The Burying Ground (3 page)

Mrs. Dunphy turned out to be a rather large woman with a heavy gait and a dour expression. She stomped in from the kitchen and thumped down a gigantic bowl of porridge. Thaddeus filled his bowl, then looked in vain for a jug of milk and some sugar to go with it. Christie ladled out a huge serving for himself, sprinkled it liberally with salt, and then handed the saltcellar to Thaddeus. “Get yourself around a bowl of oatmeal every morning and you're content for the rest of the day, isn't that right, Luke, my boy?”

Apparently they were expected to eat their oatmeal Scottish-style: plain porridge with salt and nothing more.

“Wait,” Luke said to his father, and a few moments later Mrs. Dunphy returned with a platter of scrambled eggs and side bacon. Thaddeus was relieved. There was a time when he would have been happy enough with a bowl of plain oatmeal, but he had since been spoiled by Sophie's cooking. Mrs. Dunphy's food didn't appear to be quite up to the standards of the Temperance House Hotel, but it was served hot and looked reasonably edible.

“Methodist Episcopal, eh?” Christie said between mouthfuls of porridge. “Not many of those around here.”

“I'm finding that,” Thaddeus replied. “I have my work cut out for me.”

“Always found Methodist services a little hysterical for my taste — all that shouting and so forth. I'm a John Knox man myself, or at least I was raised that way. Some seem to like the excitement though. The Cummers up yonder, of course. And the Africans down along Richmond Street, but I expect, being in the city, they're not really part of your circuit.”

“No, they're not. The African Methodist Episcopal Church is actually a separate body from us. It was organized by the coloureds themselves. They don't even fall under the jurisdiction of the Canadian Conference.”

“Interesting that they've found their way here, isn't it?” Christie mused.

There had always been a small coloured population in Toronto, Thaddeus knew, but now their community had burgeoned, swelled by new laws in the United States. Local authorities, even in the anti-slavery northern states, were now required to assist in the recovery of runaway slaves. Since all that was required on the part of the slave owner was an affidavit confirming that a coloured person was his property, many free Africans in the northern cities were being scooped up and sent south to the plantations. Many of them deemed it wiser to exit the country entirely.

“Execrable business, this slavery stuff,” Christie said, polishing off his porridge and reaching for the platter of bacon and eggs. “Slave owners should all be hanged. That would put an end to it, then, wouldn't it?” He suddenly glared in the direction of the kitchen door. “Mrs. Dunphy! Tea!” he shouted.

“You'll get it when it's ready!” Mrs. Dunphy shouted back. “You can't make it steep any faster by yelling at it!”

Christie looked at Luke and Thaddeus and smiled. “There you go. Tea's on the way. By the way, Luke, I wonder if you might attend the office this morning? I have some rather pressing business to see to.”

“Of course,” Luke said, although Thaddeus noted that his son didn't seem happy at the prospect.

Mrs. Dunphy trudged in and set a large teapot on the table. Then she settled herself in a chair at one end and glared at Christie, who, with an apologetic look, passed her the bowl of oatmeal.

“And what will you do with yourself today, Mr. Lewis?” Christie asked.

Thaddeus wasn't sure. He had a two-day rest period before he once again had to meet any appointments, but he hadn't given much consideration to what he might do when Luke was working. In the old days when his circuit was complete, he always returned home to discover that Betsy had numerous things that needed doing, and he seldom had time to complete all of the tasks before he had to leave again. Even his free days were full.

“You could go and visit Morgan Spicer,” Luke said. “He wants to talk to you.”

“Morgan Spicer?” Thaddeus was astonished. “Where on earth did you run across Morgan Spicer?” He had long since lost track of his one-time protégé.

“He hailed me as I was walking down the street the other day. He mistook me for you.”

“But what is he doing in Yorkville?”

“Spicer?” Christie said, “Isn't he that weedy little character who looks after the Burying Ground? The one with the twins?”

“I don't know,” Luke said. “But he wanted to speak with my father in connection with the Burying Ground, so I'm sure you're right. He said there had been a strange occurrence there. He said to say it was a
puzzle.
”

“Ah yes, someone's been tampering with the graves, I hear,” Christie said, reaching for the last rasher of bacon on the platter. “Resurrection men no doubt, looking for bodies for the medical students to cut up. Should do it the way they do in Scotland — just fetch them from the hangman.” He stopped talking for a moment, wrinkled his brow, and chewed thoughtfully. “Mind you, there was rather a strange case in Edinburgh in '28. Not enough people hanged, you see, so cadavers were in short supply. Families soon found that they had to post guards at the graves of their newly buried love ones, so the bodies wouldn't be dug up and sold. And then two bright souls decided to expedite the process by dispatching a raft of old folks, drunks, and prostitutes, whom no one would miss, you see. Burke and …” he hesitated for a moment and chewed thoughtfully on his bacon, “Hare. Yes, that was the other fellow. Rather a clever ploy, but they were careless with the victims' clothing and were soon caught. Hanged, of course, and dissected by the surgeons. Ironic, don't you think?”

