Meanwhile, in another old cemetery in Maine, the Earth is pocked with lichen-covered tombstones. This boneyard is not as orderly and cared for as the one I visited yesterday. An old stone wall lines only a portion of the back, then drops off and crumbles into nothing. It is the crumbling of the stone that stays ever in my mind, crumbling and crumbling. There is no separation between the designated area for the dead and the forest behind it. And the animals know it.
“Order! We must have
order!” screams the old undertaker as he stands at the entrance of the
boneyard. There was no one to take him
under when he passed, as he did for so many others, and hence he stands at the
entrance centuries later, still directing the dead. A measuring stick is held firmly in his bony
claw as he measures each member for their last dance.
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| Bonehenge. |
The living tried to organize the place. “We shall put these headstones all in a row,”
they said. “Let us make tight and
orderly lines!” Grave after grave, they
did their best to make order out of chaos.
Each time, the order fell quickly into ruin because the dead are not
known for staying put. And so in
different parts of the old cemetery, you can see where an attempt at order was
made, only to be foiled once again.
Like a macabre version of Stonehenge,
the tombstones shift and dance around their blackened ballroom, the order long
since forgotten and the Earth shifting slowly to the music. Stones fall over and some wear down to tiny
nubs, the only markers of the passing of yet another person. The historians do not visit this place as
they visit Stonehenge. If they were to do so, would they make the
same assumption? “It is a place of
religion, of ritual, of sacrifice. It is
a stone calendar marking the equinoxes.”
What might they say of the dancing stones in this old cemetery?
One of the tombstones has a hand pointing upward, and the
engraving says, “Yonder is my home.” The
cemetery gives us religion. Another
group of stones line up tall and straight like the Revolutionary War soldiers
whose graves they cover. The cemetery
gives us ritual. The smaller stones mark
the passing of children who might not have died had there been antibiotics back
then. The cemetery gives us
sacrifice. The sun hits the headstones
and the shadows slant long and point to the hidden comings and goings in the
forest behind the dark ballroom. The
cemetery gives us the calendar.
“Order! We must have
order!” the undertaker screams again.
Somewhere a band strikes up an old waltz in an effort to bring the
dancers of the dark ballroom back into line.
The stones dance slowly, ever so slowly over the years. Decades pass, and then centuries come and go. Eventually, the stones wear down to nothing
and blow away into the wind, and order is at last reestablished, the landscape
clear again and waiting for the next dance.
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| Yonder is my home. |
