Solomon's Grave (6 page)

Late Saturday night. Nathan laid the pen down on the paper and pinched the bridge of his nose. Hayden had turned in at his usual time, leaving him to work on tomorrow’s sermon in peace. Nathan wanted it to be special. Hard enough starting out in a new parish, but his entrance here had to assert his role as spiritual leader over that of little Nate Dinneck come home to roost. His thoughts wandered between the story of the prodigal son, or perhaps Jesus’ return to his own hometown. Of course, in the latter tale, the Lord was not accepted, and in the end the people were worse off for it.

No, no
. Comparing himself to God? Bad idea. He picked up the pen and crossed off that section of his notes.

Over the past few days his concentration had been pulled by the memory of the angels he’d seen over the gravesite on Wednesday. He wished they’d walked the grounds more that morning, gotten closer so he could be certain of what he’d seen. Tarretti seemed to have cut the meeting short after Nathan’s reaction. The caretaker had sensed his thoughts, or so it appeared at the time.

In retrospect, after three days and nights without nightmares, Nathan understood what was happening. First-day jitters. He still couldn’t remember being in Greenwood Street Cemetery, even as a child, but he
must
have seen the statues before. A brief glimpse walking through the woods, or passing the graveyard in winter when the sheltering leaves had fallen.

The week had been busy, traveling with Hayden to the homes of parishioners unable to leave their houses for services. They moved room to room at both Lakeside Hospital and Saint Vincent’s in Worcester, following the list provided by the administration of Baptist and unaffiliated Christian patients. The Commonwealth had recently passed a law prohibiting hospitals from disclosing patients’ religious affiliations, but Hayden was a very persuasive man when he wanted to be. Besides, most of the staff thought it such a ludicrous law they usually ignored it.

It had been an educational and pleasant few days. Hayden wasn’t much of a talker, but like on their walk in the cemetery, Nathan never felt uneasy with his silences. The old man projected a calm and assurance that was contagious.

He looked back at the paper, considered readdressing Jesus’ homecoming with less emphasis on the comparison to his own situation.

An image of the stone angels came so clearly to his mind again that he had to blink, concentrate to see the hand-written words on the page. An itch in his brain, a feeling like something forgotten. He couldn’t continue like this. He needed to clear the air, somehow dispel any lingering flotsam from his old dreams. Clear his mind for what was most important.

Tomorrow, or more likely Monday if he could find a few moments of down time, he’d return to the cemetery. If anyone saw him, he could say he returned to admire more of the stonework. In a way, that was true.

With this resolve, he found his concentration returning. He picked up the pen and began to write.

Chapter Ten

There were moments, sometimes entire days, when Vincent Tarretti had doubts about his calling. Times when he made the mistake of looking at his life, with its lack of any substantiality, since leaving California. Every day he woke up, got out of bed, showered, ate breakfast and read the
Worcester Telegram
. He would then set out to work tending the grounds in the cemetery with Johnson following faithfully behind him. Vincent talked to the dog as he would any human being, and recognized the fact that many in town thought he was a bit
daft
because of it.

Maybe he was. A man doesn’t isolate himself from the rest of the world, guarding something of such significance, and not get a little nutty. One night, a few years ago, he rented a popular movie called
A Beautiful Mind
. The concept of a man so lost in his own hallucinations—supported by the fact that this was a true story—had terrified him. Was this what he’d been doing all his life? Was there nothing in Solomon’s grave but a long dead body of a real man?

That moment had been especially difficult. Until he’d fallen to his knees and asked God for some kind of clarity in his mind, praying until he could barely keep himself awake. He felt a little better after that.

Then, as now, he understood the answer that God put into his heart. Since coming to Hillcrest decades before, hiding even from other people of faith, he’d not attended church services. He’d not sat among those who also believed with all their hearts and souls. The Sunday after watching the film, he drove aimlessly among the neighboring towns. He passed a small, non-denominational church tucked among the trees in the town of Boylston, when something settled on his heart. He turned the car around and pulled into the parking lot, joining the small crowd filing into the rows of seats. Many realized he was a newcomer and greeted him warmly. Vincent was skittish, as he always was whenever someone offered him too much attention. In the past, he’d never known whether they were being friendly or if he’d been discovered, if the smiling old woman offering her hand was ready to cut his throat for the relic buried under his adopted hometown.

