THE GRAVEYARD
By
Troy McCombs
Copyright 2014 by Troy McCombs
Tony gazed at the distant graveyard through the second-story window of Harrington Middle School during his last period history class. The gravestones were barely visible from this far away, but they were there, absorbing the glow of the fresh April afternoon sunshine. The grass on that rolling hill was deep green, showing a good sign of life despite the deceased patrons buried beneath the ground. Tony figured he would be buried there one day ... and probably one day very soon.
Tony Willis had a rare form of cancer ... untreatable, according to every doctor he'd come across thus far. He wasn't even fifteen yet, and he'd been to more hospitals than most surfers had been to different beaches. His hair was gone, his form was thin, and his flesh was awfully pale. He did not want to die. Just the thought of it churned his very stomach. Several so-called 'specialists' had given him weeks or months to live, but they'd been saying this for three years. Still, he knew he could not cheat fate forever. He knew his time was ticking away day by day, minute by minute, and that his own cells were eating his insides away slowly and meticulously.
The shrill of the school bell rang throughout the building. Most of the kids in class were up and gone before the teacher, Mr. Lansing, said, "Tomorrow we'll go over chapter eight more thoroughly. By the way, your papers on the Civil War are due tomorrow also."
Tony was the last remaining teenager in the room. In Mr. Lansing's eyes, he looked more feeble now than any time before. A skeleton in black clothes, which was the only color he ever wore. The man didn't particularly like looking at him, but couldn't help but stare when he did. He wanted to feel sorry for the boy, but was too repulsed by his appearance to befriend him in any way. Tony was his only student who'd ever had any life-threatening disease. He had no idea how to deal with it.
Death stood from his seat, the sun shining through the window behind him, accentuating every bony detail in his sharply-structured head. He could feel the teacher's eyes watching him, could sense Mr. Lansing's aversion to him. He knew he was no longer welcome in history class. And he believed such ignorant rejection only made his horrible illness stronger. I never asked to have this.
He hurried from the room to get away from those gawking eyes.
But when he entered the hall, it was not any better. Kids stared at him like they did everyday, like they had been doing since he went bald and lost a lot of weight. One tall football player made a cross with his fingers and said, "Watch! He wants to suck our blood. He's a vampire!" The boy's friends laughed and pushed the weakling as he started down a flight of stairs.
Halfway down, Tony tripped on a renegade pencil and almost fell. A cute young girl standing at the bottom pointed at him and burst out laughing. Her friends chuckled and shook their heads.
He regained his balance and continued, head down, going as fast as he could go without hurting himself. His body was too fragile to move as fast as his peers. Moving three miles an hour with his legs was pushing it.
He made it out of the building a moment later. The warm air brushed against his ivory flesh; the heavenly scent of fresh-blooming berry trees swam up his nostrils. Some kids darted for the bus; others joined a friend and walked north, east, or west. Tony hobbled down five concrete steps and toward the sidewalk, destination: home. He, unlike everyone else at Herrington Middle School, had no friends. Before last summer, he had had four best friends, but that, like Lansing's class, was ancient history. Mason, Aaron, Shawn, and Josh decided they could not be seen hanging with a degenerate. They did not want to communicate with someone closer to death than their grandparents. It embarrassed them whenever they went somewhere and people gossiped and pointed fingers at the weird-looking boy. Was he crazy? Was he mentally retarded? What was his problem?
Tony's parents had grown apart from him as well. Yes, they still loved him. Yes, he was still their boy. No, they didn't want to lose him. But anymore, they didn't know how to communicate with him. They, in some sense, felt like he was already dead. They used to see their child as strong, determined, and bright—the way they had been raised; now they saw him in unfamiliar ways they could not begin to identify with. These days, he was wimpy, unmotivated, and flunking school. As far as Tony was concerned, they were just two strangers who had raised him. Now they wanted to get his demise over with.
He didn't care one way or the other.
I don't need anybody anyway. Nobody in America gives a heck about you unless you're normal and healthy.
