Last Will (The Second Lighthouse, 2023)

“Still digging today, Abraham?” The voice cut with the wind across the hills cluttered with frosty browned grass. Mr. Ormesson walked his friendly, if thin, frame down the slope. He angled his body and took it easy; careful to not slip and tumble.

At the base of the middling hill, a great-doored stone entryway led to the hill’s innards. The doors to the mausoleum were open. Beside them, on a little black marble bench, a man sat with his lunch. He had on a tight, faded black jacket and despite his hair being a little unkempt below and above, Abraham had a respectability Mr. Ormesson always puzzled at. He looked up and smiled at Mr. Ormesson, “Still digging? I’m 43 years old! Of course I’m still digging.”

Indeed, a spade-tipped shovel streaked with dirt rested on the bench beside Abraham- and parked near the mausoleum’s entry was a small bulldozer. It had been three years since Abraham had cut a deal with Mr. Ormesson to have exclusive access to the entire back five acres of the rural graveyard.

Not more than a few miles from the yard, Skaneateles Lake stretched bluely; calm this time of year in New York, a quiet jewel with white fishing birds dipping in and out of the water.

Mr. Ormesson chuckled. This was an old routine held between him and Abraham. “You know 43 isn’t exactly dead yet.”

“But it’s old enough to know you’re going to die. You start to wonder what your life has been about and what you want to leave behind.

“Mhhm.”

“You know that rarely occurs to young people. Even the precocious ones. They spend so much of their time being afraid about how they’re going to meet life. Meeting death is very different.”

“Who knows! Maybe you’re right, Abe...” Mr. Ormesson trailed off, not quite knowing how to respond. Abraham always made him uncomfortable discussing such things so matter-of-factly.

“Well, anyways…I just came by to tell you that—well, you know how the times are—prices are rising everywhere. Unfortunately…”

Abraham broke in, “I understand Paul. You think I don’t trust you? Just bill my account for the increased rent and don’t worry about it. I know you wouldn’t if you didn’t need to.”

It was true. Paul Ormesson was a good man. He was the last in a hereditary line of owners of Knoll Cemetery, stretching back to the early 1800’s. To his father’s disturbance, when Paul took over the family business he tripled the workers’ wages and slashed prices on plots and gravestone-work for those who didn’t have the money. He never made much of this, ideologically, being someone who believed that institutions and progressivism were not at odds.

“Thank you!” huffed out Mr. Ormesson, visibly relieved to not have to impose an actual demand. “Oh and before I forget, Lauren’s made an apple pie that I’ve put in the chapel cooler. Feel free to heat that up. Her pies are the best.”

Abraham raised his dark eyebrows and laughed “I’m sure they are.”

Paul burst out grinning in turn. It always surprised him that Abraham could have such a crude, even straightly dumb sense of humor. You see, Abraham gave the impression of someone who knew more about the universe than was acceptable. But these past three years at the cemetery he had grown tremendously on Mr. Ormesson, “like a benign cancer,” he would joke.

The sun cleared the corner of the clouds it had been sliding behind most of the morning and gave a ruddy hot breath as Paul strolled back through the wind, through the hills, to his office in the red brick building beside the chapel.

As he had explained to Mr. Ormesson on their first meeting, Abraham felt it was essential to do all the work on the mausoleum himself. From the digging to the stone-cutting. This, despite having acquired substantial wealth after his father’s passing.

Abraham had said “That way, when people walk through it they’ll know that my life is in the very walls. Every detail will be chiseled out. And I’ll have lived in the chiseling. I’ll have decided the etchings. Well, with the help of the creativity or the gods or whatever I’ll have decided them. But I’ll be in each one. The architecture will be in me, and I’ll be in it. People will have a sense for that.”

Mr. Ormesson’s eyes turned abruptly “People? What people? You mean your family?”

“No, this mausoleum will be open to everyone. I’m building it to house the part of me that belongs to everyone. You have to understand that if you sell me this lot I will want the doors kept unlocked at all times. People will come to see this grave, although I don’t know who yet.”

