She was a lover of history, of the remembrances of generations gone before. She believed it grounded her. It reinforced that she belonged to a time and place of her own, and soothed the rudderless feeling that sometimes swept over her. Recently she had taken to wandering the local graveyard, next to the Church of Saint Margaret—a spot to which she felt a connection, as they shared the same name. Margaret loved the walk under the traditional pointed wooden roof of the lychgate, down the avenue of yew trees, to the long stretch of the gravestones, where the dead lay, in their ordered, recorded peace.
The names on the stones had given in to weather, to lichen. Some were barely there at all. She ran her fingers over the sunken grooves and blooming growths, tracing patterns where once there had been letters: one person, two dates, then the roles they had played, and the gaps they were leaving behind. Of the ones that remained legible, she read: Parent, child, loved one, dearly missed. Didn’t all gravestones speak of love, even if the word itself had never been carved there? When the body could no longer stand up, the stone did it for them. It counted. It remembered.
Even so, it was the stones that had fallen that interested Margaret the most. The ground had shifted beneath them, and what was once flat grassland had become hillocks, bumps and textures of moss and clumped weeds. The stones had tilted, or even lay flat on the earth. Maybe the process had taken many years, unnoticed from one generation to the next.
There was a wooden board by the lychgate where notices were pinned, in the shade of the stone walls of the church. Usually they were schedules of grass cutting, or of services to be held. The church itself seemed to be in a state of rest, barely disturbed by people, but there was apparently a committee who watched out for it and instigated the occasional change. A new pink sheet on the board disclosed the committee’s latest plan: to replace the gravestones that had fallen with new ones. The ground would be levelled. Tree roots were to blame, the pink sheet read; the avenue of yews was thought to be one of the oldest in the country, and the trees were protected, but careful work could be done around them, as long as the roots were not disturbed. The sheet went on to give a potted history of the churchyard, which was an interesting read.
It was a strange thought—movement, beneath the earth. Growth and alteration where everything should have stopped, out of respect. But that was a human point of view, she knew, and nothing really stopped. Even when names had been forgotten, passed out of history, things continued to exist.
In the end, the parish records revealed nearly all the names that were no longer legible on the stones. The work was sensitively done, one grave at a time, with minimal disruption. There was a small yellow digger, a one-man operation, parked in the corner by the road. Patches of freshly raked earth appeared, dotted white—maybe with grass seed?—and the new stones stood tall, incongruous. Margaret watched the things she had loved, the patterns and weathering, get replaced with a uniform approach: a small granite slab with an embossed edge, and a smart white script that gave only one name, two dates. There was no room on such tidy stones for sentiment, and nobody left to supply it, anyway; she was not surprised to find out that some of the dates stretched back far into the past. It made her think of the ones who had come before the stones, too. The unmarked. The pink sheet had mentioned how the church had grown on the bones of a much older settlement, and local legend had it that the yew trees had been planted by those who used the ground for their corpses long before the new religion of Christianity came this way. Maybe many gods mingled with the remains of their believers.
Margaret had little in the way of religion herself, except for a vague spirituality that suffused her, sometimes, when the church was very quiet, at dusk, and the yew trees seemed to bend to its stones, as if to reach them, brush them. She could see how it was possible to believe in greater things as the shush of the wind stirred the branches. At such times it felt as though everything was part of the world, and of her, and she belonged.
A man, glimpsed between graves.
His high visibility jacket began to catch her eye, disturbed the serenity. She assumed he was the workman who operated the digger, or a groundskeeper, overseeing the work. He was older than her, with wiry grey hair that looked unkempt. An average height. It was not that he was in any way remarkable. Sometimes, on her visits, she thought he was angling to catch her eye, but he never did approach her, and for that she was glad. All she wanted was her own space.
He wasn’t there all the time, of course, and when she was certain she was alone again, Margaret would tentatively near the new stones, the freshly levelled ground, treading softly around the white specks in case they were seeds trying to germinate. She read the recovered names aloud.
Beatrice Anne Barbeary, she read on one. An evocative name. She said it aloud.
The name, spoken, called forth an image, and an image created a story. She had it. She had the whole woman in her head, full, complete, talking:
I was born poor, to parents honest: why must truth and poverty hold hands so tight? They like each other’s’ company well, and I soon learned to prefer the luxury of a good lie. I told men what they wanted to hear, and none more so than my husband, who would not have it said I was dishonest, even when the pox, given to me by some backstreet lay, bit him hard too. There’s little I regret but the way I laughed at him to his face, one night while drunk, and he left the inn to the sound of it. When I finally arrived home again in the morning light, all was very quiet. I thought him lying in wait to kill me, but no, worse, he had taken his things and gone. He never did come back, and every night after I lay alone. I am still a poor fool, after all.