He wandered off the walkway and ambled up Main Street. The book-bag draped over shoulder weighed him down. A few fallen leaves lay on the broken and cracked sidewalk, their stems haggard and withered. Just like his body. His shoulders hung low, and his head, lower. His eyes did not look up from the ground. His legs were so grotesquely skinny, they made him queasy. Cars whooshed passed him. Horns honked .... but only at other kids. He was not important enough to greet. He probably wasn't even important enough to be remembered after he died.
No one will visit my grave site at Brooke Cemetery. It's like I had never existed ...
Tony turned and ran up Baker's Street, tears filling his eyes. The thought of dying hurt him badly. The thought of being forgotten was tenfold worse. He didn't usually do this: break into tears and run in the opposite direction from his house. But he did. The pain was too much. He didn't want to deal with his parents today, or sit in his bed for most of the night, wondering what it will be like to be lowered six feet underground ... wondering whether or not death will be fast and painless or slow and agonizing … wondering whether he will simply fall asleep forever and ever, or worse: end up in Hell.
He jolted across the empty road without looking for traffic, through some brush and up a hill, no destination in mind.
After blazing past Zerosh Car Wash, his mind breaking apart, he darted across two lanes of highway, almost being hit by two different vehicles.
"Goofy kid! Get outta the way!"
"You could have caused an accident!"
He heard them, but he didn't, too. He ran without looking back, without thinking, his heart hammering beneath his bony chest. Tears streamed down his taut white cheeks. He wasn't sure if he was even moving his legs, or if he was floating out of his body. But he passed a row of elegant brick houses on Pleasant Avenue and made his way up the steep hill at the end of the lane.
Where are my legs taking me? Where am I going?
He soon figured that out when he saw the gravestones. Some stood tall and fancy; others stood cracked, broken, and fallen over. The older ones were at the front, their dates ranging from 1767 to 1909. Some were in the shape of crosses, others were statues of creepy-looking angels, while others were completely plain. Several were nothing more than a small plaque embedded into the ground with a name and date stamped on them.
Inundated by a fury of emotion, Tony jogged out into the middle of the whole cemetery, fell to his knees, and bawled. As sickening a thought he knew it was, he felt finally home. Nobody here was out to get him, belittle him, tease him. Everyone here was like him. Every body below ground could identify with him regardless of age, race, time, distance, or cause of death. They had died, some probably of cancer, in a harsh world worse than eternal damnation, itself.
"I don't want to die!" Tony muttered as he covered his face. He said it over and over, but wasn't aware that he'd said it once. His stomach felt like a bowl of soup after throwing it into the microwave for a few minutes. He slowly began to feel cleaner, clearer, and warmer. Some of the anguish drifted away. Some of the bad thoughts disappeared. He opened his eyes and fell onto his back, glaring up at the cloudless sky, gravestone tops also in his sight. For a moment he thought he was in his own bed, wishing away the cancer—
hoping the doctors were all wrong. Then, something weird happened. Tony stopped crying, opened his mouth, grinned, and burst out laughing for no reason at all.
--
"Where in the world were you? You had your father and I worried sick!" his mother cried, right as he entered the living room. Her voice was bland and uninterested. Tony didn't hear any evident concern in the tone.
"Sorry." He bowed his head.
She was standing in front of the TV, now suddenly distracted by a man on Wheel Of Fortune who'd just won a new car.
"He won it!" His dad was the ogre-ish bald man sitting in the recliner. He was half watching the TV and half reading a newspaper. "I didn't think he had the answer in him."
Sheela, the boy's mother, a elongated, stick-thin women with frizzy gray hair, turned back to him. He stood by the front door, the life vacant from his eyes.
"You missed supper, kid. It's probably now colder than the ice in the fridge. And we fixed your favorite—Steak-ums."
Tony cringed. He'd eaten her Steak-um's for the past four years and had never enjoyed one bite. Why she had never caught on, despite the numerous times she'd caught him sneaking it to the dog, was beyond him. He even told her on occasions, 'I'm not really in the mood for that'.
In one ear, out the other.
"And look at this." Sheela pulled back a curtain and glanced out the window. "It's long into nighttime, and now it's pouring rain. You could still be out there, lost or abducted, and we would have never known."
