Also Grave Robber

(continued)

by Tom Sheehan

Mary Appolinaire came right up out of her seat, her voice reaching the rafters. “What do you mean, the character of the cemetery has been changing? I think that’s ridiculous. My sister is there. It’s the only place left for me to visit her. What are you talking about character for? I think it’s crude and gruesome.”

Clint was not offended, but you could tell he was ready for her. “Mary, just hear me out. Have you noticed what has happened lately in the cemetery around Halloween time? Just in the last couple of years?”

“Of course, I have,” Mary said, the look on her face saying she thought Clint wouldn’t believe she had an answer. “That’s when the pumpkins started showing up. I think it’s beautiful. It’s a lovely expression of a time that might go unnoticed in the cemetery, if it wasn’t for some thoughtful individuals.”

“Let me tell you what happened, Mary,” Clint said. “One day I’m down at the cemetery, a couple of days before Halloween, and I come on my parents’ stone and I see a beautiful pumpkin right on their grave. Nothing carved, no face, just a healthy pumpkin, and a decent-sized one to boot. In the whole cemetery, just that one pumpkin. One pumpkin! At supper that night, right at the table, I mentioned how nice it was seeing the pumpkin there. I said it had given me goose bumps, and I thought perhaps my cousin Emily had put it there because she highly favored my mother, who made Halloween very special for us. My daughter coughed, and looked at me with her thirteen-year-old eyes kind of shaded and said, ‘It wasn’t Em, Dad, it was me.’ So I asked her where she got the pumpkin, and she looked me square in the eyes again and said, ‘You don’t want to know, Dad.’ Just like that,” and he snapped his fingers. “I knew she had swiped it off someone’s front steps. It was the thought that counted, not the gesture. A week later there must have been a hundred pumpkins down there.”

“What the heck are you trying to say, Clint?” Mary was shrugging her shoulders and looking around at everybody. What she was broadcasting was the thought that Clint was different than the rest of them. He wrote poems, didn’t he? They all knew that. “Give us poor folk a clue, Clint.” The thin runner’s frame was upright in the aisle, like a sign pole at a bus stop.

“I’m saying whoever is doing this stealing has a different agenda in mind. He has another purpose in mind.” Clint Mobley looked around to see if any of it had sunk in. He was thinking it might be the argument about the new cemetery.

Mary finally broke free of herself. “You poets sure have a strange way of saying things, and stranger ideas. What are you talking about? I swear, Clinton Mobley, you throw me right off my stride.” She shrugged her shoulders again in the universal gesture.

Chief Tutor Clembeck was nodding at Clint. “You mean the group who’s trying to close up Riverside sooner than later and start another cemetery someplace else, like in Harry Gnosh’s property, also over against the Merrimack River? Harry’s not been out of the house in a year or more. Never goes to the cemetery, though his Wilma’s there. It sure isn’t him. How would this thieving help in that regard, being three sites under discussion? Looks like a deadender to me.” His stern look swept over the crowd. “Nothing new here but some swift objections and more noise. You know what I’m going to do about this mess, and all I ask is that all of you keep your eyes open.”

Two mornings later the cruiser passing through the cemetery came across two dozen stones smashed into ungainly pieces. The word spread around town and a hundred people gathered at the cemetery. The chief came down with a couple of sergeants. One stone was that of Margaret Appolinaire, Mary’s sister. Another stone was that of Dirk Edmunds’ son, Anthony. The method of damage looked purposeful, as if having direction.

The next morning there were two dead dogs and a dead cat right in the middle of the Veterans Section. Nearly the whole town went ballistic. There were meetings at the VFW and the American Legion.

Clint was pretty damn certain there was a hidden reason behind the whole situation at Riverside. He came by the house the next evening. “I’ve got to talk to someone about this, Max. Nobody stealing pennies or nickels or dimes, like we used to do at Mr. Zinias’ steps, wants to get rich. Shoot, we only went to see the movies, cowboy films mostly, Roy or Gene or Hoppy getting more bowlegged all the time. We didn’t even realize they never kissed a girl. All that was beyond us. And who the hell out there wants an old harmonica or goddamn paper dolls even if they are collectibles? Or Syd Welling’s out-of-tune trumpet, for God’s sake? Old Syd never finished a tune in his whole life. He couldn’t carry a note in a briefcase. Something else is going on here. I can feel it in my bones.”

I didn’t really know what Clint was getting at, but I knew this much: that whatever idea he had, whatever lurked in the back of his mind, and I was sure that something had cemented itself there, Clinton Mobley wanted that idea to come out of my mouth and not his. He wanted me to be aware of it, as if it were first-hand with me. It was now painfully obvious to me that he had a severe suspicion of someone in town. All his life Clint had worked that way. And he was good at it. I had never undertaken a study to find out why. It was just his modus operandi. I knew I had to watch carefully as the whole thing might unravel itself, right there in front of me.

We pitched ideas back and forth, nothing spectacular or seemingly possible came out of the dialogue. Then, in one sweep, Clint made a move. He said, “Do you have one of those maps of the town that the Bicentennial Committee had printed?”

“The one with all the businesses and municipal locations shown? The green map?”

“Yeah,” Clint said, “that’s the one.” Damn, I could see something in his eye, the way he so offhandedly said, “Yeah.”

I got a copy from the den and laid it out on the kitchen table. Everything that was anything in the way of business or municipal was shown. That included cottage industry stuff and home quarters for landscapers and whatever you could name. They all had paid a piece of the cost in getting the map done.

Clint leaned over the map, studying it, but I noticed his eyes almost involuntarily zipping back at the Gnosh property, near the Merrimack, where some people said a new cemetery should be located. His eyes were like the platen on a typewriter, going back to the beginning all the time. There was room enough at Gnosh’s for a new cemetery, though it was only one of three sites that came up in discussions. He started pointing out places that I knew as well as he did. I was sure he was being coy about his suspicions to the very end… that would be my saying, with some kind of start, “What about this…!”

And there it was, what he was trying to get me to say, smack dab at one end of the Gnosh property, Beau LeBlanc’s florist shop and nursery. Beau had also been one of us four for the movies. And right there I knew that Clint knew. He knew what I knew, that Beau had the mind and the attitude to do what had been done at Riverside to try to get the new cemetery near his place of business. He’d be way ahead of the other florists if he did. He’d always managed to come out on top, by any means he could. And I suddenly heard his voice, all those years in the past, saying one dark evening as we sat in Ollie Leander’s field watching the fireflies, “I think we ought to get a hammer and chisel some night and get some money from Zinias’ steps. He probably sleeps all night long and wouldn’t even hear us.”

Three nights later, they caught Beau LeBlanc stuffing toy mementos and pictures left for the dead into an old gunnysack. In the trunk of his car they found a ball peen hammer, an eight-pounder, he had probably used to smash the stones, and some of Dirk Edmund’s coins were in a small leather pouch. They found Margaret Appolinaire’s old harmonica and some other doo-dads Mary had left. Beau went that one step beyond, like the old days, figuring how to get Mr. Zinias’ coin free of cement.

After lots of noise and Dirk almost beating the hell out of his old boyhood pal, and Mary instituting a suit against Beau, the town selected a new site for the new cemetery. It was not near the Merrimack, and not near Beau LeBlanc’s Gay Parisian Nursery. And none of his thousand hours of imposed community service could be performed anywhere near the cemetery, new or old.