The River Burns

by Trevor Ferguson

  “If it makes me any less a lady, I’m all for it. But if you prefer, a trip to the graveyard sounds creepy.”

  Mrs. McCracken had obviously planned the afternoon outing, given that a spare helmet sat tidily strapped to the passenger seat. Tara put it on, snapped the clasp, then swung a leg up and over and made herself comfortable on the scooter’s small rear seat. Reaching behind her back she grabbed the chrome bars.

  “Not too fast, okay?” she pleaded.

  “Oh hush.”

  They were off.

  Stores, including Potpourri, were closed on Mondays as the train didn’t run. She should probably be sprucing up her new home now that she was moved in, and she was making progress on that front. Yet Tara felt undermined, her familiar focus wreaked by a restlessness of spirit and a new and unrequited longing. Justifications came readily to hand: she’d not run away from job and home merely to lock herself into a similar manic routine. So she strolled along in search of whatever might buoy her spirits on a cloudy day, and realized soon enough that her feet were propelling her towards the old covered bridge. She thought it a worthy destination after the prior evening’s debate. The bridge stood proud and was strikingly attractive—she’d not given it sufficient attention since her arrival, she supposed, especially considering how fixated others were on its stature. She was about to turn off the sidewalk onto the dirt path that was the riverside walk when the indomitable Mrs. McCracken intercepted her foray. She gathered that the old gal intended to snatch her from her apartment if she wasn’t claimed off the street.

  Mrs. McCracken wasn’t joking about their destination. The ride to the cemetery was no quick jaunt and gave Tara sporadic cause to be terrified. Winding roads, potholed pavement, steep hills to climb. The scooter whined loudly, objecting to the day’s extra weight. The pair made it to the top without the engine stalling, although Mrs. McCracken acknowledged the battle. “Thank goodness you’re only a wisp of a thing.”

  “You’re wispier.”

  “Thank goodness for that, too.”

  “Now what?”

  “The graveyard, dear. It’s worth a visit.”

  From the small parking lot they climbed farther on foot. A breezy day, with showers in the forecast, and each woman put a hand to her hair from time to time. Fighting a gust, Tara turned to face the wind a moment, allowing it to blow her hair back over her head, and in doing so saw for the first time above the canopy of trees the astonishing view from this altitude. She stood still before the rolling hills and snatches of speckled farmland. Mrs. McCracken, a few strides ahead, returned to take in the vista herself. While intimately familiar to her, she never grew tired of the pastoral scene.

  “A fine place, don’t you think, to spend eternity?” she asked after a few moments.

  “What’s your middle name?” Tara replied.

  The older woman gazed at the younger. “You don’t even know my first.”

  “Sure I do. Alice.”

  Seemingly without any cue, like birds turning in tandem, they both resumed their walk up the grassy hill to the rows of tombstones and markers.

  “I don’t tell people it,” Mrs. McCracken said. “Not the middle one.”

  “Why not?”

  “What’s yours?”

  “Tara. Tara-Anne, actually. Hyphenated.”

  “It’s not much of a mystery then, for you.”

  “Yours is?”

  “Why do you want to know?”

  “It’s a hobby of mine. Learning middle names. I find them”—a gang of goldfinch darted between trees and her eyes jumped with the dash of bright yellow—“not revealing exactly . . . but I think differently about people when I know their second name. Take somebody who’s a Tom. There’re so many Toms. Then you find out that plain Tom’s middle name is Augustine, or Percival, or merely Michael, and you realize that he’s not just another Tom. The parents who named Tom also held to a further idea or impression for their lad. Sometimes a grand notion. Sometimes a qualifier in some strategic way. So he’s Tom, but with an added distinction, or at least a different note. We might detect that our ordinary Tom has a secret, that he derives from surprising expectations.” She smiled, and added shyly, “As an example.”

  “Are you planning on babies, dear?” Ascending with slow, deliberate, thoughtful strides, Mrs. McCracken tucked a hand into the crook of Tara’s elbow, and climbed on.

