1985, Iowa

By Scott Siders

It happened during that brief moment in Autumn after the leaves have changed, but before they’ve completely given in to the fall of the season. On Sundays, after church, after everyone left for lunch, we’d play soccer in the old graveyard — what grandma called God’s acre.

It wasn’t really soccer, but that’s the kind of ball we used. The game was simple: Kick the ball at gravestones as hard as you can. Every ricochet was worth one point — unless it hit the stone at the far end of the yard. That one was worth ten points, but it might as well have been 1,000.

We stayed as far away from it as we could. It was an odd stone, so weathered it looked like the first rock on earth. It was shaped like an old arrowhead and had a single word on its face, a name, barely readable: ALLEN.

Some of the people in town were positive it was a first name, while others swore it was a last. One thing was for certain: It was the only grave in the yard that wasn’t recorded in the town’s registry of the dead.

Different stories went around about what lay beneath that stone. Some said it was a slave’s resting place. Others were sure the old bones belonged to an explorer who got stuck in the wilds of winter. Still others insisted it was the remains of a witch. Whoever he or she was, most agreed the stone was haunted.

It’s the sort of thing that happens in the quick conversations of small towns: The unexplained is explained by one of a number of stories passed on from father to son, brother to brother, friend to friend, and so on — the cycle repeating for generations.

Regardless of the various tales surrounding it, everyone believed it was the first grave ever dug in town — that the church and its graveyard grew up around it. In the beginning they used the stone as a kind of marker, burying the dead line by line, vertical and horizontal from it.

For us, the strangest thing about the grave was that it was the first place we’d go looking for Uncle Charlie. Uncle Charlie was the kind of drunk that takes years to perfect. He was good at it. He’d go to ALLEN late at night, after all of the bars had closed or thrown him out. He’d sit next to that old stone and swallow down whatever was left of his bottle.

When the bottle was empty, Uncle Charlie would howl — a sound that found its pitch in the mangled holler of a man gone wild or the desperate scream of a woman. What didn’t make any sense was that Uncle Charlie never remembered going to that grave. His story was always the same: “When I left the pub, I was headed home.”

After a few years the word got out. They gave him a nickname: “Crazy Old Charlie.” He was still just Uncle Charlie to us. I wasn’t embarrassed. Neither was my brother. If anything, we were proud our uncle had the courage to be alone with ALLEN.

We hadn’t been out to the cemetery for Uncle Charlie in years. He rarely left his house after the stroke. The night it happened we picked up a 12-pack and headed off to our favorite spot to drink: ALLEN. Uncle Charlie, in his own way, had everything to do with that. It just fit. The odor of alcohol lingered there like the smell of perfume cloaking a funeral parlor.

We never got the chance to crack open a single beer that night. We only got as far as the cherry tree. That’s where we found him, flat on his back, arms outstretched. First my brother, then I, leaned over the broken body of the man.

It was nothing like we’d ever seen or even imagined. It was barely real. If it wasn’t for the blood pooled around his neck and that empty stare, I might have believed he was a fallen angel. It struck me that maybe angels lose their way, too, and wind up inexplicably in graveyards.

The man was a stranger to us. We were sure of that. At first we thought it might be Uncle Charlie, that he had made his way to the graveyard to visit and drink with ALLEN one more time before they actually met in what grandma called The Great Beyond.

But it wasn’t him. We knew right away. The man didn’t have a bottle in his hand, he wasn’t wearing suspenders, and he didn’t have the scar Uncle Charlie earned (and proudly displayed) in a bar fight several years before my brother and I were born.

The lifeless body under the cherry tree had a full head of straight blonde hair, and a belly flatter than Uncle Charlie’s ever was — even as a kid. He wore torn jeans and what was once a white T-shirt. A few leaves had fallen and stuck to him.

We stared and said nothing for what seemed like an hour. A cool breeze blew from the west. Thunder cracked and the sky opened. Our gaze was taken by a streak of lightning, and then my brother’s wide eyes found mine. The rain came slowly at first, and then in waves, as we gripped the fat of our hands around his ankles and dragged him to the far edge of God’s acre.

Scott Siders is a freelance writer with a degree in English from the University of Colorado at Boulder. His published works includes This Side of Oblivion (2001) and The Armpit of Desire (2005).

Posted by Elizabeth Armstrong Moore on Tuesday, March 13th, 2007 | Email This Post

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