“Where did the bodies come from at McGill?” Thaddeus asked Luke. It wasn't a subject that had previously ever occurred to him to inquire about, but he supposed that they had to come from somewhere.

“From the jails, mostly, I guess.” Luke said. “There was some grave robbing, but not much within the city itself. It was more of a problem in the outlying districts. The Montreal graveyards are all within the city limits, with stores and houses around them. There was some talk of putting a new cemetery up on the mountain overlooking the city. That might make it easier for the resurrectionists, I suppose.”

“If they'd just hang more criminals, it wouldn't be such a problem,” Christie pointed out. “Enough of this nonsense of sending them off to penitentiary, where they sit around and eat their heads off. Hanging would save a great deal of money and ensure a steady supply of cadavers. They could start with resurrectionists and work their way up to slave-owners.”

“I'm sure you're right,” Thaddeus said. He didn't dare look at Luke. He was reasonably certain that if he did so, he would scarcely be able to stop from laughing out loud.

Thaddeus had no difficulty recognizing Sally Spicer when she opened the door of the Keeper's Lodge at the Burying Ground. In spite of the years that had passed since he had last seen her, she was still the same raw-boned, red-haired girl he remembered. She, on the other hand, seemed to have trouble placing him, and her eyebrows lifted in a question.

“Sally!” he said, tipping his hat. “Or I should say Mrs. Spicer, I suppose. It's Thaddeus Lewis.”

Her hand flew to her mouth. “Oh, I'm so sorry. I didn't know who it was at first. Come in, come in! Please sit down and I'll get Morgan. He's just out back.”

The Spicers' parlour had only two hard chairs in it, both drawn up to a scarred wooden table. Thaddeus took the seat nearest the window. He heard Sally call Morgan's name, then she reappeared in the doorway. “He'll be along in just a moment,” she said.

“So how did you come to be in Yorkville?” he asked. “I was surprised when my son said you were here.”

Sally sighed. “Poor Morgan. He could never get the hang of writing. He can read well enough, or at least by my standards he can, but he has a terrible time whenever he goes to put the words down on paper. It's the one obstacle that's kept him from being a real preacher. Whenever he's applied for a trial, he's been turned down because of it. He knows his Bible inside and out, but I guess that's not enough.”

“I'm so sorry,” Thaddeus said. “I thought I'd done fairly well by him. I wish he'd let me know. I could have helped more.”

“You had your own troubles at the time,” Sally said, “and more since. Morgan tells me your good lady has passed on.”

“Yes, although we had some fine years, even at the end.”

“I'm glad for the good years and sorry for the loss,” she said. “Any road, we fetched up here just after the girls were born and Morgan thought it was time to settle for a bit. The job here came up and he writes well enough to keep the burial records. Most don't like the work, you see, dealing with dead bodies all the time, so there wasn't much competition, and the job came with the house as well.” She peered at Thaddeus anxiously. “He hasn't given up, you know, on the preaching. This is just until we're better situated, and then he'll try again.”

“I know he will,” Thaddeus said. “If there's one thing Morgan has, it's persistence.”

“Here he is,” Sally said, turning to look as Morgan appeared in the doorway, a gaggle of children crowding in behind him. Thaddeus had to look carefully to see that there were, in fact, only four of them, and even then he had to take a second look to assure himself that he wasn't seeing double. Judging by the way they were dressed, there were two girls and two boys, but they looked so much like each other that without the clue their clothing offered, any one of them might have been mistaken for any of the others. He judged them to be perhaps eight or nine years old — at the gangly stage — but the lankiness could well be another trait they had inherited from their mother along with carroty-red hair and an extraordinary number of freckles.

“Mr. Lewis! It's so good to see you again.” Morgan entered the room, his hand out in greeting.

The years had in no way improved Morgan Spicer's appearance, Thaddeus thought. He was still scrawny and unkempt-looking, with lank hair and a straggly beard, his clothing cheap and ill-fitting. As Thaddeus looked more closely, though, he realized that Morgan stood a little straighter perhaps, and had developed a grave and deliberate way of moving. He could well have cultivated this mien because he felt it was appropriate for a minister, but it would certainly be fitting for his current occupation as well. Although, Thaddeus supposed, an effort at solemnity would be largely wasted on the customary clientele of a Potter's Field. At a Strangers' Burying Ground, there would be few mourning relatives on hand to usher the dead into the earth.

