amused by it and teasing me about it when we both returned home.
Toward midnight, one of the girls said, “Man, it’s almost twelve. I got to go; my parents will be home soon and get all over me if I come in later than them.”
The other girl said, “Yeah, me, too.” Both girls stood up and stretched and brushed off the backs of their skirts, their bracelets jingling. I heard the cork squeaking back into the mouth of the wine bottle. The girls walked back down thehill, past my family, still talking, but more quietly. They passed under the light of a streetlamp and into shadow and were gone.
T HE CARETAKER OF THE Enon cemetery was named Aloysius Shank. He talked through a voice box wrapped around his neck with a cord. There was a hole in his throat, from an operation for cancer. He smoked a pipe, though, and told me once about having smoked four packs of cigarettes a day for fifty years, since he’d been eight years old.
He bubbled away at his pipe and said, “But I quit to smoking when I got that cancer.”
Although I’d hardly ever spoken with Aloysius before Kate died, I’d known about him since I could remember. He had always simply been the man at the cemetery. I remember asking my mother once, when I was a kid and had already seen him countless times, for years, as we passed the graveyard in our car, “Mom, who’s that guy who’s always in the graveyard?”
She answered, “That’s Aloysius Shank.” She chanted,
“God help Aloysius Shank! His shack is cold and dank! He pays no rent, his head got dent, and one of his legs is a plank!”
That was a rhyme she had learned as a kid during recess at the Bessie Boston Elementary School, the same school I went to, was probably going to, in fact, when I asked her about Aloysius, sitting on the massive, maroon vinyl back bench of the woodpaneled station wagon my grandfather, her dad, had given us—as he would continue to do with all his station wagons until he died, and the last of which was still sitting in mydriveway, and still worked, fifteen years after his death, ten after my mother’s, and two weeks after Kate’s—no seat belt on, windows open, wind roaring, sun pouring in, on our way to poke around the Woolworth’s five-and-dime store—she the clothes and knickknacks, me the records in the store’s tiny music section—and after go to the drugstore lunch counter, where she’d get coffee and a blueberry muffin and I’d get a chocolate honey-dipped doughnut and a chocolate milk in a paper carton. When I asked her who’d made the rhyme up, she said that she had no idea, that everyone just seemed to know it.
It was true that Aloysius had a prosthetic leg. The original had been wooden, but it was plastic by the time I knew him, paid for collectively by the members of the Enon Fire Department, who all chipped in for it because he had been a mascot or honorable member for as long as he’d been the caretaker at the graveyard. (All the members of the Enon Fire Department were buried in the same section of the cemetery, of which Aloysius always took special care. There was a brigade of two dozen souls in the section, reaching back to the first official members of the department when it had been established, in 1821, with the purchase, by subscription, of six ladders and three hooks, according to the local histories.) He told me that he’d lost the leg when a Japanese kamikaze plane had struck the deck of the transport ship he’d been an ensign on in the Pacific during World War II. His left leg had been torn off at the knee by a chunk of white-hot shrapnel.
“Lucky it was heated,” he said, pursing on his pipe. “Cauterized the wound before I even hit the water.” (He’d beenthrown overboard by the blast.) “Would have bled out right there and been fish food otherwise.”
It was also true that Aloysius had a dent in his head. “Crease” is a more accurate description. A shard from the same exploding plane had propellered its way into his
Toward midnight, one of the girls said, “Man, it’s almost twelve. I got to go; my parents will be home soon and get all over me if I come in later than them.”
The other girl said, “Yeah, me, too.” Both girls stood up and stretched and brushed off the backs of their skirts, their bracelets jingling. I heard the cork squeaking back into the mouth of the wine bottle. The girls walked back down thehill, past my family, still talking, but more quietly. They passed under the light of a streetlamp and into shadow and were gone.
T HE CARETAKER OF THE Enon cemetery was named Aloysius Shank. He talked through a voice box wrapped around his neck with a cord. There was a hole in his throat, from an operation for cancer. He smoked a pipe, though, and told me once about having smoked four packs of cigarettes a day for fifty years, since he’d been eight years old.
He bubbled away at his pipe and said, “But I quit to smoking when I got that cancer.”
Although I’d hardly ever spoken with Aloysius before Kate died, I’d known about him since I could remember. He had always simply been the man at the cemetery. I remember asking my mother once, when I was a kid and had already seen him countless times, for years, as we passed the graveyard in our car, “Mom, who’s that guy who’s always in the graveyard?”
She answered, “That’s Aloysius Shank.” She chanted,
“God help Aloysius Shank! His shack is cold and dank! He pays no rent, his head got dent, and one of his legs is a plank!”
That was a rhyme she had learned as a kid during recess at the Bessie Boston Elementary School, the same school I went to, was probably going to, in fact, when I asked her about Aloysius, sitting on the massive, maroon vinyl back bench of the woodpaneled station wagon my grandfather, her dad, had given us—as he would continue to do with all his station wagons until he died, and the last of which was still sitting in mydriveway, and still worked, fifteen years after his death, ten after my mother’s, and two weeks after Kate’s—no seat belt on, windows open, wind roaring, sun pouring in, on our way to poke around the Woolworth’s five-and-dime store—she the clothes and knickknacks, me the records in the store’s tiny music section—and after go to the drugstore lunch counter, where she’d get coffee and a blueberry muffin and I’d get a chocolate honey-dipped doughnut and a chocolate milk in a paper carton. When I asked her who’d made the rhyme up, she said that she had no idea, that everyone just seemed to know it.
It was true that Aloysius had a prosthetic leg. The original had been wooden, but it was plastic by the time I knew him, paid for collectively by the members of the Enon Fire Department, who all chipped in for it because he had been a mascot or honorable member for as long as he’d been the caretaker at the graveyard. (All the members of the Enon Fire Department were buried in the same section of the cemetery, of which Aloysius always took special care. There was a brigade of two dozen souls in the section, reaching back to the first official members of the department when it had been established, in 1821, with the purchase, by subscription, of six ladders and three hooks, according to the local histories.) He told me that he’d lost the leg when a Japanese kamikaze plane had struck the deck of the transport ship he’d been an ensign on in the Pacific during World War II. His left leg had been torn off at the knee by a chunk of white-hot shrapnel.
“Lucky it was heated,” he said, pursing on his pipe. “Cauterized the wound before I even hit the water.” (He’d beenthrown overboard by the blast.) “Would have bled out right there and been fish food otherwise.”
It was also true that Aloysius had a dent in his head. “Crease” is a more accurate description. A shard from the same exploding plane had propellered its way into his
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