Jesse Ball: The Lesson

Downstairs in the parlor, she set the pieces up again on the board. He probably hadn’t managed the Knight’s Tour; there hadn’t been very much time. It was likely, though, that he was thinking about it at that moment. Might one say that? That someone else would be thinking of something just then?

She sat down in the chair, the high-backed one, where she often slept. Then she stood and turned Ezra’s photograph about the right way, so it was no longer facing the wall. She sat again, and leaned full back in the chair. She looked at the photograph then, as she had looked at it a thousand times, and it seemed to her to be the mention of her task — to go at once to the cemetery. There was still some light left. She wasn’t really hungry at all, and could eat later. She would go to the cemetery.

Where the road ended, there was a little path down into a sort of basin, across which one could go with ease, as there was very little underbrush. Beyond this, the wall that surrounded the cemetery could be seen, but there was a place, and it was the place to which the path led, where the wall had fallen down in parts. This was the entrance Loring always used, for she did not often go in through the tall gates that faced the boulevard. In this way, even her entrance into the cemetery was private, and she liked that.

This was not the sort of cemetery where one is allowed to have a real say in what the tombstone will look like. All of these were exactly the same, more like small obelisks, or markers, about two feet high and eight inches square. The writing was very small, very small indeed. What was most interesting perhaps was that, beyond the rule that the stones be of the same sort, there was no rule that they be in lines. So, the stones on these hills were haphazardly placed, and gave an odd impression.

Another fineness of this particular place was the profusion of stone staircases laid on one or another hill. These made good places for sitting, and gave an odd sense of ill-founded purpose to the proceedings.

You can begin to see now why Loring liked this cemetery, and why she had not wanted her husband shipped away to be buried elsewhere. Of course, the niceness of this cemetery probably had nothing to do with that. She just wanted him near.

That a person should treasure the physical body of a dead lover is unsurprising, to say the least. In some sense we define our location in respect to the place where our counterpart stands, when they are still standing. No less then can we define our location in this way when they have perished. And so it is that there is a particular psychological condition, entirely undocumented, which has to do with the malaise and confusion one feels when one has been too long away from the place of burial of the ones one loves.

In no way would Loring, not even knowing the existence of this condition, risk such an issue.

Therefore, not a day passed wherein she did not go to the cemetery, and she had learned its appearance in the morning, afternoon, evening, and night. It was the night she liked best, of course. Wasn’t it an old monastic practice to sleep a night in a cemetery? But she had sprained her ankle falling one black night, and since then, had kept more to the day when she could.

The caretaker was there, and saw her walking. He came up, and with him his wife and daughter.

This wife and this daughter, they were the same person, by a series of odd coincidences, but we will not go into that at the moment. Suffice it to say — do not be prejudiced against Gerard for this simple reason. There is proof that he is not to be blamed!

— Mme. Wesley. I hope you’re well.

— Quite so, Gerard. Hello, Mona.

— Hello, said Mona, looking at her feet.

This was a habit of hers. Mona was not shy, but it was understood in the town that she didn’t like looking at people much.

— I believe there was an accident, said Gerard. The balloon extravaganza caught fire. Everyone perished. I was asked my opinion by a correspondent from a national newspaper. He was here half an hour ago and left. He was looking for the crash site.

— What did you say?

— I said I didn’t think there would be a crash site. Such an accident, at such a height, wouldn’t the debris just spread out across the county?

— I would think so, said Loring. But I’m not a correspondent. I believe that correspondents are supposed to be at the scene when they get their story. Maybe he was worried that it might not count for much if he was elsewhere, even if there was nowhere to be.

— It was odd that he was here in the first place, said Mona. To arrive so soon after it happened? When must he have set out? The correspondents don’t cover the Jubilee. He must have proposed to himself that there would be an accident, and come when there had still not been one.

These are the sort of dark thoughts that Mona had. She had, if anything, been bleaker as a child than now. She had been one of those known as stationary children or stationaries because she refused to move much. This caused endless difficulties for her mother, who eventually perished, for other reasons. Her father kept her on afterwards, in one or another capacity. She was older than he, of course, and so he relied on her advice in order to run the cemetery.

— Did you pass the new plots on your way up the hill?

— I don’t know.

— The ground is still broken a bit around them, hasn’t settled in yet. You didn’t see?

— I suppose I did, said Loring, looking back.

— It’s no use to look from here, said Mona, not unless you can see through that hill and out the other side.

She laughed.

— People are so stupid sometimes. Anyway, what I was saying is this: The new plots are doubled up. That Grish family died, all of ’em from blood poisoning. There were six of them and just three plots, so there was a big conversation here with the constabulary about if there should be a lottery between them to see which three would get the graves, because, of course, someone has to pay for them, or whether donations would be sought out, which likely wouldn’t come, as they weren’t well-respected. Leastways, it was decided to put them all in, and so the pairings had to be made. Now, this was a particular problem, as Gerard didn’t know them at all and didn’t have anything useful to say in the matter, but luckily Jan, our digger, he knew them in some small way. I don’t think he gets around very much, but he had some experience calling on them, and so he was brought in to say which of them might not mind being in the grave with which other, and so forth.

Gerard had sat down on one of the stones. It did not look very comfortable. Loring sat too, but on the stair.

— There were six of them, as I said, and so it would seem like putting the husband and wife together would make sense, except that it was ruled out immediately on the basis of their hating one another furiously (which perhaps was the cause of death). So, the mother, Celeste, was put with Jimmy, the third oldest, and the father with the youngest, Peter, who he had been seen with once at the fair (someone said) and had appeared to have been having a good time. That left the other two, Gladys and Rollins, who supposedly couldn’t stand to be in a room together. However, there wasn’t anything for it. Three coffins, three graves, six bodies, in they went. Not even money for stones. They all got one stone. It said, Grish Family, blood poisoned. I don’t really know what that means, do you?

But by then night had fallen, and so the couple went off down the hill to their house, which was within the cemetery walls. (A cemetery watcher’s house within the cemetery walls: a fine thing!)