  “Not in the near future, if that’s what you’re asking. Is it what you think? That I have babies on the brain? Naming them? A few things need to fall into place before that goes down.”

  “Something in what you’re saying seems right to me. Initially, just about everybody is somebody’s romantic notion. Sometimes, often enough, somebody’s unexpected romantic notion.”

  “That’s it. Anyway, I like to find that stuff out. Now, tell me yours.”

  “Better than that. I’ll show you.”

  She had a gravestone in mind.

  Plain and weathered, the marker stood as an upright slab no more than eighteen inches high. The birth date went back over a century.

  “Grandmother?” Tara asked.

  “Great-grandma. I never knew her.” Winifred Alice Beauchamp.

  “Your middle name is Winifred? Oh, poor you.”

  “Guess again.”

  “You use your middle name, like me?”

  “Nope.” She seemed quite proud of this contest.

  Tara’s mouth dropped open an instant. “Beauchamp? Your middle name is Beauchamp?”

  “If you tell anyone, I’ll know it was you. Do you like it?”

  “Oh yes. Very impressive.” She gave her a knowing look. “Figures.”

  Mrs. McCracken took the remark as a compliment. “It’s of no particular use in my daily life. But it’s going on my gravestone, absolutely. Up here, among these strangers and old relations, I’ll wear it proudly. In terms of connecting the dots, if someone wants to do a who’s who of Wakefield ghosts, it’ll be helpful.”

  “You’re a character.”

  “Am I?” the older woman asked. “And you, young lady.”

  “What about me?”

  “You have some explaining to do.”

  “Ah . . . and because you feel that I have some explaining to do, you invited me to a graveyard. This makes sense how?”

  To turn her, Mrs. McCracken grasped her quite forcibly by an arm. The cemetery stood as a clearing on a hilltop, a swath amid the trees that was not flat, and undulated softly. Several rows of graves ascended gradually, markers on the surface of the ground standing out like steps. “First,” she answered with a deliberate aura of mystery, “let me show you in what august company I shall spend my eternity.”

  “You’re morbid today.”

  “Not true. I’m feeling my oats.”

  Farther along, she paused before the modest gravesite of a famous man, who’d won a Nobel Peace Prize and been prime minister.

  “Did you know, he’s not from around here?”

  “So why’s he here now?”

  “For the view.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Oh, the official PM’s summer residence is relatively close by. That’s how he happened to find this place. So he stipulated that he wanted to be buried on this hill. He found the view enchanting.”

  “It is that.”

  “You could be buried here, too. Then you’d have the PM as a neighbour.”

  “And you as a neighbour, too, I suppose.”

  “Not to mention my cats. Come look.”

  In a corner of the clearing, well apart from the graves for humans, a pet cemetery was segregated off for the remains of cats and dogs, turtles and hamsters, Billy the parakeet and Marco the wandering python who got run over by a logging truck. “The poor driver nearly ran off the road trying to avoid him, but in the end he couldn’t. The snake was
a pet that escaped a summer cottage. He wore a knitted orange vest. I’m serious. I attended the funeral, actually. The owner was a student of mine as a lad. He was heartbroken.”

  Amid the flowers and stones and carved wood plaques were the names of Horatio, Gilmore, and Frances, three cats from Mrs. McCracken’s earlier life, “before Buckminster. Another two went missing, silly things. Grease spots on a highway, no doubt.”

  “Gross!”

  “Life has sad realities, my dear.”

  “So,” Tara deduced, “this is why you come here. To visit your cats.”

  “Do I look like a dingbat to you?” she protested. “No, don’t you dare answer that. It’s true, I tend to the cats’ graves, but principally I come here to care for my husband’s.”

  Tara felt a shiver unrelated to the premises. “Sorry. I assumed . . .”

  “Do I come across as an old spinster?”

  “I wouldn’t say so. But you’ve made your own way in life, it seems. I think I knew that but I’d forgotten.”

