Mike Caldwell was old and tired, but he couldn’t sleep.
He sat on his stool under the awning of the maintenance
shed and watched the storm make a mess of Lakewood Cemetery where he worked as
the groundskeeper and gravedigger.
There were limbs down and whole trees fallen
over. At least one that he knew of had been struck by lightning; he had seen it
burst into flame and had watched it light up the night with an eerie orange
glow. He could smell the smoke and char of the burnt-greenwood even through the
rain.
The winds had been strong, especially in the
past hour, but now it was nearly midnight, and the worst seemed to be over. It
was still raining, but soon he would be able to walk the grounds with his
lantern and surveille the damage.
Mikey knew that there were a half dozen open graves
that he would need to pump the water from before the funeral services that were
scheduled for the next day. He was hoping their would not be too many
obstructions on the grounds, regardless, he was eager to get a jump on the work
that lay ahead.
The electricity had gone out around 9:00 pm,
and he didn’t expect it come back on anytime soon, so he got up and went to the
kerosene stove, lit it and started a pot of water to boil, scooped some coffee
grounds into the pot. Then he folded up the cot he had been trying to sleep on
and neatened up the work space.
Mikey’s hands were shaking as his long-gnarled
fingers gripped the can and spoon, then he emptied the last drops of clear-corn-liquor
out of a mason jar, into his tin cup. He went back to his stool and sipped the
acrid moonshine as he waited for the water to boil.
He told himself that he needed the strong
liquor to lubricate his limbs, and prepare him for the day ahead.
Mikey thought about his wife sleeping at his
grandmother’s rooming house south of the lake and west up-over the hills. He knew
she wouldn’t be thinking of him at all, unless it was to assume that he had
gotten drunk, maybe got lost in a dice game and decided not to come home.
Not that he had a choice…his wife was a
prurient woman and didn’t want him around if he had been sipping.
Mikey slept in the shed on most, he knew
better than to cross her; if he had gone home there would have been a fight.
He was out of the grounds after a little
while, walking over the hills of the cemetery in his slick poncho, making
mental notes of the work that would need to be done…there was plenty of it.
After a couple of hours he was coming back
around to the shed when he saw something going on across the southside fence,
over in the Bird Sanctuary.
There was a very large man, constructing what
looked like a platform out in the cattail marsh.
He hadn’t been there when Mikey started his
walk, there was quite a bit of lumber in the platform. It was hard for Mikey to
believe that he had hauled it all in by himself, and built the rig in such a
short amount of time…but apparently he had.
Mikey
stood beneath an old elm, doused his lantern and lit a Pall Mall. He took a
swig from his flask and watched the man at work, who appeared to have hauled a
body on top of the platform and was now performing some kind of ritual.
He
thought there was a good story here, and he made the decision to call his
friend at the newspaper, rather than report it to the police.
I
might get a fin for the tip, he thought.
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