By Robert Sanchez

Traffic circled the town common and choked it like a noose. Calvin Smith dodged execution as he crossed the street in front of the Congregational church with its needle spire and its clock that misstated the time as eleven-thirty. By that clock, it was always nearly midnight or nearly noon, depending on the observer's emotional state. In the front yard, a maple tree stood half naked in a sea of gold and crimson leaves whipped into an autumn froth. The pastor's glassed-in marquee shook in the wind as it admonished the faithful to "honor thy father and thy mother."

Calvin's knapsack contained books, spiral-bound notebooks, gym clothes, a couple of college catalogs, and a squashed Devil Dog. It all slowed him down, and he had to get to Town Hall before closing time. He pulled open the heavy door, its handle cold and unwelcoming.

The sign said "Town Clerk, Mildred Cawley." Calvin imagined that it had always been there, without beginning or end, like its owner, like God.

Mrs. Cawley peered at Calvin over her half-rim glasses. "We close in ten minutes. May I help you find something?"

"I have to write a term paper on local history stuff. I heard there was a family that died of smallpox?"

"That's common knowledge," she said, as though only fools and blow-ins shared a common ignorance about the town’s history. But she opened a glassed-in cabinet and pulled out a thick volume that filled the palm of her hand. She wrinkled her nose and sneezed.

"Vital Statistics, 1821-1830," Mrs. Cawley said as she placed the book on the counter in front of Calvin. The pages were yellow and brittle and smelled like his grandmother's Bible, which had her own grandmother's signature inside it.

Calvin flipped pages quickly, hundreds of births and deaths no more than ink on paper. These people’s grandchildren would all be dead by now. "Be careful," Mrs. Cawley said. "We can't have people destroying town property."

"You'd rather do it yourself?" Calvin said. He shrunk at his own words; one day they would do him in. The Town Clerk would refuse to help him or an irate bully would break his neck. "Sorry," he mumbled.

"Blow-ins," she huffed.

He turned the pages more gently, each one a fragile record of births, marriages and deaths. Each name, each date sat there on a page carefully inscribed in ink, the loops and swirls and dots never varying from day to day, from year to year. Perhaps Mildred Cawley recorded them then as now, but with a pen and inkwell instead of an ancient Underwood. Soon he found what he was looking for, two human lives reduced to four lines in a dusty archive:

d. October 15, 1823

Abigail Tyler, age 19

Timothy, age 2 yrs

smallpox

"This is all you have?" Calvin asked. At least his forebears owed him a small account of the family’s suffering. But Mrs. Cawley had better things to do than suffer insolence. He jotted those few lines and thanked her, though she was too busy putting on her coat to reply. Then he crossed the busy main street again, even though cars were driving straight at the late afternoon sun. Count on the drivers to see you and you can be road kill.

His term paper was due next week: write about an event in local history. Try to imagine the feelings of the participants, the significance of the event. In this town, people had mustered troops for a Civil War regiment, built the mills where men and women worked for pennies a day, and dug the Middlesex Canal to feed the engines of industry. Presidents had passed through, geniuses, felons, slaves on the underground railway. People who made society work or kept it from working, now forgotten except by teachers and their forced-labor scholars.

There was a list, but Calvin had chosen his own topic. There used to be a tombstone out past the town dump, surrounded on a small rise by scrub pine, nettles, and gravel. What happened? Why is the person buried way out there, a mile from a cemetery?

He stopped at Jim Wheeler's house on the way home, a drab two-family house that seemed to be rotting from the inside. They sat on the front steps across from a print shop.

"My dad says if your family hasn't been in town since Moses," Jim Wheeler said, "Old Mildew calls you a blow-in. Don't worry about it."

Calvin laughed. "I think that’s her sister buried out there."

"This is a lame assignment," Jim Wheeler said. "Who cares if Grover Cleveland dedicated one of the mills?"

"Why did you pick it, then?" Cal waved at a passing car. "You could have picked anything."

"Like you picked people who are landfill now, right? That's fascinating."

"We're all landfill eventually."

Jim laughed. "Cool philosophy, man. This is no time for term papers. It's a time for football. For hanging out. For--" Two girls walked by, laughing at a private joke. The taller one had movie-star legs inside those tights she wore; her smile was like a beacon down the street. "For finding out how far Melissa Thompson will go."

