The Burying Ground

The fear didn't make sense in the morning, the way night fears usually don't, and Owen let it go the way you let go of a bad dream — by getting up, by making coffee, by going out to the shop and putting his hands on wood. He had a set of kitchen cabinets to finish for a couple over in Danville, and there's nothing like dovetails for emptying a man's head.

But it came back on Sunday, sideways, the way these things do.

Maddie wanted to walk. She was in the stage where she had energy to burn and no sickness yet, and it was one of those bright cold Vermont Sundays in early spring where the snow's gone off the south slopes but the woods are still bare, and she wanted to walk the land, their land, the long sloping forty acres of Calder Hollow that had been in his family since before anybody could rightly say. So they walked. Up the old logging trace, along the stone wall some Calder had laid two hundred years ago and nobody had moved a stone of since, up to where the land leveled off under the big pines.

And that was where the burying ground was.

Owen had known it his whole life. Every old Vermont family that held its land that long had one — a private plot, a half-acre fenced in fieldstone, where the people who'd worked the ground were laid into it when they were done. He'd played up here as a boy. It had never been frightening to him. It was just the family, the old family, sleeping under the pine needles.

Maddie had never really looked at it, though. She'd come to the Hollow from away, from Massachusetts, and to her the plot was picturesque, a thing to photograph. She went in through the gap in the wall ahead of him, hugging her coat around her, reading the stones out loud the way people do.

"Oh, look at the old ones, you can barely read them. Cornelius Calder. That's got to be the first one, right? The founder." She crouched by the oldest stone, a thick leaning slab of slate gone soft and grey at the edges. "Seventeen-eighty-something to eighteen— I can't read it. God, look how worn." She moved along. "Here's a Martha. And a— is that Cornelius again? No. Cornelius, son of Cornelius." She laughed. "They weren't big on new names."

Owen came in slow behind her. He had his hands in his pockets. He didn't know why he was walking slow.

"Here's your dad," Maddie said, gentler now, and stopped.

James Calder's stone was newer than most, polished granite, the letters still crisp. Owen had stood in front of it more times than he could count, on the day they buried him that Owen couldn't remember, on the Memorial Days his mother brought him up as a boy, on his own wedding morning when he'd come up alone in his good shoes to tell a man he'd never met that he was getting married. He knew the front of that stone by heart.

JAMES OWEN CALDER. And the two dates. And under them, Beloved husband and son. Gone too soon.

"Gone too soon," Maddie read softly. She did the arithmetic the way everybody does, lips moving. "Owen. He was only thirty-three."

"I know," Owen said.

"That's—" She turned and looked at him, and he watched her land on it, the thing he'd carried so long he'd stopped feeling its weight. "He died the year you were born."

"The night I was born," Owen said. "I told you that."

"You said when you were a baby. I didn't realize it was—" She looked back at the stone. "The same night?"

"That's the story. My mother went into labor with me, and there was a bad ice storm, and he was driving back from town, and—" Owen lifted one shoulder, let it drop. It was a story he'd been told, not one he owned. "He never got to see me. He died the same night I got here. People always said it like it was the saddest thing they ever heard. The same night." He'd said the words so many times they'd worn smooth, like the old slate. "The Calder luck, my mother calls it."

He hadn't meant to say that last part. It just came out, the family phrase, the thing they said.

Maddie didn't laugh. She was quiet, looking from James's crisp granite to the rows of older, softer stones behind it. And because she was new to the family, because she hadn't grown up inside the story where everything was just the way it was, she saw it the way Owen never had. She saw it cold.

"Owen," she said slowly. "How old was your grandfather when he died?"

He had to think. "Young. I never met him either. Heart, I think they said. He was— I don't know. Young."

"Was it when your dad was born?"

The wind moved in the big pines above them, that long ocean sound. Owen stood very still.

"I don't know," he said. But that wasn't quite true. There was something at the edge of it, a thing his mother had said once and he'd never held onto, your grandfather never met your father either, said in passing, said like nothing.

Maddie was already moving down the row, reading. She wasn't spooked yet. She was just curious, the way you get with old stones, doing the small math of other people's lives. "Here's a William Calder, this one's older, eighteen-sixty to— eighteen-ninety-three. That's only thirty-three too. Huh." She moved to the next. "Edmund Calder. Thirty-four. That's young." The next. She stopped reading them out loud.

Owen watched his wife go down the row of his dead, and watched her get quieter, and watched her stop at the end of it and stand there not saying anything, with one hand resting without her noticing on the small curve of her belly where, in October, their first child would come, and he felt the cold come up out of the ground through the soles of his boots, the same cold from the night on the phone, the night fear, except it was full daylight now and there was no waking up from it.

"They're all young," Maddie said finally. She wasn't doing her bright voice. "The men. Owen, the men in your family are all young."

"Some families just—"

"Your dad. His dad. This William. This Edmund." She turned around to face him, and her face wasn't picturesque anymore, wasn't curious. "And every one of them, you said it about your dad — he never got to see me. The same night." She was holding her belly now and she knew she was, and she took her hand away like the stone had told her something she didn't want to be told. "Owen. The fathers in your family die when their children are born."

He wanted to tell her she was being silly. He wanted the easy thing, the thing his whole family had said for two hundred years, it's just the Calder luck, hard luck, that's all. He opened his mouth to say it.

But he was standing in a half-acre of fieldstone with the names of his blood going back into the dark under the pines, every stone a man dead at thirty-three, thirty-four, thirty-one, and his wife was carrying his first child, and the word luck would not come out of his mouth.

So he said nothing. And the two of them stood in the burying ground in the bright cold with the pines moving overhead, and for the first time in his life Owen looked at the dates on his father's grave and thought, not poor man, not gone too soon, but a different thing, a thing that opened under him like a trapdoor:

That's going to be me.