The Mourner's Cradle: A Widow’s Journey

1979

CEMETERY WHISPERS

Even before the calamity that shook the city to its deepest foundations, St. Charles, a place of some charm and innocence during the late seventies, held its traces of dark history and secrets. As St. Charles expanded, becoming more actual city than town, its shadows subsisted. With industry and developments accelerating the city’s way of life, many of the old tales, such as those surrounding Marion Cemetery, were forgotten by most.

“Be careful around Marion Cemetery,” a few of the city’s fading elderly used to say to their children. “Or the shadows might carry you away.”

Dominguez remembered. Having seen almost a full century, he was a man of many secrets. Though his frame was frail and his mind aged, he remembered much.

As the cemetery’s solitary gravedigger, Dominguez often strolled its outer perimeter during the dark hours. In his way, he walked the boundary of darkness and light.

His occasional whispering to the shadows punctured the silence, for two dark forms followed him closely.

Most other visitors to Marion Cemetery never saw the old whispering man with the deep-red ruby ring on his right hand. Some who came during the dark early hours heard his whispering, even if they did not see the man himself, and Lucy Newcomb was one such visitor.

On an autumn night of 1979, she approached a grave—a flat stone set in the dark-brown soil and surrounded by dried leaves that crunched with her approach. Dressed in a black coat with brass buttons, she came forward with a bouquet of sunflowers and daisies and laid them on the grave etched Newcomb.

The plain gray stone suited her aunt, simple in manner but kind at heart and gone for a year past.

Between the crunching leaves and the soft-blowing breeze, Lucy barely heard the whispering. She released the bouquet onto the stone and stood up straight. Anxious, she glanced around.

“Hello?” Lucy called, but the voice she thoughtshe had heard went silent.

She looked at her aunt’s grave again, then back to the darkness. Beyond a freshly-dug grave, she could discern nothing.

She made for the cemetery’s black iron gates. Once past the gates and to the road which ran beside them, she hurried to the black Mercedes-Benz at the curb. She drove away, making only one more stop before leaving St. Charles.

Half an hour later, she sat in one of the small bars that clustered Candle Square. She didn’t like the look of the place, but she wanted a drink. One drink turned into two. She couldn’t shake the thoughts of the cemetery from her mind.

“Excuse me,” she said to the gray-haired man behind the bar. He paused in the midst of wiping off a section of the bar with a white towel.

“Yes, miss?”

“What do you know about Marion Cemetery?” she asked him.

“What do you want to know? It’s an old cemetery, the oldest in St. Charles. Lots of history in that place.”

“Sure, there’s history,” said another man sitting two stools away from Lucy. “It’s a cemetery.” The man sipped his gin and tonic and added, “Those people in the ground, they’re history.”

The man had been sitting there for the past ten minutes, smoking his cigarette and drinking his drink beneath his brown mustache. A name tag pinned to the man’s blue-collared shirt read Mike. Lucy glanced at him but didn’t respond.

She looked back at the bartender. “I think I heard a voice there tonight. Someone whispering.”

The bartender gave a slight nod, thinking. “You ought to be careful,” he said. “You never know who might be wandering around in the cemetery at night.” He finished wiping down the bar and moved along to another waiting customer at the opposite end.

As Lucy lifted her second Singapore Sling to her lips, she realized to her further discomfort that Mike still stared at her.

“So what did they say?” Mike asked.

“It was almost like he was watching me, whoever he was,” Lucy said without looking up. “He was saying something like, ‘Look at her, look how she breathes. She’s young. She probably has a healthy young heart, doesn’t she?’”

“That’s weird.” Mike’s gaze dipped toward the scuffed brown surface of the bar. He cracked open a couple of peanuts and popped them into his mouth.

“It was creepy.” Lucy went back to her drink.

“Then what?”

“Nothing. I left after that.”

Mike lit another cigarette. “It kind of sounds like a bunch of bullshit to me.”

“How would you know?” Lucy exclaimed. “You weren’t even there.”

Mike didn’t reply this time, already having lost interest. He finished his drink and went back to smoking.

Lucy gathered her things, paid her tab, and walked out. She left St. Charles soon afterward to move on with her life elsewhere. Likewise, the city went on without her.