The Gravesavers (21 page)

As she did, I swear I saw John Hindley. He mingled in the crowd, looking over the tops of people’s heads, those laser-beam eyes of his zapping right into mine. Bring them back, he seemed to be saying, bring them back to me. A woman stood up and blocked my view. When she sat down again, he was gone. O.I.! O.I.!

Harv had his arm around Nana by the time the song was through. I turned to give her a smile and had to look away.

Her shoulders were heaving and she was choking back tears something fierce. Don’t know why, but never once before had I imagined my Nana had tears inside her.

There was a silence when the song was over and then thunderous clapping, whistles, shouts. In that silence before it started, I felt how a whole crowd of people could feel like one. That’s what Laura Smith did to us.

“Ida,” she continued, “I also understand you like a good jig. So, folks, all of you up, and here’s something a little more upbeat. Dance, everyone, come on!”

There we were tapping, swinging, clapping. Even me. After that, Harv and Nana went back to their meal preparations, and the woman who painted faces got up and sang. Some folks have so many talents. I felt her singing right to me.

In line at supper, I ran into the Cackleberries. Two of them were covered head to toe with poison ivy rashes. I turned away so I wouldn’t laugh in their faces.

“What’s this dish?” one of them asked Nana.

“Why that, it’s jellyfish cream salad,” Nana beamed. The poor woman turned white.

It was past midnight when we got home. Nana let me make her some mint tea. I couldn’t believe she actually let me touch her herbs! But she was fast
asleep on the sofa when I brought it to her. I covered her with a quilt and turned off the light. I went to my bedroom and changed into my pyjamas, but I couldn’t sleep. I polished the baby’s skull. I liked to make it warm.

I got out my journal. “Good Day. Good music. Good people.”

For a brief second at the picnic, after hearing the music, I did what Stubby told me to do. For a second there, I believed in belief.

I think that’s what Coach Rigby was getting at with all his Rigbyism and creative visualization exercises. If you believed it enough, you could do it. Maybe that’s what Corporal Ray was doing too. If he believed my mother would get better, she would. If I believed in saving the gravesite, then maybe … I could. I mean
we
could. Max and I. Max and Minn. Our names linked together made me sigh. Made me brave enough to face any old ghost or spirit head on.

Or was it head off?

There is something about the blackness of a country sky that makes me think the entire world has ducked its head underneath a blanket. The night we set out for Elbow Island it was a plush velvet sky, a shawl, maybe, studded with rhinestone stars. I thought of my mother’s favourite party dress, the one she’s worn at every Christmas dinner for as long as I can remember. My folks were both on my mind as I crept out the back door at Nana’s. What I was doing was
wrong.
I knew this and I was doing it anyhow.

The dummy was still underneath the veranda where I’d stashed her in three green garbage bags.

“C’mon, Missy Long Johns, you’ve got work to do,” I said to my creation. The plan was simple. I rehearsed it once again. Plant a dummy on the island with a sign that said Save the Grave! Phone the coast guard. Alert the media. Cause a stir.

It was getting out there that worried me. If someone had seen me lugging her up the road, they might
have thought a murderer was on the loose, with the victim in a body bag.

This dummy was larger and more sophisticated than the one I’d made when I was eight and thrown off the balcony. She was more scarecrow than puppet. I’d stuffed her with lots of straw I’d found in the old barn, and I’d dressed her all in red, using long johns I’d bought at Harv’s. That was awkward.

“What you need long johns for?” he’d asked. “It’s hot as Hades these past few days.”

“It’s a surprise for Nana,” I’d replied without blinking.

That was partly true, but I crossed my fingers anyhow. I didn’t want him alerting her.

As planned, I signalled Max three times with my flashlight. He was waiting, as he’d promised, by a small dock around the corner from the government wharf. My feet echoed like a giant’s as I walked towards him. He had on an orange windbreaker. Bright like neon. Some spy.

His voice was hoarse. “This way, hurry up before some dog wakes up.”

We untied the rowboat and put Missy Long Johns in between us. I paddled for what seemed like forever. “It’s about ten minutes until we stop,” I said.

“You hope,” he said. He never even offered to help row.

The distant clang of the buoys was a lonesome sound. Clang clang clang. Like a warning bell …

“Are you sure we should do this?” Max said.