“I really have no clue what you’re talking about. But so many people have moved from the area the land will never be filled. So as long as you don’t turn this place into a circus, I can’t help but trust you.” Mr. Ormesson looked down. “Honestly, it makes me sad to think that the parents and grandparents in some of these lots will never have their children come to visit them again, and that their children won’t know the same land that they grew up in. I feel like I’m in the last generation of people who will say things like ‘I’ve walked up and down these trails, around Skaneateles Lake my whole life. Kids are so online these days it’s like they don’t grow up anywhere in particular. And then they float from place to place.”

Abraham’s eyes softened while Paul talked, like all their blue intelligence had died and only gentle mirrors remained.

“You care a lot about family and the past. It hurts that that line of family is being broken.”

“It does… It just doesn’t seem right that children shouldn’t know what their parents knew,” Mr. Ormesson’s eyes teared but he swiftly pulled himself back, “but yes, yes, anyways. The property is yours as long as you don’t mind the grounds workers coming through to keep it up to par with the rest of the yard.”

Abe kept on topic, “I just want you to know that I care about that too—that families are being broken. In a way, and to be honest I don’t know how, the mausoleum I build here will bring the children back to their families and they will all be able to be together again.”

“I don’t mean to be rude but you always sound to me like you’re talking in riddles.

Abraham let out a good natured laugh, “My wife would agree with you!” Then he looked up with genuine interest, like a dog smelling a treat. “Do you have kids?”

“No. We don’t think we’ll want to have kids. Lauren says it’s kind of just a selfish thing for her, she doesn’t want to spend her resources that way. And you shouldn’t have to have kids just because it’s what people do.” Paul gestured in mock quotations, “Have two kids, a 9 to 5, and a picket fence.” “Not to mention it kind of seems irresponsible to bring a kid into such a troubled world. And, well, I guess it pretty much boils down to we just don’t want to, but who knows, maybe one day.”

While Paul talked, Abraham looked intently at him, respectfully. But at the back of his eyes, almost as if he had eyes within his eyes expressing a more subtle sincerity, there was the trace of a smile.

“It’s funny, you just strike me as the sort of guy who’d be a good father.”

Paul’s face softened. “I appreciate it.” Then resolutely he said “But it looks like it won’t happen.”

Abraham said “Well anyhow, I’ll get to work next week after I’ve finished some of the early design plans. Please stop by anytime and have a coffee or lunch with me while I’m at work. I’d like to hear more about the history of the graveyard and Skaneateles. Take care.”

Abraham walked off and waved his hand behind him like a loose handkerchief, in farewell. As the glass doors closed, Mr. Ormesson was left thinking about how surprised he was that Abraham had a wife.

In the early days of Abraham’s work he foisted himself on Mr. Ormesson. He asked him to get coffee one day, early on, and then nearly every day after that. There was a starlike clockwork to the ritual that matched the tenor of both men, each dependable in their own way. They would leave around lunch time, hop in Abraham’s old black Elantra, and trace around to the coffeeshop on the opposite shore of the lake.

Cat’s Cafe was both owned by a dazzling lady in her 30’s named Cat, and was home to no fewer than 17 housecats. Mr. Ormesson had only been to the cafe a few times, but evidently Abraham and Cat were more than well acquainted. Abraham laughed in exasperation as they sat down “I don’t even flirt with my wife like that. This woman knows how to lead me around like a dog on a leash. Panting all day.” He curled his hands like paws in front of him and panted with silly, intoxicated eyes.

Mr. Ormesson laughed with some restraint, caught between trying to agree with Abraham and the principals of monogamy. “You are married, aren’t you?”

“As married as a male monkey can be,” Abraham smiled. “Look, I’d never cheat on my wife but I don’t like to pretend that the situation is better than it is. You’re telling me you wouldn’t want a harem if it didn’t spoil your marriage?”

“I mean,” Paul paused. “Amy is good enough for me. Of course I’m attracted to people but I make sure to be friendly without flirting. Something feels wrong about even going that far.”

