Erin Butler
Big Death
I only noticed it superficially at first, more in my peripheral vision than head-on. But once I got my boxes unpacked and bookshelves arranged and wandering mail forwarded, it dawned on me that the number of cemeteries in town was, frankly, abnormal. There were more cemeteries, in fact, than bars, which suggested to me that the people who lived here—the ones I hadn’t met, the ones I could scarcely even find (apart from the teens) because of their perplexing insistence on staying indoors and alone—preferred to die recreationally than to drink. In Boston, we met in bars. Loitering in cemeteries had been forbidden by tin signs and, presumably, the police.
Cemeteries had always fascinated me in the way only silent things can. They don’t demand notice outright, but God help the person who tries to avoid them. God help the person who finds themselves near one and speaking too loudly. Not that you could end up in a cemetery accidentally, the way they advertise themselves with hundreds of stony billboards.
There were six of them that I passed whenever I drove to my shift at the library. Every time, I crossed myself.
The first time I drove out to this part of the state, my father in the passenger seat, he told me a joke after we had passed three. “How many people d’you think are dead in that graveyard?”
“I don’t know, how many?” I said.
“All of them.”
The gravestones got older the closer you got to the library. The town had evidently started out burying folks centrally, and then, as generation after generation insisted on dying—each person doing it alone, and each with their own valiant but senseless fight—they had expanded outward. As I drove home from work, I’d watch the headstones get progressively newer, separated occasionally by roads and auto shops, until they stopped abruptly and my apartment building appeared. Then, I’d walk in and get my mail, and rarely would I see any of the other tenants before I’d shut and bolt my door for the night, unsure where I could go to meet other people. My internet searches on the topic all turned up dead leads.
In the mornings, I walked my dog, Amy, in the cemetery closest to our building. The headstones were all clean and polished, and many still had fresh flowers leaning up against them. The years, recent enough to be startling, were engraved on the stones in fashionable fonts. Papyrus: Gussie Levoy, Wife & Mother, 1939-2017. Baskerville Old Face: Linus Billings, Gone But Not Forgotten, 1975-2019. Some stones, having been carved in advance (and at the owner’s own morbid instruction), left the year of death off to be filled in when it became relevant. There were plots in the ground beneath them, each one empty and unseen, and there was wood out there somewhere that would be hammered and coaxed into the shape of the future deceased’s casket. I got in the habit of hurrying past the preset graves.
I never got the impression that Amy was aware of the bones shut up in boxes beneath her. She preferred the living things in the cemetery. She chased the butterflies and barked at the squirrels. Walking her there made me feel like I was walking her through a museum. But there was limited space in town where I could let her run more or less freely.
I was there with her early one morning when I saw a stranger who seemed realistically approachable—the first one I’d seen in town. It was like spotting a deer in the wild after having hunted fruitlessly for days. He was a tall man, gentlemanly, and skinny in the way that only the lanky and friendless can be. He sat cross-legged in front of a headstone that was so freshly lacquered that the sun glinted off it in a way that threatened real danger to the eyes.
“Morning,” I said as Amy nudged her way toward him. Though I was a people person, I was a shy one; but Amy was eagerly a people dog.
“Good morning,” the man said, whipping his head around toward me and grinning broadly in a way that made his upper lip stick to his teeth.
“Judgment call. I like it,” I told him. Amy sniffed at the cuff of his pants, sure that she wanted to be noticed while not yet sure whether the man could be trusted. He turned his grin on Amy and tried to muss the fur on her head the way you’d muss a child’s hair, undeterred by her short coat. She panted in big soprano huffs and wagged her tail expectantly. I pulled back on her leash just a little.
“Were you close to her?” I asked, nodding my head toward the stone, Engravers MT: Catherine Leahy, 1932-2017.
“Oh, not really,” he said, standing and wiping the dirt from his seat. “She was my aunt. Mother’s sister.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Not at all. Thank you. Maybe it’s rude to say so, but I was never especially sad about it. It’s just relaxing to be here.”
“With her?”
He nodded.
“That’s nice of you.”
“I don’t know that ‘nice’ is the word for it. It felt like a duty at first—my mother’s in a home. But that was just the first time. Now, though—” and here he paused, and the look that passed over his face was one of true puzzlement. “It’s still a duty, in a sense. Just not toward her.”
