Grave

Eleanor Rigby

“Erzahlen”, he thought, hauling the door closed behind him with a toe.

His arms wrapped around an icy bundle of wood, and the draft from the door was uncomfortably chill with new snow, just a little, on the walkway.

“Zahlen” he reminded himself from a long-ago German vocabulary class, was a verb meaning meant “to count”.

He knelt on the brick hearth, threw open the folding glass doors and neatly stacked the wood where the previous night’s embers still glowed.

Somewhere the sun was up, but the snow, the news called it Storm Inga, and sky reflected each other in that dull colorlessness that was January in Virginia.

He would brush the ash off his knees and confront the now empty but simmering coffeemaker in the farm kitchen, hollow and cold with its insulation removed for renovation.

“Er-zahlen”.

To tell a story, he mused to himself. The logic had never dawned on him and all these years later, he made a connection. To count: zahlen. To tell a story: erzahlen.

Recount: that was it, to recount a story.

The joy of etymology rediscovered, gave an brief inner warmth as he pour his fourth cup of coffee.

To tell a story.

The writing of December had segued into reading as bad weather arrived. It had been too cold to continue work outside with milling, and too icy to clamber up the frame of a barm he was building. The frame of the roof was symmetrically perfect to his surprise, but then he was always partial to exploded diagrams of anything mechanically complex.

He had meant to mention to her about the Muse Business, but the email he had written suddenly moved in other directions and, like so many dreams that had refreshed sleep lately, the notion would waver like an autumn leaf on a gentle breeze, and disappear.

There were times when he had the morning presence of mind to jot down a note or two, enough to recover the images from dreaming, and the rare occasion when, suddenly, near midday after having completely forgotten the dream, some image would suddenly drift up into the unrelated consciousness of the day’s business, and he would pause.

Oh, that was it.

Winter was a time when the interruption of the daily activities by a notice of death, would wake him up a little more than usual.

On that windswept hill some dozen miles south, the first gravestone had popped up recently. It amused him that the Vestry had been denied the significant construction bond that had been required to post with the County pending fulfillment of building permit stipulations.

They were having trouble cultivating grass on the landscaping fill that raised the original slope of the prior vineyard west of the Church building.

He knew because he was one of a brigade of parish volunteers who were responsible for lawncare as a means of lessening the operating expenses of the new Church.

That January morning, he sat by the fire thinking these things and closed his eyes, recalling how hot the August days had been while he had mowed, and how the red Virginia soil that had been trucked in, but was infertile, rose in clouds of dust that should have been held in place, had the landscape soil been the right sort.

It took five hundred years to generate an inch of topsoil, he had read.

No: the only things that seemed to sprout on that arid hilltop, were the solitary gravestone and the flowers that remained from the funeral.

“Lord”, the new headstone read. Not because of a biblical epitaph, but from the curious fact that the family surname was Lord.

You could see it when arriving at Church for the early service Sundays.

Winter was a time to think of ice and cold and the day when the chill of one’s fingertip would no longer be troublesome or relevant or remembered.

The previous Sunday, during announcements after the Lessons and before the Nicene Creed, The Rector had brought news that Jerry, a long-suffering husband and father of two friends who were in regular attendance, died. His lung cancer complications had made his visits to Church increasingly rare, quite different from his wife and adult daughter who sat a pew or two in front of him each and every Sunday.

Now Jerry was gone and services would be held the next Saturday.

Perhaps, with the prospect of the second gravestone rising.

The Vestry had proposed a price increase for plots in February, and he himself had joked with another older man, about whom they would gossip about spiritually, once their headstones would enrich the growing necropolis.

A cemetery inhabited with people, all of whom he knew well, was not such a discomforting notion.

To tell a story.

The cemetery and the church itself had been preceded by a vineyard of chardonnay grape vines. He had helped in its demolition of wire and posts in order to clear the building site.

He knew the story of the old Church, and the first Rector who, offended by the compromises made by the Episcopal Church, had carried with him a small congregation in 1979, to a tiny country church built in 1878 for a congregation who was brought together during the Civil War when the nearby city had changed hands many times and the armies had rumbled and rattled along the nearby road.

He imagined he would also find a final resting place on this same hill. There would not be room on his headstone for the story of this Virginia hill, and the people who found their way here.

And then there was a hazy memory of how angry his daughter had gotten over New Year’s dinner about politics and childbearing. She would be thirty-one in another month or two.

Later, it would strike him that with her attitudes and lifestyle, she was headed to become Eleanor Rigby.

Without a church.

All the lonely people, where do they all come from?

All the lonely people, where do they all belong?