Cyrus Jones Lived Forever

Re-post of my awkwardly award-winning short story. Will fix typos sometime, I promise.

When I was but a child, I used to sit near the window for hours and just watch the cemetery.  I wasn't a tortured child, mind you.  I had friends and family and parents and even some hobbies, but nothing tugged at my soul quite like the peaceful serenity inside of that graveyard.  I think that I had always secretly yearned for the peace and quiet that only those cold, stone companions could offer.  My parents moved me from our farmhouse in Plainfield, Indiana to that small flat in upper New York City nearly before I had learned to walk.  My father worked for some law firm downtown and my mother worked as a babysitter during the daylight hours.  Of course the irony in this being that I, myself, was raised by another babysitter in the absence of my mother.  Every day my babysitter, Anna, would come and go.  And every day she would come over and instead of dilligently watching me, she would put on her vinyl records and listen contently to her contemporary dreamboat musicians.  Luckily for her, I was not a rambunctious child.  I was happy to sit perfectly still in the windowsill for hours and just watch that mysterious cemetery.  It was 1932.  And I was happy.
    Eight short years later, my parents and I celebrated my 13th birthday.  My parents also celebrated (with very little of my own participation) my coming of the age of which they saw an appropriate time for me to venture out and begin earning my fair share of the family bread.  I quickly found work near home as a printer's apprentice.  Those were truly the days in which I began to experience the world.  The venture to and from was like a brand new adventure each and every day.  Each with new smells, new sounds, and new faces - not all of them friendly, but always different.  And every day, I would pass that magnanimous cemetery on the way to work and then on the way home again.
    At first, it was easy to resist the temptation by imagining the look on my father's face if he saw me trampsing about a graveyard.  Not to mention, the subsequent lashing with his belt.  I had only been physically disciplined once by my father as a child (for breaking an antique vase, which I later learned was a treasured family heirloom) but it was not something I looked forward to experiencing a second time around.  But as days went by, the temptation grew stronger and stronger.  It felt as if those wraught iron gates and those strange, marble obelisks had a strange magnetism about them.  A sort of semi-gravitation pull that drug me inexorably toward them.  Then the Fall approached and the days grew shorter while the dark, mysterious nights grew longer.  And my parents' attention became less focused on myself and more focused on the hypnotic voice that poured news of Europe and bloodshed from the radio.
    It was one evening near the time the sun had just begun to sink below the Western horizon that I was trotting home from work.  I was in a particularly swell mood because the war panic meant more headlines being printed which meant more sixpence in my pocket.  And I was perfectly happy listening to those coins jingle in my pocket as I traversed the route home.  But as I neared our flat, I felt myself walking closer and closer to those black, iron gates.  I felt that I could no longer deny the urge to explore those hallowed grounds - and I couldn't.  I swiftly made my way to the entrance while trying my best to avoid eyeshot of our apartment windows.  When I stepped into that cemetery, it was like stepping into a whole new world.
    The ground felt different, the air smelled different and even the sky looked different.  There was something very poetic about that time and it awakened something deep inside of me.  Something that I didn't understand.  But seeing all of those graves washed in the red light of the evening sun changed me somehow.  And as I made my way cautiously through the rows of stone, I became enraptured.  The careful, intricate engravings of the headstones amazed me.  And all of those names...  Henry Thomas, 1804-1859.  Margaret Builder, 1887-1931.  Edward Hayes, 1832-1856.  Jacques Freeley, 1900-1935.  Emma Hollock & child, 1860-1876.
    But all of those white-washed tombs with their names and dates never thrilled me quite like the older stones.  I particularly fancied those stones that were so old you could no longer make out the information that was once painstakingly engraved upon them.  I became obsessed with these markers.  Who were these people?  How had they lived?  How had they loved?  How had they died?  I sat there for hours on end daydreaming about the possible owners of these enigmatic stones.  Before I had realized it, the sun had gone down and I was sitting alone in the dark of night.  I swiftly ran home where my parents had been waiting for hours.  Luckily for me, we didn't own a telephone so my crafty lie about running out of ink and having to run cross-town to get some worked easily.  That night I lay restlessly down to sleep and dreamt all night of my deceased imaginary friends.
    The next day, I took yet another journey after work.  I traveled to nearest printing shop (we didn't sell printing supplies you see, we just used them) and purchased a small black notebook and lead pencil.  That evening I returned to those unmarked graves and began to concoct elaborate life stories for all of them.  I chronicled every event from birth to death in my little black book.  I felt like their only friend and each night I would return home and dream of more to write.  I became plagued by my obsession.  Soon, my parents quit asking why I was home late from work every night.  Soon, I felt more at home in the depthless silence of the cemetery than I did in my parents' living room.  And soon my little black book became heavy and leaden with the lives of others.
    It was a cold winter night when I first saw the man who would later haunt my dreams and writings for the rest of my life.  I had just finished an elaborate and twisted tale staring a former plantation owner turned freedom fighter when I began my trek homeward.  Trotting happily along the dirt path, I spied a grave that I had previously failed to notice.  Something which surprised me to no end.  So of course I instantly began creating this stranger's life story within my imagination.  I reached into my pocket to grab my pencil and that's when he spoke.  His voice startled me.  It sounded more like someone rubbing two pieces of gravel together and somehow forming words than an actual voice.  I think I may have jumped.  He stood quietly behind me, the moonlight casting his shadow over that un-imaginative marker.  He was wearing a faded black suit with a formal vest and tie.  His shoes were caked with mud and ice and his top hat was bent and dusty.  Had he been standing straight up, he would have been six feet tall, but he was bent over a small black walking-cane.  His silver hair fell sloppily onto his shoulders and nearly over the frames of his black glasses.  He had more wrinkles than time itself.
    I said nothing, could say nothing, for what seemed like an eternity.  I simply stood, dumbfounded that this ridiculous figure of a man had somehow managed to sneak up on me, completely unnoticed.  Seeing that I had either not heard or not comprehended his words, he spoke again.
   
