Month: May 2019

Mr. Braithwaite had paid for a nice plot looking out over a bend in the river where the sun exploded over the pines in a shower of pinks and reds in the evenings. We sat off a ways in the truck under the big oak in the center of the cemetery. It was a hot day in the middle of August and a warm breeze came through the windows, carrying the sound of the words being spoken over the deceased.

On most days I didn’t partake, and rare was the day Santiago offered, but I cracked a Bud from his cooler, trying anything to beat the heat. Santiago had pulled a small bottle of Jack from his hip pocket and was a quarter of the way down before I realized it was there. He was mumbling to himself, though I couldn’t make out the words. 

“How much do you think a plot like that costs?” I asked to break up the silence.

“What?”

“How much do you think Ol’ Man Braithwaite paid for the plot for Billy?”

“Who cares?”

“How much are any of these plots?”

“No clue.”

“You’ve worked here 20 years and you don’t know how much the plots cost? That’s crazy.”

“I just bury ‘em. I don’t worry about how much it cost them to get here.”

“It’s a nice spot,” I said, oblivious to the dark mask falling over Santiago’s face and the dark clouds forming on the horizon.

“Nicer than the bastard deserves,” Santiago replied, taking a long pull from the bottle.

“Not as big a turnout as I would have thought.” A small crowd of white-haired men and women were gathered around the plot. 

“More than the weasel deserved,” said Santiago, picking up on a certain refrain, “he deserved to keep living, keep dealing with whatever brought him to his end, short of that, he deserved to stay in that tree and have the crows pluck out his eyes while he rotted.”

I laughed, thinking Santiago was making one of his crude jokes or was just irritable due to the heat.

“I wish they’d move it along and get the hell out of here,” he stormed after another pull on the bottle, “don’t they know people have work to do?”

I was about to answer, but he spoke again, “no, they don’t give a good god damn about other people’s work, so long as they get what they want. They just take and take, damn the consequences.

“And that’s what their kids see – them just takin’ and takin’ – and so they think that’s the way of the world. They think it’s okay to just take what they want, like they’re owed because they were brought up in privilege. They don’t care who or what they hurt. They just want what they believe is there’s, like it’s some sort of divine right.”

A low rumble of thunder rolled across the Melanski, punctuating his words. A crack of lightning struck hard and fast over the river sending the gathered assembly scurrying to their cars.

As they slammed their car doors and scrambled to get their windows up, a wall of water worked its way up from the southwest corner of the cemetery. I hurried to roll up my window as the rain began to rattle off the roof of the truck and another roll of thunder shook the air. Santiago made no move to roll up his window, instead allowing the pellets of water to explode off his window into the cab. He was so deep within the depths of the darkness covering his face he didn’t notice.

The break lights of the last car of mourners had faded into the distance when Santiago turned the key in the ignition. The truck coughed to life, lights fluttering on to cut through the artificial darkness of the afternoon storm. 

Santiago put the truck in gear and sent us crawling down the roadway toward Billy Braithwaite’s final resting place. His knuckles were white on the wheel. A beet red coloring had replaced the deep tan on his face and the fury that sat there caused me to inch closer to the door on my side of the cab.

Lightning continued to flash and the bursts of thunder were so loud and violent they shook the truck as we inched towards the plot. Far off to the west, the sky was becoming lighter.

Santiago put the truck in park as the rain continued to pound the truck’s roof. He opened his door and got out as another burst of thunder rolled across the cemetery.

“What are you doing?”

“A burial.”

“But the thunder? The lightning?”

“It’ll pass by soon enough.”

“Why not wait?”

“You can wait. I have work to do.”

“But it’s not safe.”

“Safe enough.”

“Santiago…”

“Goddammit, I’m going to bury this bastard right here, right now. I can’t wait another goddamn minute. I want him in the ground. I want this over with. Sit in the goddamn truck if you don’t want to help or if you’re afraid. It doesn’t matter to me. I don’t care. I’m burying this bastard.” 

In the years I had known him, these were the harshest words this harshest of men had ever spoken to me. I slumped from the truck in fear and shame. In an instant the rain had soaked me to the skin. My toes swam in my boots as I grabbed a shovel and walked through the puddles to the mound of muddy dirt that awaited us.

As the rain subsided and the thunder faded to the distance, a soft light hung in the cool air. Rivulets of water ran from the top of the dirt pile and poured down along the walls of the grave to form a thin moat that glistened in the dark around the concrete vault.

I’ve never seen someone approach a job with the fury with which Santiago attacked the pile of dirt and the burying of Billy Braithwaite. He tore into the pile, tossing shovelful after angry shovelful into the hole. I attempted to assist but found I was more liable to get hurt then I was to be of any assistance. 

