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CHAPTER 1
STONE FACES
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Essay by William Gilson
IN 1990 I LIVED in York, England. My apartment was about a mile north of the old city wall, and most mornings I would walk down Bootham, through the old gate called Bootham Bar, and explore the city. One drizzling morning, near Swinegate and Grape Lane, I came upon an archeological dig. Fifteen feet down, at the bottom of a hole about the size of a small living room, four skeletons lay exposed. Under a pale green tarp several archeologists in muddy clothes and colored hard hats were examining the bones, which had been carefully cleaned of dirt. The floor was level and free of debris and the skeletons drew sharp attention to themselves. One was a child, two were incomplete, and the fourth was an intact adult lying on his or her back with what looked like a small gravestone near the head. The bones of this adult appeared smooth, with a coffee-toned patina, and the skull looked to be grinning, the eyeholes large and round and dark.
I spoke with one of the archeologists, a young woman who seemed to be in charge, and she told me they had been digging "on our way to the Romans" when they came upon the skeletons, which she estimated to date between 1000 and 1100 A.D. She said the incompleteness of two of the dead was the result of a medieval wall; the intact adult had apparently been "an important person," as the archeologists had found signs of a wooden coffin. The headstone had two smoothed parallel surfaces but nothing could be seen to have been carved. The bodies were aligned on an east-west axis, heads toward west. The archeologist was blasé about all this, seemed a bit bored by my interest, and while we talked one of the team, who had been videoing the skeletons, began disassembling the intact adult, putting the bones into a large plastic bag. When I returned the next day, all the bones were gone and the digging was proceeding downward.
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I began liking burial grounds when I was a child. My earliest memories of them are too imprecise to allow of exact location, although I suspect they were cemeteries where my mother would leave flowers, places where members of the family were buried, old New England cemeteries such as the typically beautiful one in Middlebury, Connecticut, where my mother and father's ashes now rest under a small stone. I remember being told not to step on the graves, which caused me to notice the way some portion of the rectangle had sometimes slumped — a small thrill of horror when I pictured the person in the box down there, the weight of the dirt, the lid giving way.
On our annual summer trips to Ontario, to my father's childhood farm, on the long drives through New York State before the thruway was built, we stopped and ate picnic lunches. Sometimes we'd stop at a cemetery. Now, in my sixty-sixth year, with an accumulation of cemeterial experience, I can give context to those memories. Such places would have been pleasantly grassed parks, landscaped into levels with a variety of trees — maples, oaks, elms, ash, catalpa, various evergreens. Benches with wooden slats or cast iron vinework, facing modest but pleasant views. Gravestones, seldom aligned or closely spaced, made of white marble, gray or red or black granite, and ranging in size from small, plain, upright markers to tall gothics. Here and there a few large granite mausoleums resembling miniature Greek temples. Part of the appeal of these parks was in their quiet, their absence of people, the feel of safety; but mostly for me it was a powerful evocative oddness: the natural world of trees and birds and weather harmonizing with an underlying shapeliness, a shapeliness derived from something mysterious, at times scary. Everywhere I looked there were dead people, underground.
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In the 1970s I lived in Provincetown. I did a lot of solitary walking. One winter, feeling bored with myself, tired of sand dunes and of looking at the ocean, I discovered that for such a small place, Provincetown had a lot of acreage given over to the buried dead.
Some of my friends commented on the peculiarly large amount of time I began to pass in the cemeteries, but I grew happily absorbed. I decided I'd write an essay. A period of preparation was necessary, which involved spending much time musing among the gravestones, walking slowly about, and as spring came, sitting or lying on the grass, smoking, filling notebooks with scribblings.
Cape Cod is a peninsula mostly underlain with dirt and rock; near its end, beyond Truro, ocean currents have shaped sand into a huge hook that curls around a harbor. Provincetown lines part of the harbor, and if you walk east away from the town you come to woods and low scrub brush and sand dunes, and finally the Atlantic Ocean. Before there was a town proper, it was a stopping-off place for various fishermen, sailors, explorers, drifters; the town began to stabilize as a community in the eighteenth century. Always, until around the time just before I lived there, Provincetown survived by fishing for cod, mackerel, lobsters, whaling, whatever could be got from the sea. The nature of the land made that imperative, there was no way to farm.
The Hamilton-Gifford Cemetery, the Town Cemetery, the Catholic cemeteries (New and Old), the Oldest Cemetery — for a town with a permanent population of fewer than five thousand, there were a lot of graves, there was a lot of land that year after year had to be kept covered with enough grass to hold the sand beneath it from blowing away.
