The Last Invisible Boy by Evan Kuhlman

Author:Evan Kuhlman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ginee Seo Books
Published: 2008-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

40. Cemetery Tales V

If you spend lots of your life at a cemetery you will meet all kinds of people, like beefy landscapers and gravediggers and slick funeral home people, but mostly you will meet people who have lost someone they love. Like George, a wrinkled old guy who, a few months ago, buried his wife that he was married to for thirty-nine years. “Margaret was the spice of my life,” he said to me droopily. George, in case you are dying to know, means “earth worker” or “farmer,” and Margaret means “pearl.” A farmer found his pearl and then lost it.

And I met two blond-haired twin sisters in their thirties who lost their younger brother due to the Iraq War. Corporal Addison (his name means “son of Adam”) Kent is buried at the bottom of the hill. The sunny side. His grave always has fresh carnations and a tiny American flag. And I met a family of seven who was visiting the grave of a woman named Beverly Fitzsimmons, mother to two of them, grandmother to four of them, and great-grandmother to one of them, the baby. Beverly means “beaver stream.” No lie. It’s a pretty-sounding name, but I’m not sure when or why some people started naming their daughters after a beaver stream.

Sometimes I tell visitors to Green Oaks about my dad, and sometimes I say I’m only here because I like the view, and other times I keep quiet. Once, I froze myself and pretended to be a statue of a boy sitting on the hill — I’m stone white enough that I can get away with the concrete look. I stayed that way for nearly a half hour. My nose itched like crazy but I didn’t scratch it until all of the visitors had left. None of them gave me a second look. I kind of liked that, being unnoticed and left alone, even though I was very much here. And sometimes I wear my Reds baseball cap pulled low so no one will ask about my funky hair, and clothes that cover every inch of my arms and legs so no one will ask about my pasty skin. And sometimes I don’t bother to hide my growing invisibility. Call me Morfinn Garrett, The Last Invisible Boy. (Get it, Morfinn sounds like the word “morphing”? Sorry.)

But right now, this minute that will soon be gone, I’m here with you, writing these words in my notebook and drawing some pictures. Just me and you and the grass and the trees and the three hundred dead people and the squirrels and the birds and that owl and the slightly tilted cemetery worker’s shack that will one day fall down and the statue of Jesus near the cemetery gates and the one of the Virgin Mary in the old part of the cemetery. Thanks for staying so long with me in this weird little place.

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