Cemetery Flags

I always enjoyed graveyards. I don’t know what it is about them that draws me there, I used to think it was the quiet, or the isolation. I know now that can’t be right, because there is nothing more occupied than an empty graveyard.

I’ve been going to graveyards, cemeteries, a large field with a lot of rocks in it, whatever you’d like to call it, for as long as I can remember. The first house I ever lived in was sat right behind the largest cemetery in my small town. Anyone who’s seen the sprawling churchyards of Queens would scoff at me calling this acre of land a large cemetery, but as a kid it was the best playground I could wish for. Some of my fondest and earliest memories are framed by taking walks with my father through the woods to get to that cemetery. We would walk our dog Sasha there, a fluffy mutt who loved life simply for its existence. I would play amongst the headstones while my dad walked nearby, smoking cigars on his own and weed when my uncle came along with us. My cousins and I would dare each other to pry the door off the ancient mausoleum that marked the yards center, and I even carried around toys placed on the graves of children no older than me. A stone Eeyore was my happy companion as we chatted about my day before I returned him to his rightful place. I was always sure to return the toys I borrowed, even to the dead. In retrospect it’s no surprise what grew from it. My first playmates were the dead, those who were supposed to be resting I woke for my childish entertainment.

My next home cemetery came with our next house. We moved when I was eleven or twelve. I was annoyed with being uprooted from my morbid playmates, but I was excited to get a new cemetery. This one was a small plot framed by the colonial era stone walls anyone whose spent time in the forests of small-town New England would recognize. It came with the land of our new home as a historical cemetery that couldn’t be altered or removed. As a history buff my father loved the idea and promised maintenance and care that was never followed through with. The small plot’s designation as a historical site was meant to keep it safe, but instead a housing development had measured and cut around it, building their modern homes in defiance of its ties to the past. Our home had drawn the shortest straw, and the lot came with the responsibility to maintain the 14 headstones in this 20x40 patch of sacred land.

Again, we turned a graveyard into a playground, my sister and I spending time ducking behind headstones while throwing pinecones at each other. We would often pretend to be able to read the names worn away by the elements and long covered in moss. We made up names for them, stories of who they were. We claimed a broken headstone near the back as the resting place of a child, creating a whole family who’d once lived where we did now. One grave even included a flag, a soldier from a war that changed depending on the story we told. The person we created wasn’t real, but the flag certainly was, and once a year an old man in a Vietnam veterans cap would knock on our door with a fresh one to replace it. It was a different man every year, but always the cap was for Vietnam and always the flag was the same. Once he asked me to go with him, and as we trudged through the leaves to this stranger’s grave a weight of shame at how we’d treated him nearly knocked me to my knees. But it passed, and I stood back as the man who had once fought knelt shakily for another man who had done the same. To me, they were echoes of each other. Generations apart, experiences separate, but in this moment reduced to the same creature in my mind. In that moment I realized it was his grave I had been playing on, and as he took the weathered flag that I had never thought to take care of he turned to look at me and he was dead too. I ran, of course I ran. I ran back to my empty house and I locked my door, hiding behind my couch until I knew the dead man had gone. I lived in that house until I turned eighteen and went away to college, but I never went with the Vietnam veteran to change out the flags again. It was always a different man, but it was always a cap from Vietnam and no matter how many time my mother insisted against it, I knew now that he had always been dead.

I moved to New York City as soon as I was able. I went to college there, and lo and behold there was another graveyard on their property. This one was even smaller than the one at my house, though it hailed from the same era of the colonization of what would soon be the American East Coast. I didn’t see it much, it was tucked away in a corner like my home cemetery had been, but I found a strange comfort in it being there. It reminded me of home, a fact that I bragged about whenever I wanted to appear dark and mysterious, which in college was often. Even if I used it to boost an image that I couldn’t truly follow through with, it was true. I could see just a bit of it from the window of my freshman dorm room, and when I was homesick, I would often find myself looking down on it. I would watch the occasional old man in a familiar veteran’s cap visit with a detached ache for childhood fighting with the growing pit in my stomach. From this distance, I couldn’t tell if he was dead, but I was pretty sure. Sure enough that when he turned to look in my direction, which he always did, I would duck out of the way. It would take ages before my heart would stop pounding and I bucked up the courage to look again. By the time I did he was always already gone.

I couldn’t see the graveyard in any of my other dorms, and for three years I only thought about the dead man when I went home for holidays and summers. I distracted myself with work or the drama of my quickly deteriorating family instead of thinking about the man I now always saw standing in my graveyard. The first time he’d been there I’d been startled enough to alert my mother to my surprise. I told her Thanksgiving was a weird time for the veterans to be changing out flags, but the blank look she returned to me sent a chill down my spine. She saw no man, but not like when I was a child and she’d seen life where I’d seen the dead. To her there was no one there at all. When she questioned me again, I shook my head, passing off my words as a joke that hadn’t landed. I could feel him staring at me the entire time, and when I looked back his rotted eyes met mine unwavering. The words on his cap had long faded away, but I already knew what they said. I didn’t go into the backyard that Thanksgiving, playing sick when my cousins and I were summoned for the last photo that we would ever take all together with our grandmother before she passed. I didn’t have to play sick for long, the sight of the dead man taking my place in the photo and putting his boney, hole speckled hand on my grandma’s shoulder was enough to truly turn my stomach and I spent the rest of the day in the bathroom. My grandma died a few months later, and at her funeral only I could see the spot of rot on her shoulder, and how much it looked like a handprint.