Calvin laughed until his face hurt. Jim had always done that to him since they'd met in first grade. We’re having a race, Jim had told Calvin’s mother as the boys sat on the lawn on a warm summer’s day. To see who can go the slowest. Then they snuck a couple of cigarettes from the dresser in Jim’s parents’ room. "You wouldn’t believe the noises that come out of this room at night," Jim said. "It’s disgusting."

That night, Calvin polished off his pasta, polished off a stack of dirty dishes, then sat down to polish off his homework.

Jacob Tyler's soul was empty, his hands callused, his body full of fever. Abigail Johnson had been sixteen when she first graced his eyes at Sunday service. She had long brown hair, laughing blue eyes, and surely was a joy in the sight of God and man. They had walked together along the canal where horses pulled the flatboats; they had held hands as they walked among the fragrant pines; she had accepted his first shy kiss.

Their courtship grew slowly, as Jacob and two horses worked ancient rocks from the soil on his father's farm. With great effort, he placed stone alongside stone to mark the boundary of the property. There was a permanence to a wall that elated Jacob, that his grandchildren's grandchildren might see it and wonder at the honest sweat that dripped over stones that had remained in the same place since Creation.

Marriage meant having their own cabin to freeze in. Warmth came from the crackling pine logs that burned out too quickly, from the heavy blankets and the bodies that clung together beneath them, and from the Holy Bible that warmed their souls and promised peace.

Then why had God stricken Abigail Tyler and Jacob's son Timothy? Surely Jacob was less deserving to live than they. Taking undue pride in his work, wanting wealth beyond his station, neglecting his God--there were a thousand reasons why it should have been him.

No one in the village would help him bury his family. The contagion was his alone to bear. Jacob's tears stung the open sores on his face; he would have to work quickly. He wrapped their bodies carefully in a blanket, a two-year-old in his mother's arms. Smallpox would soon overtake Jacob as well, but not on this day. They could not remain near the family that had loved them, those few that still lived. He would take his loved ones to the far edge of the town, and bury them where their bodies could not threaten the survivors.

With great effort he brought them to the crest of a hill and placed their bodies in the sunshine. He dug with a shard of stone into the soft earth and carved a shallow cavity. A pair of horseflies stung him without mercy, but songbirds and cicadas made soothing music in the still and sweltering air. Sharp stone cut through the roots, cut more deeply into the soil and left Jacob's hands blistered and bleeding. After an eternity, Jacob stopped to rest. Far past the brambles, a speck of a man walked behind a plow on the Sheldon's farm.

Then Jacob placed Abigail and Timothy into the grave, which was barely deep enough to hold two souls. If he lived, he would come back to leave a poor stone marker. He reached into his brown sack and removed his Bible, leaving smudges of dirt and blood until he found the page he wanted to read. Would God forgive this desecration of His word?

Perhaps his family would find peace here, on a beautiful hilltop a little bit closer to heaven.

"All men wither and die like grass," he read aloud; "the wind blows and they are swept away."

"As for man, his days are as grass: as a flower of the field, so he flourisheth. For the wind passeth over it, and it is gone; and the place thereof shall know it no more. But the mercy of the Lord is from everlasting to everlasting upon them that fear him..."

Calvin and Jim met again on Saturday morning, a glorious do-nothing day warmed by the sun. They passed by the football field, where some of their classmates wore helmets and shoulder pads at a scrimmage. Jim would have been there if he hadn't dropped football when Calvin failed to make the team. Then they cut across a yard with its tarped-over swimming pool, hopped the fence, and sat on a stone wall to wait for an approaching train. Four cars rumbled down the tracks carrying Boston-bound commuters, anonymous people hiding behind dirty windows.

"Girl was killed here a couple of years ago," Jim said. "You know that? Her dog was on the tracks, wouldn't get off, so she went to rescue him and got knocked a hundred feet. And you know what's funny? The dog was fine."

"That's not funny," Calvin said. The train disappeared around a bend, and the boys crossed the tracks.

"Weird is all I meant. Where's this place you want to show me?"

"On the little hill over there."

