In the Forest of Light and Dark

by Kasniak, Mark

When we arrived, I noticed that the place was bigger than I would’ve imagined. It carried an ancient spooky cool to it too, like old-world European.

  There were a few very tall monuments scattered throughout dotting the landscape that looked to me like they might’ve been made of marble. Most of them though had been severely weathered over the years—their family names barely decipherable anymore. The cemetery also had a few mausoleums that looked like they could’ve been an entrance to a catacomb or the Batcave for that matter. There were also plenty of smaller graves that I had assumed belonged to common folk. The headstones of these more modest gravesites looked to me as if they’d been made from cement. Over the years the names and dates on them had also been whitewashed away by the elements to the point where they were indecipherable.

  My parents and I had begun walking down the cemetery’s access road and I was a little ahead of them when I glanced back noticing that they were walking hand-in-hand. So, I reckoned I would give them a little time alone by taking off on my own to explore the cemetery further.

  After wandering aimlessly for a while, I found myself having ventured into an area of the cemetery that looked as if it had been long forgotten by anybody still alive today—except of course maybe the cemetery’s grounds keeper who obviously wasn’t doing the greatest of a job.

  The graves in this area were incredibly old, most of them having had their headstones cracked or broken, possibly even vandalized. A lot of them even had a bad repair job done to them at some point.

  As I walked on in this forlorn area of the cemetery I reminisced of a book I had once read about a cemetery named Highgate in London. It was a privately owned cemetery that had run out of room to take in new members. So, the money used to keep up the place had run dry causing the grounds to fall into disarray which allowed trees and vines to grow all over the headstones and walkways. This place was eerily similar.

  Coming up on one of the rows of graves I tried to read the names and dates on them, but with most I just couldn’t make out what had once been engraved on them, the words just to worn away.

  There were a few though, I could decipher if I really concentrated. One was of a girl named Rebecka Sherwen 1724-1738, next to her was her sister Edith Sherwen 1726-1731.

  How sad, I thought of both of them to die so young and I wondered if their parents had any other children? But I didn’t see any other graves marked with the Sherwen surname that had dates on them that suggested they did. Next to the sisters was just two more graves Lorena Sherwen 1704-1749 and Bennet Sherwen 1697-1746, who I had assumed must have been Rebecka and Edith’s parents.

  Further down the row, I came across even more graves of children from the 1700’s. Elijah Bligh, 1729-1739 and William Whipple 1731-1743. As I gazed upon their gravestones I wondered if any of them had known Abellona Abbott, but after pondering the thought I walked on down the row, assuming that they must’ve known her in some fashion given how small the village must have been back then.

  As I approached the end of the row, I rapidly found myself drawn to one grave in particular. It stood isolated and behind it was a huge oak tree looming that had basked the grave in shadow and shade. The grave’s headstone had been intricately carved out of white marble and had angel inlays impressed into it. The name engraved on it read, Magdalena Scovell, with the dates 1773-1790. I imagined about her life and how cool it must have been that this girl had been alive during the time when our country was just being forged from a small group of revolutionists that didn’t want to deal with a King’s bullshit anymore.

  It was at that point in my journey that I looked back over the cemetery’s landscape for my parents, but they were nowhere in sight. I was then about to start heading back over to the other side of the cemetery, to where I’d seen several small mounds of dirt indicative of fresh graves to see if they’d be around there. I had figured that my Grandmother’s grave would most likely be somewhere over there among all the other newbies.

  I had just turned around to begin my walk back when unexpectedly, a cat sprang out from somewhere behind Magdalena’s grave landing right atop of her tomb’s headstone. It had startled me, but then I quickly regained my composure as I remembered my mama saying something about Mt. Harrison having a stray problem. I was definitely starting to realize just what she’d meant by that.

  This cat had brown, puffy fur and black feet. As she stood on the gravestone she looked right at me and began to meow before turning back and forth in tight circles as if cavorting.

  “Where did you come from?” I had asked her in a soft tone as if I was ever going to get an answer out of a cat.

  She then mewed again, following that up with a low purr as I reached out my hand to rub her supple fur along her back. To me she didn’t look like she was a stray. In fact, she looked pretty well fed, healthy. I figured she might even be somebody’s house cat, possibly belonging to one of the homes nearby the cemetery. But then again, if she indeed was a stray, then this cemetery might be a helluva good place to find a lot of field mice or rats that she can munch on.

  I spent another moment with her and then said my goodbye, and as I walked down the rows of aging gravestones, out of my peripherals I could see that she hadn’t been alone. She wasn’t the sole queen of Mt. Harrison cemetery. There was another one peering out at me from behind one of the other graves. Then soon I saw another, and then another. They seemed as if they were following me and I couldn’t help but think of myself at that moment as being Michelle Pfeiffer in Batman Returns with her legions of cats as her minions.

  When I’d reached the access road I had followed it to the other side of the cemetery, my new friends still in tow. As I went, I did my best not to look right at any of them specifically because every time I did whichever cat I’d look at would then dash behind a gravestone to hide like a child having been caught out of bed by their parents. Even though I wasn’t looking right at them and couldn’t really see them too well as they stalked behind me, I could still hear them behind me, meowing. I wasn’t sure how many there actually were, but I sure-as-hell knew that there was a lot more than the three or four I had definitely seen.