“Pardon me for not rising,” Thaddeus said. “I've grown older since last I saw you.”

Spicer sat in the opposite chair and beamed. “Those were good days, weren't they? When you and I rode together.”

Thaddeus nodded, although he by no means agreed with this statement. They had been hard days, the whole colony stirred into an uproar by rebellion and invasion, and all the while a murderer was stalking young women. He and Spicer tracked the villain down, but Thaddeus had been shaken to the core by the experience.

The mob of children had filed into the room in Morgan's wake and now stood in a row against the wall, their collective gaze fixed on their father's unexpected visitor.

“These are our children,” Sally said. “Ruth and Rebecca, Matthew and Mark. Children, this is Mr. Lewis, who is a very old friend of your father's. Or I guess that's a friend of long acquaintance, isn't it? Not an old friend.”

“Either way is appropriate, I'm afraid,” Thaddeus said. “Are these quadruplets?” He found their unwavering stares slightly disconcerting.

Sally shook her head. “No, two sets of twins. The boys are a year older than the girls, but they're at that age where the girls outgrow the boys. They all look the same right now, don't they?

Thaddeus had to agree. The duplication was astonishing.

“You go off now and leave your father to talk with Mr. Lewis,” she said to them. “Go play outside.”

The expressions on the twins' faces didn't change as they obediently filed out of the room.

“They've been a chore in some ways,” Sally said, “coming as they did in batches. But now that they're older, all they want to do is follow their father around. Now, would you have tea, Mr. Lewis?” When Thaddeus nodded, she disappeared again, presumably to the kitchen.

“I was surprised when Luke mentioned that he'd seen you,” Thaddeus said to Morgan.

“No more surprised than I was when I heard you were in the area as well. I mistook your son for you, when I saw him on the street, but he set me straight and promised to pass my message on. He's the new doctor then? The one that's taken over from Christie?”

“Not really taking over.
Assisting
would be a better word.”

Morgan nodded. “Christie's a good doctor, but he's a bit odd. He always acts like he'll look after your ailment if you insist, but that he would really rather be somewhere else.”

“I think that's why he took Luke on,” Thaddeus pointed out. “So he can be somewhere else. Whatever his reasons, his decision certainly aided our plans. Luke needed a position and I needed a place to stay occasionally. But tell me about you and Sally.”

“Sally's a grand woman, for sure. We seem to produce children only in pairs, but she's wonderful with them. It helps that we're settled now. It's better for all of us.”

“She mentioned that you still hope to find a congregation somewhere.”

Morgan glanced at the doorway before he replied in a low voice. “That's what I pretend — to Sally if not to myself — but I don't think that's what I'm meant to do. You know, I used to think that it would be such a fine thing to be on the road, to ride to a different town every day. See new sights. Meet new people. It wasn't so fine after I'd done it for awhile. To tell the truth, it got tiresome. And I like it here well enough. It seems almost as good, dealing with dead souls instead of the live ones. I take care of them. And after all, I already know all about gravestones, don't I?”

Thaddeus recalled then that Spicer was once apprenticed to old Mr. Kemp, the gravestone maker in Demorestville, before he had taken it in his head to go off preaching. It would not be so dissimilar an occupation, he supposed.

“I'm just sorry that the job won't last, that's all,” Morgan said. “I may have to start looking for something else soon.”

“Why? Surely dead bodies are a commodity that's in steady supply at a cemetery?”

“Some of the local businessmen want to petition the legislature to close the grounds so they can be given over to more shops and houses. They say the village will never amount to anything as long as it has a cemetery in the middle of it.”

“But what about the people already buried here?”

“They'd move them all over to the new Necropolis. There's been talk of it for years, but the Board of Trustees seems to be taking the notion seriously this time.” Spicer shrugged. “The grounds are getting full anyway, so even if nothing happens, I probably wouldn't be needed that much longer.”

“I'm sorry to hear it.”

Just then Sally reappeared with a pot of tea and two mugs on a tray. She set it down on the table. “I'll leave you two to talk,” she said. “I know Morgan has something to ask you.”

“Yes, your puzzle,” Thaddeus said. “Luke delivered your entire message, you know. He said you needed my advice on something.”

“Something very odd happened, and I'd like your opinion of it.” Morgan briefly filled him in on the strange dese­cration, and the constable's reaction to it. “I don't see how it could have been grave robbers,” he said. “And I don't believe it was hooligans, either. They seldom do more than topple the grave markers.”