I went home for holidays less. The man was not to blame for this, but instead the demands of my chosen profession. I didn’t fight it, as it was a necessary evil and a way for me to avoid the man in my graveyard. I didn’t see him for two years, my terrible apartment safely away from any nearby cemeteries. This couldn’t last forever. Life in the city often requires jumping from place to place to maintain living situations that will keep your head above water. The time for that came, and the best apartment, the perfect apartment, sat directly across from The Episcopal Church of the Intercession, along with its large cemetery dating back to the revolutionary war. I almost turned the place down, almost. I should have. I swore I’d never live by another graveyard, but it’d been years since I’d seen the man who was dead. I was miles from home, miles from him, and so I didn’t listen to the pit in my stomach, and I signed the lease.

I saw the man two weeks later. I had settled in, I was comfortable, I’d even been brave enough to walk my dog past the intimidating iron gates of the church. It was the cockiness, I think, that sent me back on this path. Maybe it was deserved, but it doesn’t make it fair. It was on one of these bold expeditions that I saw him. The cemetery’s older sections were often its quietest. Here there was no space for new graves to be dug, and so on the top of the hill there was rarely a living person inside the gates aside from the occasional film crew using the old stones and large presence of the church as the backdrop for their drama. That’s what I thought he was at first, with his back to me he could have easily been someone on the crew of whichever branch of the Law-and-Order franchise was filming that day. With that and the New York mentality of minding my business, I paid the dark figure matching my pace amongst the tombstones no mind. We were separated by the cemetery’s high gated walls, you weren’t allowed to wander the gravestones here like I could back home, especially not with my dog and her lack of respect for the dead. I didn’t look at him until I came to the black painted iron gate that blocked entrance to the graves. He’d beaten me there, even though I swore he’d been beside me only a moment ago. His fingers were gripping the gate, and even from ten feet away I could see that his nails were black. They were dirty too, soil packed beneath them like he’d been digging, but even without the grime they were black. His hands were pale, but not his skin color. It seemed to change every time I saw him, but no matter what it always carried the same washed-out gray of rot just below the surface. I didn’t realize I’d stopped until someone bumped into me. I was blocking the sidewalk, and all around me people were walking past, unaware that death was just beyond the gate. My dog stood stock still beside me, her hackles raised and her teeth bared but frozen. She waited for my movements, and I couldn’t bring myself to do anything but step heavily forward. My legs weren’t my own, but they moved anyway, slowly, painfully, to stand in front of the man who’d fought far away and was dead. He looked at me with no eyes, and as I reached out to open the gate he gripped it tightly and shook the bars. The iron creaked in protest and his broken knuckles cracked loud enough to frighten me. I screamed and fell back into a stranger who let me drop and swore at me for touching him at all. My dog jumped between my legs and snarled at the gate that no one had been standing behind. I had to pick her up to get her home, and the entire time she kept her eyes locked on that cemetery, barking and snarling until we were both inside.

I didn’t leave my house for four days, attempts to walk my dog countered by such intense waves of anxiety that we were forced back inside with the speed of someone being chased. The feeling hadn’t gone away, the feeling of the dead man’s eyes on me. It had lingered before, but never for this long and never this intensely. I could feel them burrowing into my back, my shoulders, anywhere there was a window I could feel those eyes. I covered all the windows and still I was seen, watched, by someone who shouldn’t have been able to do either. I didn’t answer the door or my phone, my work was left unfinished as I instead spent my day tucked into a corner where I could see all the exits, waiting for something that I knew was waiting for me. I’d had roommates once, but they seemed to have disappeared along with everyone else on my once busy block. True silence is often searched for but never found, and I am here to tell you that there is a reason for that. The silence that took me over was a deafening, panicked thing that tore around looking for escape. I screamed to fill the void and the sound was simply swallowed, and still I could feel the eyes. I needed to make it stop, and eventually I knew how without having to ask. On the fifth day of my watched isolation, I left the house knowing I wouldn’t come back. I walked across Amsterdam Avenue to my childhood graveyard and this time when I reached to open the gate nothing stopped me. The dead man who had fought in every war greeted me with a smile that had long lost its teeth and an open, decaying hand. The other held a small tattered American flag on a stick that waved weakly in the breeze. As he swallowed me whole, I finally returned home to play amongst the headstones. The players were new to me, but the games were familiar, and this time my stone was home base instead of the one with the fresh American flag.