  (Now that I’m writing this, I reckon I should’ve been more freaked out than I was by having a horde of cats follow me around. They didn’t scare me though, honestly, at the time I recall having felt comforted by their presence.)

  At the end of the access road I could see my mama and step daddy walking down by a row of graves that I could tell were some of the newer ones in the cemetery. (Because all the dates on the ones I was walking past were edging their way into the twenty-first century.) As I approached them, I began to whisper to my mama, “Hey, look behind me.” To which she replied, “What, dear?” So, I again said, “Look behind me, do you see them?”

  “See what?” she then asked with a perplexed look taking over her face.

  “The cats,” I said only slightly above a whisper. “You were right. This place sure has a lot of strays. There must be a hundred of them right behind me.”

  “I don’t see nothin’!” Step Daddy Cade suddenly shouted like a moron.

  “Shh, they’re skittish. You’re gonna scare them off.” I scolded him slightly above a whisper and surely sounding a bit more derisive than I would have liked.

  “I hate to tell you this, kid, but there ain’t a damn thing behind you.”

  I turned around to look back at the graves, and to my astonishment, my Step Daddy Cade was right, they were gone. I’d figured that at some point, as I was walking closer to my parents, they must have lost interest in me, turning around and having gone back to the old part of the cemetery.

  “Huh, that’s funny, they were right behind me…” I mumbled to myself.

  “Yeah, well, whatever. C’mon, you can help us find your grandmama’s grave. It’s gettin’ hot, so I wanna get this over with.”

  “Gees, you guys still haven’t found it yet?” I asked thinking, What the hell have the two of you been doing all this time?

 
; “No, No… I know where it is.” My mama then said chiming in. “She’ll be with the rest of the family down by the creek.”

  When we came to the area of the cemetery where my mama had said the Barrett clan lay buried, I could see right away, by my family’s isolation, that the people of Mount Harrison didn’t want our family being with the rest of the deceased residence of the village.

  Our family’s tombs were down at the bottom of a hill and at the end of a narrow gravel pathway that snaked its way through the hillslope and around a couple of old weeping willows. The base of the hill ultimately came to a plateau leveling out where the Barrett family graves began and ended before reaching another small escarpment that led directly into a creek that wound its way around the east end of the cemetery.

  We were careful as we made our way down to the graves, due to this part of the cemetery, not having been very well taken care of—having been neglected for at least a decade or more.

  As we walked down the incline of the hill where the weeping willows cast their heavy shadows down upon the Barrett gravesite below, I could hear the behemoths creaking when the breeze blew. Their invasive roots had breached up from the ground crossing over the gravel-dirt pathway we had to follow. The grass on the hill and down by the graves looked as if it hadn’t been mowed all summer, while the graves themselves—the ones that weren’t toppled over—had weeds and vines growing all over them, giving them an appearance that they were being slowly swallowed.

  “Wow, is it just all us Barretts down here?” I asked my mama.

  “Afraid so,” she said, answering me back. “We have our very own private Potter’s field down here.”

  “So what’s the deal with this?” I then asked her when we’d finally made it to the end of the path where the beginning of the graves started. “I mean, why would they only put us down here?”

  “Oh, it’s just because a long time ago, like in Abellona’s time, you remember the girl we talked about last week, the one that all the yahoos around here killed for no good reason?”

  “Yeah,” I answered.

  “Well, during that time, the people who had lived here in this village thought that one of our great-great ancestors was a friend of Abellona, and therefore guilty by association of witchcraft too. So, when she died, they put her down here in this unconsecrated ground. Then, when her parents and her sister had also passed away, they wanted to be buried here next to her, so they’d been added. Then her sister’s husband and their children had their interment here. Soon, as time went on, the grandchildren’s burials were here, and-so-on-and-so-forth with more-and-more Barretts. Before long, we Barretts had a monopoly on our own little corner of the cemetery.”

  “Who was she?” I asked.

  “Who our ancestor they originally put down here?”

  “Uh- yeah,”

  “Oh, I don’t really remember her name anymore, honey. It was a long time ago, back when I was a kid that I used to hear these stories.”

  That’s what my mama had told me, but I didn’t believe her. I could always tell when she was trying to keep the truth from me, which was happening a lot lately.

  The graves in my family’s area of the cemetery were like looking at a timeline and I could easily determined right away which one was my Grandma Lyanna’s. (It was the one not far off from the gravel-dirt pathway and the only one which still had a fresh mound of dirt on it.)

  “Look, over here. I found Grandma!” I called out to my parents who were coming up the row behind me.

  My Grandmother’s grave still didn’t yet have the headstone that my mama had said she’d purchased for it. But there was a white, wooden cross marker with a brass plaque that read.

  Lyanna Barrett

  December 18, 1955—June 26, 2010

  My mama had told me that the ground needed to settle in for some time before they could set up the stone or it risked toppling over as the dirt shifted and settled beneath it. But judging by the wear-and-tear on the other stones in the cemetery—especially us Barretts—I would’ve said the greatest threat came primarily from people vandalizing the stones, not the ground re-solidifying making them unstable.