    "Jonesy, they's called him.  Seven hun'red n' fifteen ta seven hun'red n' fo'ty two.  Afr'can slave fella.  Took 'is death a'fallin' under a wagon wheel."
   
    Then there was silence again.  But I had heard him this time.  Only none of it made sense.  Had he really just told me a story about someone over two hundred years old?  My childhood mind raced for a possible solution.  Was he some terrible, ageless demon?  Or was he just a senile old man waltzing about the old cememtery?  Either way, I had no inclination of staying to find out.  I picked up in a sprint and got home as fast as I could.  Strange thing is; I remember looking back several times but never did I see him turn toward me, or even look at me.  Not even as he was speaking to me.  Not once.
    Weeks passed as Winter died and Spring was born.  I walked to and from work every day, but each day I took special care to steer away from the mysterious cemetery.  My little black book collected dust under my bed.  More weeks passed and Spring turned lazily into Summer.  And that's when it happened.  Coming home from the printing mill one day, I found my mother in shambles.  Through teary eyes and quivering lips she told me that my father had been killed.  They had found him that afternoon outside his law firm with his throat slit and his wallet missing.  No suspect had been apprehended.  And it seemed likely that no suspect ever would.  Days later I found myself under gray clouds, inside those familiar iron gates.  My mother was still a mess.  But I don't remember crying at the funeral.  Knowing that I would never see my father again hurt deeper than any pain I had ever imagined, but my eyes remained dry.  After they had shoveled in the last bit of dirt, I told my mother to go home without me.  That I wished to stay and pay my respects a bit longer.  Looking back on it now, I don't know if that was the truth or not.  I just know that I didn't want to go home.
    As the mourners filed out of the cemetery, I heard that gravelly voice again.

    "What you's doin' fo' them is a great thing.  You got'sa lot a' work that need doin' now, boy.  They's really a'missin' you's."