That first morning he had sat in the back of the church. By the time the service was over, he had felt the Spirit renewed within him, suddenly proud of his calling beyond words. He wasn’t crazy. Yes, his situation was like none other save that of his predecessors, but if he was nuts for following God so blindly, then so were all these fine people. None of
them
seemed daft to
him
. Though he continued to avoid the churches in his own town—he doubted anyone in Hillcrest even knew he was a Christian—since that first Sunday, he never missed a service in Boylston. This morning had been no exception; another inspiring service, another chance to remind himself that, though he worked and lived by himself, he was never alone.

Lonely
, yes, sometimes achingly so, but never alone.

Prior to his arrival as caretaker, Vincent Tarretti had not been so lonely. As a child, he’d been dragged to church, sat listening to the ranting preacher talk about redemption. Mostly he concentrated on the raven-haired Melissa Alvaraz sitting with her family in the front pew.

During his junior year of high school, Vincent, who at the time insisted on “either Vinnie or Mister Tarretti, there ain’t nothing in between,” learned to his delight that Melissa spent those same Sundays thinking about him. They were soon inseparable. The relationship was purely platonic at first, a mutual evangelical upbringing having at least
some
effect on their behavior. But after two years, they could no longer restrain their feelings for each other and broke away both from their celibacy and the church.

They left home, sneaking away in the night, and found a tiny, roach-infested apartment thirty miles north, just outside of Hollywood. While she looked for a modeling job, Vinnie worked the grill of a diner two blocks from the Strip. He would have taken any job, as long as it paid the rent. They married. Not in the church, but in a small chapel in Las Vegas following a grueling day-long drive. A Justice of the Peace performed the ceremony. Melissa’s modeling career ended before it ever began, when she learned they were going to have a baby.

Vinnie took a second job. They found a place slightly bigger and with smaller cockroaches. Even now, Vincent wondered what his son would have been like had he been born. He wondered what kind of a mother Melissa would have been—a fantastic one, he was certain—had a man named Simon Ellison not taken one drink too many before trying to drive home.

Vinnie had been home from work only twenty minutes when the police came to his door and told him his wife was dead. The officer, sent to inform the next of kin, had not been at the scene. He simply took the report he was given and told Vincent Tarretti that his wife and son had been killed in an automobile accident.

In the strongbox hidden under two loose floorboards beside Vincent’s bed, sandwiched between his notebooks and the short stack of other yellowed clippings, was the single newspaper report of the accident. A small number “1” was written in the corner, but with no corresponding notation in any book. It was the only thing he kept from those long-ago days, aside from his cheap, gold-plated wedding ring which he also kept in the box.

His memory of life after the funeral, held in the town in which they’d both grown up, was a blur of alcohol. He had died in every sense of the word in that accident with his wife and son. Afterward, he was simply
waiting for the van to arrive
, as the song went. He was certain, thinking about it in retrospect years later, that death was waiting for him one particular night as he washed his third shot of Jack Daniels down with his ninth beer. If not that night, then soon. He’d sensed his personal limit had been reached, a signal to return upstairs and pass out on whichever piece of furniture was easiest to reach. That night, he’d hesitated, ordered another shot and beer. Once crossed, it was a line that would continue far into some desperate darkness waiting only for him.

While he slouched in a booth, twirling the now-empty beer bottle on the table top and considering without much resolve about going back upstairs, an old—no,
ancient
was the word that came to him that night—woman slowly slid into the bench across the booth from him. She had garnered a lot of looks from the brooding regulars at the bar. As soon as they saw with whom she sat, people kept their comments to themselves. They’d watched Vinnie’s deterioration and short temper long enough to know not to make any comments about someone who was most likely his grandmother.

