Up Jumps the Devil

Bulldozers dispose of gravestones even more efficiently.

Every time new crowds up against old, old is what gives way.

A few years earlier, the cousins’ grandfather had drawn a diagram of the different plots, each rectangle neatly labeled in his old-fashioned wavery handwriting.

I was shown this drawing along with a copy that had all the property lines drawn in to scale. In that one, the rectangles labeled “George Patterson—d. 1894” and “Sally Patterson—d. 1913” appeared to be approximately ten feet from Geraldine Stevens’s property line.

“Here’s how it is right now, Your Honor,” said her attorney, one Brandon Frazier, who was so young that you could almost hear his shiny new law degree crackling in his back pocket. “These two little piles of rocks right there have been moved so that they’re now almost twenty feet from my client’s property line.”

Fifteen of those feet had been paved over in August.

“She’s driving back and forth right over her own great-great-aunt and -uncle!” Geraldine said tearfully. “And it’s wrong!”

“Tell me, Mrs. Stevens,” said Edward (“My friends call me Big Ed”) Whitbread as he rose ponderously to his feet. Ed Whitbread is not my favorite attorney. He’s pompous and dull-witted and he opposed me in the primary when I first ran for judge. “How old was your grandfather when he drew this diagram?”

“I don’t know. Seventy-five or eighty maybe.”

“And was he a professional draftsman?”

“No, he was a farmer.”

“A farmer,” Whitbread said portentously. “I see. Yet you claim he made an accurate drawing, to scale, with no formal training, when well past seventy?”

“My Grampy was sharp as a tack right up to the month before he died, and he certainly knew where his Aunt Sally was buried. He was eleven years old and he remembered going to her funeral.”

“I’m sure he thought he remembered,” Whitbread said genially.

As the questioning continued, Allen entered the back of the room and slid into a rear bench. He was alone and didn’t appear to be fleeing, so I had to assume that his alibi stood up to a cursory check and that Dwight had turned him loose.

But why was he here?

And why was I worrying about Allen when young Mr. Frazier was summing up for the plaintiff?

With little else to fall back on, he cited the drawing as ample proof that his client’s cousin had willfully changed the dimensions of the cemetery, thereby showing great disrespect for the dead who had a right to lie undisturbed.

“No respect for her ancestors?” Ed Whitbread snorted at the very idea. “Your Honor, you’ve seen the photographs of how disgracefully overgrown that cemetery looked before my client took it in hand. And you’ve seen the photographs of how it looks today.”

I might disdain Whitbread, but he had a point. In the earlier snapshots it was hard to even see the headstones. Now the trash trees were gone, a single magnolia’s lower limbs had been pruned so that a concrete bench sat in its shade, and the well-mowed grass made the plot look almost like a small park. Azalea bushes neatly bordered the wide new driveway. Very pretty.

“Mrs. Stevens,” I said. “In the years preceding your grandfather’s death, did you ever help your cousin clean off that graveyard?”

“She never cleaned it off,” said Geraldine. “I would’ve helped if everybody else did. But after Grampy quit doing it, nobody else ever offered.”

(What Allen thought of her answer could be read on his face. He was following the testimony like a play and her words made him roll his eyes at me. One thing—maybe the only thing—that could be said in Allen Stancil’s favor: I never saw him shy away from hard or dirty work.)

My options were clear. If I believed Geraldine and dear old Grampy’s diagram, which I was inclined to do, then opportunistic Annice had indeed moved the rocks and, in defiance of the laws of North Carolina, was now driving over the remains of her great-great-aunt and uncle. Not that much could be remaining after nearly a century.

No matter how I ruled, the animosity and hard feelings between these two cousins would no doubt continue. If I found for Geraldine and ordered Annice to remove the paving and restore her drive to its previous narrow width, the cemetery would probably fall back into a neglected state. Clearly Geraldine cared nothing about old Grampy’s final resting place. It wasn’t in her front yard. The important thing was to give her cousin grief by making Annice tear up that new driveway.

If I found Geraldine’s suit without merit—and except for a freehand diagram drawn by an old man, she had shown me no overwhelming proof to support her accusation—the graveyard would probably be kept in immaculate condition from here on out. Not, however, because Annice gave a true goddamn about the place. She reminded me of Adam, only instead of a business in California, her goal was a driveway wide enough to accommodate a Cadillac. One thing about it, though: from now on, Annice would be forced to prove to a watching world (i.e., her neighbors and the rest of the family) that she had more respect for her ancestors than anyone could ever ask.

“The law is the law,” the preacher said sternly. “You can’t overlook the desecration of two graves just because a half-abandoned site is now prettied up.”

I thought of our own family graveyard, bordered in old-fashioned roses and kept in loving repair. My mother is there. So is Daddy’s first wife. They lie amid my grandparents and great-grandparents and children that died of diphtheria and croup a hundred years ago. Daddy and some of the older boys want to be buried there, but will any of the grandchildren?

“The law is the law,” the preacher repeated inexorably.