“I don’t think I follow,” I said.
“Well, there are certain things a cemetery is very well-suited for. Right?”
“I guess it’s good to have a place for the dead. Noble. For me, it’s a good place to walk my dog.”
“Uniquely suited, isn’t it!” the man cried.
I stood there, utterly at a loss. Even Amy seemed confused, sitting quietly as she was at my feet.
“I’m running for the town council,” he said suddenly, leaning in conspiratorially. “And I’m hoping to make something of this little feeling we share. I hope you won’t forget.”
“What?” I was asking him, but he was petting Amy—this time, two staccato pats on her head with a flat palm—and turning to go.
“It was a pleasure running into someone here,” he called over his shoulder, “particularly you.” I couldn’t tell if he meant Amy or me. Amy strained briefly against her leash toward his heels, but he was soon out of reach, and neither of us watched to see where he went. There were plenty of dead folks left to visit, and plenty of living things to chase.
~
Genevieve Loughton was in front of my desk in the teen room the next morning moments after the library opened. She had to have been waiting outside for my boss to unlock the door. I didn’t want to ask for how long.
I liked Genevieve. She was the sort of library teen I wanted to have sculpted myself. I often wished that she had come to me as a surly pre-teen, drawn hypnotically but with some resistance to the idea of endless free books, and that I had opened her eyes to the transforming world of the library. But she had opened her own eyes before I even got the job of teen librarian. And she was a vicious stickler about the proper arrangement of all those i’s and e’s in her name. She couldn’t have been older than fourteen.
“I’m starting a book club,” she announced when I looked up from my computer, which was still booting up.
“That’s a great idea. I’m sure lots of teens would love a book club,” I said.
“Right. Which is why I need your help. I need you to get the word out, and then make sure we get enough copies of the book.” She kept nodding her head, and whenever she did, her pigtail braids bounced a little.
“Good thing I don’t have anything else on my plate,” I said, and I glanced back down at my computer to enter my password. Genevieve just tapped her foot and waited. “What book are you starting with?” I continued.
Genevieve sighed, rubbed the bridge of her nose beneath her glasses, and said, “I don’t know yet. We’ll vote on it. We’re a democracy.”
I wasn’t certain you could have a democracy when there was only one person in your club so far, but I told her, “Alright. I’ll post some flyers, and we’ll schedule a meeting to—”
“We?” she cut me off. “It’s a teen book club. For teens. We’ll do that ourselves.” Then her face brightened considerably, and she called out a “Thank you!” as she skipped off.
I watched her braids bounce behind her as she left. She passed by the display of new books, most of which I had not read yet, thanks to the hectic process of moving to town. Still, I could tell that this was a good season for YA. Nobody tells you this, but most of the time, you really can judge a book by its cover. The artists had really gone all in on the new covers—there was an intricacy to them that I hadn’t seen in ages—and most of them were doing their own thing instead of replicating the same design over and over. This boded well for the contents. Genevieve and her teens, if she rounded up any, would have a good selection to choose from. I thought I’d pick one up to bring home with me for the night.
~
I was surprised and a little spooked when the doorbell rang that evening. It hadn’t rung since I’d moved in, and the sound it made, like coughing wind chimes, was unpleasant. I was even more surprised to find that the person outside my door was the man I’d met at the cemetery.
“Well, hello!” he cried. “Who knew you lived here?”
I did, I thought.
“Hi there.”
“I don’t think I ever properly introduced myself. William Storelli,” he said, flashing his politician’s grin and extending a hand that looked too big for his arm.
“I wasn’t expecting anyone. Why are you—what brings you here?”
“Canvassing,” he said brightly. “I’m visiting everyone on the block today.” I raised an eyebrow. “For the town council seat, you recall,” he explained. “I can count on your vote, can’t I?”
“I don’t think I’m even registered here yet.”
“Don’t worry about that. We’ll take care of it like this.” He snapped his fingers. “I’m sure you’ll want to see us go full speed ahead on what we talked about yesterday.”
I blinked. Misreading me, he winked, then straightened up. I hadn’t realized how close he had gotten as he gradually leaned in toward me.
“Our little secret,” he said, and he winked again.
