Stones and Shadows
by Kathryn Hawkins
When I was seven, my father took me to Homewood Cemetery to look for witches. We walked down the steep hill of Reynolds Street, my small body struggling to keep up with his spider-long legs. We arrived just after sunset, the gates already locked. We squeezed in through the crack in the fence just wide enough for our thin frames, brushing up against the cold black metal.
My father held his finger to his lips. "Be very quiet. They won't come out if they know we're here."
I followed him along the path, into the dark grass that stretched on for ages. He stopped suddenly, grabbed my arm. We crouched behind a mausoleum with shattered stained glass windows. I felt the cold granite against my cheek. My father's bony shoulder, tensed and waiting, pressed against my own. When he craned his neck, I turned to follow his gaze.
"Do you see it?" he whispered. He pointed over to a sloping section, thirty feet away. That was the old part of the graveyard, where most of the names had worn off their stones, and the grass was untended, overgrown.
I squinted from my hidden perch, but couldn't see anything. Maybe a few leaves rustling in the September wind. The blurred tail of a squirrel leaping into a nearby tree. A statue of an angel with a missing arm.
"She's hiding behind the chestnut tree over there," he said. "Look — the tip of her hat is pointing out. I bet she's looking for toads to use in a spell."
I peered harder into the shadows, stared for minutes, my father waiting for me to tell him that I saw it too. The sky went darker and at last I found her, rising line by line from the flat plane of the field. She looked like the witch from my favorite picture book: hooked nose, coarse knots of white hair, a thick black dress that rustled as she moved. She walked slowly, grave to grave, bending down and sifting through the weeds with her gnarled white hands.
"I see her, Daddy," I barely breathed. "What happens if she catches us?"
"We go into her boiling cauldron, of course," he cackled. He laughed long and hard, his head thrown back from the pleasure of his trickery. I looked back towards the spot and the witch fell to pieces: a knotted branch, an overturned headstone, a plastic flag with a pointed tip.
***
It's seventeen years later, the end of January. Now I live so close to the cemetery that I can see it from my house, the granite tombstones peeking through the gate. I come here often — it's a peaceful place. Usually, there is no one else around, only the squirrels, birds, and deer. Some people I know won't step into a cemetery, will hold their breath while driving by, but I feel drawn here. When my father brought me as a child, I didn't know what lay beneath my feet on these green hills. All I saw were stones and shadows, mystery.
Now as I walk the paths, crows gather in the crooked treetops, their voices rising together like a wild chorus of the dead. The sun begins to lower, shedding amber light across the barren hills. The stagnant pond is frozen over. In a clutch of pine trees, something moves. A squirrel, a chipmunk. Or something else.
My father has been dead for twenty five days. Yesterday I looked inside the box that held his ashes. They are soft flakes of pale gray, like second-day snow. There is nothing I can salvage, not even a tooth. His name is printed on the box, but it may as well be dirt.
Somewhere on this cemetery hill, there's a plot reserved for him. Once the headstone has been carved, what's left of the family will gather to inter his ashes. I don't want to bring flowers, don't want to see his name carved in stone. Instead, I'll wait for dark and study the shadows for his mystic form — a face seen faintly through the trees, cackling with mad delight, everywhere and nowhere all at once.