Living Witness(18)

Home was up off Main Street to the north, on Carpenter, and then left up the hill on Jerusalem Cemetery Road. The Cemetary along side the road had belonged to a small church—Congregationalist it was when it was still in operation—that served people who had moved here from New England. Annie-Vic wasn’t old enough to remember that, and she didn’t think anybody else was either, not the way this world worked. No, the Congregationalists had built their own church right on Main Street around the time of the American Revolution, and that was probably the last time the Calvinists had really had any influence in this part of Pennsylvania.

“Fanatics,” Annie-Vic’s father used to say, when she was in high school and deemed old enough to hear “serious” discussion. Ah, but Annie-Vic’s father had never been able to let go of his need for all kinds of discussion. Annie-Vic had heard it from the cradle, and so had her brothers and sisters, the whole lot of them sitting around that dinner table every night while Papa railed on and on about religion and politics and the moral philosophy of the Greeks. They’d all gone off to “good” colleges, too, in the East, just as Papa wanted them to, and they’d all left Snow Hill forever soon after that. Annie-Vic didn’t know why she had never really gone, all the way, since she’d come so close a couple of times.

At Jerusalem Cemetery Road, Annie-Vic stopped power-walking and just walked. The hill was relatively steep, and her own house was at the top of it. The church had never moved their cemetery. She could still see the thin, plain headstones row on row among the weeds and brambles. The weeds and brambles grew up every summer and every winter brought them down, as if something in nature wanted you to notice where the bodies were buried. Maybe they hadn’t known how to move a cemetery back then. Annie-Vic wasn’t entirely sure how they moved it now. Did they dig up the bodies? If they didn’t, what got moved? What would it mean to people if they came out to visit their loved ones and visited only a stone? Did people care?

This was the way she got when she was tired: she asked questions she didn’t know the answers to. She reached into her utility belt and came up with her little thing of water—there was a name for the thing, but she couldn’t remember it. Her grandniece had given it to her. Her grandnieces and nephews gave a lot of things to her, and one of them had represented her when she’d threatened to sue the AAVC over not being allowed to go to Mongolia.

Up the hill. Into the house. Have some yogurt. Make some tea. Sit down in the living room and listen to the next lecture in the Music History series she’d bought from The Teaching Company. What she really needed was a series on evolution. She hadn’t been able to find one of those.

The house was big and dark. It had been her father’s house, and her grandfather’s. It had eight bedrooms. People in town had called it a mansion when Annie-Vic was growing up, and she supposed that in the middle of the Great Depression it had looked like a mansion. It wasn’t one, though. It had only had a single bathroom back then. Every morning was an agony of waiting in line.

Annie-Vic let herself into the pantry door and sat down on the bench there to take off her walking shoes. They were the kind of shoes she would have called “sneakers” when she was younger, but you couldn’t call something a “sneaker” when it cost a hundred and fifty dollars at the discount store. There were four bathrooms in this house now, “retrofitted” in the early eighties at the insistence of her plain nieces and nephews, whose parents had all been dying out and who saw old Aunt Annie-Vic as some kind of parental substitute. Annie-Vic didn’t understand any of that nurturing stuff. She really didn’t. Psychology, like music history, was not something she’d spent a lot of time studying at Vassar.

She’d left a pair of ballet flats under the bench for when she came inside. She was damned if she was going to start wandering around the house in her slippers like an old person. She put on the ballet flats and went through into the kitchen. It had been updated in the eighties, too, but it looked old-fashioned, nevertheless. Annie-Vic wasn’t much interested in her kitchen.

One of those things she remembered about being very young was Halloween, and running in among the gravestones of the Jerusalem Cemetery, as if by making enough noise they could raise the dead. People thought they were crazy, those Hadley children, running around in there among the tombstones as if it didn’t matter. But then, people had thought they were crazy anyway, all the time. If Annie-Vic had to put a finger on what it was that made her so angry about this town—and she was angry about it; the place made steam want to come out of her ears—it was the way people had been about the cemetery. It was bad enough to be ignorant. It was something truly evil to be proud of being ignorant, and that was what too many people in this town were.