"I am okay," he mumbled.
"Don't you think we should do something, George? Ground him, or something?"
George laughed at the funny pages. She kicked his leg off the stool and put her hands on her hips.
"George!"
"What?" The bald ogre was confused, perhaps unmoved.
She gestured to the boy. Still, he wasn't getting it.
"What?"
"He comes home late, doesn't tell us beforehand, and doesn't seem to care he had us worrying about him."
He looked at her, then his son—that boy across the room—as if wondering what to do or say next. "Oh. Oh! Yeah. Well, you just go up to your room and ... think about what you did. Yeah." George went back to the funnies.
"You go to your room," Sheela pointed upstairs, "and your father and I will possibly consider letting this misunderstanding go. Okay?"
Tony gave her a look. His voice was bitter: "How about I go live in my room until one of us dies?"
Without sticking around for a response, he ran upstairs, into his room, slammed his bedroom door, and jumped into bed. He wanted to cry; he tried to. But tears would not come. Thoughts bloomed in his brittle mind, crashed around like ocean waves against a shore. He hated the word why, but it was one word from which he could not escape, just like his fate. Why, of all the two-thousand kids in Harrington Junior High, did only he have this degenerating disease? Why did they treat him less because of it? Why didn't anyone care? Why didn't anyone even try to listen? Why had his parents changed since that first hospital check-up? He was like a stranger in their house, and they were like strangers to him. He believed he didn't belong anywhere except that graveyard. His death was coming ... that, he knew more certainly than anything else. He could blink out during the night—tonight—and never wake again. Never do anything ever again. No more thoughts, no more feelings, no more experiences. Out like a candle in the wind. Never remembered by anybody for the rest of eternity.
What was the purpose of being alive then anyway? Why was anybody here? What was the point? Or was there a point? Were people thrown onto the globe for somebody's amusement? Or was it a matter of chance? A mistake of universal proportions?
The thoughts did not cease, did not give the boy peace. He fell asleep thinking, dreading not waking in the morning, and dreading opening his eyes again in a worthless world.
--
But he did open his eyes. He had woken up. He wasn't sure if he was grateful or not. The sunshine blazed in through the windows, casting a big, deformed square on his bedroom floor. The sun hurt his eyes, as intense light often did with his condition. He didn't like light much, either. It was a sign of life. Vitality. Things he did not believe in anymore.
"Tooooony, geeeeeet up!" His mother screamed from downstairs. He checked his watch to see if he was late for school. The digits read: 12:19. Then he remembered that it was Saturday.
He looked up, rubbed his face, and threw the quilt off his legs, sighing in disgust. He did not want to face the day, nor the inaccurate, self-righteous doctors who, he wished, had just a small taste of the cancer he carried in his body.
They think they have all the answers, they diagnose what all's wrong with you, and send you out the door with a gentle, thoughtful message: 'Maybe a week, two at most. Sorry we couldn't do more.'
What would they say today?
That's the thought that scared Tony.
--
The ride to the hospital was slow, long, and uneventful. His parents said nothing the whole way; not to each other or to him; nor did he speak to them. The only noise in the car was that of George coughing some phlegm into a handkerchief. Tony watched a flock of birds fly over Potter's Field during one point. Their wings fluttered gracefully up and down. They glided like they had no worries, no destination, nothing to fear. They flew closely together in a V, creatures with a more useful purpose than Tony. Had they had a disease, at least they would have never known about it.
Ignorance is bliss.
--
They parked in the garage half an hour later, took the elevator up to level 5, and walked across the facility to Dr. Tremin's Office. There, they each took a seat in the vacant waiting room. Tony sat back, arms crossed, leg on leg, expressionless. His parents, sitting on either side of him, watched the Ellen Degeneres show on a thirteen-inch HDTV hanging on the wall by a coat rack. Not a word was spoken.
They waited forever for the doctor. Tony didn't have forever. His impatience ate at him like the cancer in his body. He continuously cracked his knuckles, bored, anxious to hear with Tremin would say today. Would it be good news? Or, most likely, bad news?