The name let her go, and she stepped back, put her hands to her face. Beatrice Anne Barbeary, under the ground, complete. A life, summoned up by newly carved letters. She looked around for someone to tell, someone to share it with, but no, she was alone. It was a direct thread back into the past. A secret between her and the ground.
Every one of the new stones took her into another life, long since ended.
Frederick Joseph Lackle
There was never time to waste, not in the trade, there was always more orders to make than minutes in the day, and that was good, kept me busy, made for a livelihood, which many men did not have, and I was grateful for. The speed in the fingers was all. They never slowed, they worked the lace independent of my mind. My hands weren’t even feeling like a part of me no more, on the fastest days. I could marvel at them while they did their nimble tricks. I could even talk with others, laugh at jokes! Strange, it were, to be separate from a part of myself in that way. Then, when the fingers began to slow, to trip up, I blamed them like they were children misbehaving, them who could be brought back to decent ways. I took to keeping a stick by the loom, and cracked my own knuckles for each mistake made. A terrible way to treat my own body. No wonder one hand stopped working altogether, then the arm, then that side of my face fell and I would drool and stutter and lash out, like a terrible stranger had taken me over, was fighting inside me, refusing to be good and obey me ever again.
For a time, after sharing a moment of Lackle’s life, her own fingers itched to create something. She found a patch of daisies, by the back wall, and made a chain, splitting each stalk with her thumbnail to slide the other one inside. Delicate work. She left the chain on his new stone, curving down over the letters.
Esther Lanten
I don’t know what I did wrong, I don’t know why the others won’t let me stay, I’m good at counting and can draw a square with even sides. I have my own piece of chalk, I took it from the schoolroom when the teacher wasn’t looking. If they would let me stay I would be a good friend, and I would have let them win at the game even though I could beat them all cold, I reckon. I can hop and jump high, and I hate having to walk home in the dark alone, these autumn nights. We’re not meant to be all alone, I think. We’re meant to be all together, and get along, and that is how I’d like it, I think I’d be easy to love.
Barnabas Samuel Templeton
When you’ve lived as long as I have, you will understand that all the dreamed-of happenings, all the years of wishing and wanting, amount to little more than time wasted. What has been done? What can be held up as proof of a strong mind, a great heart? I take myself to the city when I can, and stand in the park to give away my pamphlets, and I see the young men and women, lost in their own dreams. They eye my beard, and wild expression, and think me feeble, demented, when I call out to them and bid them act, live in here and now. They skirt around me, or sometimes gather at a distance and mock my words. But why should they obey me, or give me power over their actions? I’ve done nothing to deserve it. But I will continue to attempt to pass along my pamphlets, and speak my truth, whether they will listen or not. Words are all I have. All any of us have, in the end.
“Here again?”
She shook herself free of Barnabas. The wiry-haired man in the high visibility jacket was beside her, his body squarely to the new stone, but his gaze on her face was direct, intent, as if searching for something.
“Pardon?” she said.
He gestured to the name. “Put that one in last week. There’s not many more to go.”
“The replacement?”
“Nearly done.” He looked away, back over his shoulder, to the church and the avenue. “Beautiful spot. You like it?”
“I’m a history buff,” she told him.
“Then you’re in the right place. History to spare around here. Wish I knew the half of it.”
She smiled. The voices that sprang from the names: her secret. Impossible to describe. She wouldn’t try.
“Have you seen over there?” He pointed. “That corner’s for the old church workers. My family line. I just put in a new one for my own great grandfather. Wetherall. Wetheralls have taken care of the grounds here forever. Even got the same name. We’re all Freds. Frederick Wetherall. First born sons.” He pointed to an area far back, in the shade of the tall hedge that marked the boundary with the open fields. The small granite store there was incongruous, alone in the cluster of heavy crosses. “Have a look if you’re interested. I’ll leave you to it.”
She watched him make his way to the digger, by the gate. He checked it over, then shrugged off his jacket, left it in the cabin, and ambled away. As he stepped through the gate, Margaret thought he straightened, looked a little younger. The graveyard was his family’s responsibility; she could imagine how that could weigh a person down.
She made her way over to his namesake.
The crosses were all marked Wetherall, the surnames still legible, sunk into the centre of each one. The forenames were much harder to read, the lichen growing thick in patches, but yes, many of them were for Fredericks. There were seven in total. The granite stone lay in ground that had been newly flattened, bearing the name in modern, accessible script. The soil around it was damp, sticking to her shoes. It would take an age for the grass to grow back here, surely. Moss would take over the ground first.
She put her hand on the new W, traced its diagonal strokes with her finger.
“Frederick Wetherall,” she said.