Abraham sat absorbing Paul for a moment- the affective sincerity pressed out through his fine cheeks and open, blue eyes. Even his short, business-tousled hair and nearly nonexistent, elegant eyebrows lent themselves to the presentation of a person who believed in the perfect harmony of inner and outer. That is to say, sincerity; that if you were simply good then no secrets would be required. Everyone saying what they meant and everyone meaning well. Paul glimpsed this vision for a moment, and nodded.

“Fair enough. Fair enough. I certainly won’t tell you that you have to go around and flirt.” Abraham pointed to his coffee and said “Now that’s a good mug. Nice and plain.” It was a standard diner mug. “It’s what good coffee was made to go in. No deception. Black on white. No fancy designs or artsy preciousness. Beautiful rounded lip, just plain, American clarity. Love a mug like that.”

Paul laughed “You’re ridiculous.” He sipped his coffee and inspected the mug. “I suppose it’s a good mug. Kind of boring.”

Abraham looked directly at Paul with dancing in his eyes, with just enough restraint to not be rude. “Couldn’t have said it better myself. So anyhow, tell me about Amy. What’s she like?”

If Mr. Ormesson was surprised that Abraham had a wife, he was absolutely flattened when he found out he had three children. It was the first Summer after Abraham had purchased the back acres of Knoll Graveyard. The leafy ash trees were swelling on the hills beside Skaneateles lake; configurations of data so great to the eye that only undulations could be noticed. They might not have been leaves then, but green waves. Abraham said as much to Mr. Ormesson, who found himself annoyed but also somewhat envious that a real person talked like that.

Abraham had invited him to a lake picnic at his home. Abraham said that the cherry tree in his yard had just grown ripe and that he and his family always liked to celebrate that day. As he didn’t have many friends around, he said it would mean a great deal to him if Mr. Ormesson came by. The invitee was touched by this. He understood that he was somehow being chosen by a man who didn’t choose many to be in his life. He had little idea what interest Abraham had in him, as he was not very artistically inclined and not at all a philosopher—the two things which seemed to interest the man.

Abraham’s house was the last on the dead-end drive up the east side of Skaneateles Lake. Paul drove through the July warmth with open windows. He found himself getting excited. He didn’t know why, but he had the sense that something lay in the future with him and Abraham. Or that Abraham was pulling him somewhere. It was a kind of love, complete with butterfly moments and excitement. He decided that he would do his best to win Abraham over.

A few sporadic willows hung near the water like opulent sunbathers. Otherwise the window-view had much the same to offer as any scene of a valley lake in the center of summer. Rushing green and blue. And the quiet quantum of privacy across the lake, cut out by the hills from the world without. He felt the heady leisure of heat on his face and chest. A feeling simultaneously pressing and freeing, like having so much wealth that work no longer attracts.

As he came to the end of the drive and parked, Mr. Ormesson wondered that an area so pristinely lovely hadn’t been ruined yet with establishment. In the yard he saw a woman crouched in the square herb-garden out front. He thought to himself that it must be Lydia, Abraham’s wife. She stood up and began walking towards his car with sun-tanned, waving arms. Some picked basil and oregano was tufting like grass out of her blue-flowered apron front. He shook his head ruefully.

Her eyes were maybe the clearest eyes Mr. Ormesson had ever seen. Not in color, for they were a deep brown speckled with light streaks. But they stood for a character with so little pretension in it that everything was a matter of expression. Abraham later joked with Mr. Ormesson that Lydia had probably caused all of her young lovers to kill themselves by tearfully telling them she felt love for them Tuesday, but not Wednesday, then again on Thursday, but not so on Friday.

As Lydia greeted him she flushed on like a brook in a golden hour- asking if he wanted to try the basil or oregano, how much Abraham liked him, how the Summer had been so gorgeous this year and didn’t he agree. Her talk was hypnotic, and her curly umber hair moving with her hand gestures. Her face was almost foreign and gently tan. And she naturally called him Paul, which surprised him since Abraham almost only called him Mr. Ormesson (to the point where he’d begun to suspect that perhaps the man had forgotten his first name.) He found himself bringing Lauren, his wife, to mind in order to reclaim some safety.

As Lydia guided him around back to the water, she asked coyly how he had come to know her husband.