The side door opened eventually, and a young attractive blonde nurse with tantalizing black eyes, peeked out. "Tony Willis?"
He jumped to his feet, staring at the white-clad woman he had never seen working here before. Her smile was impeccable, her lips kissable. She had no pimple that he could see, and no ring on her finger. Tony wanted to get with her, date her, marry her. She was a goddess in his vision, but establishing a relationship with her was fairy-tale that he knew could never be.
Regardless, he hurried over to her, savoring her delicate, symmetrical features. "Hello. I'm Tony."
She chuckled. Her eyes looked into his. Oh, my God.
"Hello, Tony, nice to meet you." They shook hands. Her skin was soft, silky smooth.
"I never seen you here before."
"Yeah, I just started working here last month. How are you doing, young man?"
I'm never doing good, he thought. "I'm super."
She chuckled again. "Well, that's good. These your parents?" The woman looked over his head. Sheela and George were standing behind him.
"Yes, I'm his mom, he's his dad."
They all got acquainted. Tony learned that his dream girl's name was Candy, and he really liked that. She led them to an examination room, where they had to wait for the doctor yet again.
"He'll be in soon. He's almost done with another patient," Candy said. Before she shut the door, she looked at Tony, smiled, and winked at him.
This is the best day of my life!
That perception changed in minutes. He knew he would never get to kiss someone that beautiful in his short life. He would never be kissed by anyone ever. He would never get to hold hands with a girl and walk down the street, telling her how much he cared about her. There were volumes of experiences he would never get the pleasure to go through.
The door popped open. "Hello," the elderly doctor sa
id, stepping into the small room. His face was a wrinkly runway of liver spots.
And I'll never get to grow that old, either.
"How are you today, Tony? Mr. and Mrs. Willis?"
His parents said they were doing well, but the boy just mumbled, "'M' okay."
"I haven't seen you for a while," the man with the thousand wrinkles said, sitting himself on a small stool. "Well, your test results came back days ago. I've had a chance to look at them, and—"
"Are they okay?" Sheela wondered, as if concerned for the first time. Tony thought he already knew the prognosis. He did not look at Dr. Tremin. His eyes never left the floor.
"Well, they aren't good, I am sorry to say. The cancer is spreading. His cells are dying quite rapidly. His immune system won't be able to tolerate much more. His whole body is attacking itself. Now, the only thing I can do for him is try Chemo. That might prolong your life, Tony. And if your parents decide not to .... I would give you about a few days. Perhaps several hours. Now, it's up to you, Sheela and George. Why don't you guys talk it over, and I'll be back in a few." He got up and quietly left the room.
The silence was brutal, the truth unchangeable.
"Honey, if there's a chance that staying here can help you—" Sheela began.
George spoke before she could finish: "Buddy, we care about you. You know that, don't you?"
Tony didn't respond. He did not believe it.
George scratched his bald head, frustrated. "The chances are terrible. I know that. But don't you want to give it a shot? If these medicines can rid your body of the cancer—"
"No, father! They can't. They won't do anything to help me, just like you and mom haven't for the last couple years."
"What are you saying?" George said, oblivious.
Tony looked at both of them. There were no tears in their eyes, not even a gleam of one. Their facial expressions were neutral. They looked like mannequins in a dime store window. Their son was going to die and they didn't show any emotion.
"I wanna go home." But he really didn't.
"Son, just think, you'll be in the hospital's care. Whenever you need real help, you got trained doctors at the push of a button. You won't have to worry."
"No," Tony pouted, "it's you and mom who don't want to worry. You don't want to have to take care of me and my disease. I'm a burden to both of you. Since you first found out I had cancer, you treated me like I'm an outsider, like I'm not even a part of the family anymore."
George said nothing. Sheela looked slightly upset. "Tony, after all we've done for you, this is what you have to say?"
"You haven't done anything for me in a while. And yes, I will stay here, especially if it gets me out of your house, away from yens. I gotta go." The boy stood and hurried from the room. He found his doctor and told him that he wanted to stay at the hospital to receive Chemotherapy.