She wasn’t his grandmother.

“Is your name Vincent Tarretti?”

“Yea…” he’d said, trying to focus on her face, but not succeeding very well.

“My name is Ruth Lieberman,” she said. “I’m dying.”

Vinnie rolled his eyes. “Well, too bad for you,” he said, and raised the empty beer bottle, trying to catch the attention of the bar’s only waitresses, a thin girl with tired eyes. She seemed to be looking everywhere but in his direction. He lowered his arm and said, “Everyone is dying. I’m dying; you’re dying.”

“In a way,” she said, never breaking eye contact, “you’re already dead. You’ve made up your mind to choose oblivion. Now,” she said, laying her aged hands flat on the table, “forgetting the obvious repercussions of such an act, God has need of you. You will have to stop drinking, forever, and come with me.”

In his state, the fact that this woman was echoing the thoughts blurring through his mind only a moment before did not carry any surprise. He simply smiled and said, “Yeah? Where to?”

“Massachusetts.”

The answer was spoken so assuredly that Vinnie sat up straighter in his chair. Hollywood was full of more kooks and weirdoes than he could ever count, but they never failed to entertain him.

“Mass-a-what?” He chuckled, a gesture that felt alien in those days. “And why would I do that?”

“I told you—because I’m dying, and God has sent me here to find you.” She looked around then, and for the first time Vinnie saw the calm certainty in her expression waver for a moment. “Everything I see, including you, is exactly as in the dream. There’s no question.” Saying that, her determination returned.

“Yeah, and what exactly am I going to be doing in Massachusetts? Selling flowers at the airport?”

She smiled. “No, sir. You’re going to be the new caretaker of the cemetery in town. Hillcrest, Massachusetts to be exact. It’s a pleasant little place a few miles north of a city called Worcester. It’s very nice.”

He leaned over the table. The wrinkled hands remained flat on the surface. He whispered, “Go away now or I swear to God I’ll—”

And then her hands came up and touched his cheeks.

And the bar disappeared.

Vinnie Tarretti saw the face of God as flames, burning His commandments into the stone tablets... a terrified old man carrying them down the mountain and in anger shattering them on a stone at the sight of the idolatry before him; returning from the mountain a second time with new tablets, placing them in a tabernacle adorned with the gold from destroyed idols, carried across the desert for forty years; then King Solomon, tall with a knitted beard and flowing robes and riches beyond match, building the temple of God, and the placing of the golden Ark of the Covenant beneath angelic wings of gold and….

He vomited across the table. In the days that followed, he never found out—and dared not ask—if he’d also thrown up all over the old woman. But as Vinnie fell into unconsciousness, he felt his life and whatever remained of his soul burn away. The world he thought he knew blew apart like ash in the light of God’s vision.

When he awoke, he was in the hospital. “Alcohol poisoning” was how the medical report read. He was released as soon as he could stand under his own power, being without insurance. Vinnie walked outside, into painful sunlight and thick, dirty air. An Asian man waved to him from a cab waiting at the curb, running to open the rear door without waiting for a response. Reflexively, Vinnie climbed into the back seat. Before he could get back
out,
the cab pulled into traffic.

The old woman from Massachusetts patted his hand and said, “It’s time to go, Vincent.”

Twenty-six years later, Vincent pulled his Blazer to a stop at the back of his small caretaker’s house, still relishing the joy from this morning’s service. Johnson barked from inside, as he did every time his master arrived home after going somewhere without him. Johnson’s bark sounded different this morning. An angry, warning tone.

He understood why when he walked around to the front of the house, fiddling with his key ring. A short man stood on the porch, hands folded calmly in front of him as if in prayer. He wore a dark suit with a black shirt and white tie. The neat apparel, his
Sunday Best
, Vincent assumed, fit in well with his clipped moustache and short white hair.

As Vincent mounted the single step, the man extended his hand.

“Mister Tarretti, I presume? So glad to finally meet you.” Vincent took his hand in a perfunctory shake. “My name is Peter Quinn. I was hoping we could talk.”