The Cemetery

Salt and Crossing

Chapter 9: The Cemetery

The cemetery was on the hill above the harbor, the highest point on Dunmore Island's northern end, one hundred and forty-two feet above sea level, and from the cemetery you could see both shores — the island falling away to the east toward the open Atlantic and to the west toward the channel and the mainland, the two views the island's two faces, the ocean face and the channel face, the face that looked outward to the sea's indifference and the face that looked inward to the crossing's dailiness, and the dead had both views, had the ocean and the channel, had the infinity and the 1.4 miles, and the having was permanent because the dead do not move, do not change their view, do not shift in their plots to face a different direction, the dead fixed in their orientation the way the headstones are fixed, the headstones facing west, facing the channel, facing Port Clement and the mainland and the ferry terminal where the Constance sat at her dock, the headstones watching the crossing that the dead had once made.

The cemetery had been there since 1839. The first burial was Ephraim Dunmore's wife, Margaret, who died in the February of that year of a fever that the island's doctor — the island had a doctor then, a man named Sprague who had come from Boston and who would leave for Boston again in 1843 when the isolation proved stronger than the vocation — could not diagnose and could not treat and could only attend, the attending the doctor's last resort, the sitting-beside that medicine performs when medicine has exhausted its options, and Margaret Dunmore died with the doctor beside her and the February wind against the house and the channel frozen, the channel frozen solid from shore to shore, which happened in the 1830s and the 1840s and does not happen now because the water is warmer now, the climate's arithmetic adding degrees to the channel the way the tide adds inches to the shore, slowly, incrementally, the change invisible in a single year but visible in a century, and the frozen channel meant that Margaret could not be taken to the mainland for burial, could not be carried across the ice because the ice was not trusted, was not solid enough for a wagon, and so she was buried on the island, on the hill, in the ground that was frozen too but that could be opened with picks and bars and the labor of men who understood that the burying could not wait for the thawing because February was long and March was long and the dead require burial before the spring.

Margaret Dunmore's headstone was slate. Gray slate, quarried from a deposit on the island's south end, the slate cut and shaped by a mason whose name was not recorded and whose work survived his anonymity, the stone standing since 1839, one hundred and eighty-three years, the letters still legible — MARGARET DUNMORE, WIFE OF EPHRAIM, DIED FEB. 12, 1839, AGED 31 YEARS — the legibility the stone's gift, the gift of slate, which weathers slowly in the salt air, which loses its surface at a rate of approximately one millimeter per century, the loss so gradual that the letters carved in 1839 were still readable, still said what they had been carved to say, the saying preserved by the stone's patience, by the slate's resistance to the wind and the rain and the salt and the fog and the one hundred and eighty-three winters that had pressed against the stone and had not erased it.

Four generations of island dead lay in the cemetery. The Dunmores and the Clements and the Pelletiers and the Gosses and the Ouellettes and the Webbers and the Pinhams and the Hales, the families that had settled the island in the 1820s and 1830s and that had stayed, had committed, had married each other and buried each other and named their children after each other until the island's genealogy was a web so dense that every living resident was related to every other living resident by blood or marriage or both, and the relatedness was the island's social architecture, its invisible structure, the structure that governed who spoke to whom and who owed whom and who remembered what about whom, and the structure was maintained not by the living but by the dead, by the dead's presence on the hill, by the headstones that said: we were here first, we are the foundation, the living stand on us.

The Goss plot was in the cemetery's third row, on the western edge, the edge closest to the channel view. James Goss had bought the plot in 1958 when his father, William Goss, died — William, who had been the ferry captain before James, who had run the Agnes from 1938 to 1958, who had crossed the channel for twenty years and who was buried now in the plot he had bought from the island cemetery association for twelve dollars, twelve dollars for a plot that would hold four burials, the plot's capacity the family's anticipated need, four graves for four bodies, the four a number that assumed a certain family size, a certain mortality rate, a certain continuity, the continuity of a family that would live on the island and die on the island and be buried on the island in the plot that the patriarch had purchased for twelve dollars.

William was in the first grave. His headstone was granite, gray, cut by the monument company in Rockland, the company that served the coast's cemeteries and that shipped its stones by ferry to the islands, the stones riding the Constance's car deck the way all the island's freight rode the car deck, the stones heavy, the stones the heaviest single items the ferry carried, heavier than the lumber and the appliances and the propane tanks, the stones' weight the weight of permanence, the weight of the thing that would remain after the thing it commemorated had been reduced to bone and then to dust and then to the minerals that the soil reclaimed and that the grass consumed and that the rain dissolved and carried back to the channel, back to the water, the dead returning to the water by the slow chemistry of decomposition, the return taking decades, centuries, the return as patient as the granite, as gradual as the slate's erosion.