He had his own bed and his own room by nine P.M. that night. Chemo was set to begin the following morning. His parents did not stick around for long; just to say their quick good-byes. George practically pushed Sheela out of the way to leave the room and get home before the baseball game started. Tony laid still for hours, gazing out the window at the growing thunderstorm, pondering his own mortality. This was how he was going to die: all alone in a vacant room, with nobody to comfort him while he passed. Would he even go to heaven? Or would God abandon him, too? He could die in an hour. Minutes. Seconds. Nobody would care. If he was lucky, there would be three whole people at his funeral. But that was a stretch. He didn't even think his parents would attend the service.
He thought he died soon thereafter, but he actually drifted to sleep.
A dream invaded him as he slept. He saw himself running through the Brooke Hills Cemetery, passing between gravestones, jumping over recently-filled burial mounds, and up the hill, toward a great white light in the sky.
I died ...
His eyes jerked open moments before dawn. He bolted upright, mute-screaming, gripping the sheets in an attempt to hold onto dear life. Sweat ran down his rosy cheeks. He was not dead. Yet.
He decided this from the nightmare: he was not going to die alone ... not in some bed in an unfamiliar place with latex-covered hands reaching for him at many different angles. No doctor could help him; no medicine could cure him. He had to live the rest of his days at the last place where he felt welcomed.
--
Getting there was easy, but stressful. He ended up hitching a ride in an eighteen-wheeler. The driver, a fat, smelly man covered with white-supremacist tattoos, never stopped complaining about the new, first black president. During the drive, Tony thought the guy was going to bludgeon him to death with the tire iron lying on the cab floor ... maybe leave him dead in a ditch somewhere along Route 22. It wouldn't have surprised him.
But he was certainly safe an hour later. Frank dropped him off at Rizz Street, bidding him farewell with a hail Hitler salute. The sound of the diesel engine continued on without the boy, who began the long climb up Burgeron Hill, the steepest one in town. Going down this hill in a sled during snow season was like rolling down a cliff at Menonimo Bay. Going up was even worse; local high-school football star Joe Gerrheer got a good workout hiking up and down it for exercise.
Tony joined the summit ten minutes later, after stopping every five yards to replenish his breath. The rest of the hike from here was easy. He went down Sector Boulevard, passed through a group of shrubs at the Dead End sign, and came to the sign he wanted to see: Brooke Cemetery. Ahead, over a small, bumpy, narrow road ravished by stray weeds, the gravestones were poking up in the air, awaiting his return.
He ran across the wet pavement and entered the field, to his new home. He was not going back to his parents' home, where he felt less welcome than at school. If he had to sleep on the cold, damp ground and wake to ants crawling on his body, he was going to do it. He didn't care if he didn't eat, if he did starve; death was right around the corner no matter what.
I might as well be where I feel most comfortable.
This was it. The only graveyard around for miles.
He thought he could feel the essences of lingering life draping around him, telling him everything was going to be okay, regardless of what happened to him, his body, his soul. This place was quiet, calm, serene. Though there wasn't a person around for hundreds of yards, he felt anything but alone.
The voices he thought he heard, were talking to him from the heart. Subconsciously. He spoke back, in a verbal voice, interested.
"I am dying. I will become a ghost any day now. Could be today. Could be tomorrow. By the doctor's standpoint, it could be another year or two. They don't know anything. They don't want to help me. Nobody cares but you guys ... and gals." He did a long pan of his surroundings. There must have been hundreds of graves, and a few vaults, all withered from time and by weather. The grass on which he stood was rich in color, moist, a little high. Everything around was unkempt. Tony nodded. "I hear you. Nobody cares about you either. Your relatives probably come to visit you once a year, throw a flower on your grave, and go home to watch a ballgame. They get busy with things less important than happy memories. What's more important than them? Without those, nobody would get where they're going. You can't forget about the good times. The problem is that they want to move on so suddenly. They don't stop. They don't take a break. What's so good about moving on if you let go of someone you're supposed to love? People, I think, are more afraid to slow down than to run. They always take the emotionally easier way out." He turned his head, taking in a big whiff of country air. The entrance into the woods was up the hill, where the more recent graves were located. His attention locked onto two fresh, dirt mounds bare of grass. His heart sank. He started toward them.
