The Graveyard Alight (The Second Lighthouse, 2023)

Of all nights, it was Día de Muertos when the first contact began.  In an unexpected turn of fortune, a Mexican was required.  

Old lady Clara García had driven the long route around Skaneateles Lake, her faint head beams traveling like lanterns through the dark.  The worn frame of her plain gray ‘89 Accord squeaked and almost groaned as it wobbled into park.  Wind twisted dry leaves along the ground.  Old lady García crossed herself with a quick prayer as she stepped out of the driver seat.  The night clouds sailed swiftly past, opening the moon.  To her right, the cemetery sprawled out in moonlight, with soft shadows in the nooks of the hills.  

A single cheerful jack-o-lantern sat on a stone pedestal beside the black-iron gate.  A simple note from the cemetery owner read Felíz Día de los Muertos, Clara!

Clara entered into the hills.  She went slowly.  Her legs weren’t the vital waltzers they used to be, and her thin arms were full of marigolds, calaveras, candles, and an unopened bottle of red nebbiolo.  

After a few video calls earlier in the day to her Mexico City family, she was alone for the special holiday.  The usual cheer of the day was offset by her isolation in the states.  Being a loyal and careful person, she hadn’t made many connections, certainly no hispanic ones, since Jorge had passed three and a half years ago.  Like most isolated and widowed elders, her claim to life now revolved around an absence, like a planet still curving around the absence of a star.  Ghostly herself, she made her way to her lost husband.    

Tall wax candles flickered around the makeshift shrine Clara had erected before the gravestone.  At the center was a framed picture of Mr. García.  His deep brown eyes stared out in a frozen smile, through the moving light, into Clara’s living eyes.  She poured some of the wine.  

“One for me,” she slung the bottle in the air and helped herself to a healthy chug, “and one for you my love.”  The deep red liquid flowed onto the grass.  Clara sadly smiled at the stain.  

But the liquid carried on.  Past the thought of Jorge.  Past the green blades.  Soaking the topsoil, it sank deeper. The roots almost jumped, coming into contact with the bright alcoholic concoction.  That electrical shock passed along the root system, communicating something uncertain to the vast field surrounding the stain.  All the grass knew it now.  And the deep roots, the roots of the oak near the road, for example, felt the slightest of shock-waves, all the way down to nascent tangles of growth, embedded far in the dirt.  And one of those spindly hands of roots, having wormed through the earth over years, caressed the side of old Mr. García’s oak coffin.  And almost imperceptibly, almost enough to communicate nothing, almost enough to disturb nothing in the black, silent earth below the living—the root heard the splash of wine.  It tingled just once against the wood of the coffin.  

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Over the centuries Knoll graveyard had been open, the hills had been privy to many wild laments, earnest prayers, and one sided conversations full of pondering, wandering pauses.  They had heard a great deal.  But, perhaps due to the chance, or perhaps due to a general ethnic and cultural provincialism, no one had ever made such prolonged and amicable conversation as Clara García did that Day of The Dead.  

She spoke and laughed in front of Jorge’s gravestone, with more imaginative interpolation than thoughtful pauses, like an only child used to playing all of the characters of a game.  It may as well have been that two lovers from Mexico City had paraded to a graveyard to drink late into the night.  

Moonlight flowed as if the atmosphere of the moon was being poured from a decanter over the hills.  Clara’s face was lit cherry with the nebbiolo.  Her flustered partying paused for a moment.  The corners of her eyes narrowed with pain.  She was looking again at the portrait.  

“Oh I wish I could hold your face.  I wish I could hold your face Jorge.”  An unexpected wind rose from the Western hills, breaking the still night.  It twined through the mounds and mausoleums, clattering some of the thinner branches together like dice in a cup.  And as the breeze rounded the near hill on Clara’s left it rushed out and filled the valley.  The candles trembled and were snuffed.  The wind circled and circled the valley like a padding wolf, gently rushing through the grass.  From those green instruments, a pitch began to form in the wind, and then a clearness of sound more appropriate to a whisper than a moan.  Drawn out and thin, Clara heard from all directions one word.  

Jorge

She shook and her mouth sprung agape.  Again the wind swished.

Jorge  

Knowing that she was either experiencing a second-to-none miracle or she was going looney, Clara chose to accept the impossible.  She clasped her hands together and gazed out in wild eyed wonderment, “Gracias dios!  Gracias, gracias, gracias!”  

The wind hummed in what Clara could only interpret as a happy tone, a warm and soft clarinet.  With climbing excitement Clara babbled “Oh Jorge, show me your face!  Can you show me your face,” having no real idea how such a thing could be done.  

Gasping slowly through the dry grass again, the airy voice formed.  

Show me my face

Can you show me my face

At first Clara thought that perhaps she was just being parroted.  Then another idea came to her.  She didn’t know much about ghosts—maybe in his time in the afterlife Jorge had forgotten his physical appearance.  Scrambling forward, Clara’s thin arms reached for the portrait resting against the tombstone.  She picked up the frame and held it aloft.  “Here you are, here you are.”  

And it wasn’t the wind this time, but the grass beside the grave began to bend, as if each individual blade had its own volition.   A form began to take shape, cleverly using the broad moonlight to carve out shadows and brightness into a face on the grass, two or three times the size of a human head.  

Jorge’s handsome profile, in black and white, looked out meaningfully, and then smiled from the grass.  Old, lonesome Mrs. García flung her form into the grass, her breasts and lips pressed tight against the cold november ground.  

Clara and the apparition of Jorge, talking in the wind, conversed until the early sun tinged the sky orange.  It seemed as if Jorge had forgotten a great deal in the afterlife.  Most of the night he simply asked Clara to elaborate on who he was and the things they had done together.  But as they spoke he began to spontaneously say more and more that reminded Clara of her dear husband.  As she left, before the face in the grass flattened into a natural plain in the morning light, the wind spoke.  

Come back soon

I love you

Deep beneath the ground, in Abraham’s crypt, a glowing screen spanning the ceiling expressed the shape of a colossal human body, curled and still, breathing softly in and out, like a sleeping baby.