“Good luck,” I said, shutting the door. In spite of myself, I almost wished I hadn’t sent him away so quickly. I sat down at the kitchen table and stirred at the filmy microwaved sauce on my dinner . After I forced myself to swallow down the majority, I spent the evening with the YA book I’d brought home from the library and embarrassed myself with the empathy I felt for the teen protagonist.
A few weeks later, when the election came around, I didn’t vote, despite the fact that the polls were open in the library basement. But, not having an opponent, William Storelli won.
~
With a speed I could not fathom, with an inexplicably complete absence of red tape, construction started in the cemetery just days after the solemn swearing-in of the new town councilors. As a government employee and an adult female desperate for company other than bookish teenagers, I had gone to the swearing-in and watched as the councilors made oaths with one hand on the Bible, the other on the town by-laws, laying each hand flat on the books as if the mayor were giving them manicures. William Storelli saw me in the audience and given me that big grin of his.
He was there when they broke ground at the cemetery, arms folded and mouth downturned in a grimace of concentration. I was there, too, with Amy, who strained at her leash. I asked William if it counted as breaking ground when surely they had broken ground there several times already, it being a cemetery.
“You’re a funny one. This is a whole new level of ground-breaking,” he said, the grimace dissolving in favor of his usual grin. It hadn’t looked artificial until I saw how naturally distaste suited him. “People in this town have been waiting years for this sort of thing.”
“What exactly is it you’re doing?” I asked, pulling back on Amy’s leash as she leapt toward one of the burlier construction workers.
“It’s very exciting. We’re building a memorial kiosk at each grave. Mourners will be able to leave flowers, personalized voice memos, anything they’d like for the dead. And it’ll all be much neater.”
“Wow. Every grave? That sounds expensive.”
“People will love it. Can you imagine? They’ll fight to get a plot here. And it won’t be that expensive in the long run, with everything else,” he said, shifting his gaze to the flurry of workers.
“What?”
“Your dog looks hungry,” he said, abruptly snapping his head back toward me and then turning on his heel. I didn’t have the energy even to take the breath it would require to stop him. I’d spent all morning reshelving the mysteries someone had flung from the stacks in bunches during my coffee break. So Amy and I watched some construction workers build kiosks.
~
“Do you have Romeo and Juliet on the shelf?” Genevieve asked before I could open my mouth to ask how I could help her.
“Good morning, Genevieve.”
“Hi. Do you have Romeo and Juliet on the shelf?”
Spotting the familiar spine from the Classics shelf without even standing up, I nodded yes, we did.
“Great. What about 13 Reasons Why?”
“Plenty of copies,” I said. Carnage from a recent TV show craze. “Are those your book club options?”
“Great. What about The Virgin Suicides?”
“Genevieve,” I said, “what kind of book club are you running?”
“Nobody signed up for the book club,” Genevieve said hotly. “This is for a project.”
“Okay, then what kind of project requires a pile of suicide books?”
“I thought librarians weren’t supposed to ask questions like that.” She crossed her arms.
“They can if it helps them serve the patron,” I shot back with my semiautomatic library degree.
“Do you need to know what my project is to type in a title in the catalog?”
I blinked because she wasn’t wrong, typed in the title, and sent her on her way with a little list of call numbers. She kept her head held high as she sauntered through the stacks.
~
I came back to the cemetery with Amy a few days later, astonished to see that the kiosks had all been built. They were tiny wooden stalls, made from the same kind of splintery wood as the now-outlawed playgrounds I’d grown up on. And they were working. People had begun to tack things up on the kiosk walls—photos, notes, the occasional annotated obituary. Flowers and teddy bears and candles sprinkled the shelves, and even as I walked among the headstones, I passed a smattering of people who carried more goods to deliver to the dead. Occasionally, my movement seemed to trigger a song or voice memo to start playing from a hidden kiosk speaker. Up until then, I had never seen anyone, besides William and those persistent butterflies and squirrels, alive in that cemetery. There was another new kiosk, larger than the rest, situated at the entrance near the road, and it was piled with kiosk goods for sale. The woman standing beside it, all dressed up in an apron and baseball cap like she was selling hot dogs at the World Series, smiled at me as Amy and I passed by.
