Sidenote: This is inspired by either a dream or a waking thought at 4:30 in the morning. I suddenly couldn't stop thinking about this though I haven't really thought about it that much over the years. I made a valiant attempt a few years ago as I have been doing all this morning to now, around 9 am, to find out more about making some kind of amends to this now ancient situation to no avail. I also rather obliquely mentioned this incident in this TRAVELOGUE post back in 2013. Why would this all pop up out of the blue today all of a sudden? I'll include my theory about this in an epilogue following this post:
FLASHBACK: Summer 1985
Working the graveyard shift at an old institution for the mentally disabled in an even older village settled back in the 17th century will have an effect on a young man's thoughts. Sometimes, even on nights off, it becomes hard to fall gently into that soft, soft slumber. This night was one such night. The warm late summer breeze with a gentle and slight chill in it wakens the senses and, when accompanied by a robust and brilliant full moon, well, the juices doth flow. And, as was growing to be commonplace in these heady days of post trust fund bliss, so were the intoxicants, both liquid and powder.
I decided on a whim to take to the road under these influences. No moral or logical qualms about this back in these days. I actually thought I drove better under them. And to keep me in "fine shape" on my nocturnal cruise, I'd be toting a sixer along for the ride. A practice far too common, sad to say.
Somehow my illicit, nocturnal, open-windowed version of Mr. Toad's wild ride brought me to the backroads of rural Cumberland and before I knew it, I found me, my '81 Ford Focus and one remaining bottle of Heineken parked across the street from a well known historic, and very spooky landmark, Elder Ballou Meeting House Cemetery.
This Olde Tymie plot o' land had it all: Gnarled trees nestled among tight little rolling hills, a combination of copse and grass in haphazard array, littered with all manner of slate and granite tombstones pitched askew, this way and that, as if up-heaved by some long-ago tremor under the earth. Or perhaps by an ancient evil uprising of the un-dead steadily and assuredly crawling their way up, handful by handful, from the dank ire-filled bottoms of their long forgotten graves. Oh, and the open crypts...
It was inside one of these, hidden in the deep, stark shadows cast by the gleaming moon, I slugged down the last of my beers, lay back on the musky dirt, and pawed drunkenly at my hardon bursting through the seams of my tight acid-washed jeans. Shit like this didn't scare me, it turned me on.
And there, in a sacred sanctuary seemingly carved in the side of a small hill to protect the dead as they waited for the caretakers, so many eons ago, to bury them nearby once the ground became soft with spring, I spilled my seed and let it soak into the soil, perhaps to meld with the dust of their remains forever.
Is this it? Is this the great act who's memory haunts me in the middle of the night so many decades later? Er, nope.
After I finished jerking off in the winter keep (little crypts they temporarily kept coffins of people who died in winter before the age of powerful machinery that could break the frozen ground) I inspected some of the nearby tombstones, fascinated by their Olde Tymie carvings and engravings. And then, at one particularly thin stone which was leaning quite a kilter, I wondered how it remained erect though at such an angle. And, well, it snapped cleanly at its base. Did I do it knowingly or by accident? I can't honestly recall. But, rather than let it lie there getting consumed by the mosses and the molds, I thought I might, well, just take it with me.
Yup. I stole a tombstone. And not just some random tombstone. Well, the tombstone WAS random, I mean, I didn't know the dude buried beneath it or anything, but, in a way I kinda did.
You see, this graveyard was well-known for its history to our area. The road and much of the land in the area is named for this Ballou family and many of their friends and neighbors in their day were also interred here. Like members of the Arnold family. You know, Benedict Arnold? The famous Revolutionary War traitor? His ancestors. Yes, this cemetery dates back to colonial times.
Who's grave did I desecrate? Now that's a hard question to answer. All I remember is it WAS a male member of the Ballou family and he was the only name on the stone. I seem to remember from the dates that he'd died young and that his death year was in the very early nineteenth century.
After I placed this forbidden slate slab, a sordid souvenir of my night of debauchery, in the hatch of my car I drove home, snuck it into my apartment, hid it in the bedroom closet and very soon thereafter forgot about it. It wasn't until perhaps a year later that I was reminded of it when I inquired of my apartment building manager about my security deposit once I moved from there. He told me, rather uncomfortably, that the landlord was quite upset at what he'd found in that closet. I then realized what it was and I'm not even sure I took the effort to explain it all. I mean, how do you explain a actual freakin' tombstone in your bedroom closet?
Epilogue: So why be woken and all focused about this now, some three and a half decades later? Perhaps, now forgotten as I came out of my dream, but perhaps that date on the stone, the one marking this man who died, was December 8, 1819.
Two hundred years ago today.