Bellies filled with a lunch of steamed clams, vinegar-drowned french fries and Shipyard Ale, we push through the brambles and Indian paint brushes that crowd the narrow trail up to the graveyard. The air is sticky and heavy, has threatened rain all day, but so far the black clouds have stayed low and patient over Penobscot Bay. Becky was afraid our morning lighthouse tour around the bay would be canceled due to the impending storm, but I assured her, with my best old-salt imitation, that the weather would hold off until evening.
I’ve never been to this graveyard, lying on a stony ridge above Castine, but I’ve been to others like it. I know to expect the cracked limestone markers with their inscriptions long ago washed away by squalls and nor’easters, the graves settled into shallow bowls overrun by quack grass, the monuments leaning crazily on their crumbling footings. No one has been buried here for a hundred years; no one has visited for fifty. The oblivion that we try to stall with headstones and carnation wreaths has settled at last on this place, and it has an air of wistfulness rather than grief.
“That trail is steep,” Becky says as I pull her up the last few feet of loose gravel and scratchy nettle. Becky was born and raised in Chicago, where “steep” doesn’t occur naturally and is conquered by elevators when it happens downtown. Tomorrow we’ll drive west to Mount Washington, where I expect her to cling to her seatbelt and bury her face in my shoulder while I thread us up the narrow, wind-swept road to its peak.
The graveyard has an iron picket gate around it, now mostly rust and leaning away from the stones. Even when it was intact, it would have been more a conceptual than a physical barrier; it’s too low, the gaps between the pickets too wide, to keep anything out or in. A few rusted links of chain hang on the gate, but they shake loose when I push and the hinges make a low, plaintive moan as it opens just enough for us to squeeze through.
“You know why they put fences around graveyards?” I ask as I guide Becky through the gate.
“No, why?”
“Because people are dying to get in.”
She punches my shoulder. “Very funny.”
The view from the ridge is fantastic. To the west, down the trail, is Castine, all clapboard houses and church spires, the thick crowds of summer tourists invisible from this height. East of us is Penobscot Bay, with yellow and red and blue lobster buoys bobbing in its black water. And far to the south is the Atlantic, curving with the bowl of the earth and churning under the low black clouds that are still far away. When I was little, I spent my summers with my mother’s family in Sedgwick, just a little north of here, and scenes like this where earth and air and water converge are stamped on my dreams.
But Becky has skipped the vista and gone straight to the gravestones. Once they were in tidy rows—the guidebook says this is a Quaker graveyard, denoting a plain and regular order even in death—but now they list and lean like the channel buoys at the mouth of the bay. Some have tumbled over and lie lost on the weeds; some cling to their dignity but stagger in spite of themselves, like a dour great-aunt who drank a little too much punch at a wedding party. Most are simple, tooth-shaped stones, rounded at the top, anonymous, but there are a few obelisks and spires, later additions, planted after the Quakers had lost “thee” and “thou” from their daily speech and were known more for their success in selling whale oil than for their quiet but intense faith.
“1836 … 1828 … 1793 …” Becky is calling out years as she moves toward the center of the graveyard, stooping to push the grass and wildflowers from the stones. I follow, moving a little closer with each step back in time, until we stand in front of Charity Hathaway, born 1687, died 1709, and I rest my hands on Becky’s hips.
“So young,” she sighs. I wrap my arms around her waist and smile into her hair. Since Becky turned thirty last month, she’s acquired an almost matronly tone; the high school girls at the mall are just children, and she chuckles knowingly at the youthful follies of her twenty-something single friends. But Becky herself, clear-eyed and slender and given to musical bursts of laughter, can still pass for twenty, and I find her lack of wisdom to be her most charming trait.
“She looks pretty good for … three hundred and eighteen,” I say.
Becky breaks loose from me and kneels by the next grave: Samuel Hathaway, born 1683, died 1708. She sighs and looks up at me.
“Her husband,” she says, brushing a strand of hair from her eyes.
“Or her brother.”
“No, her husband. I’m sure of it.”
“How can you be sure?”
“See how close together the graves are? Like they’re holding hands.”
