All But Impossible: The Impossible Files of Dr. Sam Hawthorne by Edward D. Hoch

Author:Edward D. Hoch [Hoch, Edward D.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Crippen & Landru
Published: 2017-09-10T04:00:00+00:00

The Problem of the Crowded Cemetery

I used to picnic in Spring Glen Cemetery in my younger days [Dr. Sam Hawthorne told his visitor over a suitable libation]. That was when the place was more like a park than a cemetery, bisected by a creek that flowed gently through it most of the year. It was only in the spring, with the snow melting on Cobble Mountain, that the creek sometimes overflowed and flooded part of the graveyard.

That was what happened following the especially harsh winter of ’36. The flooded creek had so eroded the soil on its banks that several acres of cemetery land had been lost. I was a member of the cemetery’s board of trustees at that time and when we met in the spring of 1939 it was obvious something had to be done.

“It’s just been getting worse for the past three years,” Dalton Swan was saying as he showed us photographs of the damage done by the flooded stream. He was the tall, balding president of the board, a rotating responsibility each of the five members had assumed at one time or another. Swan, a fiftyish bank president, was in the second year of his two-year term.

I shuffled the pictures in my hands before passing them to Virginia Taylor on my right. Aware of the cemetery’s shaky financial underpinnings, I asked, “Couldn’t this go another year?”

“Look at these pictures, Sam,” Dalton Swan argued, “The Brewster family gravesite is almost washed away! Here, you can actually see the corner of a coffin among these tree roots.”

“Those coffins need to be dug up and moved,” Virginia Taylor agreed.

She was a tall, athletic woman in her thirties whom I often glimpsed on the tennis courts around town. The Taylor family had made their money growing tobacco all over the state of Connecticut but all it had earned them was the largest family plot in Spring Glen Cemetery.

We discussed it awhile longer, with Randy Freed, a trustee and the cemetery’s legal counsel, suggesting we give it another month. “We simply can’t justify this expense if there’s another way out.”

Dalton Swan scoffed at that, “The only other way is to let the Brewster coffins float down Spring Glen Creek. That what you want?”

Freed bristled, more at Swan’s tone of voice than at the words. “Do what you want,” he grumbled.

Swan called for a vote on the motion to move the endangered coffins. “I’ve already spoken with the Brewster family. They’ll sign the necessary papers.”

Miss Taylor, Swan, and I voted yes, along with Hiram Mullins, a retired real-estate developer who rarely spoke at our meetings. He sat there now with a sad smile on his face, perhaps remembering better days when creeks did not overflow their banks. The only negative vote came from Randy Freed.

“We’ll proceed, then, as quickly as possible,” Dalton Swan said. “Gunther can have the workmen and equipment here in the morning.” Earl Gunther was the cemetery’s superintendent, in charge of its day-to-day operation.

“You’re making a mistake rushing into it like this,” Freed told us.

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