Ghosts in the Graveyard

Bats in the Belfry 

As a child, my sister and I were carted away each summer to spend a week with our grandparents. My grandmother, a frail and forgetful woman, wasn’t much of a source of entertainment since she sat in her Archie Bunker chair all day reading or praying or asking my grandfather what time it was. My grandfather, though a jolly old fellow, was missing his knee caps and couldn’t physically keep up with us. We were left to our own imagination and their basement full of crap.

Rows and rows of decorative whiskey bottles lined the walls of the front part of the basement. We were taught at an early age not to touch them since all of their value was in the thin paper strips covering the caps. Often, temptation called and I felt the overwhelming urge to swipe my jagged thumbnail through one of the strips rendering the bottle shaped like a telephone with a curly cord worthless. Gently setting the bottles down so the clink and clunk of ceramic and glass couldn’t be heard by my grandfather upstairs, my sister and I quickly moved to the decorative styrofoam mace, wooden shield, and cast iron sword hanging on the wall.

My sister, who is thirteen months older,claimed the shield and sword. I always got the mace. She lunged, sword in hand, and I ran swirling the mace around my head. We jumped on the musty couches fighting, defending, playing, until my mace detached itself from the painted dowel that acted as the handle and went crashing into the wall.

“What was that noise?” my grandfather shouted from the top of the stairs. “You’d better not be into my bottles. Go play outside!”

Guiltily, we reattached the mace head to the stick, hung our weapons back on the wall, and went outside. We were old enough to wander outside the yard so we decided to take a walk up the road.

The end of the road lead to rolling green hills that, though we were in our early teens, we decided to roll down. Racing each other to the top and ready to dive down the lush grass, we came to an abrupt halt. There, at the bottom of the hill, were rows of graves. Our playful mood soon turned somber and we slowly walked down the hill wanting to pay our immature respects to people we never knew.

We walked row after row saying, “May you rest in peace,” to each headstone we passed pausing longer at the graves that had pictures attached to the headstones. From time to time, we passed living people who were there to visit the dead. The living clutched hands full of fake flowers to deposit into the cement flower pots beside most of the graves.

We watched the visitors for a while seated on a cement bench crafted to look as though it were made from logs. An elderly man with fresh flowers passed us and smiled kindly down on us. We smiled back. He walked a few steps further, stopped, and walked back to us.

“You know you’re sitting on someone, don’t you?” he said.

We quickly stood up not wanting to disrespect the dead. We looked more carefully at the bench, and sure enough, on the lip of the bench seat was someone’s name, birth date, and death date. They were also a loving mother and wife.

We apologized to the man and we apologized to the bench. We left the cemetery in a hurry, too embarrassed to pay our respects to the rows we hadn’t yet walked down. We walked back to our grandparent’s house in silence.

We sullenly went down into the basement when we got back, leaving the front part with all of the bottle and weapon lures alone. We walked into the chilly, musty back part of the basement filled with years of unknown memories. We opened boxes to find spiderwebs mingled with our dad and uncles’ numerous basketball trophies. We found decrepit, crumbling newspapers. Then we, as young fashionable ladies, hit the mother load. We found a box filled with clothes from decades past.

Soon piles of holey bell-bottoms, thread bare work shirts, and mismatched shoes surrounded us as we sifted through the box. My sister pulled out a black dress from the 40's and called dibs. She pulled her shorts and shirt off and slipped into the cocktail dress. She twirled, the skirt floating out like a bell, rubbing it in my face that it looked like I would be stuck with old Navy dungarees. I shoved clothes aside. I pawed through the box with determination until I came across a cream-colored flapper dress that had its fair share of water stains.

I turned my back to my sister and slipped out of my summer clothes. I stepped into the dress and slid my arms into the 3/4 length sleeves. Without being asked, my sister started buttoning up the long row of buttons that I couldn’t reach. When she was finished, I turned for her approval.

“Oh! It fits you like it was made for you,” she said.

We pranced around in our new old finery until we were called up for lunch. We carefully stashed the clothes back leaving our finds at the top of the box.

After we were finished eating, my sister pulled me into the kitchen.

“Let’s play ghosts,” she said.

“Um, I don’t know.” I was the perennial wimp.

“No, let’s be ghosts at the graveyard tomorrow. We can wear those dresses we found and make people think that we’ve risen from the dead and are looking for prom dates.”

We sneaked a cup of flour from the tin and went back down to the basement where we quietly plotted for the rest of the afternoon.

The next morning, we hurriedly ate breakfast. We went down into the basement and slipped on our dresses, powdered our faces with the flour to hide our sun-kissed cheeks. Our death pallor wasn’t as convincing as we hoped but thought we could fake out the old people with the failing eyesight that were the most common visitors to the cemetery. Once we were outside, I dusted flour on my sister’s shoulders so she looked more decayed than her fourteen-year-old self. She liberally smacked flour down my back so I left a dusty trail when I walked. It worked for five or so steps until she had to slap more flour on my back.

We walked to the graveyard watching for cars not wanting to be seen until we made our big entrance. We looked down the hill into the graveyard, and not seeing anyone we went in. Walking up and down the rows of graves, we waited for other visitors. Every so often, my sister would slap another hand print of flour on me, each slap got harder as she either tried to get the flour to stay longer or she started hating me more.

Running out of flour and not seeing anyone else in the graveyard, we stopped for a rest on the grave-bench. My sister posed half-swoon style in the event some poor mourner should happen by. I sat with my knees tucked under my chin picking listlessly at my cuticles having lost interest in our spooking.

My sister’s posture changed ever so slightly. She gave me a swift elbow to the hip. I looked up. There, in the distance an old man was limping in our direction. I collapsed back onto the bench letting my limbs dangle loosely from the bench. I closed my eyes for better effect. I heard the step-scrape-step-scrape of the old gent lumbering our way. He was getting closer. My heart was beating faster. What I was supposed to do next was beyond me, my sister and I hadn’t come up with a plan further than flouring our faces and looking solemn and lost.

“You girls best get your tails in the car before I count to three,” the man said.

My eyes popped open. It was my grandfather.

“A neighbor called me. She told me what you two fools were up to. You’re ruining a respectable place by making a scene.”

My sister and I shot to the car faster than our knee cap-less grandfather could walk. We found a can of Brass-o on each of our seats. We were relegated to polishing the silver for the rest of the week.