“I agree, although I must admit that my first thought would have been of resurrectionists.”

“They weren't interested in the body. They threw it aside. He wasn't very fresh anyway. He had been in the grave a long time. He died in 1848.”

“Then there must have been something of value in the coffin.”

“I don't understand how that could be. The man had no relatives and was buried by the county,” Morgan said. “But if there
was
anything there, it was taken.”

“Who, exactly, was it who was dug up?” Thaddeus asked.

“A man by the name of Abraham Jenkins.”

“And who was he?”

“I don't know. Just another poor soul who died alone, as far as I can tell. I don't even know how old he was. There wasn't a birthdate to put on the stone. He died of a pain in the stomach, but other than that, there was no other information in the record.”

It certainly wasn't much to go on, Thaddeus thought, but in the interest of being thorough, he supposed he should have a look at the disturbed grave itself.

Morgan led him out of the cottage to the laneway that led through the burying ground. The twins materialized, seemingly out of nowhere, and followed them, a little parade that straggled past a small building in the centre of the cemetery. A chapel, perhaps? Or a deadhouse? Probably useful for either function, Thaddeus figured.

Morgan turned into one of the right-hand rows and stopped in front of a grave with loose soil heaped over it. As soon as their father stopped, the twins hunkered down on their haunches to watch, two of them with thumbs in their mouths. They were like little imprinted chicks, Thaddeus thought, programmed by nature to follow. Morgan appeared not to notice that they were there.

“This is it,” he said.

The raw soil looked out of place next to its undisturbed neighbours, but that was the only extraordinary thing about it as far as Thaddeus could see. Abraham Jenkins's headstone revealed little. It was a plain square piece of granite, as befitted one buried by charity, with a simple statement of name and date of death. Other than the fact that the grass on the nearby graves had been trampled and suffered a spade mark or two, there was nothing nearby that offered any other clue.

Thaddeus made a slow survey of the grounds. It was an old-style cemetery, more thought given to the efficient use of space than to the comfort of dead souls, the graves laid out in regimented rows with a minimum of space left between them. It would be a sorry place to spend eternity, Thaddeus reflected, but then, he supposed, it provided a last resting place for the sorriest of people.

Nearly the entire ground appeared to be filled, except for small empty sections at the back, and there was no direction in which it could be expanded. Yonge Street and the concession line along Tollgate Road hemmed it in on two sides. Buildings crowded up against it on the other two.

“Show me where they went over the fence.”

Morgan led him to the back of the cemetery, the twins flapping in a line behind them.

“I think it must have been here,” he said. “At least this is where they ran to when I surprised them.” And then he stood back and waited while Thaddeus examined the fence and stared at the buildings beyond it. There was nothing at all remarkable about any of it: an ordinary paling fence and a huddle of wooden houses. He turned and walked back to the gravesite, but the backside view of it was no more informative than the front side had been.

“Can you think of any reason at all why they would have chosen this particular body to dig up?” he asked.

Morgan shook his head. “No. The grave has been here for several years. There's nothing special about the headstone that marks it. Nothing special about the person in it. I have no idea why this happened.”

Thaddeus knew that Morgan was expecting him to discover some piece of information or small item that would set them on a path to resolution of the mystery, but there seemed to be nothing that suggested so much as a line of inquiry. He would make a circuit of the grounds, he decided, just to be thorough, but he had little expectation that anything useful would come of it.

As soon as he moved, Morgan made to follow.

“Just stay here for a minute,” Thaddeus said. “I'll shout if I have any questions.”

To his relief, the children stayed with their father. He was finding their presence hugely distracting.

The burial ground wasn't large, only five or six acres in all, he judged. Back in the 1820s, when the field was established, no one could have foreseen that there would be so many strangers to bury, although it had obviously found favour with some affluent families, as well, for here and there more elaborate stone and marble memorials towered over the plain blocks that were planted for the indigents. He went up and down the rows, idly scanning the information recorded on the markers. Most of the names meant nothing to him, but one small slab with two familiar names caught his attention. Samuel Lount and Peter Matthews were buried here, a fact that he had not known, but he supposed he should have guessed it. When Mackenzie fled the colony after his failed rebellion, it was Lount and Matthews who were fingered as ringleaders. In spite of pleas from across the colony, they were both hanged and their bodies buried with strangers. Ironic that Mackenzie himself had now been welcomed back, all forgiven. Thaddeus wondered whether or not the little rebel had ever visited the graves of the men he had led to their deaths.