The Deed (21 page)

MARY ELIZABETH HAANSVOORT
1720–1734
CHYLDE IS TAKEN TOO SOON FROM US
BUT THE STAR OF HER LYFE LIVES ON
“WHEN PRIDE COMES, THEN COMES DISGRACE
BUT WITH HUMILITY COMES WISDOM”

“Seventeen-twenty,” Jason marveled, grinning from ear to ear and thinking giddily that, come what may, this was already one of the most interesting forks his life had ever taken.

“Fourteen years old,” Amanda noted quietly. “Poor kid. Doesn’t say how she died.”

“Could have been just about anything,” mused Jason. “Did you catch all that cholera back there?”

“Let’s hope not,” she quipped.

As Jason glanced around at nearby stones, hoping to luck into another big find, Amanda began clearing away the beard of grass at the base of the stone, revealing the bottom half of a decorative pattern the growth had covered up. It seemed a small, inscrutable act of devotion.

“
Here
we go,” she said excitedly, and began feverishly tearing out clumps of the grass. Jason frowned, not understanding…then caught a glimpse of lettering and realized what she was up to. He knelt by her side to help, and in less than a minute, they’d unveiled a small motto at the base of the stone that read:

WHAT PROVIDENCE HATH GRANTED
LET CHARITY NEVER FORGET

“Cool,” said Jason, scribbling down the words. “Remind me to leave a dollar in the collection plate.”

“You can build her a damn cathedral, if we find that deed,” replied Amanda.

Elated, they dusted themselves off and continued their search, following the perimeter fence, which here struck back sharply toward the center of the graveyard. Hopes of finding similar stones nearby faded quickly, and Jason had walked almost twenty yards, squinting into the sun, already starting to decline over the chapel, before he realized that Amanda was no longer next to him. Turning, he found her walking back toward Mary Elizabeth’s grave again, running her hands along the fence and peering into the thick wall of undergrowth that pressed up against it.

“What is it?” Jason called out, but she ignored him. He began walking toward her, frowning.

“The fence…,” she said enigmatically as he approached, without turning to face him. “It’s…different.”

“Yeah, it kind of angles in here,” he said, not comprehending. “I noticed that. We—”

“No, it’s a different
fence,
” she clarified, pointing. “Look.”

Still black and flaking with rust, and nearly obscured by the dark wall of vines and brush squeezing through from the other side, the fence here, it was obvious on a closer look, was of a much more basic, unadorned design than the one they’d been following.

“Hey, you’re right,” he said, running a cautious thumb along a whorl of flaking iron. “Interesting.”

Her smile broadened. “No, think about it. They wouldn’t just change the style of fence in the middle of the run. This,” she explained, pointing into the hedge, “isn’t the perimeter anymore. Look—the fence angles straight in here, then takes a right and continues for a while, then cuts back to the outside. Right?”

Jason nodded, starting to comprehend.

“I’ll bet you anything,” she continued, “if you walk around the outside of this graveyard, you’ll see a smooth, unbroken circle. There’s a
space
in there, Jason.”

He was nodding. “So what do you think it—”

“I
know
what it is,” she interrupted. “It’s another graveyard.”

A quick tour seemed to buttress Amanda’s theory. The simpler design continued for all three legs of the square that protruded into the graveyard, reverting to the older style when it rejoined the “normal” circle of the perimeter, after describing an area of perhaps a half acre. But they never came across an obvious entrance, and the wall of brush was too thick at all points for a visual confirmation that there was, indeed, another section of graveyard within.

“Maybe you access it from the exterior,” said Jason.

“One way to find out,” said Amanda, striking off immediately for the brick cottage that now stood directly between themselves and the graveyard’s entrance.

He glanced over his notes as they walked, beginning to realize the enormity of attempting to tie all the names together into a neat tree. Relationships between the deceased were almost never stated on the stones. In most cases, all they’d have to go on were birth and death dates, enough to sort people into rough generations, but not to establish lines of paternity. This was going to be like trying to reassemble a living tree from a pile of firewood.

“Listen,” Amanda whispered, laying a hand on his arm, but he’d already heard it, the muted sound of a radio. Turning in the direction of the source, they spied, a hundred feet away or so, a small mound of freshly dug earth keeping watch over an open grave. He looked at Amanda, who shrugged, and together they silently walked toward the sound.

“Is that Korn?” Amanda whispered.

Six feet under, a teenage local yokel sat against one wall of the new grave, paperback novel spread open on his lap, the headset of a Sony Discman plugged into his ears. The kid’s face was knotted into a menacing frown, and his head rocked back and forth as his lips angrily mouthed the words. A grimy hand turned the page of the book. White-boy dreadlocks oozed out beneath a green John Deere baseball cap; a tattoo on his right arm read simply, “Cop Killer.”