William Goss, 1904-1958. Captain, M/V Agnes. The headstone said this. The headstone identified William by his vocation, by the work that had been his identity, the work that had connected him to the channel and the crossing and the island and the daily transit between the shores, and the identification was deliberate, was the family's decision that the headstone should say what William was rather than what William felt or believed or hoped, because what William was — captain — was sufficient, was the word that contained the other words, the word that implied the channel and the crossing and the fog and the tide and the wheel and the thirty-four thousand crossings and the knowledge of the water that the knowledge's accumulation had produced.

James Goss was in the second grave. James, who had taken the crossing from the interim captain who held it after William's death and then had taken the Constance from the shipyard when the Clara B. was retired, and had run the crossing from 1962 to 1988, twenty-six years, and who had retired and had lived for seventeen years in the house on Harbor Road that was now Mere's house, had lived the retired life of a man whose work had been taken from him not by a bridge but by a hip, by the body's betrayal, the joint that had carried him up and down the wheelhouse stairs for twenty-six years and that had finally said: no more, no more climbing, no more standing, no more crossing, and the no-more had been the retirement and the retirement had been the ending and the ending had been seventeen years long, seventeen years of not-crossing that James had filled with the tasks that retired men fill their days with — the woodworking in the shop behind Mere's house, the reading, the sitting on the porch watching the harbor, the watching a form of crossing, a visual crossing, the eyes traveling the channel that the body could no longer traverse.

James Goss, 1936-2005. Captain, M/V Clara B., M/V Constance. Two vessels. Two names on the headstone. The two names the two eras of James's career, the wooden-hulled era of the Clara B. and the steel-hulled era of the Constance, and the two eras were the crossing's modern history, the history that living people remembered, that Louise Pelletier remembered, that the island's elders could speak of from their own experience rather than from the stories they had been told.

Harlan's mother was in the third grave. Dorothy Goss, nee Hale, 1938-2011, who had married James in 1960 and had raised Harlan and Mere in the house on Harbor Road and had been the captain's wife in the way that island women were captains' wives, which was to say completely, invisibly, the wife's contribution to the crossing uncredited and essential — the meals prepared for the schedule's demands, the house maintained during the captain's sixteen-hour absences, the children raised with the understanding that the father's work was the family's work and that the family's sacrifices were the work's price, and the price was paid daily, was paid in the early mornings and the late evenings and the storms that kept the father on the water and the wife on the shore, and the shore's work was the wife's work, and the wife's work was not recognized by the headstone, which said only her name and her dates and did not say: she kept the house, she raised the children, she maintained the life that the crossing required.

The fourth grave was Janet's.

Janet Eaton Goss, 1964-2017. Teacher, Dunmore Island School. The headstone was granite, the same gray granite as William's and James's and Dorothy's, the granite from the same monument company in Rockland, the company now in its third generation, the grandson of the man who had cut William's stone cutting Janet's, the cutting a craft passed down the way the crossing was passed down, by apprenticeship, by the hands learning from the hands, and the grandson's hands had cut the letters that said Janet's name and Janet's dates and Janet's vocation, the vocation that was her identity the way the captaincy was Harlan's, the teaching that was her crossing, her daily transit between ignorance and knowledge, between the child's not-knowing and the child's knowing, and the transit was as real as the ferry's, as essential, as daily, and the headstone acknowledged it, said it, carved it in granite for the rain and the wind and the fog and the years to read.

Harlan visited the grave on Sundays. Sundays were the ferry's day off, the day when the Constance sat at the dock and the channel was uncrossed and the captain was released from the schedule's demands, and Harlan used the release to visit Janet, to walk from Mere's apartment — he stayed with Mere on Saturday nights, slept in the guest room, the room that had been his childhood room — to walk from Mere's apartment up Cemetery Hill Road to the gate and through the gate and along the path to the Goss plot, the path worn by the feet of the visiting living, the path that connected the gate to the graves the way the crossing connected the mainland to the island, a path between two states of being.