I took a seat on the exposed roots of an ancient tree that shaded a good swath of graves. Amy was immensely pleased, and she amused herself by watching a fresh batch of humans scurry about. As I scratched behind her ears, I tried to think of an appropriate way to introduce myself to strangers who were in the midst of mourning and decorating their loved ones. There didn’t seem to be any polite option. I would have had an easier job if I’d been able to find people anyplace else.
As I sat there, trying to avert my eyes from anything too dead and wishing distantly, horrifically that I had my own dead loved one to visit here, I spotted a pop-up sign sticking out of the grass: “NEW: Cemetery tours, daily at 4pm.” It was illustrated with a looming tree that unfurled spidery limbs and rivaled the tree under which I sat. Bingo.
I approached two women who stood together in front of a shiny headstone, alternately chitchatting and sniffling. There was a large photograph of an old man, printed on what looked like a lacquered woodblock, sitting prominently on the kiosk shelf and adorned with a spray of flowers.
“Hello,” I said, hating myself a little for the undue emphasis I placed on the lo, “do you ladies know where the tour starts?”
“Yes, yes, it’s just over by the gates,” one of the women said.
“Great, thanks. Will you two be going?” At this point, chasing down some old women for friendship was better than nothing. The one who had spoken turned to her companion, who began to fish in her purse. At last, she pulled out a green punch card. It had three tiny circles clipped in a row from the bottom.
“I suppose we ought to,” the woman said. “I’d like to fill up this card.”
“A punch card? What’s it for?”
“Didn’t you get one? It’s their new promotion. The first ones to fill up the card get their names inscribed on the memorial bricks.”
“And a free mug,” the first woman added. “I’d like to plant flowers in mine to leave for Ronald.”
“You don’t worry that people might mistake you for dead like that?”
“Of course not!” the punch card lady said. “This place is quite alive.”
“Quite,” her companion emphasized.
“I guess so. I’ve never seen so many people here,” I said.
“Well, Ronald has been here for quite a while, anyway,” the punch card lady said, nodding her head toward the gravestone, which sent the other lady hooting. “And we’ve missed him, haven’t we?”
“We’ll come to see him more often now, won’t we?” her companion said, nodding.
“I’ll see you on the tour, then,” I said, and I walked back toward my tree, balancing too far forward on the balls of my feet. Amy looked back once and gave the women a wistful whine, then followed me. We didn’t go on the tour.
The walk home, I tugged absently at Amy’s leash and looked at nothing in particular, my mind lost, as it were, in thought. And suddenly she was pulling on me instead, howling at something she saw and straining against the leash into the street. It was a squirrel, plump and freshly dead against the double yellow lines. Nothing had come by yet to flatten it. Why, I wondered, did dead things in the road always look so exhausted? Why was it that after having taken that final, fatal risk, their mouths went slack with that shocked look of having given it all, just to end up like this? And why didn’t their faces change when, finally, they split open and spilled themselves out? A car would come by and crush him eventually, and then another, and on and on through the weeks, until no one would be able to distinguish what was his body and what was the road.
~
The first suicide was a twenty-something, a white woman. She’d had long chestnut hair with chunky blonde highlights, and the note she left had a headstone design in the postscript. I couldn’t get over the idea of a postscript in a suicide note, the finality of it, the messiness in its sense of addendum. I didn’t try to get over the idea of her design.
The headstone she envisioned for herself had a top eight friends list, archaically Myspace-style, nestled in the bottom corner, complete with spaces for photos, mostly her mom and her boyfriend and a few friends. Above that was a sketch she had wanted to get as a tattoo, but had foregone with the assurance that a headstone would be even more permanent.
Her friends—her Maids of Mourning, as they called themselves in the newspaper article I read about the affair—threw a spectacular wake and drew up seating charts for the funeral. They had to give out tickets and appointment times for visiting her grave those first few days after the burial. By the time the visits began to slow down, two more suicides hit the papers, along with ads for a freelance kiosk designer and a cruise sweepstakes exclusively for new grave plot buyers.
I’d stopped going to the cemetery by then. I was looking for another place to walk Amy, who remained just about my only friend in town. Even the library teenagers had slowed their visits to a trickle, preferring instead to bring their paperbacks to the graveyard and read them under the ancient oak trees by the light of the kiosk candles. So Amy and I walked along the breakdown lane. Whenever I told her, “Good girl,” or when I waved on a car telling them to go ahead, I was startled by the novelty of my voice.