“Well uh… we met at Cat’s Cafe. And now we play chess over lunch most days. Abe’s some kind of interesting guy. But then again you must know that!”

“Uh-huh. Well it was worth a try.” Lydia smiled wryly and huffed a breathy sigh. “Thought I could pry some information out of you if I was sweet enough!”

“But that’s alright, I”ll—” she raised her hands and made dramatic finger-quotations “trust his method.”

Mr. Ormesson awkwardly laughed and, not knowing what to say, looked up at the few clouds in the porcelain sky and offered up “he really does kick my ass at chess!”

Abraham had made him promise to not disclose to his wife anything about the graveyard arrangement or his work on the mausoleum there. At first Mr. Ormesson stated he wasn’t comfortable lying but Abraham soothed his concerns by saying that he had an agreement with his wife about the secrecy of his work. It was a known secret. Mr. Ormesson demanded that Abraham tell him if he had a terminal condition because he didn’t want that secret on his conscience. “Just being human Mr. Ormesson. It’s a difficult condition to wrap my head around. The doctors say I don’t have more than fifty or sixty years at most. Or the terminality could be tomorrow.”

Paul and Lydia came to the backyard, the lawn pushed out right to a personal strip of beach with a canoe overturned on it, and the long stretch of Skaneateles lake across the way, like they were looking out from the knuckle of a god’s blue forefinger. Five crescented flower beds surrounded a circular, white-stone patio with an abnormally large wooden table at its center. Paul and Lydia took seats on the patio chairs, settling in the sun-warmed cushions.

“You know, if it makes you feel any better, I don’t know much about what your husband actually does.”

Lydia laughed with deliberate freedom. “That makes two of us. You know he’s always worked this way, ever since we met in our twenties. He would lock himself in the study and draft buildings for hours.”

“Isn’t it hard to never know what he’s up to?”

“Well it was at first, but you know Abe’s really a sweetheart. That makes it okay.” Lydia expressively opened her arms, “Sometimes he just can’t share things with me until they’re finished. But then he’ll come in all proud and glowing and parade his new design or model around. I swear he’s the only man I know who’s figured out how to be pregnant.” Lydia looked at Paul and smiled deeply and intently, showing how proud she was of her husband.

The backdoor door slid open and a small circus of figures spilled out, heralded by a collection of shouting voices like a shrill brass band. First a gray and white husky ate up the distance to the patio and jumped on Mr. Ormesson as he stood up. He happily pet the dog but it was apparent he was somewhat afraid of getting too dog-like with it, holding out his hands and shimmying his body away from the jumps. Then, as if sensing his own ambivalence and guessing what Lydia might approve of, he jumped down to a crouch and stuck his face out into the husky’s, rubbing its whole fluffy body with abandon.

Following the dog came two dark-tan boys weaving in and out like jets with arms extended, shooting pew-pew noises and lip-rumbling machine gunnery towards each other. Clearly it was a dogfight for the books. And stuck in the middle of the imaginary crossfire came Abraham with a young girl practically dangling deadweight from his arm. “Daddy please, Daddy please, Daddy please. Angela and Sarah are both going to be there and—” Abraham looked innocently ahead and walked on as if he didn’t have a human leech on him. Out of the side of his mouth he said “You can go after you meet Mr. Ormesson. He’s a very special friend of mine and I want you to at least say hello so he knows I’m not raising savages.” His voice could hardly be heard in the midst of the aerial warfare.

His daughter grumbled her prisoner’s compliance and awkwardly stepped out in front of Paul. Her hair was a lighter, earthier brown than either of her parents or her brothers, and was tied into a lively ponytail behind her. She was maybe 12 years old, at the crest before the plunge of adolescence. Her cheeks had an eager interest bottled in them, as if tensely seeking for a glimpse of a more fascinating world than the one she currently resided in. Her body practically bounced in self-conscious freedom- look how I move like a bird, like a squirrel, I’m a wild thing- can’t you tell I haven’t been chained. Shyness quickly merged into interest and a desire to impress Mr. Ormesson. After all, he was a not-too-old man with handsomly thin features who held his body with respectability.