There was a possessiveness to Santiago’s work, as though he had to be the one to bury Billy. I wondered if it wasn’t unlike the way Pap had been when he buried Gram. Though I doubted there was any love lost between Santiago and Billy.

Santiago fell into a fast angry rhythm: shovel into the pile, life shovel, throw dirt, curse, spit into the grave, shovel into the pile, lift shovel, throw dirt, curse, spit into the grave. The added weight of the rainwater, nor the mud his boots sank into did a thing to slow his fury.

When it was time to tamp down the sides, to pack the dirt in around the vault, Santiago jumped down on top of the concrete. In a normal burial, we worked from the edges of the hole out of an unspoken respect (or fear) of the dead. I wasn’t that comfortable walking on top of the plots once we’d put the sod back on, but I had an active imagination.

Santiago had no problem stomping on the dirt and sod and spitting during a normal burial. I don’t think he ever thought about respecting the dead, but he still didn’t walk on the vault before it was covered.

My first week working in the cemetery I’d had to lie face down on a vault because I’d knocked in a piece of wood the man who lowered the vault into the grave was using to stage his equipment. When the wood had fallen in, I’d looked up at Pap who’d give me a look that said, “it has to come out, and I’m not getting it.” So there I was, lying facedown on top of a dead body. It remains the creepiest experience of my life.

When Pap told Santiago about it later, he’d laughed the hardest I’d ever seen a person laugh. I’d never seen him laugh before. It was odd, but the act of making this unhappy man laugh took the edge off my embarrassment and I was rather pleased with myself.

There was no laughter as Santiago stormed around on top of Billy Braithwaite’s vault slamming the piece of wood we used to press down the sides with a vigorous rage. When he was satisfied, he jumped from the hole and took to the pile again with same rhythmic assault: shovel into the pile, life shovel, throw dirt, curse, spit into the grave, shovel into the pile, lift shovel, throw dirt, curse, spit into the grave.

When the level of dirt reached a particular height, he jumped back on top of the vault and tamped the edges again. The furious power of the strokes was unbelievable in someone so small.

When the edges were packed in he threw the wood tool to the edge of the hole and moved his hands toward the front of his pants.

“Santiago – “ I started, but my words were cut off by the black look he gave over his shoulder at the sound of my voice. He pulled the bottle of Jack from his pocket, reared his head back and took a huge slug as he pissed on Billy Braithwaite’s vault.

I stood paralyzed, unable and unsure of what to do and what I was seeing. When he finished, he took another quick pull on the bottle, adjusted himself, jumped out of the hole and fell back into the rhythm: shovel into the pile, life shovel, throw dirt, curse, spit into the grave, shovel into the pile, lift shovel, throw dirt, curse, spit into the grave.

I walked over to the truck and took out a Bud and watched him work. He stormed through the rest of the job in a white-hot fury, stomping the dirt on top of the hole to pack it in, beating at the pile until it was gone. He mumbled to himself, but I didn’t try to make out the words. Still stunned in the face of a rage I didn’t understand, I leaned against the truck and sipped my beer. 

As the light began to fade from the day, he placed the last pieces of sod. He pressed them into place with his boots in angry authority. He dropped the shovels and tamping stick in the bed of the truck. 

Coming around to the front of the truck he reached in and took a beer from his cooler. He popped it open and drained it. He reached for another and said, “nothing so good as a beer after a piece of good hard work.”

I didn’t respond. I didn’t know what to say. He wasn’t waiting for a response. He cracked and drained the second beer, then took a pull from the bottle of Jack before opening a third.

He carried the third over to the Braithwaite plot and rested it on the headstone. With his back to me, he pissed on the stone and surrounding flowers. After having watched him piss on the vault, I suppose I shouldn’t have been as surprised, or repulsed, as I was by his pissing on the stone.

When he returned to the truck, he answered the disgusted look on my face by finishing his beer and saying, “it keeps the slugs off.” He smiled. 

Then he climbed into the truck, motioned for me to do the same, and we drove back up to the shed. We didn’t speak again on this earth.

The summer I was 18 and getting ready to head off to college we buried Billy Braithwaite, the son of Will Braithwaite, the same Will Braithwaite who had denied Santiago’s father a loan to keep the mills going. Pap had passed not too long before. I’m sure he would have found some irony in the situation with Santiago burying the son of the man who’d helped to kill his father; depending on which form of the legend you believed.

Billy Braithwaite was in his late 30s at the time of his death, close in age to Santiago Holmes. The two were a year apart at Berwick High School, but traveled in similar social circles due to their fathers’ respective successes. For a time they had been friends, as much as anyone was anyone else’s friend at Berwick High.