  “I was widowed young. I call myself Mrs. in good faith, dear. Yes, it’s so sad. If I seem like an old biddy who’s been on her own throughout her lifetime—”

  “You don’t!”

  “—it’s because it’s true. My poor Robby was only twenty-seven.”

  Tara linked the length of her arm with hers. “An accident?”

  “I wish.” Mrs. McCracken spoke more quietly, in deference to their closeness and to the solemnity of the memory. “Might have been less . . . enraging that way. A brain aneurism, dear. Something in his head misfired and burst and he was dead and gone, as quick as a wink. No prior warning. No final word. Just poof ! Alive one second, dead the next. A doctor said it might have happened at any time, but that it was bound to happen, sooner if not later. My Robby was a walking time bomb. Too bad I didn’t know it earlier on. I might have been a better wife. Or maybe I’d have set my sights on becoming a mother instead of putting it off.” She waved her free hand before her face as if to ward off flies. “Perfect nonsense, of course. If I’d known his brain was going to explode one day, I might never have married the poor fellow, practical gal that I am. Now isn’t that a sad commentary?”

  “Now you are being morbid. I know you’re teasing me so don’t bother.”

  “Smarty-pants. Let me show you where he rests.”

  For the first time that day, Tara did not particularly want to go with her, but acquiesced, and standing over the grave felt less uneasy. Mrs. McCracken bent to support pink and reddish annuals by retrieving earth that washed away, and brushed off dirt that splashed onto the tombstone in a downpour.

  “There you are, my dear,” Mrs. McCracken said, and it took a few seconds for Tara to realize that she was not talking to her. On her knees, the attentive widow looked up at her new young friend.

  “So what’s your first name, dear, since you get by with your middle?”

  “Raine.”

  “Like the weather?”

  “With an e on the end. But otherwise, yes. I’m a gloomy day on two legs.”

  The women laughed. Tara never made that reference before and didn’t know why she did it now, although the day was gloomy enough and they were standing in a graveyard. Mrs. McCracken was willing to accept a hand up and struggled back to her feet.

  “Well then, Rain-e—Rainy I should call you.”

  “The e is silent, but stick with Tara. If you don’t, I’ll call you Beauchamp.”

  “Oh, bother. But now let me show you something, Raine Tara. After that we’ll talk. You are going to tell me why you’re on the run.”

  “Who said I’m on the run?”

  “Do you want to be called Rainy?”

  Tara’s initial defence was to cross her arms. While her posture was now self-protective, she tried to mount an argument. “A woman on the run might not want to say why. If I was on the run, as you put it, I might not even know why. Or know how to explain it.”

  “I agree. Then that’s what we’ll talk about.”

  Mrs. McCracken guided Tara a few stones down from her husband’s final resting place. “See her?”

  “Is this what you’ll do to me if I don’t talk?” Tara teased.

  “You jest. But if she’s resting peacefully now, she can thank me for that. You might hear this story if you haven’t already.”

  Tara read the name and the inscription. She and the deceased were born less than two years apart.

  “Poor child,” Mrs. McCracken said solemnly.

  “Who, me?” Tara asked.

  “No. Her. A car crash victim. Sadly, we have too many in this cemetery. A small town’s all-too-common anguish, I’m afraid. She was off to a city. Toronto, or, no, Hamilton, I think.”

  “That’s so hard on the family.”

  “It was, but it also got worse.”

  “Worse? Than death? Really?”

  “Oh, it was a bother. Something came up, to do with the other car and liability, and the insurance company wanted to know her exact injuries to figure out if she was wearing a seat belt because that information wasn’t include in the original report. The point is, her corpse was exhumed and examined. When she was returned to the ground after that rude awakening, the forensic scientist in charge forgot, or so she claimed later on, she forgot to include her head.”

  “Oh lovely.” Tara herself didn’t believe that the ill-treatment of bodies mattered a whole hill of beans. The dead were dead. Respect ought to be accorded the living, though, and it would be mortifying to foresee that a dreadful end to one’s life would not constitute the final humiliation. This woman once lived, and so deserved basic, civilized respect. If she was in court on the matter, that’s what she would argue. “How did that come out?”

