Ghosts of Graveyards Past

by Laura Briggs

  Her encounter with the stone carver had left her feeling restless. Seeing him up close, catching hold of his guarded expression…there was a sadness behind it she wanted to understand. His manner, though awkward at times, had seemed to pull her towards him, like the force from an invisible string.

  “He’s a little different, isn’t he?” Those were the words of the county clerk she had phoned to report the cemetery’s neglected state. A reference to the stone carver had prompted a tsking sound. “Almost never leaves his shop, or has visitors. Sad, especially when you consider he’s still young.”

  “What about his family?” Jenna asked, remembering the mention of a wife.

  “He’s alone, as far as I know,” the woman replied.

  A call on another line had prevented further speculation, leaving Jenna to wonder even more about the craftsman’s strange habits and her own fascination for someone she had only just met that morning.

  Yes, he was good-looking—almost in a haunting way, if she could bring herself to use such romanticized language. But the pull she felt was something deeper than a chemical reaction. More like the same urgency that drove her to uncover the cemetery, as if she hoped to piece his secret self together the way she did the bits of jagged stone.

  But why? He hadn’t shown any enthusiasm for the recovered headstones. Which made her think his skill was for business reasons only and not enough to make him feel a connection to the lost and damaged monuments.

  So that was that—best to forget the whole thing, and cross him off her list for potential research sources. Her agent would be disappointed, but hopefully something else would turn up to make the graveyard come alive, so to speak. One of the objects on this table, perhaps.

  Placing aside the collection of tin types, she reached for a stack of documents grown brown and crumbly with age beneath their plastic shields. Most were newspaper fragments, articles with topics that ranged from the war to the weather. No obituaries or marriage announcements, though, to her great disappointment.

  The bottom of the stack contained papers salvaged from the museum rubble. Among them, sheets of stationary, penned with a feminine script. Singed in places and too fragile to touch, they had been labeled as ”Two Letters to Soldier from Sister.” The dates were from 1862, making her bend closer for a look at the contents.

  My Dear Brother,

  I pray this letter finds you, and all from your camp, in good health and spirits. The training sessions you described sound most arduous, though you seem to be managing them well. I know you are eager for marching orders, but I cannot help hoping it is still some time before that day occurs.

  You would laugh, Henry, to think how often I worry about your uniform. My poor sewing skills were all that could be found, with both Mama and Granny Clare suffering rheumatism of the fingers. I fear my fortune will never be made by the needle, though, and once dreamed that all the stitches began to burst, leaving you as raggedy as the toy soldier doll you played with as a boy.

  Do you remember the time his poor jacket was torn by the dog? It was I who sewed it up back then, and what a mess my clumsy fingers made of it! Poor little Jack (for I believe that is what you called him) was nothing but a mass of frayed threads around the arms and shoulders. I would hate to think your own coat should suffer such a tragedy, so please put my mind at ease by writing that it is quite sturdy thus far.

  I can scarcely believe you have been gone from us these many weeks. Sometimes, I will hear a sound from your old room—some faint creaking as the doctor arranges a trunk or medicine cabinet say—and for a moment, I will think it is you. How strange the mind is to play such tricks on the heart!

  Forgetting that she came only for documents that matched names from the cemetery, Jenna let herself sink into the letter writer’s old-fashioned narrative. Her gaze following the curve of the script to another place and time, where a young woman composed her thoughts to a brother called away to battle.

  

  Nell Darrow was almost twenty when the war that tore the states apart finally made its way to Sylvan Spring.

  It came in the form of a newspaper advertisement. Her brother, Henry, folding back the County Times, showed her where a recruitment meeting was being held two towns over, a call for all able-bodied men between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five to pledge their service to God and homeland.

  “You won’t be eighteen ‘til March.” Nell’s voice held a note of panic, her hands buried inside the dough she was kneading for that night’s dinner. The worried remark had earned her a sigh of exasperation from the youth who shared her suntanned complexion and tawny-colored hair.

  “Yes, but they won’t know that,” he said. “All they’re looking for is someone to handle a rifle and pull their weight on the trail.” He spoke matter-of-factly, though neither of them knew anyone from the soldier camps. Until recently, the war had been just a rumor, a story brought by the tradesman passing through from other territories.

  “What will Papa say?” she asked, knowing full well he would tell the boy to do as he wished. That was the luxury of a blacksmith, whose harvest was small and livestock holdings even smaller. Her father could spare a son’s help easier than his neighbors, whose crops and cattle were a livelihood that demanded the strength of youth to run smoothly.

  Later, she had watched as Henry squeezed into a cart with six other boys. Others from the town were riding horses and taking turns with those who traveled on foot for lack of better options. All were laughing as they sang snatches of a war song she had heard played at the last community dance. As if they were going off to a picnic, she thought, heart sinking with the carefree sounds.

  It was her small hands that sewed his uniform a week later, and pieced together a kepi hat in the fashion of Johnny Reb from the newspaper cartoons. She stitched the brass buttons in place with a mixture of pride and nervousness, the idea it might become his burial garb causing her needle to slip more than it normally would, pricking little dots of blood along her fingers.