When the Holmes Mills began to fail, the friendship had died with it. Billy began to lead the jeers at Santiago from their peer group. When he was home from college, he’d make a point of driving through the cemetery with a group of his friends to taunt Santiago.

Billy followed his father into the banking business and became the youngest vice president in the history of the Berwick Savings and Loan. He became fat on success and evenings spent drinking 100-year-old scotch at the Tavern. He never married, which folks about town took as the reason for the uneasy irritability that was a dark cloud over his shoulder. 

Why such a successful son of Berwick never married was a mystery to everyone, and was to remain one in perpetuity when he was found hanging from a sturdy oak behind the Tavern.

I was still young enough I didn’t understand suicide. I couldn’t understand why people wouldn’t want to be alive. I hadn’t been hurt by anything or anyone yet. I hadn’t felt the weight of life crushing my shoulders, people’s expectations, and my own hadn’t broken me. 

I wasn’t an insider, or a popular kid, in high school, but I wasn’t on the outside either. I missed the cruelty of youth. A loving mother and a general sense of obliviousness protected me from many harsh truths.

I understand much better now we all have our ghosts and our burdens. Desires and needs to fit in. Events and memories we carry with us. Responsibilities. The past. The future. Chemical imbalances. Sometimes it is all too heavy. It is too much, and we have no one to turn to in our perceived shame or despair or hopelessness or need.

I thought about it once, during a darker part of my life, when I couldn’t see a way out. I was directionless and low. Everything I touched or did felt washed in blackness. It was the fear of it that stopped me. I didn’t have the courage to go through with it. Or maybe I had the courage to keep on living in the face of the blackness. The calls with my mother, and a few good friends in the City were the light I clung to.

When I was 18, I didn’t understand what any of it meant, so I took a Santiago Holmes-esque approach to the burial: everyone has their time and this was just another body. At that point, I ‘d buried quite a few townspeople; some I’d known better than others, and had developed the hard shell you needed to not feel for each dead soul.

Santiago didn’t care who was being buried, he gave the same indifference to each burial. He did care the job was done right. That made his rage at the burial of Billy Braithwaite so difficult to understand.

That day all those years ago had stung me so much, I reverted back to seeing him as much of Berwick did: the dirty man who worked for Pap in the cemetery. He was mean and ornery, though to me, he had seemed to soften over the years, until that last day.

As a child I was scared of him. Ma or Gram would have him over for Sunday dinner, and I was always tense throughout. I knew what the kids at school said about him. Those words stuck to my brain like the dirt clung to him no matter how hard he tried to clean himself up.

More often than not he’d had so much to drink he couldn’t string clear sentences together. His efforts at civility ended in a slurred jumble that furthered my imagination’s opinion he was some type of ogre. He was never able to leave the dark cloud of hate at the door. It hovered above his head throughout the meal. He seemed so unhappy. I don’t know why they invited him.

On the rare occasions I put my old fears and fresher resentments aside and remembered to ask, Ma would give small updates on his condition. For quite a while he was able to go on working at the cemetery. 

“You wouldn’t know he was sick. He’s still working seven days a week. As he says, ‘people keep needing to be planted, god knows they won’t stop for me.’ He also mutters something to the affect of joining them soon enough. Have I told you he’s taken to calling it the ‘bone orchard?’

“I don’t think anyone in Berwick knows about his condition, and if they do, they don’t care a hoot. Did you know the cemetery committee hasn’t let him hire a helper in all the years since Pap passed? Incredible.

“I think there was some sort of pressure from one of those old coots who used to drink at the Tavern who never forgave Santiago for being a Holmes. These grudges are so foolish, as though one person, or one family could be responsible for the death of those mills. It was a collective effort by the whole town. No one shirks the blame. I’m sure there is something every last one of us could have done to keep them running.”

Another time when I asked, when he was further along, she said, “I’ve known a few people from work who’ve gotten cancer or been dealt other bad health hands, and not a one of them have reacted the way Santiago has. A few have jumped in and said, ‘hey, I’m going to fight this,’ but most have found themselves victims of some power not their own. They’ve blamed everyone and everything but themselves.

“Santiago has done neither. He’s just accepted it and tried to make some sore of peace with it. I think he feels guilty for the way he’s handled some parts of his life – though god knows if the people of Berwick didn’t push him to the edge. I think his guilt is driven by loneliness, and now, faced with the end, he’s alone and I think he has regrets. Of course, he never says it in so many words, but it’s in there when we talk, hidden below the surface.”

At my mumbled surprise over the mention of their talking my mother laughed, “you didn’t think I came down here everyday and puttered around without speaking to the man? No, I talk to him.