“Nice to meet you, I’m Avigail.” Then she tested the sarcastic waters- “My dad says I have to say hi so you know he’s not a bad dad.”

Mr. Ormesson enjoined smoothly, reading the girl well, “Does he always make you do such hard things?”

After gleaning that Mr. Ormesson was play-ready, Avigail pestered him with questions about his work, his car, his haircut, his favorite music, and whether he had a girlfriend.

Meanwhile the two boys, Orion and Paul, ran back and forth on the small beach. They chattered and squeaked like monkeys. At first they appeared indistinguishable with their semi-long, thick messes of hair and roasted olive skin. At closer inspection, the younger, Orion, had somewhat darker hair and lighter eyes. He stood erect but loosely, with a proud upwards tilt to his chin. He kept skipping stones across the lake. His feet deer-hoofed in windup, then planted in the dingy sand with a flourish. His thin forearm kept low and parallel to the blue surface, like the low whip of a trebuchet arm. He wasn’t bad. Six or seven skips, sometimes eight clean intervals marked and faded like puddles on the flat blue plane. Mr. Ormesson frequently caught him looking over his shoulder at him to see if he had noticed a good throw. But after a botched splash he would immediately turn his head groundward with a flat face, searching for another flat stone to inspect, as if he were a professional who only cared for the process of practice and not for results.

Paul tried stone-skipping too, but clearly wasn’t as proficient or interested in it. Despite being the older brother by a margin, he spent most of his time talking to Orion or trying to get Orion interested in engaging with him. He brought sticks to stickfight, coaxed a wrestling match, and repeatedly petitioned Orion to help him build little moats and buildings in the sand. Orion was somewhat amenable to these invitations, but clearly annoyed that he was being distracted from his stone-skipping. After a while Paul gave up and sat down beside Orion, cheerleading his skipping. Orion warmed up to that and lectured on the art of skipping. Eventually Paul got up and joined the family while Orion continued his work like a solitary fisherman casting by the water.

Lydia poured Mr. Ormesson coffee from an earthen pot. The pot was deep brown, the color of clay after rain, with a bold lip circling its top. A hummingbird was painted on one side of it and a sparrow on the other—the more exuberant bird in some sort of conversation with the plainer one. The coffee steamed in the white diner-mug, pleasantly smoky and acidic.

Meanwhile Avigail had been emancipated to run off to her friend’s. Her feet splashed in the warm water as she flew away.

Abraham and Lydia talked over meal plans. It made Paul happy to see Abraham simplified by his wife’s presence. There was none of the usual philosophical waywardness. It was clearly important to Abraham that, to her, he was not a smart or special man. They had the well-established set of prods and ripostes that ornaments any marriage. The afternoon passed by and by in domestic constancy.

Mr. Ormesson lounged in the chair with his coffee in the liquid-like summer ease. The new personalities mixed in his mind with their different harmonies and polarities and flavors.

There was the hoppy after-taste of Avigail’s rowdiness, wolflike Orion still skipping stones near the waves, and heartful little Paul now napping, nestled in Lydia’s arms and aproned chest. And Lydia herself like the earth or its daughter, dark lashes glinting in the sun, proud and sweet. And, like the freedom of air and the darkness of space, Abraham’s spiritual wit playing against her; as if the couple were two elements that one could never decide belonged in love or hate. Just that their relation was intensity. Mr. Ormesson felt that in the middle of all this family wriggling there was a fullness. He had not felt so happy in a long while.

Years later, long after Abraham and his family disappeared, Paul had forgotten most of this.

At Cat’s Cafe: Paul sitting at a table when he hears Abraham’s voice behind him:

“Mind if I sit here?”

Paul laughs. “Of course I do. It’ll cost ya.”

Abraham lowers himself into the seat, “It already has.”

Paul deeply laughs, shaking his head. “That’s good. That’s good.”

Paul didn’t understand why Abraham liked him so much. Truthfully that was much of his charm. Mr. Ormesson was the sort of man who unconsciously, and freely, gave his deep friendship on the basis of accumulated trust. It was never a fiery and selfish affair, but, like one brick being laid on another until a house was built, a monument to shared endeavor. Abraham didn’t forget or stop cherishing that loyalty until he died. He loved it more than almost all else.