I nodded. “Too late to turn back now!” I scanned my flashlight across the waves in front of us, a funnel of light leading only into more blackness.

The waves were choppy. The boat rocked as if it were frantic with panic. I rowed steadily until I spotted the grey hump of Elbow Island just ahead.

The rocks were giant spikes, the jagged canine teeth of some prehistoric creature. Expertly, I eased the boat into the dip we’d seen on the map. I thought Max would be impressed by that, but then we bumped up against a rock for a crash landing.

“Make sure you tie the boat tight,” I said, draping Missy Long Johns around my neck and sloshing through seaweed and eelgrass until I finally reached drier land. I dumped her down at my feet and shone my flashlight around and up, trying to find a way to get over the mounds of rocks to the field beyond. Once there, I could figure out where to dump the dummy.

Yes! It was a well-worn path. Rocks almost like stair steps led out to a ledge. Easy, I thought—until I stepped on one. The rocks were slimy with algae and seaweed. Slow but steady, that was the only way to proceed. I picked up Missy Long Johns and draped
her around my shoulders again. She was heavy for a scarecrow.

“Help me here, would you?” I yelled back to Max. I was high up by then and could see the field below me. “Max? Come on!”

There was no answer.

“Max?” I looked back. And saw the rowboat floating empty away from shore. “Maaaaaax!”

My own voice echoed back. Frantic, I looked ahead into the field that suddenly was like one deep black hole. Crazily, I thought maybe he had got ahead of me. But the field was empty except for clusters of scrub brush that looked like giant porcupines guarding the forest beyond. Boulders perched lopsided, ghoulish heads were sprouting from the earth, cocked to one side, taunting. Here and there, vapours spiralled up from the ground like small geysers. Swamp gas, I told myself, but if I didn’t know better, I’d say they were vibrating. As if curled inside them something lived.

“Max!” I screamed. Had he fallen? “Max! Stop teasing!”

“Hey, you there!” came a reply. Not Max. A deep growl of a voice behind me.

“Please don’t be afraid.” Right.

I heard the footsteps. He was closing in.

“Turn around,” he said. His voice warbled, gurgling like bubbles under water. Turn around? Not on your life.

“It’s only me.” Closer, closer, he was almost beside me. “John Hindley.”

I ran faster than the speed of light. I shouted for Max again and again. My pleas were lost in the wind, blown out to sea, drowned by the clangs of the buoys. By this time, the sound was not just a lonesome sound but a haunting, chilling warning.

An angry wind started up. A few splats of rain hit my face.

“Max?” I whimpered. But I knew he wasn’t around. The footsteps behind me were gaining.

Once the race has started, never ever look behind you. It’s a waste of valuable seconds.

The Rigbyism came out of nowhere.

“Stop!” he was shouting. “Hold on!”

I was holding on, all right. To my life. Out of his reach.

There were no clouds in the sky. No stars for guidance or light. In fact, it was like there was no sky either. I was in the midst of a mist so low to the ground, it was as if I was in the clouds. I was forced to slow down. I listened.

I’d lost him. At last. I finally threw Missy Long Johns down. And that’s when the voices started. That screaming Stubby had talked about. It wasn’t the wind, if that’s what you’re thinking. It was voices. Crying. There was no thunder. No lightning. But the rain! Like waterfalls cascading over me. I gasped for breath.

I ripped a garbage bag off Missy Long Johns and made a rain poncho for myself. The red lipstick mouth I’d been so careful with was smeared like blood all over her face. Even she looked evil.

Then, a movement in the dark. He was stalking me! I ran like I never did in my life. I was ready to break the sound barrier.

Down into the field, trying to get away from the voices and the rain and—
a ghost—a killer.

There was nowhere to hide in the field. I had to get to the forest. I tore past the twisted-faced rocks, got snagged on spindly scrub and kept right on running. Finally I reached the woods. But his footsteps crackling through the underbrush followed.

I was in the haunted forest of my childhood nightmares. Shadows of branches like the claws of animals and the fingers of witches surrounded me. I tripped and went flying into a swampy-smelling patch of bog. I closed my eyes, expecting him to pounce. One second, two seconds, three seconds went by—like whole lifetimes.