He stood at the grave. He did not speak. He did not bring flowers — Janet had not liked cut flowers, had found the cutting wasteful, had preferred flowers in the ground where the flowers could continue to be flowers, could continue to bloom and fade and bloom again, the continuation the point, the not-cutting the respect — and he did not kneel and he did not pray because Harlan did not pray, had never prayed, had not been raised in the vocabulary of prayer and had not acquired it later, the vocabulary absent from his repertoire the way certain depths are absent from certain charts, not because the depth does not exist but because the chart was not designed to show it.

He stood. The standing was the visit. The standing was the thing he did, the physical act of being present at the place where Janet was buried, the act of placing his body above her body, the vertical alignment of the living husband and the dead wife, the alignment not mystical but physical, the physics of two bodies separated by six feet of earth and the chemistry of decomposition and the time that the decomposition required, and the physics and the chemistry were not thoughts that Harlan had, were not reflections that he entertained, but were the facts, the facts of the visit, the facts of the grave, the facts that the standing encompassed without articulating.

From the grave he could see the channel. He could see the full 1.4 miles, the water moving, the tide rising or falling, the current setting northeast or southwest, the channel doing what the channel did regardless of the day, regardless of Sunday, the channel not observing the ferry's day off, the channel working every day because the channel's work was the tide's work and the tide did not rest, did not take Sundays, did not observe the human calendar that divided the week into working days and rest days, the tide operating on the lunar calendar, on the 12-hour-and-25-minute cycle that the moon imposed and that the channel obeyed and that the ferry accommodated and that the grave overlooked.

The bridge's construction was visible from the cemetery. The towers were visible — the two towers at the channel's narrowest point, the towers rising, growing taller with each week's construction, the towers' height an intrusion on the view that the cemetery had held for one hundred and eighty-three years, the view that had been water and sky and shore and nothing else, the view that Margaret Dunmore's headstone had faced since 1839, and the towers were in the view now, were part of the view, were altering the view the way they were altering the channel, by presence, by the simple fact of being there, the towers' steel and concrete asserting themselves against the water and the sky with the confidence of engineering, the confidence that says: we belong here, we have been calculated, we have been designed, we have been approved, and the approval is the authority and the authority is the presence.

The dead did not object to the towers. The dead did not object to anything. The dead's silence was the cemetery's condition, the silence that the living visited and stood in and eventually joined, the silence that was not the absence of sound — the wind was there, the birds were there, the harbor's sounds carried up the hill — but was the absence of opinion, of protest, of the living's endless negotiation with circumstance, the negotiation that produced debate and argument and town meetings and newspaper editorials and the divided opinion that the bridge had generated on the island, the for and the against, and the dead were neither for nor against, the dead having surrendered their opinions at the gate, having left their positions and their preferences at the threshold of the cemetery the way the living left their shoes at the threshold of a temple.

Harlan stood at Janet's grave and looked at the towers and did not object, because the objecting was not what the visit was for, the visit was for the standing, for the being-present, for the alignment of the living body above the buried body, and the alignment was the visit's purpose, its function, its act of maintenance, the maintenance not of the grave — the grave maintained itself, the grass grew, the headstone stood, the granite endured — but of the connection, the connection between the living man and the dead woman, the connection that required regular maintenance the way the Constance required regular maintenance, the greasing and the checking and the tightening that kept the vessel sound, the visiting and the standing and the looking that kept the connection sound, that prevented the connection from loosening, from slackening, from the gradual deterioration that all connections undergo when they are not maintained.

The cemetery held two hundred and fourteen graves. Two hundred and fourteen headstones and markers and plaques and, in the oldest section, fieldstones with no markings at all, the fieldstones the graves of people whose names had been lost, whose identities had been surrendered to the same forces that had eroded the slate and weathered the granite, the forces of time and weather and the particular forgetfulness that descends on the dead when the last person who knew them dies, when the last living memory of the dead person is extinguished and the dead person passes from memory into record, from the known into the documented, and the record is not the same as the memory because the record does not feel, does not grieve, does not stand at the grave on Sunday mornings and look at the channel.

Among the two hundred and fourteen were fishermen who had drowned. Their headstones said the dates and the names and sometimes the circumstances — LOST AT SEA, the phrase that the maritime dead are given, the phrase that means drowned, that means the body was not recovered, that means the sea took the body and kept it, the keeping the sea's claim, the sea's assertion of ownership over the bodies that entered it and did not return — and the lost-at-sea headstones marked empty graves, cenotaphs, the word meaning empty tomb, the tombs empty because the bodies were in the water, were in the channel or the bay or the open Atlantic, the bodies dissolved by the salt and the time and the chemistry of the ocean's digestion, the bodies returned to the water that had taken them.