I am in love with life, with its light and goodness, and I will fight for it for as long as I’m able. People say it’s time that erodes all away, but I say it’s the will of the nameless. This ground is filled with them. They seethe under the soil, moving, squirming. I don’t mean those whose names can’t be read any more, or those that are no longer remembered. The good Lord knows there are enough of those, and they sleep quiet in their graves, nothing will wake them. But there are a few, just a few, who are never given a name at all. They get born and live and die, somehow without ever being given that first gift, and when they die they never sleep. They feel keenly what others had, and crave it, and they swell upwards in the ground, and shift from grave to grave, looking for ones that have fallen, or lost their lettering, hoping to claim it, hoping to find a place of their own.
I feel pity for them, but I will not let them take what is not theirs. I beat down the ground. They will not rise on my watch.
There was a time, generations back, when the local lord wanted the oldest grave reopened, searching for treasure. It was marked with a flat stone, and letters in a strange language that had nearly worn away. The lord listened to the tales of a Viking warrior placed here in honour, in a barrow, and the ground was domed, a hillock. He told my great-grandfather to open it up, but it did not take much digging to find there was no treasure at all. The whole lump of earth was filled with bones, some scratched, some worn, some broken, tangled together in a mess. The nameless. They had been drawn to that spot, had battled to own it. Were close to breaking through to the surface. It was no longer a place of everlasting peace.
We are all creatures of battle, after all, but we must choose what we will fight, how we will fight. I fight the nameless, in the name of the living.
Frederick Weatherall’s story changed her. She no longer thought the ripples under the grass had anything to do with roots. Hadn’t they moved, overnight? Weren’t they in different places, travelling from grave to grave, looking for a stone without a name?
The committee’s replacement project was drawing to an end.
About a third of the stones were new: the same size and shape, perfectly straight, embedded and easily legible. Something of the past had been lost, but the feeling they brought to Margaret was ease, clarity, comfort. These were modern emotions for a world in which everything and everyone already had more names than could have been written on their graves. People were awash with them—the ones they were born with and the ones they invented for themselves, on screens and among friends. Ones they even threw away. She couldn’t believe she hadn’t seen it before: the wastefulness of names. The greed of it.
Frederick was making a new grave with his digger. The lines were cut very precisely, squarely, by the clean metal edge of the machine, reaching down, very deep. It was an interesting process, and a surprising one. In all her time of frequenting the churchyard, Margaret had never seen a funeral take place there. She had thought the ground closed to new bodies. She edged closer, took a seat on the bench by the Wetherall family plot. The strange thing was the stone was already set, ready for the occupant. She wanted to edge closer, read out the name, learn a new story. It had become an obsession, she knew that. She wanted to understand everyone who had been laid in the soil there, get as close to them as possible.
The digger stopped.
Frederick got out, wiped the sweat from his glowing face with his sleeve, and called her over. “Here, look,” he said. “The last one came from the council.”
She tried not to appear too eager as she picked her way through the graves. “It’s a replacement?” she asked. “Not a new one, then?”
“The last one couldn’t be traced,” he said. “They weren’t sure what to do. I told them this wasn’t a good idea.” He shrugged.
The new stone was blank.
“Oh no,” she said. “No no no.”
“What?”
“They’ll move to it. They’ll be drawn to it. Under the ground. Like your relative said. They’ll pull up, from beneath. Fight over it.”
“You know that old tale, huh.”
She couldn’t explain it. She stared at the ground. The patterns of the bumps and raises in the ground: they were already changing. Growing. The nameless were coming. They would fight. Break through. The grave was wide open. “Fill it in,” she said. “You need to fill it in, now. Why did you dig it?”
“It’s like this,” he said, with that searching gaze locked on her once more, “The nameless don’t start off in the soil. They get put there, by people like me. That’s not to say I don’t feel bad for them. I don’t know how they get born and raised. It must be a terrible thing, to be made that way. Imagine it.”
“I can’t. I can’t.”
“They get drawn to places like this. They can feel the pull of lying down, getting covered in the earth, I reckon. They want the strong stone marks they’ll never have. Tell me your name, miss, if you don’t mind.”
“Margaret,” she whispered.
“Now, you and I both know that’s not true. You saw it on the church and you tried to take it, but it won’t stick, will it? It’s not yours. I’ve dealt with your sort before. Best get in the grave, now, quick, and I’ll cover you over and fill it up before the others arrive.”
“You could give me your name,” she said. He was so strong, so certain of who he was and what he had to do. Did he appreciate it? “I could have just a small part of yours, you’d never miss it.”
The ground around the grave trembled; a little soil fell from the sides. The grass was raising up, bulging outwards. The new stone shifted.
“Best hurry,” he told her.
“I’ll answer to anything,” she said, but he shook his head, not unkindly, and she climbed down into the dark and laid still. It was wet and cold, and she crossed her arms over her chest and said a small prayer, feeling that was the right thing to do. Frederick got back in the digger and began the process of filling, filling, filling, determined to make the ground as flat as he could. Everything in a graveyard should be serene: he believed that. Achieving that peace: now, that was a battle. He fought it every day.