  She cried when he tried it on for size and then again when he packed it inside a haversack with his other scant belongings. Squeezing her arm reassuringly, he said, “It’s not as if I wouldn’t have gone eventually. This way it will be over and done with. Besides,” he added, “the war can hardly last much longer. Everyone says as much. I want my part of the fuss before it’s over.”

  Glory, excitement, adventure—these were things enrollment in the Confederacy promised to bring. Compared to this, Sylvan Spring was just a sprinkle of homesteads along a wooded stream, gradually expanding to include a church and school, a post office and general store. The blacksmith’s stand and mercantile shop were the last obvious signs of civilization before dirt lanes gave way to fields of cotton and corn, a few farmhouses visible here and there to break apart the acres of crops.

  Planting and gathering the harvest was the main past time of the local youth, even more so than the subjects taught in their one-room schoolhouse. Perhaps this was why so many of them chose to don the uniform of a private. Boys who once used rifles for hunting wild game talked excitedly of driving Yanks from their native territory. Others spoke of marching into places they had only seen on the pages of a school atlas, tracing the battle sites they read about in the newspapers with a sense of awe.

  Wives and sweethearts were left to worry and to send their love in letters to the camp where newly signed soldiers underwent training. Nell had only her brother to write to, her heart unsought by any among their small community. Which wasn’t to say it had no secret admiration of its own—for Nell was hard-pressed to conceal her girlhood crush, now turned to something deeper with the passage of time.

  The object of this quiet affection had not been among the figures she saw bound for the recruitment meeting that day. Instead, he fought a different kind of battle, one he seemed to be losing as the days slipped by.

  Our friend, Arthur, does no better since you left. The sickness that came upon him these past weeks refuses still to
leave, a remitting fever as many says it must be. I see little of him in the family’s fields, and last week he did not attend church, which ought to tell you how severe he suffers with it. Such attacks leave him no choice, though he says nothing will stop him from being among you all when marching orders are finally given.

  Dark, serious Arthur. His face flashed before her with astonishing clarity, causing her to break partway through her narrative. Those features, still so boyish, yet full of understanding, were as familiar as her own shabby reflection in the mirror.

  She knew them from years of glances stolen across a schoolhouse aisle, where Arthur’s head was always more inclined to the lesson than those of his friends. The same was true in church. When others had passed tic-tac-toe on scraps of paper or hid magazine stories between the pages of a Bible, always, he kept his eye upon the pulpit, an action that Nell would try to mimic, as thoughts of him drew her away from the sermon.

  He was handsome, but not with the bold air that made his friend Wray Camden such a favorite among the local girls and envious boys. The two were inseparable and the natural leaders for the group of boys who trailed through the woods after school each day.

  Eight year-old Nell would try to tag along after them, bare feet and braids getting caught in the thick foliage that grew among the woods.

  “Go on,” called the oldest Stroud boy, as he spotted her in the thicket. “Leave us be, why don’t you?” He was perched on a log above the spring, where the youth had been daring each other to walk a balancing act.

  Tears sprang in Nell’s eyes, her hands clenching the fabric of her worn pinafore. She wanted only to watch, but their laughter forced her to turn back most times before the fun even started. One day, she followed them to a part of the wood where violets grew in thick clusters among the roots of the trees. Collecting a handful, she strung the blossoms together for a crown that quickly tangled in the coarse head of hair. She tugged at it desperately in an attempt to make it more pleasing, hearing the guffaws of a classmate as they cried, “Look there—Nell is trying to be a girl.”

  “I didn’t think she knew how,” teased Preston Cray, whose sisters were called the prettiest in the county by those who knew.

  Blushing, Nell had ripped the flowers off and run back through the path. When she stopped to catch her breath, there was a rustling sound on the trail behind her. She gasped as a hand rested against her shoulder, dark eyes meeting hers with a look of apology when she turned around.

  “They don’t mean it, you know. It is only talk to them.” Arthur spoke with reassurance, twining the purple flowers around her wrist, a friendly grin forming at her look of surprise before he ran back to join the friends who called his name impatiently.

  The chain of blossoms had lain on her bedside table until just a sprinkle of dust remained to blow away in the breeze of an open window. She thought of it whenever the flowers came back into bloom, sprouting in rich, velvet hues with the change of the seasons.

  This season had not been kind to any but nature, it seemed. Already a poor farming community, Sylvan Spring had only grown poorer in the absence of its young men. The work was harder than before, slower as well, with children and elderly folk alike shouldering the burden.

  Arthur, meanwhile, could take part in neither world. The illness that kept him from the regiment made it equally difficult to work his father’s fields. A fevered look haunted the dark eyes, and more than one began to speculate that a grave waited for him in the cemetery in the woods.

  

  There was no physician in Sylvan Spring at that time, and the apothecary was buried several summer’s back, from an illness beyond the aid of his medicine cabinet. Healers would sometimes pass through, and traveling men boasted of miracles in a bottle from displays in the town square.

  The town’s reverend was among those who cast a wary eye at such claims. He had not always been among them. His younger days were passed in Mobile, where a relative’s illness brought him in contact with a doctor’s more refined practice. Anxious to provide for his flock—most of whom suffered the effects of old age—he was the one who sent a letter to that same clinic, inquiring if any who trained there might fill the position of doctor for a small farming community.

