She’d been a nice woman. Honest, upright, forthright, honorable, diligent, hardworking, and dependable. Hell, she might’ve even been good.
But that was past, and so was she. Elsie Holmes – ‘Granny’ Holmes for thirty years and counting – had been over and done with for days. This was just the catch-up.
It was a properly overcast day, and the rest followed suit.
The priest said her words.
The family sobbed theirs.
The gravedigger took up her spade.
And WHACK with one hard blow severed the spitting, slobbering, fanged skull of Elsie Holmes from her neck, cutting the spinal column and setting it into a more mellow sort of rictus. Then everyone slammed shut the coffin, nailed it, and shoveled it under as fast as we could before it could pull itself back together and crawl back out.
It was a pretty good funeral, as far as they do around here, and we all said as much.
“That’s a funny thing to say,” said the visiting girl – a friend of a friend of the deceased, or so she’d claimed. “I mean, she tried to eat you. Is this whole cemetery like that? Because that’d explain the barbed wire on the walls. And the walls. And the guard tower.”
We explained to her that it wasn’t the cemetery as much as the town. You get about a few days – half a week if they’re very old. Then they’re up and feisty. It’s a lot to deal with, but here’s like anywhere else in the world: folks get used to it. The sun’s too hot, the wind’s too cold, the rain’s too thick or too thin, the dead rise after a few days and thirst for your flesh and blood. That’s just the way it goes in Downsville.
“Fair enough. Ever thought of doing something about it?”
Now she had our attention – and our irritation too. But we kept our words and fists to ourselves, because it was obvious to anyone with half a wit that she was one of those travelling folks, the kind you don’t get a chance to see very often, those roamers. Appleseeds and Coyotes and others. You don’t start things with them, and you don’t hope they stay, but you keep your ears open if they happen to you.
“Right. So you don’t want to move, and you can’t fix it. But you can make it a lot more bearable if you just try burning them instead of burying. Saves time, saves on fortified cemeteries and reinforced concrete in coffins, saves wear and tear on shovels. Even saves space – what’s harder to keep aside for your grandpa; a six-by-three-by-six of nice land or a prize spot on the mantelpiece? Go on, give it a try.”
Well it was advice, of a sort. And the priest said it wasn’t traditional, but she only said the words as words; and the gravekeeper and gravedigger were a bit reluctant, but they liked the idea of never getting up at three in the morning to shovel someone back into their coffin; and the town was altogether reluctantly experimental and so we tried it.
It was a stupid way to break a leg, falling off that barn roof. All Teresa’d had to do was nail in a board and come back down the ladder but no, had to show off to her friends and do it one-handed and whoops down she came. A stupid way to break a leg, let alone her neck.
But tick tock, time was a-wasting. So the procession came, and the lumberjack with the driest cords he’d cut, and we all went down to the pavilion in the cemetery, where the bonfire could burn in even the most appropriately funereal of weather.
In went the torch, and up went Teresa, in smoke and ash and an awfully porky smell. Weren’t as many pig-farmers around here now as there were a generation ago; folks just couldn’t quite muster the stomach for it. But there went her stomach, and her eyes, and her face, down to the bits of the bits of the bits of the bones and then they were gone too, cracked up and cindered. And that was when we all put on our masks because Teresa came screaming out of the coals at us, bowled down the graveyard gates, and set three houses and the church on fire.
“Well that’s something,” someone said, and we knew it was a stranger because nobody else would be surprised and we knew it was the travelling girl because nobody else would get over it that quickly. “This happens every time?”
And we explained to her that yes, pretty much it did. Some of the older folks went quieter; some of the younger, louder. In general the more time they’d had to put themselves to peace the better. It was a sort of therapy. And the bucket brigade had things well under control. It might seem odd, but that’s just the way it works in Downsville.
“I see,” she said in the way that people did when they didn’t see at all but didn’t want to call you a stupid, inbred old so-and-so to your face. A lot of us had heard it before. We’d had kids. “You know, I was suggesting this to make things easier for you, right?”
We knew.
“This doesn’t look easier.”
We pointed out that the fire precautions were both cheaper and more generally useful than the old graveyard guard had been and we stopped when it was obvious she was just waiting for her turn to talk again.
“Sky burial. Lay out your dead for the birds. You’ve got crows around here, right? Ravens? Turkey vultures? Do it. Just smack up the bones with a mallet afterwards, they won’t go anywhere otherwise.”
And she walked out of town again.
So we tried it. But we kept the fire brigade at work anyways, and we were glad of it. We do what we know works, here in Downsville. And we don’t forget it, either.
It’s a long walk, the path out there. Well-worned, well-tended. There’s flowers, and people that tend them. And the pallbearers use oiled wood that doesn’t so much as creak, let alone groan, god no. No sound but soft footsteps and sobs all the way to the burial platform, where we leave them to be as they were born: naked and soft.
Then we walk back while the antiaircraft guns fire.
She was waiting for us on the road back again, hands bloody and covered in feathers. She didn’t have a gun, the travelling girl.
“So. I see people in Downsville still do things differently.”
Well, who doesn’t where?
“There’s different, there’s different, there’s DIFFERENT different, and then there’s just plain obstinate. So, when did the birds get this big?”
It was a bit of a fuzzy record, that. See, back in the old days they were the size of junkyard dogs and a strong arm with a bat’d keep them away. Then they got bigger and meaner, and we broke out the shotguns. Nowadays they’d carry your car off, if you let them, and the funerary business around here was awfully dependant on army surplus.
“Right. Right. Hey, any of you got a cigarette? I don’t smoke but I really need to say that. Right. Right. Okay.”
The travelling girl walked around town about three times saying things like that. In the end she wasn’t much calmer but she was sure dustier. Her patience hadn’t improved any either.
“I’m out of ideas,” she told us. “You’re all too stubborn, even after you die. You linger and make a mess for years after you’ve stopped being even REMOTELY useful and I’ve worn out the last threadbare hint of a germ of a ghost of a favour I owed Elsie. Wad it up and throw it all in the trash for all I care; I’m out.”
And the travelling girl left, but she left something behind by mistake: a damned good idea.
Downsville doesn’t have a cemetery any more. The bonfires haven’t roared for years. The old anti-aircraft guns were turned into public statuary, and the pigeons that poop on them are normal birds.
Our garbage dump does moan a lot, late at some nights. But there’s ten thousand tons of mangled, immortal plastic twixt us and whatever we put in there.
I realize this all might seem a bit strange to you, but you really must remember.
That’s just the way it goes in Downsville.