~
I didn’t expect to see William Storelli again. I didn’t expect to see much of anyone in that town. I had tabs open on my computer for every teen librarian job in the tri-state area. I did see the townspeople, of course—hoards of them—every time I drove past the cemetery, where they flocked. The signs advertising it and its new features were all over the place. Customizable tombstone designs. Destination funerals. Highlight reels that played on loop at the kiosks of the deceased—people had started wearing GoPros around so they could edit their own footage before their time came.
But I did see William Storelli again, and outside the cemetery. He rang my doorbell one night when I had just pulled my frozen pizza out of the oven, and I thought of all the times I would have preferred company when my dinner wasn’t getting cold.
“Good evening!” he said when I opened the door, like he knew me. I told him hello and invited him in, cursing my automatic manners the moment he crossed the threshold. “So, what do you think?” he said.
“What do I think about what?”
“The cemetery. Everything I’ve done there. Aren’t you pleased?”
“Why would I be pleased?” I said, my mask slipping quickly.
“It’s been very successful. We’ve had more foot traffic than ever.”
“So what? Why is that something you even care about?”
“I thought you’d be happy,” he scoffed. “Did you know you’re the first person I saw there just hanging around like that? Enjoying the scenery?”
“I was walking my dog. It’s grass.”
“It’s a real community atmosphere,” he continued. “Great for the town. I think it’s finally the hub we’ve been after.”
I scratched my arm and blinked too many times. “Nobody talks to anybody else who’s alive,” I said finally.
“Well, that’s just the thing,” William said. “I think that’s the next thing,
what’ll really push us over the edge.”
“What is?”
“Holograms. Actual holograms of the dead. And we’ll get voiceovers and program the holograms and let people actually talk to the folks they’ve lost.” His eyes were shining and he was speaking too fast, as if he were describing the plot of his favorite comic book.
I looked at him and tried to imagine it, I really did. I could be so good at giving someone the benefit of the doubt.
Just then, there was a knock on the outside door of the apartment building.
“Hello? Is there anyone in there?” a voice called out. Half a second later, the knocking turned to pounding. I sighed and brushed past William.
“The door isn’t lo—” I began as I pulled the door open, but then I looked down to find Genevieve Loughton on the stoop. “You know where I live?”
“Are you aware that public employees have their addresses listed in a locally available directory?” Genevieve asked, and we both knew it wasn’t a question. “Anyway, I need your help.”
“Genevieve, I’m not on the clock.”
“Regardless. This is important.”
She dropped the duffel bag she was carrying, and it fell with a loud clunk on the stoop. With movements quicker than I would’ve thought her capable of, she reached down and plucked something from the bag, and suddenly, she was wielding a knife as long as her forearm in one hand and industrial-size stapler in the other.
“Which one of these says, ‘Bet now you regret not joining my book club’?” she asked.
I lunged forward and plucked the weapons from her hands.
“Stop it right now. You’re not doing any of that to yourself.”
Genevieve’s eyes shone with defiance as she prepared to deliver her rebuttal, but for once, I was too quick for her.
“You do that, and you’ll be following the same trend as everyone else. You’ll be just like them. Is that how you want to get your attention?”
Genevieve exhaled slowly as she considered me. She’d taken in so much breath to try to cut me down, but I knew I’d gotten her. If nothing else, I was uniquely qualified to talk down a kid like Genevieve.
Her eyes got cloudy, but she nodded and turned to leave. “See you tomorrow morning,” she called over her shoulder.
“It’s a school day,” I said, but she just shrugged.
When I turned to go back to into my apartment, William was still there, watching me. His pasted-on grin was gone, and in its place was the scowl that suited him so much more neatly.
He stepped forward and tapped a bony finger against his chin before finally shaking his head.
“You could have been so well-suited to this,” he said, and he didn’t look back as he left the building.
Back in my apartment, my pizza was cold enough that the cheese had started to congeal. Amy was a good dog, though, and she sat beside the oven, wagging her tail, not even thinking about jumping up on the counter and taking a bite.
Erin Butler is a writer and teacher currently living in Western Massachusetts and holds an MFA from the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