He joined them a moment and a chest-pain later. The stones themselves were quite small, not stamped into the ground but not extravagant or striking, either. Debra May - 1944 - 2009 was written on the left one, and George Gopert - 1970 - 2009 was written on the right. Two unfortu
nate people without a pulse, without air, trapped beneath six feet of earth for all eternity.
"Hello, Debra. George. It doesn't say how you died, but I'm sorry it happened. I'm sorry anybody dies. Everyone says it's a part of life, but it isn't. Why are we given life in the first place? Seems pointless. Why give something just to take it away? What's the point in building a house if you're going to tear it down in a few years? I'm only thirteen years old. God's going to steal my soul. I don't want him to have it. I want to live forever and ever. I want to be unable to die. If I were God, nobody would ever die. He's cruel. Mean. He wants to put us through all heck for nothing. I could be a better one. I would be a better one!" Tears gleamed in his dark eyes. One rolled down his cheek. Before he turned inside out, Tony dropped to his knees and cried. Crying was so easy and natural to him these days. It was one of few things that made him feel at ease. It was the only thing he felt he was even capable of.
He sat there and wept for several minutes in front of Debra May and George Gopert's grave, until his body shut down from the pain and he passed out.
--
Nobody came to the graveyard for over twenty-four hours, because it was twenty-four hours later when he woke up. Sleep was relaxing as crying, but more scary, since there was no certainty that he would ever wake back up. He lifted his head off the cool, wet ground. The whole right side of his cheek was indented with grass lines. There was a smudge of dirt on his chin.
The harsh reality of the world came back to him. Maybe it was best he died—then there'd be no worry. Then he wouldn't be a burden on his parents' shoulders any more.
Then he pictured being lowered underground and cringed at the sudden thought. Dying was terrible, the worst thing in the universe. The disease of diseases.
The boy stood up, his bones cracking beneath him, and looked up at another gloomy, gray sky. He had no idea of what time it was, but didn't really care. His stomach growled for food. He was starving, but didn't care to eat; he hated having to chuck it up soon afterward, anyway. Vomiting wasn't one of his favorite activities.
He took a stroll around his new home, looking at every tombstone, at every name, every date of birth and death, wondering how they'd all left this world. He recognized some of the last names—Kochtner, Billson, Frouch, Timerson, Skylord—from school. Probably the grandparents of some of his peers at Harrington Jr. High. Tony spent hours going from grave to grave, asking them one by one if they were finally at rest now. He introduced himself to many, bowed to some, and expressed utter sympathy for them all. He expected a sharp voice to respond every time; he heard only silence.
It was nearing dusk when he made it to the vault, a colossal, ancient stone box gripped in heavy, brilliant-colored ivy. The massive thing took up enough space to hold dozens of graves. The names on the front read: Dean and Mildred Heavly. He didn't recognize their first names, but the last one seemed strangely familiar to him. Under that, there was quote, which read: "Death is not the end, but the beginning of a new voyage of life."
Tony didn't know what to make of the saying. He didn't know whether to be grateful, happy, sad, angry, or hopeful. He wanted to pout. Scream. Make himself heard.
He didn't do anything.
Tony wandered around the graveyard some more. He wondered what his gravestone would say when they chiseled it into existence. Here lies Tony. Who cares? So what?
He didn't eat all day or all night. He remained awake until three A.M., lying on the ground beside the vault, gazing blankly up at the stars. This was the first time he could remember when he didn't strain his mind with the continuous, cumbersome 'what if' question that never died but only grew worse.
Tonight, Tony slept better than any night in his past. And there were no typical nightmares of him being plucked from his body.
--
Voices woke him the next day. There were at least three of them. At first he thought it was the dead talking from their graves, until he realized the voices were immature in tone and timbre. Older teenagers probably. Probably here to cause unwanted trouble, too.
Tony sat up. It took a lot of energy for