The Cleft and Other Odd Tales by Gahan Wilson

Author:Gahan Wilson [Wilson, Gahan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates
Published: 2014-05-05T22:00:00+00:00

The Marble Boy

It was like a huge hole cut into our ordinary world, a great, aching gap sawed right out of the middle of everything that made us and our world seem to make sense, a fatal hollow dug into the very center of the simple, optimistic philosophies our parents were trying to make us live by.

I did by no means realize at the time that I thought of it in those terms, but I know now that is what all of us, all the children, knew the Lakeside Cemetery to be. It wasn’t just a weird place isolated permanently from the day-to-day pretend reality of the grownups; it was an accessible and explorable proof to us, to their young, that even our adults—so huge and powerful, so full of rights and wrongs from the newspapers—were just as fragile and afraid as we were, after all.

The graveyard spread itself out northward from just this side of the city border for five blocks where it ran into the alley in back of Mulberry Street, and living people in houses, and was temporarily stopped. To the east, it crowded all the way up to the beach drive so that its gray fence and ominous, high gates could remind us of the eventual certainty of our mortality just when we had bobbed up wet and blinking into the summer air after momentarily convincing ourselves otherwise by holding our breath for a full minute underwater. To the west it was bordered firmly by the train tracks which were the extension of the city’s elevated line, now turned suburban and ground bound. If you were up there on the track in order to put pennies on them so that the copper would be squished flat and spread bigger than a half dollar by the wheels of passing trains, you had a fine, panoramic view of the graveyard spread out beneath you like a verdigris carpet splotched with fuzzy brown stains and sprinkled with a multitude of tiny little stones and statues and tombs.

It was, and is, a fine graveyard, thanks to the prosperity and grief of many Lakesidians from the far and near past, and it boasts as excellent and varied a collection of midwestern funerary art as you could hope to come across. There are any number of elaborate and diverting memorials; rows and rows of mausoleums vie with one another in sustained contests of marble pomposity, and the number of flamboyantly sculptured mourning angels is past counting.

Of course we, like kids of any generation, were perpetually fascinated with death, and of course we had long since learned that grownups were useless in any consultations on the subject since they seriously disliked talking with their children about even the possibility of dying, and, astonishingly, they never seemed to bring the subject up even among themselves unless one or another of them had recently expired, so we had to satisfy ourselves by quizzing one another on the subject in alleys and other dark places where adults wouldn’t hear and disapprove and stop us.

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