I got curious about the gravestones. They ranged from a few primitive markers, such as the imperfectly smoothed small gray stone in the Oldest Cemetery with the initials TN scratched with a blunt tool, to five or six nicely hand-carved gray slates, to many commercially cut and lettered white marble uprights and obelisks, to the standard modern ill-proportioned machine-made granites. There were a few small tombs with underground chambers, and a row of modest mausoleums set into a bank of sand. It was obvious from the proportionate numbers of stones and their dates that the town had had a period of prosperity during the middle and last half of the nineteenth century.
Into each stone was cut a name, or names, each with a death date, often a birth date as well; sometimes a quote or epigram. Seldom more. The lettering of some of the marbles — sharp-edged, well preserved in the clear air — now and then told of someone having been drowned, or lost at sea; one obelisk gave the latitude and longitude where a boat went down.
I decided to try and learn something about who they were, these underground old-timers. In a small room in the basement of the town hall was an archive. I got permission to squirrel myself in that room and became an almost everyday visitor. I made notes. Legal-sized yellow pages piled up. I read ledgers and odd slips of paper and old newspapers and Board of Health reports. What was I after? I said I was writing a book.
What comes back to me now are fragments of a half-imagined past, conjured through old-smelling paper, awkward prose, antique handwriting. A town where sand drifted between small houses. Windmills, salt works, huge outdoor racks of drying codfish, the harbor filled with schooners, the "mackerel fleet." A piece of paper certifying that old Seth Nickerson, whose grave I knew, had been declared senile; a woman — whose grave I also knew — was certified to care for him. Captain Mackenzie, climbing the foremast of his schooner alongside a wharf at low tide, got thrown off when the boat "keeled," he cracked his head and died. Another captain was returned dead from Suriname in a wooden coffin inside a steel box, packed in salt.
This period of "research," as I called it, ran its course, as did my time in Provincetown. No book materialized; I don't think I really was working on one. All my pleasure was in walking in the graveyards, in the reading and in the note-taking, disorganized and untidy as it was. I left in 1975, drove to the mainland in my VW Beetle, all my possessions, including my boxes of notes, in the car with me. Gravestones and burial grounds — what an odd lens to hold up to one's life. Two things retain a presence in my memory. The first was my discovery of New England Puritan stonecarving, which came about because of two 1745 stones in the Oldest Cemetery. The second was the smallpox graves.
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Smallpox. The skin confluent with acutely painful, pus-filled sores, eyelids swollen closed, burning fever, delirium. Virulently contagious. A 40 percent death rate, no effective treatment. Always lurking; epidemics came, subsided, then came again. There were two possible protections: vaccination and the disease itself. Vaccination was fairly common by the 1860s, but there were so many who hadn't been vaccinated and who hadn't had the disease that there was a ready pool.
In Provincetown a smallpox outbreak had killed an unknown number of people in 1801, and in the fall of 1872 it returned. Most likely by sea. One of the first cases went unreported by the attending doctor. New cases appeared. The old Pest House was in such bad shape that nurses could not be found to stay in it. The three-member Board of Health finally got things under control with quarantines and preventive enforcements, and in early 1874 the disease went away, having killed thirteen or fourteen people.
Someone told me about the graves in the woods, but not why they were there. I found them, after some poking about, amongst a dense growth of beeches and oaks and thorny vines. Instantly recognizable as graves, low-mounded, moss-covered, with small identical markers: limestone two-by-fours stuck upright, each with a single small sans-serif number. Maybe ten graves visible — it was impossible to be sure; some of the markers had been snapped off and lay nearby, some were gone.
Not far away was a hole about the size of a bomb crater, brush covered, with sloping sides. Maybe it was the cellar of the old Pest House; there was nothing visible to make this likely other than location. Trash from camping backpackers. An empty box of .22 shells.
A couple brief paragraphs and a list of expenses in an 1874 Board of Health report confirmed that the graves were those of smallpox dead. Nowhere did I find a key to the numbers on the stones, to who was buried where. It was promised that the graves would be fenced around and cared for, and it was recommended that the Pest House be rebuilt.
Here was a burial ground edging toward nonexistence: not because the dead were about to go away, but because the grave markers and the surroundings were ceasing to matter. In a subsequent visit I picked up one of the broken stones and put it in my backpack, intending to leave it at the local museum. I should have, but I never did. After moving it around with me for a few years, I last remember seeing it lying near a doorstep amongst weeds in Vermont.
An old story, marked graves becoming unmarked, a graveyard becoming normal land, the dead returning to dirt. During the ensuing years I've found that the memory of that place has stayed with me, has held some evocative presence that has never been displaced by the hundreds of burial grounds I have since visited.