  He shared its reply from the pulpit, a sheet of stationary in one hand as the other adjusted the spectacles balanced on his nose. “I regret to inform you of Dr. Moore’s recent death,” he read from the paper, “and the subsequent closing of his clinic. However, I can promise to fulfill the request for a qualified physician set to begin practice in your community within the month.”

  Signed M.R. Moore, it would seem the doctor’s son had followed in his footsteps and would soon be among them to continue his medical trade.

  It was Nell’s family who would board the physician, a decision that gave her unease as she pictured a stranger moving into Henry’s old room. Her discomfort grew when she learned the reason why, her mother’s voice carrying through the window to the kitchen where Nell scrubbed the family’s breakfast dishes.

  “He is likely to be older, you know,” she said, crouched in the herb garden beside Nell’s grandmother. “A man with no family but a skill to keep him busy when even the crops are bad. It may be he will take a shine to Nell, since no one else has spoken for her these past years. “

  Her granny sounded less certain. “There can be no hurry to lose Nell. I would miss her terribly, and with her brother gone, you would find it hard to manage the house and farm both.”

  “What else can she do, though?” her mother wondered. “I have urged her to think of teaching, but she will have no part of it.”

  Mortified, Nell had almost dropped the plate she cleaned. Leaving it half-washed in the basin, she retreated quickly to her room, burying her face in a pillow as she prayed, God, please don’t let this be my future. A marriage made out of no other choice—I would rather be alone, or to teach at the school, as Mama so wants me to do.

  The same thoughts ran through her head as she drove the family’s cart to meet the stagecoach over in Woolwich. Her mother had insisted she be the one to go, since Mr. Darrow’s smithy work kept him in town, and her hands were too stiff for guiding the reins. Really, though, it was just an excuse to push her daughter in the doctor’s path as soon as might be.

  At the station, Nell’s voice shook when she asked for the passenger who came from Mobile, only for the clerk to point where a woman scarcely older than herself waited, a trunk and bag piled beside her on the bench. Seeing Nell, she rose with an expectant look on her face while the girl struggled to grasp the scene before her.

  “We assumed the doctor was alone—unmarried,” Nell stammered, remembering her mother’s words on this subject with fresh shame. How bitter that woman’s disappointment would be upon learning the physician had a wife. Nell quickly banished the thought for one even more startling.

  “I am alone,” the young woman replied, drawing her shoulders further back as she spoke. “My father, Dr. Moore, was the recipient of your minister’s letter. I have answered the post in his stead.”

  A woman doctor. The notion was unfamiliar to her. Nell stole glances at the figure beside her as the wagon bounced over narrow lanes. She was nothing like the herb women who peddled their plants in the square, or the diviner who dangled a wedding band over women’s palms to tell whether it was boy or girl who formed inside their growing stomach.

  The doctor’s skin was untouched by harsh weather. Auburn tresses wound into a crown of neatly pinned braids. Nell brushed the strands of dingy yellow from her face, seeing dirt lodged beneath her fingernails from helping in the garden earlier. Dr. Moore—or Mariah as she was called—showed hands that were smooth and clean folded atop her medical bag.

  “She’s got no grit,” had been the estimate of Nell’s father. Shaking his head in a wry motion, he watched the doctor set off on foot for a house in need of her skills as a midwife.

  She had brought no money with her for buying a horse, the boots she wo
re broke down quickly under the rocky paths in the nearby wood.

  Their neighbors viewed her with begrudging acceptance, coming to her for medicines that were sold by the former apothecary. Broken bones and gaping wounds—some of them belonging to livestock—made up the bulk of her work, among the few early patients who would trust a woman doctor. In between, she struggled to fill her time, and Nell wished fervently her talent might be applied to another case, as Arthur struggled even to plant the seed for his family’s barley crop.

  She heard the cough that stole his breath, felt the clammy nature of his skin when he offered her a carriage ride back from a neighbor’s house one day. As they neared the Darrow homestead, the doctor passed them on one of the family’s horses, saddlebag bulging with supplies for customers who lived in the stretch of woods beyond the spring.

  “Have you seen the physician at work yet?” Arthur asked, his gaze following the woman with curiosity.

  Her beauty was unmistakable, even in the plain clothes she wore to navigate the landscape’s rough terrain. She had not returned his glance, posture ramrod straight as she followed the path that would take her to Crooked Wood.

  “Miss Moore seems a good hand at medicine,” Nell told him, “though I have not seen her skill so much as heard about it. She receives few visits at the house, though anyone is welcome to call on her in the parlor.”

  This was a hint, one she put forth timidly. To contradict his parents was something Nell would never dream of, though she feared they might be his undoing. She pressed his hand affectionately as he lowered her from the cart. “You are welcome to come inside for a cup of Granny Clare’s tea.”

  “Another day,” he promised, thoughts elsewhere as he released her fingers. Where, she did not have to guess, as he gazed back down the road where Mariah’s horse had long since disappeared from sight.