There were children in the cemetery. Small headstones, small plots, the smallness the grief's measure, the headstones' size proportional to the body's size, the small stone for the small body, and the smallness was the cemetery's hardest feature, the feature that made the living pause, that made the standing harder, that made the visit heavier, because the children's headstones said ages — 3 YEARS, 7 MONTHS, 11 DAYS — and the ages were the measure of the loss, the numbers that said: this much life, this much and no more, this many days and then the ending, and the ending of a child's life is not the same as the ending of a captain's life or a teacher's life, is not the completion of a vocation but the interruption of a beginning, the cutting of the thread before the thread has been woven into anything.

Janet had taught some of the parents of these children. Janet had taught in the island school for twenty-six years and in twenty-six years the children she had taught had grown and had had children of their own and some of those children had died — one, in 2008, a boy named Caleb Webber, seven years old, who had fallen through the ice on the freshwater pond at the island's center in December, the ice that was thick enough to walk on but not thick enough to hold when the walking became running and the running's impact broke the surface and the surface gave way and the water beneath the ice was cold, was the cold that stops the heart, and the stopping was the death and the death was the grave and the grave was in the cemetery and the headstone said CALEB JAMES WEBBER, 2001-2008 — and Janet had taught Caleb's mother, had taught her in the third grade in 1993, had taught her to read and to write and to add, and the teaching's failure was not the teaching's failure but was the world's failure, the world's inability to protect the things it produced, the children it raised, the lives it began.

The cemetery was the island's memory. The cemetery remembered what the living forgot — the names, the dates, the vocations, the relationships, the family lines that had produced the current generation and that would produce the next, the memory stored not in neurons but in granite, not in the brain's electrical patterns but in the stone's carved letters, and the storage was durable, was the most durable storage available, more durable than paper, more durable than electronic media, more durable than the human memory that lasted one generation, perhaps two, before the forgetting began, before the dead person's face became unclear and the dead person's voice became inaudible and the dead person's habits and preferences and daily acts became the generic habits and preferences and daily acts of a person remembered in outline rather than in detail.

Harlan remembered Janet in detail. He remembered her hands — the hands that had held chalk and then markers and then the stylus of the tablet computer that the school had adopted in 2010, the hands that had held his hands and had held the thermos and had held the railing of the Constance on the crossings she rode, the hands that were now bone beneath the granite, the bone the hands' last state, the state that the chemistry was working to dissolve, and the dissolving was the forgetting that the body performed, the body's erasure of itself, and the erasure would take years, decades, the years and decades that the granite would outlast, the stone remaining after the body had been returned to the earth and the earth had absorbed it.

He stood at the grave. The wind came from the northwest, the October wind, cold, carrying the first taste of the winter that would follow, the winter that would be the crossing's last winter, the winter that would end in March when the ferry stopped and the bridge opened and the crossing became a memory, became a thing that the living remembered and the dead had witnessed and the cemetery overlooked.

The cemetery would overlook the bridge. The cemetery would face the bridge the way it had faced the channel, the view altered but the facing unchanged, the headstones still oriented west, still watching the water, still watching the crossing's space even after the crossing had been replaced by the spanning, the headstones not knowing the difference because the headstones did not know, the granite did not know, the dead did not know, the knowing reserved for the living, for the man who stood at the grave on Sunday mornings and who knew everything — knew the channel and the tide and the crossing and the woman buried beneath his feet and the bridge rising in the view and the ending approaching and the ending's weight increasing with each week, each crossing, each Sunday visit to the hill where the dead lay in their plots with their views of the water and their silence and their names carved in stone and their patience, the infinite patience of the dead, the patience that the living cannot achieve and that the dead cannot avoid, the patience that is not a virtue but a condition, the condition of being finished, of having crossed for the last time, of having arrived.

Harlan turned from the grave. He walked down the path to the gate and through the gate and down Cemetery Hill Road to the harbor, to the island's shore, to the water that the dead overlooked and that the living crossed and that the tide filled and emptied and filled again, the filling and the emptying the water's patience, the water's version of the dead's condition, the water not finished but continuing, not arrived but crossing, always crossing, always moving between the shores, the shores that held the living and the dead and the cemetery on the hill and the ferry at the dock and the bridge in the channel and the morning and the crossing and the constancy and the name.