“I know you two had a falling out, but I don’t wonder if you were being too sensitive. Santiago’s bark was always so much worse than his bite. It was the drink. I tried to get him to stop, or relax it some, but I don’t think he could have lived with the hate in his life without it. I never quite understood if it was the hate that fueled the drinking or vice versa, but the drinking has won out and will rule this last act of his life.

“You’d think he might have stopped drinking, but he hasn’t. He knows the diagnosis and knows it’s killing him, but he’s the same old Santiago; ‘live by the sword, die by the sword’ he says to me when I chastise him at the end of each evening. 

“You won’t believe this, but he has almost an embarrassed smile when he says it. It’s almost as if he knows how ridiculous the sentiment is, though I can’t argue the position with him. It is how he lived his entire life, right on the knife-edge. If he hadn’t fought back against them…

“But he did, and that’s what has kept him alone,” the sadness in her voice that day almost broke my heart.

When Santiago Holmes passed, two years after his diagnosis, Ma called me.

“He was stubborn until the end,” she said, “he kept working right up until his body gave out. They found him besides a push mower on top of the hill you used to hate mowing. He had a good view of the entire place at the end. For some reason, it comforts me to know that.”

“He was a hard worker,” was the reply I found, “despite the beer, which might have made the work he did get done all the more impressive.”

“He was more than that. He was a good man. Misunderstood by most, but a good man all the same. I learned a lot from him.”

“That’s good Ma,” I replied, the disbelief in my voice – even as a middle-aged man – was the unspoken thought what could you learn from a drunk, aside from how to drink, or the numerous reasons to never take up the habit.

“You don’t give him enough credit. You think he was a dirty drunk who wasn’t worth a spare thought.”

Mother’s have a particular talent for reading their children’s minds, the shock at which dulled my protest and Ma was not to be slowed.

“You didn’t see the beauty of the man, fighting his own David vs. Goliath styled battle against a town pre-programmed to hate him. Did you know there were teenagers in this town, young ones, 13, 14-years-old who would scream hate at him in the streets? What did these kids know about the name Holmes? No one even calls them the Holmes Mills anymore. And these kids, how have they been affected? It wasn’t their parents who worked in the mills. Their parents were just starting to have their own thoughts when the mills closed for good.

“Maybe their grandparents were affected, but then they carried that ridiculous hatred down through the generations, passing it to their children, who passed it on to their children. Not one of those generations stopped to say, ‘wait a minute, what did this family do to me? Who were the Holmes’s? What did this guy who works in the cemetery do to me?

“No one in this town has ever asked that question. So it is no surprise that right up until the end, Santiago raged back at them. Who can blame him?”

“The people of Berwick?” I offered in crude jest.

“Right, but don’t you think , if they’re going to spit on someone because of their name, they should know something about that name? The Holmes family was not just the one in charge when the mills shut down. They also opened them and kept them running for over 150 years, providing a wonderful living for all these angry children’s ancestors. Why is it that history, which also didn’t affect them, isn’t remembered and taken into consideration?”

“I don’t know Ma.”

“It’s the epidemic of our time, this lack of touch with the past. It’s a shame that poor man had to stand on his own in the face of such senseless stupidity.”

I’d never heard this type of fire in my mother’s voice. I was conditioned to hear only weariness. I should have taken a hint from this new tone and not asked why he mattered so much to her.

“Ma, I get that he’s died and it’s sad, and I know it was awful how everyone in Berwick treated him, but he wasn’t the most pleasant guy. I know, you’ve outlined why we shouldn’t blame him for that, but don’t you think if he’d tried a little harder things might have been better for him?

“I mean, putting aside our differences, he was good to me when I was younger, but I’m not broken up about his death. He drank like a fish. It was only a matter of time before his liver gave up the fight. I dunno, he had a good run, but it was like he used to say, ‘we all gotta die at some point.’ So I don’t quite understand why he means so much to you.”

I could her gather herself on the other end of the phone, “I was never as good to him as I should have been. I tried so hard, but I felt the stupid pressure of the town’s gaze. I wish I’d been more like Pap and not give a shit what they thought of me, but I wasn’t.

“Now, I find I was too late in my kindness. By the time I had the courage to stand up to the town and stand beside him, I had run away and Santiago was dying.

“I learned so much from his death. This hard, undignified man approached it with such grace. Yes, he was bitter for a time, but in the last six months, he had found peace with the inevitability of the outcome.

“I don’t know if I could have approached death in the same way without seeing him do it first. Now I’ll have a better idea how.”

“Ma, you still haven’t answered the question: why did he matter so much to you?”

She sighed through the phone, “Santiago Holmes saved my life. Come up for the funeral and I’ll tell you how.