  “How had grandma even died?” I asked Mama having realized just then that She’d never mentioned to me what had happened to her. “I mean, she was pretty young, only fifty-four, and looked pretty healthy in those pictures I saw of her back at the house.” I then added.

  “I really don’t know.” My mama told me sounding plaintive, and I thought I could hear a sob creeping up in her voice. “The coroner’s report just said that she had died of natural causes.”

  I knew by the inflection in my mama’s voice having changed suddenly that she was getting upset talking about it, so I didn’t push the issue any further. I then had reckoned that she might want a little time alone with her mama, so I gave a steady glance at Step Daddy Cade trying to get his attention, but he just stood there with a vacuous look on his face while smoking a cigarette.

  Furtively, I edged my way over to him and gave him a little smack on the arm with the back of my hand. He then looked at me having been snapped out of his trance and I then signaled him with my eyes to follow me, to which he just looked at me dumbfounded, but then soon caught on as to what I was getting at.

  My step daddy and I then slowly walked off together, making our way further into the depths of the Barrett family’s little section of the cemetery. As we carried on I noticed that the graves seemed to get older the closer we headed towards the edge of the creek.

  Francis Barrett

  April 12, 1842—March 19, 1894

  Ellen Barrett

  August 3, 1851—July 5, 1865

  Virginia Barrett

  May 21, 1723—October 22, 1802

  These were several of the names etched into the graves that I could read, having not been to weathered by time and the elements.

  At the end of the oldest row, over by the very edge of the creek, we came across a grave that I’d figured must have been the one—our ancestor—that my mama said she couldn’t remember her name. It was the grave of the girl who had allegedly been friends with Abellona Abbott and subsequently tormented for being so. The engraving on the stone read.

  Emma Barrett

  September 4, 1720—July 11, 1736

  Now, there was nothing about Emma’s grave in particular that made it stand out any more than any of the others in the Barrett section of the cemetery. It was what someone had written across the marble headstone that made it stand out from the rest. Across the face of the stone in big capital letters was the word WITCH in red spray paint. It was a sloppy job too, because there were streaks of dried-up excess paint that had dripped down from each letter, giving it the appearance of it being written in blood, not paint.

  It was at that point, I had to assume that this was the girl. Mostly, of course, given the fact that some douche-bag had spray painted the word witch across her gravestone, and given Emma’s date-of-birth, which would have put her at about sixteen-years-old in 1736. The same age my mama had told me Abellona Abbott supposedly was when she had died. At least that’s what I had recalled my mama having told me, that Abellona Abbott was about my age when she had died for allegedly being a witch.

  My step daddy and I had been standing in front of Emma’s grave pondering just who would do such a thing for at most maybe a couple of minutes when my mama came walking up the row of graves behind us. Her eyes were morose and still somewhat puffy and a little bloodshot as if she’d been crying, and when she spoke to ask us whose grave it was that we were looking at; her voice had a touch of unease in it.

  As she approached closer, I watched as my mama’s eyes suddenly became wide and then seemed to light up in her skull when she saw the word WITCH strew across Emma’s grave.

  “Jesus Christ!” she cholericly spat out. “Who the hell would do such a thing?”

  “Ah, some asshole.” my Step Daddy Cade said firing his cigarette butt to the ground then crushing it under his foot. “
The world’s full of ‘em.”

  My mama, then quickly pulled a Kleenex out from her purse and started aggressively trying to remove the paint from Emma’s stone, but to no avail.

  “Awe, hell, that ain’t gonna work.” Step Daddy Cade griped at her. “I thought I saw a pint of paint thinner left over in the garage. We’ll come back tomorrow and get this cleaned up properly. Just leave it be for now.”

  My mama vigorously kept scouring, not listening at all to him and trying her darndest to remove the stubborn paint, but she was soon fell exhausted to her knees where I heard the sounds of dead, dried-up old leaves from past autumns crunching underneath her weight. She pressed on continuing to work on the spray paint—determined, even after my step daddy had raised his voice at her telling her to stop. It wasn’t until he had finally grabbed her by the arm that she’d given up and said in a defeated tone, “I… I guess you’re right. This isn’t going to come off.” Then, I watched as she palmed a couple of tears from the corners of her eyes. She then used the Kleenex to wipe the end of her nose.

  My mama, then stood up and turned to look back at my step daddy and me, and the harrowed look on her face was like something I had never seen before. She had suddenly become pallid and very wan as if the blood pressure had suddenly fallen out of her and all her energy zapped. She stood there frozen with her mouth agape, gawking at us.

  “Mama, are you all right?” I asked as I reached out to take her hand. “You don’t look so good.” But, all she did was stand there staring through us like we were invisible—ghosts.

  I hadn’t noticed right then, but I would a moment later, that my mama wasn’t staring at me or my step daddy at all, but what she was actually looking at was what was going on behind us without any of us even knowing. It was that which had left her in such a somnambulistic state.