I know Becky is trying for a romantic image, lovers embracing for all eternity, but all I can see are bones crumbling and brown after three centuries in the rocky dirt, jumbled together until which metatarsal belongs with what femur is a task even Jehosaphat couldn’t sort out on Judgment Day.
“He died at sea,” Becky says, “he was missing for weeks, and Charity came up to this ridge every day to watch for his sail on the horizon. When he finally washed up on a beach in Nantucket she fell ill, wouldn’t get out of bed for months even though all the handsome boys in town wanted to marry the pretty young widow, until on the anniversary of his death she slipped out of her house in a storm. They found her here, clutching his headstone, her eyes wide open and smiling as if she could see his sail at last.”
“He died of cholera,” I say, “or dysentery. She followed him six months later, from childbirth. Their fourth baby in as many years.”
”You can be such a jerk.” Becky stands and brushes the gravel off her bare knees.
“I guess I’m not very romantic.”
Which I’m not, at least not about the past. My mother grew up in a house that was built the year Samuel Hathaway died, and didn’t have indoor plumbing until she was eight. When it was sold in 1985, three years after my mother died, it was heated by a black Franklin stove in the kitchen. On cool mornings early or late in the summer I would burrow under the down-filled comforter and be thankful I didn’t have to spend the winter there. I teach early American history, and can rattle off the grim mortality statistics that filled graveyards like this. Flush toilets and central air are the pinnacle of human achievement.
Becky leans into me and nibbles my ear. “You’re romantic enough,” she whispers. “You brought me up here to see Charity and Samuel.”
“I brought you up here to get away from the crowds. And for the view. Which you haven’t even looked at.”
She puts her cheek next to mine so she can look over my shoulder. And suddenly she tightens her grip around my neck.
“The storm’s getting closer,” she says.
I turn. From the ridge I can’t see the rocky beach below us, but I can hear the waves breaking against it. The roiling black water is capped white now, and delicate threads of lightning weave through the clouds like flying eels sporting in the sky. I look west to the bay, and see the lobster trawlers making their way to shelter.
“We should probably go,” I say, thinking of the narrow trail ahead of us. It will turn to a swift and treacherous stream in a downpour.
“Not yet. This is just like the storm that took down Samuel’s ship.”
“Or the one that flooded the streets with raw sewage. Come on, I think I left the car windows open.”
But then her lips are on mine, and her tongue slips between my teeth at the first rumble of thunder over the Atlantic. Becky’s hands are on my back, at my waist, in my hair. There’s a desperate urgency in her kisses that trumps my own urgency to keep the rental car in Castine from flooding.
“He came to her in dreams,” she whispers between kisses, “that whole long year they were apart. He stood at her window when there were storms, he climbed into her bed when there were blizzards, he carried her up here the night she died and made love to her on his grave while lightning flashed all around them.”
“That’s a little creepy,” I say and steal a glance at the ocean. The wind is cool and wet, and I can no longer see the horizon beyond the black clouds.
“Is it?” Her hands are at my belt and with a quick tug my shorts are around my ankles. While the lightning flashes over my shoulder Becky slips an agile, nimble hand into my underwear and wraps her fingers around my cock.
She smiles at me with half-lidded eyes, then takes a deep breath as if she’s about to dive below those white-capped waves and disappears. The first gentle drops of rain hit my shoulder as she takes my cock into her mouth, letting her teeth scrape gently along the shaft before swirling her tongue around the head. I gasp and wrap my fingers with her thick brown hair, cut short for the summer.
Out of the corner of my eye I can see the lightning flash, and when I catch its blast I count until I hear the thunder. One … two … three … crash … one … two … three … crash … one … two … crash. Then there are too many flashes, too many crashes, to keep the count clear, and the rain is falling harder and her hand has joined her soft lips and I pull away, step back, surprised at the sudden cold wind on my cock.
“We should go,” I say. I can picture people in Castine rushing across the piers, sprinting from souvenir shops to their cars, or deciding to wait out the storm surrounded by driftwood and sea glass tchotchkes. “We can finish up in town…”
But she smiles up at me, letting her rain laden bangs hang in her eyes. Her shirt is drenched, and I can see her dark nipples pressing against the fabric until she pulls it over her head and tosses it onto Samuel’s headstone. She shivers when the rain hits her bare skin, but she keeps smiling and inches toward me on her knees.