I lifted my head, and there was a flicker of light, like a match struck and quickly blown out. He was going away. In the other direction. I lay there for five whole minutes, holding my breath as best I could. The voices were still screaming.

I stood up, staying in a crouch, and picked my way, inch by inch, along a tangled path.

Then? Well, I’d swear up and down on my own grave that I saw a woman holding a lantern. She beckoned with her arm. Steady as a beam from a lighthouse, she guided me directly to the cabin. Don’t ask me how, but I knew it was the Clancy cabin. The voices started to lower as I got nearer. By the time I walked up to the front stoop, they had stopped. The stillness was worse. A deathly quiet. I stepped in as softly as I could.

“My fiancé married and had many children,” she said. “He lived a happy life. I’ve watched now and then.”

Maryanna Rayborn? It was as if she was continuing a conversation we’d started before.

“There’s this this—man,” I gasped. “Out there …”

She laughed a tinkly laugh. “There’s more than one, I’m afraid. You’re a sorry-looking sight.” She smiled. She really was dazzling.

“And you needn’t be looking so terrified. I know you’ve talked to spirits before. And I have to say, Miss Minn, we are all very grateful for what you are doing to save the grave. My own bones are still safely there but wouldn’t have been much longer had you not taken action.”

She drifted when she walked, sort of like Miss Armstrong-Blanchett, only more graceful.

“Still,” she said, “before you get to saving us, there’s something you need to say, is that right? There’s a shadow weighing you down. I can see it plain as day all about you.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Stubby told you about me. You’ve come here because you can whisper your darkest secret to me. I have the power to take away your shadow, your dark cloud, if you do.”

“I came to save the grave.”

“But you have a sad heart, am I right?”

I nodded. Gulped. Tried to swallow. There
was
a big something. I sat down. My lips moved. I began to whisper. Something like this …

The week before Christmas, it had snowed. And snowed and snowed and snowed. By the middle of the week, the snowbanks were so high I could prance out our back door, waddle up a snowbank and step right onto the roof of our garage.

Maybe I was a bit old to be doing what I did, but I guess that much snow would make anyone feel like a little kid again, wanting to play. Even Mr. Forest was in his yard making snowmen and forts. See, in those few minutes after I jumped off the roof and before I landed kerfluff in the white fluffy mounds below, softer than clouds, I pretended I was flying.

It’s not like I was the first kid in the history of the world to imagine such a thing. Just a few summers before, Davey Stevenson had jumped off a two-storey house under construction a street away.

“What on earth could that boy have been thinking?” my mother said, clucking and shaking her head.

“He was trying to see if he could fly,” I wanted to say but didn’t, knowing this was something most adults would not understand. Even one like my mother, who had a pretty lively imagination of her own. After all, it’s not everyone who could come up with the name Cinnamon for a child or invent names like Mango Butter, Raspberry Riot, Grape Expectations or Paradise Pink.

“Lucky all he got was a broken arm,” added Corporal Ray. “He could have gotten a concussion or worse.”

Concussion. One of those words that set the bells chiming in my head. All those s’s shushing together in the middle like that. It was a
c
word, too, something I was collecting at the time.

“What exactly is a concussion, Dad?”

“A crack in the skull,” he replied. To demonstrate, he fell to the floor, threw back his head, stuck out his tongue and started to gag. It wasn’t funny, maybe, but we all laughed.

So anyhow, yes, I admit it, strange as it might sound. I spent most of the week jumping from the roof—flying! That’s when I wasn’t tobogganing. It was the tobogganing that caused the trouble.

The hill out back of our house was perfect—not too long a walk up and not too steep a ride down, smooth and long. You could pick up a bit of speed,
too, if you happened to be brave enough to go over the ramp we made.

For Christmas I’d gotten a new toboggan. It was a two-seater wooden one from Canadian Tire—the exact one I asked for. And could it race down that hill!

Most days we took turns, lining up patiently until it was our time to slide down. Up and down all day on that hill we zoomed and slid, until finally the sun started to dip behind the houses on the next street and blue shadows filled the yard. Only then did we realize it was close to supper and we’d all turned into human icicles and thoughts of steaming mugs of hot chocolate made us head for the warmth of our houses.