On the other side of the rise came plumes of dust and the hum of dirt bikers' engines. To the left lay the town dump, seven hills of stinking refuse. Seagulls squawked and circled above the dump, dive-bombing plastic bags, sitting on a mountain of trash: cereal boxes, detergent bottles, mangled and discarded toys all mere impediments to a good meal of rotting food. Garbage trucks lumbered in from the big city, excreting their load, briefly scattering seagulls that then settled down to check the latest lunch-wagon delivery.

Calvin curled his nose at the smell as he and Jim headed off to the small hill that stood within puking distance of the dump. His grandmother was on top of a hill in another part of town, where flowers lay by the headstones and the smells came from freshly mown grass and the nearby pine trees.

The climb took only a minute as their feet slid on the loose gravel. There were broken branches, gray from several seasons in the sun. They stepped over brambles and weeds that were covered with dust. At the top, a scrub pine struggled for life, and the boys stood on the flat brown grass.

"Are you sure this is the place?" Jim said. "Doesn't look it."

"The stone was there, right where you're standing." Jim stepped back and looked down at his feet. Underneath the matted grass lay a flat stone, and Calvin went down on his knees and pulled away the grass with his fingertips. "Except it used to stand upright." The stone was blank, and broken off at the base. Calvin lifted the slab out of the muck and lay it face up in the sun. It was caked with mud and crawling with slugs and millipedes.

"Cute little guys," Jim said. "They probably haven't changed for fifty million years." Calvin picked up a dry stick and began scraping the face of the stone. "And when the last human being dries up and blows away, these guys will keep on for another fifty million, just like this."

"I don't believe that," Calvin said, patiently working a groove until a capital "A" appeared. "We're here for a purpose."

"Right, an A on your term paper." Calvin chuckled, and Jim started to help with the scraping until the inscription appeared:

Abi. Tyler

1804-1823

Son Timothy 2 yrs

"This is it," Calvin said.

"This is bogus," Jim said. "Somebody swiped this stone from a cemetery and left it here."

"That's not what I heard. The Town Clerk says everybody knows about this. Besides, a couple of years ago the stone was standing up."

"Which proves exactly nothing. If I stole the stone I could have stuck it in the ground."

"Did you?"

"There's nothing here," Jim said. He kicked at the ground, and his foot sunk slightly, water oozing up through the imprint. Calvin caught his breath at the sight of a shred of rotten wood and the darkness underneath. The hole seemed to go forever.

"You kicked a hole in the grave," Calvin said, his tone accusing. "Stop it!"

"And let the ghosts out? Ooooh, you’ve been watching too many bad movies, my man. A casket would be buried a whole lot deeper than this." He tugged at the edge of a board, and it seemed fragile but reluctant to move.

"Let’s go home, Jim. I found what I wanted."

"No. You already knew the stone was here, so why come back? Why not test my theory?"

"Grave robbing is illegal."

"Illegal? That’s always stopped me dead in my tracks." Jim squatted down and began to scrape with a piece of broken slate. "This is just an old door or something, and I’m going to prove it."

Calvin’s mind flashed forward a hundred years. A pair of no-account pseudo-scholars with bill-backward baseball caps opens the casket of Calvin’s grandmother. It’s not grave robbing, one says. It’s archaeology.

"Just cut it out." He put a firm hand on Jim’s shoulder, but Jim shrugged it off. "Let’s show some respect for the dead."

"I know what you're worried about. Ghosts. Oooooh!" Jim’s eyes widened and his mouth formed an "o." His arms stretched out like a scarecrow’s.

Calvin’s face felt flush. "If you do this, we're not friends anymore," he said.

Jim’s arms fell to his sides and his dark brown eyes hardened as they took the measure of Calvin. "Nothing is forever," he said. Then he leaned down and grabbed the edge of the board with both hands and lifted.

Abigail Tyler stared back in empty reproach. Her arms held Timothy to her breast, their bones lying in a shallow carpet of green mold. Millipedes scattered at the unaccustomed light. The young men stood transfixed as autumn leaves blew across the bodies. Gently, Jim lowered the cover and began to replace the dirt.

"I’m sorry," Jim said.

But Calvin was halfway down the hill, his hands in his pockets now against the suddenly chill wind.