    No one else seemed to notice his grimacing countenance there that day.  But it didn't matter.  I knew what he said and I knew what it meant.  And I felt that he was right.  I had fulfilled for many the only wish most leave behind when they pass on - I remembered them.  Maybe not exactly as they had lived, but I remembered them.  But I had been unfair in my choosing.  I chose only to remember those unfortunate enough to have their names erased by the sad winds of time.  So what if the others had names and dates?  Those cold engravings didn't dictate how they lived their lives so why should they be allowed to dictate how they were remembered?
    That night I returned home and saved my little black book from desolation.  Saved it from disappearing slowly into the past.  I immediately began writing my father's story.  I gave him a more exciting life as a New York City police officer.  I made him a hero.  I gave him the life that I thought he deserved.  But it wasn't long before my father's legacy was put out of my mind and I was back at the graveyard creating more memorandums.  I took a new job as a Mason's apprentice where I learned to carve, shape, and engrave marble headstones.  And I had more encounters with my mysterious companion.  The most remarkeable of which happened on a chilly Winter's night, quite similar to the night of our terrifying introduction.  I stood again, after completing the life of a rich socialist aristocrat who became so intoxicated with her own beauty that it drove her to madness.  When I turned home, I became face-to-face with my strange friend.  For a long moment, I said nothing, but then I mustered the courage to speak.  The first words I ever spoke to this man were simply, "Pardon me sir, but what's your name?"
    At first he didn't speak, but then he put his hand to his face and removed his thick-shaded glasses.  It was then that I could see why he had never turned to face me before.  I staring into the milky white eyes of a blind man.  Then at last he spoke.
   
    "Cyrus," he said, "Cyrus Jones is ma' name.  Thank ya' kindly fo' askin'."

    From that day on, I met Cyrus every day in the cemetery.  He would sit on one of the cold, wooden benches and I would sit next to him and read him the life stories I had created.  Before long I had entire notebooks full of these memoirs.  He would simply sit and nod his head slowly in understanding as I read.  I became content again.  And once again, I felt at home in this strange, house of death.
    Years passed and my visits to the cemetery became less and less frequent due to work and my poor mother's declining health.  I met a lovely young red-headed girl named Annabelle and we were soon wed.  And before I knew it, I had quit going to the graveyard at all.  Some nights I would again sit in the window and watch as Cyrus seated himself on the wooden benches until the nighttime swallowed his image.  I often pondered on whether or not he wondered if I were still there, sitting next to him, writing away.  But our small New York City flat quickly became much too small for my growing family, so I moved us back to Indiana - to a small town called Cordon where I got a job as a gravemaker.  I made very good money and our family was very happy.
    I would often sit up in bed, late at night and ponder on how I had managed to build an entire life upon death.  People died so that my family and I may live and prosper.  But such was the way of the world, I imagined.  It wasn't long after we had settled into our new home that I was carving my dear mother's name upon a slab of marble.  Years later, my wife joined her in the great beyond after giving birth to our third infant.  I missed them both terribly but a tiring life at work and hectic life at home kept me distracted for many, many years.
    Eventually my children grew up and left home in search of a story of their own.  It was then that I opened my rustic box of notebooks and took up my old hobby again, with fresh a perspective.  Not to mention an entire cemetery of new names and dates.  More years passed and my hair turned gray, but still I wrote on. 
    One evening, nearing the final grave in the cemetery, I looked up from my notebook to see a figure clad entirely in black, silhouetted against a giant oak in the distance.  Through squinted eyes I could make out a hobbled figure sporting a long-since out-of-style top-hat.  There was no doubt.  It was Cyrus.  Only one thing was different.  He wasn't wearing his usual dark glasses.  And while I couldn't make out his eyes from that distance, I could feel them.  I felt him looking at me.  Needless to say, I was greatly unnerved so I rushed home that everning, put my little black book away and went straight to bed.  The next day there was an accident in the workshop.  My engraving knife came loose from the brace and ground hard against my steel worktable.  The sparks blinded me in both eyes.
    I lost everything that day.  My job, my sight, and my hobby.  Years and years passed by while I sat and moped within the confines of my farmhouse.  My children wrote me, but I never knew what they wrote.  Only that the letters arrived at the same time every month.  But as time passed on, I began to develop a case of claustrophobia and it urged me to get out of the house.  So I returned to the only recluse I had left - the cemetery.  And so day after day, I sit on a wooden bench and feel the breeze stir the leaves while listening to the Earth talk.  It brings my soul peace and makes me content.  Though I know in my heart that I am alone and that everything that I ever valued is gone - I close my eyes and it's 1932.  And I'm happy.



Here in the year of our Lord, 1974
We commend Thomas Keate to the ages
Gravemaker, author, husband and father
Succeeded by daughters Annie and Edith
And son Cyrus Keate...