“WHERE ARE WE GOING?” ALREADY, THEY WERE ALMOST flying.
Pressing her hands tightly against his sides, Stella felt Darl’s body contained between her palms. The wind of their speed rumpled her skirt, and she remembered the terrible wind buffeting the car on the way home from Helicon when the cyclone struck. She tried to stare over Darl’s shoulder into the distance, but at the sides of her eyes the gray pavement slid by like an endless blade.
“To the cemetery,” he answered, turning his mouth so the airstream could fly his words to her turned ear.
Darl steered the Vespa north, toward Oak Hill, a vast cemetery deployed over several hills. In the distance, a large water tower topped the highest elevation. When Darl found the gates closed to traffic, he parked the scooter. They climbed over a low brick wall and pushed through a tall, thick hedge of holly.
Once inside, they walked the narrow, deserted streets winding among the communities of the dead. Humidity veiled the trees and graves, the slopes of grass, homogenizing all the features of the cemetery. Hosts of gauzy monuments, like solid ghosts, rose solemnly from the graves toward the faint moonlight and fainter starlight. Behind them, the holly hedge held the ordinary world at bay. As Darl and Stella walked deeper into the cemetery, the darkness increased. To Stella, the quiet seemed holy, as though the slight noise of their walking was a sacrilege.
But Stella’s people were not here;they were all buried at Helicon.
“You’re not afraid, are you?” Darl asked, and lightly put his arm over her shoulders while they walked. “I drove through here earlier today,” he went on. “I want to show you a special statue. It’s deep in, over the next rise and down again.”
Hardly speaking to each other, they passed a grove of specimen holly trees and then walked on a footpath through an expanse of cedars. “The older graves are ahead, among the magnolias beyond the oaks,” Darl said.
Occasionally Stella saw a small grave marked with a lamb and assumed these were the graves of children. How quickly an aesthetic for monuments established itself. She disliked the heavy chunky monuments, especially if they were a dark, pretentious marble—the color of liver. She glanced up at the gibbous moon. The crowns of the elm trees spread like black lace against the deep blue satin sky. Like fans, she had said once to her cello teacher, Miss Ragrich, and the teacher had admired Stella’s phrase.
But where were the right words to render what it is to be alive? To walk, to see? She wanted the words of Emily Dickinson and Virginia Woolf. She pitied the myriad dead who slept in their small houses underground. “Has death undone so many?” T. S. Eliot asked in a line from The Waste Land. She felt she shouldn’t pass the graves so quickly.
When her foot crunched acorns underneath, the sound seemed wholesome. Occasionally she heard an unseen bird stirring on its night perch from within its shelter of thick oak leaves. Among the leaves, the bird made the sound of someone clearing his throat. While she walked, she closed her eyes and listened more intently. What was an unseen world like? A world of the immaterial, of spirits? Because they were walking rapidly, she could hear Darl’s breathing and her own breathing like woodwinds sighing.
She imagined the feet of the birds sleeping in the trees, how the little hidden birds’ feet were clasping their roosts, three toes curled in front, and from the back, one clamped over the twig. The birds were hot and restless.
“Let’s slow down,” she said, and Darl immediately responded to her request.
Quickly, he turned and kissed her cheek, like a reward, but a kiss such as a friend might give.
She opened her eyes.
“Listen,” he said. “That’s a horned owl.”