  “The scientist happened to mention it. She was guiding a TV crew through her lab one day and somebody said something, and she said, ‘Oh, that’s Maria Sentis.’ I saw it on TV. I knew where her grave was located, just down from my Robby’s, so why was her cranium not in it? The thought made me ill. So I put up a major stink.”

  “I bet you did.”

  “I did. Her poor family came apart at the seams and moved away after her passing. They offered me some moral support. Do you know, that scientist, who has more skulls to play with than she can count, is an avid collector? She did not want to give Miss Sentis her head back. She claimed that it was hers now, and when that made people mad she argued that it belonged to science. Then she tried to say that I was an old ninny with silly superstitions and that Miss Sentis did not miss her head one whit, but in any case her skull was staying put, in her lab. The woman’s public relations skills weren’t the best, I’m afraid. She tried to make me out to be a nincompoop who wanted to put mummies back in the pyramids, which I told the press when they came calling wasn’t such a bad idea, but in any case the cranium of a young woman who lost her life prematurely belonged with the rest of her, that we, as a society, with our fast cars and dangerous drivers, owed her that.”

  Tara was on Mrs. McCracken’s side in this. “What did the scientist say?”

  “No.”

  “She said no? Just no? What did you do?”

  Mrs. McCracken’s grin seemed impish, a break from the gravity of their discussion. “Tara, by the time I was done with her, that scientist wished that she was the headless one. I vilified the poor woman. She summered in a cottage up here but it’s sold. She accused me of running her out of town but I never did. I swear.”

  Tara enjoyed the tale. “So you got the skull back.”

  “You bet I did. Not only that, I made her put a name to every skull in her lab, in case anybody else wanted a friend’s or a relative’s head back. She rued the day she came up against me, that’s for sure.”

  Tickled, Tara let the last of her laughter subside. “You’re a wonder,” she said. “But the part about not going up against
you—am I to worry?”

  Tara moderated her remarks with a broad smile and a sparkle in her eye, yet Mrs. McCracken took the charge seriously. She bobbed her chin and squinted at her. “You, Rainy Day Tara-Anne Cogshill, have some explaining to do. Don’t think that you can escape me. I’m going to know where you came from and why even if it kills me.”

  The younger woman took a deep breath. “How far will this go?”

  Mrs. McCracken pulled an imaginary zipper closed over her lips.

  “Seriously?” she asked.

  “Tara,” Mrs. McCracken vowed, and crooked their elbows together to commence their walk and talk together, “I’ll take it to the grave.”

  ■ ■ ■

  Ryan scrunched farther down in his car seat. He knew how this could look but didn’t care. He put in extra hours, paid and unpaid, and his employers and the citizens of Wakefield were aware of that. A very occasional nap by the side of the road then was not a mortal offence.

  Not that he napped. Nor was it the idea. His eyes stayed open despite his desire to crash for a bit, and he adjusted the mirror to see who might come up behind him. While he remained in danger of falling asleep, and on any other day he might easily have done so, too much agitated his synapses for that to happen this afternoon. Really he looked more like a policeman trying to conceal his presence for surveillance purposes, albeit in a marked car, than a cop goofing off on the job. As further evidence of that, more than his cop radio was turned on. A CB brought in sporadic communication from deep woods loggers.

  He knew where his brother was working today so chose this road to monitor, listening in to the crackling radio even while nodding off. When Denny emerged he’d drive this route and Ryan evaluated the pros and cons of stopping him, something he’d done only once, back then to give him the news that their mother had passed away. Over the years, his brother edged above the limit on his radar gun a few times, but nothing extreme, and if he stopped him today it wouldn’t be to fine him. They just needed to talk. Denny would protest that he was hauling logs, that downtime and conversation cost him cold hard cash. Mentally, Ryan rehearsed a response. “I could talk to you here and now, or later at home in front of your wife and kids. You choose.”