You ever take a walk through a graveyard, Mr. Ormesson? You know most people just have two dates and two labels on a gray stump of rock?”

“I think most people are interested in living.” Paul said modestly, but with some sharpness.

“Yes, yes. I take your point. But let me tell you, this…”

“You know, I was always more of a philosopher than an architect. I always hated reading the biographies of the great architects because you’d always hear “from the age of 2 he had a fascination with block-structures” or about how they researched every arcanity of draft and design in spare moments and lunch breaks. Somehow actual design always bored me. I have to use it, but I never know what it means. It’s like I was born in the wrong person.

But I wasn’t meant to do philosophy; I was meant to be an architect. But like a blind architect who could only ever see the shape in air, the urge of the pattern before it touches material and reality, before the lines are drawn. That essence is what I know. But that’s hardly architecture.”

Abraham also said that whereas he might be quietly sad over a thing for months, Lydia would have a great thunderstorm and flood of despair. He said that he sometimes felt something was insincere in it, as simple as it was, because it gave so much to expression and so little to what he sometimes felt was the dignity of staying sad and not giving it all away immediately to the world.

In the three years it took Abraham to complete the mausoleum, only once did he bring outside assistance.

Most days he’d drive up in his battered, black hyundai elantra. The car bore its age with pride. Heavy dents curved into the frame beneath the doors—clear marks of carelessly bumping over curbs. He’d pop the humble trunk and begin to unload a battery of tools on the grass beside the grave’s opening.

In the early days Mr. Ormesson saw him working away with the shovel, a rusty old pickax, and the squealing bulldozer. Once, seeing the old architect like a southern field worker drenched with sweat, Paul suggested that he must enjoy the exercise. Abraham informed him that he enjoyed no such thing. The work just had to be done by his hand. He said that often.

Later he came towing slabs of stone on a rickety wagon—black and white marble, granite, limestone. He’d work with ropes, sometimes dragging in enough of the thick, tawny cables to wrap around a man’s body several times. Mr. Ormesson once saw him at sunset, his shirt off and his unkempt hair burned blackly into his silhouette, dragging a granite slab half his size through the dirt behind him. It was like the figure of an ancient slave, Mr. Ormesson thought. The ropes were tied steady to his shoulders—he wasn’t leaving it to the chance of sweaty hands. The cables dug into his skin as he pulled and he let out grunting heaves and swore as he moved the burden into the dark shadows.

And then the next year he arrived with long ungainly sheets of drywall, paints and brushes, a mass of electrical wiring, and what seemed to be a different toolbox every day. He would work long days occasionally, when the spirit moved him, but mostly he kept to four hours a day. Two hours in the morning, then lunch or coffee with Mr. Ormesson, and two in the afternoon.

Abraham claimed that working more than four hours a day wasn’t good for anyone’s soul. Mr. Ormesson disagreed on that point—he believed in an honest forty hour work week. He said that despite often not having enough work at the graveyard to fill that quota himself, he would make sure to fill in the missing time with odd jobs, volunteer work, or any labor he deemed difficult enough. He was very sincere about making the precise 40 hours each week. When he was younger he smoked a bit too much pot and was ashamed of the time he burned away. He said he has a natural laziness he’d rather keep out of the picture, and keeping to the 40 hours kept him in line.

It was a spring day towards the end of the third year when Abraham brought some outside help. The tiny bluets kept on the hillside had just begun to bloom. Mr. Ormesson was fond of flowers, something he attributed to having seen the ritual of flowers brought to graves so many times. In the warm months he kept a permanent, bustling supply of cut flowers at the cemetery’s gate. Incoming family could freely take some and bring them to their loved one’s grave. Mr. Ormesson liked that people would bring these colorful, delicate gifts to their relatives. Like saying “see, I haven’t forgotten, these flowers are like my memory for you- fresh and young.”

