By Ilse Eskelsen
My three uncles are dead. My great-uncles too. They’re buried in the churchyard, in the family plot.
They all come from my mother’s side. Boys don’t last on my mother’s side. That’s why my brother spends his summers teaching scuba in New Zealand and his winters at a ski resort in northern France. He says he wants to make the most of the time he has. He says it’s best to get away from the local chapel.
That’s the churchyard I meant, with the family plot to one side. St. Julian’s Chapel, Cuthbert, Virginia, which is in the part of Virginia that no one ever thinks of very much. We don’t have a lot of industry, but we have a lot of graves.
Matthew’s is my favorite. I think he was named for the apostle—my grandmother was in her Jesus phase when he was born—and he always seemed like the best of them to me because he died at nineteen, so he had no time to be well and truly bad. It was a single-car accident on a side road at midnight. He was on his way back from the party where he’d finally kissed Amanda Rhodes. They were standing in the yard, under the trees, and he told her that he’d missed her every day at JMU, and he didn’t want to miss her now that she was standing right in front of him.
“So, what are you going to do about it?” she asked, and he kissed her.
I know because Amanda Rhodes has told me the story. She’s told everyone the story. She must still be mourning him, all these years later, and her mourning makes sense to me. She grew up with Matthew, always thought she’d marry him. So, to make up for the disappointment, I guess she married a ghost instead.
She told me he didn’t kiss her like it was both the first time and the last. She told me he kissed her like it hurt him, but it was a hurt he wanted more than anything in the world. Amanda is somewhat dramatic, but she teaches English at the high school and wears long scarves, so I suppose that’s to be expected.
Matthew’s tomb says 1966–1985, Gone too soon, forever in our hearts. He was the first one dead.
They got more creative with the next ones.
Like the next tomb over, which belongs to George. Grandma was on a presidents kick.
1968–1999, Loving father, son, and friend. And then there’s an etching of a triangle I never understood, no matter how many times I traced it, sitting on the churchyard grass, long green stains on my Sunday dress.
Harrison Peters says it was an inside joke of theirs. Well, theirs and everybody’s who was alive when George still was. George was big on joking around, and he was big on keeping everyone in the loop. He would quote people no one in the room had ever met until everyone was quoting them. He would insist on showing his friends his favorite movies just so they knew the classic lines. That was the kind of guy he was.
Harrison Peters should know. “We were real tight in high school,” he said. “Batman and Robin.” Harrison never had any shame about being the sidekick. It’s easy to admit someone else was the hero when they’re dead. And George sure sounded heroic—volunteering after school to help elementary schoolers learn to read, coming home to see his siblings every weekend of college, coming back to Cuthbert after law school to practice, sometimes pro bono.
“He was the best man I ever knew,” Harrison told me once, when my mom had him over for dinner and we were all washing up. “I would’ve followed him to the ends of the earth.”
I was young and not particularly tactful, so I asked, “Didn’t he cheat on Aunt Lisa?”
Harrison rinsed his plate with an expression both distant and dignified. “You shouldn’t speak ill of the dead.”
It was an aneurysm that got Uncle George. Very sudden. Harrison said he was at lunch with Aunt Lisa. Grandma said he was “out with that woman Stacy.” Apparently, she worked for Greenpeace, which I guess made the whole thing more or less okay, in some people’s books.
Anyway, you shouldn’t speak ill of the dead.
Arthur was born in 1970. My grandmother had soured on the American government then as sure as she’d soured on the Bible. She’d moved on to other legends. She wanted my uncle Arthur to be a leader of men, a king in his place. My grandfather had less particular ambitions, I believe, but then again, no one ever tells me much about my grandfather. He’s not dead or anything. He married into the boy-killing line. He’s just silent and surly and forever in mourning, as I guess we all are.
Arthur was an artist, not talented, my grandmother said, but dogged. He worked at it and worked at it and worked at it until he was selling paintings at the farmer’s market for two hundred dollars a pop. We have one of his sketches hanging in our house, in my brother’s room, the one he’s never in. It’s a strange sketch; I’ve always been fascinated by it, always found it a little troubling. It’s a rabbit, but it’s not a rabbit. It looks like something that would eat you.
I’ve never asked if he drew it before or after he quit the meds, but I’ve wondered.
People don’t tell me much about Arthur. Well, they tell me the outlines: art class and honor roll and warming the bench during football games. They tell me he was sick, and he needed his medication, but he stopped taking it. They get pretty quiet after that.
I know what they mean by sick.
I wish he’d kept taking his meds.
But maybe that’s the family curse. Maybe it’s nobody’s fault, not the physical therapist who said only crazy people took those pills, not Arthur himself when he threw away the orange jar, not the state or the system or the will of God for letting people be homeless, for letting people suffer. I looked him up once, Arthur, and I found an article about an area man who called the police from someone else’s hot tub and cried while he asked them for a hug. He broke into some family’s backyard and called 911 for a hug. A tragedy dressed up as a punchline. I wanted to smash my computer screen.
Was that the family line? Or do things like that happen in everybody’s families?
I don’t even know how he died. After I saw the article, I stopped asking questions.
1970–2002. An innocent to the end; there’s a drawing of an angel there. I don’t know who picked the inscription. It always rang false to me, false and condescending.
I called my brother today. I asked about New Zealand. He said it’s nice. He said he’s got a girlfriend. I wanted to tell him to kiss her now, while he still can. I wanted to tell him to be good while I can still criticize him. I wanted to tell him to take care of himself while we can almost still live with ourselves.
Instead, I said, “Stay safe, okay?”
There’s a plot for him in the churchyard, and I’ll cry when it’s filled.
Ilse Eskelsen is a BYU English student who has lived just north of Washington, DC; in Stuttgart, Germany; and just south of Washington, DC. She has pieces published or soon-to-be published in literary journals like Rainy Day, Lunch Ticket, and Inscape Journal.