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Provincetown was an unlikely place to discover Puritan stonecarving. Most of the gravestones were marbles from the nineteenth century, standardized imagery, weeping willows, funerary urns, patterns rigidly copied, no flair or eccentricity or feel of even a crude vernacular art. The pleasure was mainly in the cemeteries themselves, the expanse and the quiet numbers of stones.
But the Oldest Cemetery held two gravestones that offered something more; they were appealing as carved objects, very different from one another, each dated 1745.
One was the stone that marked the grave of Experience Rider. It was small — about two feet by a foot and a half — and close-grained, light gray, a single piece of slate most likely brought by boat from the mainland. About three inches thick, the back of it crudely roughed out, the front a hand-smoothed flat rectangle filled with lettering. The text was elegantly spaced, a handsome serif typeface:
HERE LYES BURIED THE BODY OF M. EXPERIENCE RIDER WIFE TO M. SAMUEL RIDER AGED 40 YEARS DIED DEC. Y 21.1745.
Along the sides and bottom of the rectangle were narrow decorative bands of shallowly cut stylized long thick leaves, looking as if they were moved by a light wind. The top of the stone formed an upward curve, a third of a circle, containing the bas-relief frontal view of a skull with two large circular eyes, minimal nose, and grinning teeth; out from the sides of the skull projected a pair of wings. All of it had obviously been carved by hand, by someone working with mallet and chisel; cleanly done, but showing the small waverings and vagaries of an actual person working without machinery.
The other stone was that of Capt. John Tallcott of Connecticut. About half again as big as the Rider marker, a brownish red sandstone, somewhat abraded by weather:
Here lies Interr'd the Remains of Cap. John Tallcott of Glantenbury in Connecticutt (Son to Deac'n Benjamin Tallcott) who Died here in his Return after the Victory obtained at Cape Breton A.D. 1745 in the 41 year of his Age.
It too was roughly finished at the back, the front a text-filled rectangle bordered by bas-relief long-stemmed flowers and leaves at sides and bottom, and at the top not a skull but a face with wings: maximum simplification of line, two eye circles, a nose, a small mouth; wing feathers indicated by small half-moon gouges. Atop the head a small stylize crown.
In the spring of 1745, as part of the British-French hostilities then known as King George's War, a small army of New England volunteers had captured the French fortress of Louisbourg at Cape Breton Island. Perhaps John Tallcott had been wounded and died on his way home. Someone had gone to the trouble of having a gravestone, together with a small footstone, made for him back in his native state and shipped to Provincetown.
* * *
I drove south the length of the Cape, then north to Cambridge, where I planned to stay a couple nights with friends. I'd removed the rear seats from the Beetle, my belongings filled the back. I was on my way to northern Vermont. Behind the house in Cambridge was a small parking area and in the morning I came out and where the car had been were tire tracks in the snow that went out to the street. I had not unpacked the car. A few days later the cops found it, empty but for a two-volume edition of the journals of Henry Thoreau and the broken-off smallpox gravestone.
There was a period of adjustment. I kept feeling I was about to reach for something, then realizing I no longer had it. Socks, underwear, a precious stone arrowhead, a book, my extra glasses.
After some attempts to live and find work in Vermont I returned to Cambridge, where I settled for a watchman job, sitting nights in a small brick shack at the entrance to the old Watertown Arsenal, a mile of empty long dark brick buildings where tanks had been made during both World Wars. I read books and dozed in my chair, and during the daytime, besides whatever else I did, I began to seek out the old burial grounds.
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The first white people to settle in New England in sizable numbers were Puritans from England. Their religion, which many of them practiced with extraordinary focus and intensity, had its origins at least as far back as Henry VIII's split with the Catholic Church. The Puritans were not satisfied with the compromises resulting from that split, with what came to be regarded as the Church of England, and their pressure for further purification resulted eventually in the cutting off of King Charles I's head in 1649 and the installing of a Puritan government. But twenty years before that date there took place a migration to New England of some thousands, most of whom — and especially their leaders — considered themselves the purest of Puritans. They were intent on starting over, making a new state in what they perceived as a wilderness, where the word of God could be followed with exactitude, and the miasmic corruptions of medieval Catholicism forever boiled away.
First to make the crossing were members of a small, financially poor sub-sect of Puritans who came to be known as the Pilgrims. They settled in Plymouth in 1620 (after making first landfall at Provincetown). Ten years later the well-financed, well-planned "Great Migration" began, with shipload after shipload arriving at Boston. The natives — seen of course by the Puritans as heathens — were already by then dying of European diseases such as smallpox; here and there they made resistance but ultimately gave way as the Puritans went north, west, south, founding towns and churches.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Carved In Stone"
by .
Copyright © 2012 Thomas E. Gilson and William Gilson.
Excerpted by permission of Wesleyan University Press.
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