Jason and Amanda, peering down into the open grave, were almost overcome with mirth. “This guy’s probably the mayor,” whispered Jason, plucking the shovel from the pile outside the grave. “Let’s bury him.”

“Don’t!” hissed Amanda, laughing.

Jason replaced the shovel with a mock-penitent look and stooped down. Slowly, he reached into the grave with one hand and waved his fingers, hoping to get the kid’s attention without startling him.

The kid simply looked up and pulled the headphones off casually. “Yo,” he said neutrally, pressing the stop button on the tape.

“Howdy,” said Jason. “You work here?”

The kid nodded.

“We were wondering,” said Amanda, “if you could tell us how to get into the old graveyard in the middle, there.”

The kid cocked one eyebrow and considered this for a moment. “Whoa,” he said. “That’s a new one. Sure thing.”

Whistling, the kid led them to a shed, about the size of a small garage, which buttressed one side of the cottage. Inside, the sunlight filtered through a thin, corrugated Fiberglas ceiling, giving everything a hot, but not unpleasant, yellow-green glow. The space was cluttered with mowing and weeding equipment, shelves bursting with soils and fertilizers and hand tools, and a solid-looking white pine workbench, where a dusty vise eternally held an ax handle between its jaws. On the pegboard behind hung dozens of lawn-care implements and various other knickknacks—including, disconcertingly, a human skull.

“It’s not real,” said the kid with a cough, following Jason’s eyes. “I mean, it’s
real,
” he corrected, elongating the word and opening his hands as if holding the object in question. “But it’s not…a
bone.
You know?”

Amanda suppressed a giggle, and the kid smiled at her in a shyly flirtatious kind of way. “Well, anyway, it’s in here somewheres,” he said, hiking up his overloose jeans and fishing around in a junk drawer at the bench.

Five minutes later they were following the kid back toward the mysterious old fence, where he began pulling aside vines with agonizing lassitude. A few false starts later, he unveiled a well-camouflaged gate bound by a single Master padlock. Into this he pressed a tiny brass key, and Jason held his breath.

The effort was painful to watch; tendons on the kid’s skinny arms stood out like cables as he tried in vain to twist the key in the lock. Minute after minute dripped slowly by.

“Here, can I try?” said Jason desperately. After first glancing around as if unsure he wasn’t breaking some law, the teen yielded the key with a shrug, and Jason wiggled it around in the lock. On the third turn, something clicked.

“Cool,” pronounced the kid.

With a satisfying creak, and a little more vine-yanking, the door was freed, and swung inward a foot or so into the hedge, just enough to squeeze through.

“Cool,” the kid reiterated. “You can just drop the key back on the bench when you’re done.”

But they were already inside.

Contrary to all expectations of cobwebby decay, the hidden yard beyond the hedgerow was literally teeming with life. The eight-foot hedges that had blocked their view from the outside rose up on all sides like the walls of an enormous vault, enclosing a buzzing, chirping world. The wild grass was easily knee high, and all kinds of bushes, vines, and even trees broke through the surface to rise even higher. Birds and butterflies flitted easily around the chamber; as Jason stared openmouthed, a flotilla of enormous bumblebees chugged improbably through the air before him, bloated little lords trotting around through the rarefied air of their private sanctum.

“Whoa,” said Jason, spellbound. He glanced sideways to see Amanda positively transfixed with wonder.

“It’s a secret garden,” she said breathlessly.

“Well, of
dead bodies,
” he reminded her, and regretted it instantly when she scowled in reply and bent to start examining stones.

It was easy to sneer at her childlike credulousness, but Jason had to admit he’d never have discovered this inner space without her. Apart from his grandmother, who’d probably never even leave her hometown again, he was perhaps the last person on earth for whom this place held any meaning, and he would have walked right by it if not for Amanda’s wishful thinking. Did she discover this graveyard, or did she in some sense create it? Was she actually able to make a more interesting world for herself through sheer force of will?

“Another old-timer!” she said excitedly, just a few feet away.

They ultimately found so many Haansvoort stones in the inner yard that they decided to record all the names, on the principle that since this was obviously a private graveyard, every stone was likely to have some connection that might prove useful.

“Do you think anybody knows they’ve got graves from the mid-1600s in here?” said Jason, when they were closing in on the last few spots. “This ought to be on the National Register of Historic Places, or something.”

“Well, here’s my question,” said Amanda. “How come the other Haansvoort grave isn’t in here, too?”