And on the winding road between the green flowered hills three black pickup trucks came in swift order. They were unlike Abraham’s beat up piece of metal. Spotless, almost brand new, with gloss shining in the sun. Two men got out from each truck. They all had on well-fitting jeans and collared shirts tucked in. Guided by Abraham, all six brought dozens of sealed wooden crates into the mausoleum. Altogether some 100 crates were lugged in, each the size of a small stove. Clearly the hole Abraham had dug out the last few years was no standard interior. Just to fit the crates within it it had to be at least the size of a spacious living room.

The day the men came was one of the long days. Mr. Ormesson locked the cemetery gates an hour past sundown and didn’t know how long the team toiled into the night. That day was also one of the only days Abraham didn’t emerge from the vault to lunch with Paul. Paul waited around the crypt’s entry a bit, kicking at rocks and feeling humorously like a dumped prom-date. After fifteen minutes hearing the ceaseless sound of drills and grunts and clicking from within the hillside, with Abraham’s middle-range voice issuing orders, he decided to leave them to their subterranean work.

The men in the trucks never came again. Mr. Ormesson puzzled at this, as he puzzled at the whole enterprise. He asked Abraham what the big deal was. Abraham just said “a thousand Homer’s can’t do what a single phonograph can do. Sometimes a guy needs help.” “Help how,” Paul asked. Abe looked sideways at the tomb. “I’d just go ahead and tell you but it’s a surprise and I think you’ll like it. You know architecture is funny because you’re always imagining things that ought to become real. That’s why most architects are so boring. But I’ve done something here that should never have the right to become real. I imagined it like a novelist. But most novelists are so trite because they never engage the difficulty of changing the world. So I had to work with a special team to give this dream the technological life-blood for manifestation. Very few people can do what this team did. Very few.” Abraham paused and raising both eyebrows in bushy half-moon arches, said “But if anyone asks I did it all myself.”

“Like hell,” Paul said. “I’m gonna plant a huge sign out front saying ‘he did most of it and got tired.’ Well I’m very interested in whatever novelist architecture or whatever it is you’ve made here. Is it almost done? Maybe then Lydia and I can see what your final resting place will look like.”

Abraham laughed kindly. “Yeah, it’s almost done. And I’m not sure I want to be buried here. I think I’d like to be buried back in the mountains, in the Carolinas.”

Mr. Ormesson looked at Abraham with his eyes popping outrageously wide, his mouth scrunched open like a crescent roll. “You don’t mean that. Then who’s it for!”

“Well geez I didn’t mean to offend you. Maybe it’s for me after all! Roll me in Mr. Ormesson.” Raising his hands out as if to stop Paul’s confusion, he patted the air. “No, no. I’m serious. I don’t want to be buried here. This is just the place of my last will, where people will always be able to find me…” Then he paused, squinting his eyes and looking up and to the left. “Well, to find something like me. But maybe the best of me, and much bigger than I am.”

“I swear if there’s a marble greek statue of you set up in there—”

Abraham laughed like a naughty child. “Not quite.” Paul smiled, somewhat relieved. “A marble roman statue,” Abraham said. “You’re the worst,” Paul returned.

Abraham returned to Knoll Graveyard five more days. He worked short hours, just two or three a day. Clearly he was putting on the finishing graces. The day after, in the pleasantly tempered spring climate, a few clods of cloud hung listlessly around the sky. Abraham closed the great iron door to the mausoleum with a tender slam. The steel door stood quietly at the base of the green knoll.

Mr. Ormesson was the first one to see what lay hidden in the mausoleum. He walked down to the steel door. It was framed in a gray stone entryway. The only marking on it was in thick, romanesque lettering directly above the door—“ABE”. Mr. Ormesson smiled at the informal abbreviation. Standing before the completed mausoleum, nestled in the graveyard hills, he almost felt as if his friend were dead already. A feeling brushed through his slender chest like a halloween wind. With a doggish shake he cast the dark sensation off. Slowly wrapping his fingers around the door-handle, he pulled open the metal slab with a whoosh.

He was hardly prepared for what awaited him on the interior. A stone hallway led to a landing at the top of a staircase. Everything was made of a smooth

It was spacious for a mausoleum. The interior was all white, leading to a podium with a book on it.

The book was titled “Last Will”. A line drawing of a lighthouse shone on the cover.