapped lips, in style with a spade that’s handle is half broken. Henry smiles. By now he knows every worker their family lives including. Eustace’s shift is almost over for today, that’s why he must be here. A wife and three cats are waiting for him to spend the weekend with, and the new grandson they’re having for the first time at theirs after being born.
“You lost the storage key again, didn’t you?” he asks, leaning to the doorframe. Eustace shakes his head.
“No, son.” He’s chewing on a gum, the Texas drawl Henry adores even after three years spent here, more conspicuous. “That boy done showed up again.”
Henry nods. “Off you go. I’ll deal with him.”
“Mighty kind of ya!” And he disappears in the dusk whistling a tune Henry’s heard before but can not recognize.
He turns back to the house to grab the keys and a flashlight. If the boy – the man – is the same one that keeps coming by every day for weeks, it’s gonna be a long walk through the cemetery to reach the parcel he usually wanders around.
It’s Friday. He never stayed this late on a Friday before. And if he did, he probably doesn’t know that November means new and shorter opening hours.
Henry takes the desire path between the graves – he’s learned that people go for efficiency for they don’t want to spend more time in here than needed. Unlike most, he loves taking a walk in the cemetery. He feeds the strays, leaves poems in the most visited places, keeps note of graves not taken care of in a while, sometimes cleans a few of them with the help of one of the groundkeepers, Marsha, and checks the fences teenagers just love to jump over and paint obscenities on in summer nights. He’s caught them a couple of times.
Inspiration can be found everywhere in this place. The forgotten graves, the wilted flowers, faded names and crosses and stars, the trees bending in the cooling wind, the last of the birds and bugs bidding farewell to the night. Quiet settles in. The most poetic times are just after and just before light.
Henry turns on the flashlight. He’s here to work now. He can’t wait to get back to the caretaker’s residence he’s grown so fond of he calls home, and brew a cup of tea while the soup on the stove is cooking.
He knows what he’s looking for in the shadows: an admittedly handsome dark haired boy with an infinite amount of sadness in his equally dark eyes, probably in a black leather jacket and a worn bracelet around his left wrist that immediately caught Henry’s eye when he first noticed the new most frequent visitor of the cemetery.
Sure enough, pacing back and forth on the very path Henry’s on, at the second to last parcel, there’s the man, hands buried deep in his pockets, not looking upwards. Henry stops. He’s visibly upset, and Henry’s not sure how to approach him. Bloody hell, he is not just handsome, he is gorgeous. But his expression has less life than the cemetery at night, excluding Henry and the strays, and it honestly breaks Henry’s heart. Henry clears his throat.
“The fuck you want?” grumbles the gorgeous stranger. Still pacing. Still not looking up.
“I’m Henry Fox, the cemetery keeper. I am really sorry to tell you, but we’re closing.”
“When?”
“Like half an hour ago.”
Now he finally looks up. Henry expects a tear, or a frown, but not a smile sickeningly sweet. Not a bit attractive. Intimidating and worrying. Like the man snapped out of whatever state he was in a moment ago. Henry shivers. He never felt the cemetery to be haunted until the moment he looked in his eyes.
“Can I show you to the gates, sir?”
Another smile. Chills down the spine.
“No, thank you, sugar,” the man says, skipping past Henry. He smells of sandalwood and desperation. Henry knows this smell. The stranger adds, way down the trail, “Just call me Alex.”
***
The soup turned out fine, though a bit salty for his taste, and the tea – well, the tea will never be as good as in England, but it was acceptable considering its American origin. And now Henry is up the floor, reading a book, David, his beagle curled up next to him. Yet.
He can’t get Alex out of his mind for a couple hours now – well, at least he can put a name to the face and a face to the visitor. What could he be after? The past three years he hasn’t seen him here – perchance a long lost family member? A highschool friend he can’t let go of? Surely it can’t be someone freshly buried, friends and relatives tend to avoid the cemetery for at least a couple months after the funeral, especially now that winter’s near. People have more important things to tend to than the dead. The most disturbing thing about Alex, however, is not the sudden frequent visiting hours but the lack of life in his eyes, in his movements, as if he was a puppet, moved by god knows what, and this makes Henry doubt his hypothesis after all.
Henry decides to ask after the past funerals from Eustace the next time he’s on shift, he’s been here for the longest, after all, and maybe he’ll ask father Jeff, too, if he knows something about this peculiar boy. Maybe he could leave a poem for him. In secret, of course. He doesn’t like to flaunt his writings, and even if he was – when he will be – a published author, he’d want small signings and little to no fame.
Sometimes it even crosses his mind that he stays here as a clerk, but he knows it’s just temporary. Just until he finishes it.
So he sits to his desk to work, but something entirely different blooms from the ink of his pen, and he doesn’t mind. In the past years he spent in the cemetery he also learned that you gotta let go of the purpose guiding you so the soul can take its place, and it will lead you to places far more magical than you could have ever imagined.
In the morning he decides not to leave him the outcome after all. He doesn’t want to burden him further with his own lack of relief of the past.