Elizabeth Hand - Black Light

THERE WAS SOMETHING ELSE strange about Kamensic, and that was its suicides. Some of these had taken place so much before my time that they had the solemn, dingy aura of ancient myth. But by the year I started high school there had been ten or twelve of them: deaths by hanging, by jumping off Darnell Bridge into the reservoir, by drug overdose, by gunshot, by carbon monoxide and straightedge razor. Almost all of them were teenagers, although the mother of my friends Giorgio and Nastassia Klendall killed herself when we were in high school, climbing to the roof of their four-story village Victorian and jumping off. The note she left in the kitchen, weighed down by an empty wine bottle, read only

Th-th-that’s all, folks!

The deaths were seldom spoken of, but they were not hushed up. They were treated as normal deaths, as normal at least as dying in your bed at the age of ninety-seven with a hooded peregrine falcon on your breast, as Gloria Nevelson did, or expiring of lung cancer after smoking three packs of Kents a day for thirty-four years, like Clement Stoddard. And there was certainly no religious distress or stigma attached to the suicides. Despite the presence of its century-old Congregational Church, Kamensic was not what you could call a religious place. There was no minister affiliated with the Congo Church, which in any case was used almost constantly as an informal rehearsal space. Occasionally out-of-towners would arrange to be married there—it looked so charming, tucked in amidst the maple trees with the Muscanth River meandering in the background and all those eccentric, theatrical villagers mowing their lawns!—but they brought their own clergy or made arrangements with the justice of the peace.

The only time I ever saw the church used for something like its intended purpose was at funerals. And I never realized how bizarre, even disturbing, these must seem to outsiders, until I was much older and attended a funeral down at Sacred Heart in Yonkers, with Irish Catholic relatives of my father who wept while incense burned and an Irish tenor sang the “Ave Maria” in a voice so pure that I wept myself, though I scarcely knew the deceased.

It was not like that at home. In Kamensic there was solemnity but no real grief; no service save for readings from Shakespeare or Aeschylus; no music until the very end. The church’s rough-hewn wooden pews would be draped with ivy and evergreen boughs, even in midsummer, and the lovely, stellated wild tulips that grew in rocky crevices on Muscanth Mountain. All of the casement windows would be opened, no matter the weather, and the doors as well; but no coffin or casket ever entered the building. Only as the brief ceremony of readings ended would someone commence playing on a flute in the back of the church, and those gathered would leave, to reconvene at the cemetery a few hundred yards away. The music was always the same, a haunting, repetitive melody, not filled with sadness so much as longing and a strange, almost exhilarating intimation that something was about to happen.

But what that was, I never found out. Nor did I ever learn who played the flute: I never saw anyone, either in the back of the church or in that tiny choir-loft where choirs never sang. At the cemetery a plain wooden coffin would lie on the ground, its top strewn with poppies and anemones; in winter, there would be the poppies’ dried seed-heads, ivy, and holly. Beside the coffin was the grave, freshly dug, the soil protected from rain or snow by spruce boughs, and beside the grave the women would stand in a line. Usually someone would say a few words, but it would always end with my mother standing at the head of the grave and reciting in her fine clear girlish voice—

Then the unadorned box would be lowered into the grave. This was always done by women; never men. Sometimes it would take only four of them, sometimes six or even ten, as when Chubby Snarks, an old vaudevillian who weighed three hundred pounds and was buried with his notices, choked to death on a cornichon. The women would strain and groan, but at last it was done. Robins and thrushes would alight upon the mounded earth, to hunt for insects there, and butterflies drawn by the flowers.

As a child I thought the cemetery was the most beautiful, even idyllic, spot in Kamensic, with its flowering dogwoods and shads and forsythia, and so many apple trees it might have been an orchard. Daffodils bloomed underfoot, and more of the tulipa saxatilis ; there were bluebells and periwinkles and, everywhere, ivy. And of course there were the gravestones themselves, carved figures of winged foxes and men with the heads of birds, of lionesses and deer and serpents, commemorating the dead from wars and influenza, fire and cancer and noose. The strains of the flute would die into the sound of wind in the leaves, and the children would run off to play quietly among the grave markers. When the coffin was lowered the villagers shared the task of heaping soil back upon it; and when this was completed the last part of the ceremony was performed. Mrs. Langford would produce several bottles of red wine. My father or one of the other men would open them, and the bottles were passed around. Everyone drank from them, even children—I can remember spitting out my mouthful, and my mother smiling gently as she wiped off my mouth with her handkerchief. Sometimes only one or two bottles were quaffed this way; sometimes a dozen or more. Then everyone would leave—not very quietly, either, and generally to my house or the Wellers’. People would speak fondly of the deceased, but there was no sense of genuine grief or bereavement, even with the suicides of the village children. It was as though you one day discovered a dead chipmunk in the woods, half-buried in the leaves; but every day thereafter it was harder and harder to find, until at last it was gone, completely swallowed by the earth.

So it was with Kamensic: swiftly and remorselessly as an ermine, it devoured its own young.

Somehow it never appeared strange to us. After all, what else did we know? It was the early 1970s, we were thirteen, fourteen, fifteen years old. We absorbed Kent State and the Manson Family, evacuated our classrooms for bomb threats and stayed home from school when Albert Shanker called our teachers to strike. Death just seemed to be an occupational hazard if you were young. What shocks me now is how we were all expected to simply take it for granted, how often we met on the playground or school parking lot and spoke in whispers, glancing over our shoulders as a brother or sister of the deceased would arrive and take their place among us. Famous or notorious as Kamensic’s residents were, there were no talk shows, no tabloid headlines, and certainly no school psychologists waiting to comfort the bereaved. Even when Phillip Lawton’s son died—the New York Times reported it as a bad reaction to a bee sting, but we heard otherwise—and the television crews appeared, the people of Kamensic drove them away.

“Have you no decency?” cried DeVayne Smith at the train station where the reporters had gathered, his basso voice quavering with rage. “Go from here, now— go —”

They went. Confronted with the angry mob that had rushed to Lawton’s side—not just DeVayne Smith but Gracie Burrows, Constantine Fox, my own parents, and Axel Kern—the reporters shot a few seconds of taped footage, got into their vans and fled. Fifteen minutes later, heading south on Route 684, a deer ran in front of the van and it crashed. The footage never aired. Lawton’s son was buried in the Kamensic Village cemetery, alongside a weathered statue of an angel with folded wings and a wolf’s muzzle.