“It was cold that last night he came to her.” She’s almost shouting to be heard over the wind. “But he lifted her from her bed and brought her here, up the narrow path, without her robe.”
Becky stops when she reaches me and tugs at the hem of my shirt. I pull it off and toss it toward hers but it falls short, landing in the mud. The rain is coming down hard enough to sting; maybe it’s sleet, or hail. I kneel down with her and she presses her breasts against me; they’re so warm I can see little wisps of steam between us when the rain evaporates against her skin.
“She felt more alive that night than she had since he died,” Becky whispers. My cock is in her hand again, and she squeezes the head before sliding her fingers along the shaft. “The storm clouds blocked the moon, but she glowed like an ember in the black night.”
Becky’s shorts are drenched and cling to her hips; I hear fabric tear when I pull at them, but I keep pulling anyway and she pushes against me and bites at my shoulder and then they’re free, her shorts are free and sailing toward Charity’s grave and my hands sink into her. Becky groans and pushes me over onto my back.
The stinging rain has been overtaken by a downpour; heavy sheets of water pour relentlessly onto us and churn the graveyard’s dirt into a soupy mud. Becky climbs across me and straddles my hips, my cock still in her hand. I think she’s talking, still telling the story of Charity and Samuel, but I can’t hear her over the wind and rain and thunder. She hovers above me and I try to thrust up, but in the mud I can find no purchase and only slide from side to side. But Becky is in control, and she settles herself onto me, settles me into her, and she finds a rhythm somewhere between the thunder and the rain.
The rain is almost horizontal now, the wind is so strong, but Becky sits up on top of me, a brave sail in the storm. My universe is narrowing: the rain blurs her summer-bronze flesh until she disappears into streaks against the black sky; the graveyard is swept out to sea, and when I close my eyes I see the tombstones bobbing like wreckage from Samuel’s ship. All that exists is my cock, pulsing with the lightning, and Becky’s desperate grip. I surrender to an oceanic orgasm, what I imagine must be a woman’s orgasm, where the boundaries of my self are blurred and fluid and I push off from the shattered mast I’ve been clinging to and let the waves roll over my head. I’ve heard that drowning can be pleasant, a warm embrace into a world of color and music, and so I must be drowning. On the wind I hear Charity Hathaway gasping against Samuel’s stone.
I float to the surface as gradually as I sank. Becky is lying on top of me, shivering, and when I touch her back I feel gooseflesh. The rain is still coming down, lighter now, and behind me I sense the clouds breaking apart as the tail of the storm drags over us. I try to let the warm glow of drowning pour out of me into Becky, but the glow is fading and the mud is cold on my legs.
Our clothes are ruined: Becky’s shorts are torn nearly in half, and my shirt is a knotted, mud-soaked rag. I manage to salvage my wallet from the puddles, but I only find one shoe. Becky, curled into a ball in my arms, starts to apologize; I silence her with a squeeze and a kiss.
Far out over the Atlantic, where the clouds are dissolving into blue, I can see the white sails of gulls’ wings. I help Becky to her feet, and we laugh at the gravelly mud that covers us.
“How are we going to get back to our car?” Becky asks.
“Quakers sometimes went into Puritan meetinghouses naked,” I say. “We can just tell the tourists we’re doing a reenactment.”
“That should go over well.”
“The Puritans didn’t like it much either.”
We lean together, cold and naked as if we’ve just been cast out of Eden, and make our way through the mud to the gate. The gate complains angrily when I push it open, as if to say it prefers its visitors to stay. And for a moment I think that I could stay, a guest of the Hathaways, a watcher of storms. But there’s a world before us, of flooded rental cars and warm beds in town, and so much time still before I need to join the Quaker bones.
The path to town, as I’d feared, is a slippery stream draining the graveyard’s puddles. I help Becky down on the flooded path, guiding her with a hand at her elbow and hip.