Abandon - Meg Cabot [75]
The cemetery sexton was shaking his head. “But —”
“What is wrong with you?” I burst out. “Can you not hear that thunder out there? That’s all totally him!”
He broke off and stared at me. “He certainly cannot control the weather.”
“All right,” I said. This guy lived in a fantasy world. “Fine. He can’t. How long has he been here? Was he around during that big hurricane you mentioned, the one where this necklace disappeared?”
The cemetery sexton’s eyes widened. “He’s a death deity, Miss Oliviera, not a murderer or a weatherman. You of all people should know that.”
I didn’t think this guy really knew John very well at all, but I didn’t say anything to correct him.
“But from what I understand,” he went on, “yes, the Great Hurricane of 1846 is when John originally appeared on this island…or at least when sightings of him first started being recorded.” I must have looked surprised, for he said, “Oh, yes. Other people have seen him, too, not just us cemetery sextons…although most sightings have occurred around here. Why do you think we’ve never had to bother investing in security cameras? Because everyone on Isla Huesos knows to stay away from here after dark, as no one wants to run the risk of encountering him.” His expression darkened. “Well, with the exception, of course, of teenagers who haven’t learned their lesson yet, especially during the days leading up to Coffin Night —”
I shook my head. “What is that? Does that have something to do with John, too?”
“Of course it does,” he said. By now the room had gotten so dark that I could barely see the sexton’s face in the shadows. Outside, the wind had calmed. It seemed deadly still, the kind of still it only gets just before it starts to pour. “Except it all happened so long ago, no one remembers the story or, at least, remembers it correctly. They just remember that it’s important to build a coffin, and then hide it.…Of course the hiding is symbolic. The hiding represents burying.”
“But why?” I asked. “It makes no sense.”
“It does, actually,” he said. “Because no life — if it was led by a decent person — should go unremembered. So if, for instance, a soldier was betrayed by people he thought were friends, his body tossed from a ship and abandoned to the waves, his family left to wonder forever what had happened to him, never knowing if he was alive, if he was well…That is a certain kind of hell all its own.”
I blinked at him, my mind going back, for some reason, to those moments at the bottom of the pool in our backyard in Connecticut, when I had lain there looking up at the tassels on my scarf. Abandoned. That’s sort of how I’d felt. Even though, of course, no one had betrayed or murdered me, really. My death had been no one’s fault but my own.
“Is that what happened to him?” I asked, a sudden throb in my voice. Even though of course I didn’t care about John, I didn’t like to think of that having happened to him. It must have been scary, being tossed around on all those ocean waves. It had been nice under the water of my pool. At least my mom had known where to find me.
Do you think I like this any more than you do? John had asked me that day in his room, his voice raw. Don’t you think I’d like to see my mother?
I think my heart broke a little bit more right there, in the cemetery sexton’s office.
I hadn’t known. I hadn’t had any idea what John was talking about.
I did now.
The cemetery sexton leaned back in his chair suddenly, causing it to creak noisily. The moment — whatever it had been — was broken. He wasn’t going to tell me more about John’s death, if that’s even what he’d been talking about.
“Like anything,” he said, all business again, “the tale’s gotten twisted. And perhaps, in this case, that’s a good thing. Because sometimes when people know the real story, they can’t take it. It’s too frightening. And so it turns into something like Coffin Night and has more to do with football and setting things on fire than it does with honoring the dead.