My Contribution to the Semiquincentennial

This month marks the 250th anniversary of the United States. It also, by a coincidence I have decided to pretend is meaningful, marks the 30th anniversary of one of the strangest forty minutes of my life, so I have concluded that it’s finally time to write down the most weirdly patriotic — and the most aggressively American — story I’ve got:

The story of the time I met a Revolutionary War veteran.

In November of 1996 I was eighteen years old and in the third month of my first “real” job: the first one that wasn’t writing, and that required physically arriving somewhere and being a person about it. The details of the job don’t matter except that it involved a great deal of driving around New Jersey, New York, sometimes Connecticut, and the occasional misadventure that deposited me in questionable corners of Pennsylvania. I’d held a driver’s license for roughly a year, and a grasp of the regional geography for exactly none of that time, so I navigated the Tri-State Area with all the precision and confidence of a goldfish being asked to valet park the Staten Island Ferry on a log flume.

I left my last job site of the day just as the sun was starting to bottom out and, lacking any working theory of where I was, I fell back on an ancestral New Jersey navigational technique that every native instinctively understood: drive in one fixed direction until you encounter a highway with a number that you recognize and hope for the best.

Had I driven south, I would have found a familiar highway in about three minutes.

I, however, drove north. For forty minutes.

By the time I realized my mistake, the sky had turned the dull purple-gray of lunch meat so extravagantly expired that it evolved an inner monologue and I found myself somewhere near the border between New Jersey and what I, at the time, firmly considered to be Upstate New York, but which is actually Downstate New York.

This commute was going to take a little longer than I’d planned.

I was still wearing my work uniform. Management had made it clear that sporting the uniform while off the clock carried real yet extremely vague liabilities that I probably didn’t want to find out about. Fortunately, I kept a shirt in my car for precisely this genre of afternoon, so I pulled into what identified itself through pure architectural despair as an industrial park: a cul-de-sac of low beige buildings that each appeared to manufacture either PVC piping or denture adhesive.

Industrial parks seem to come pre-installed with a moat of undeveloped scrub and woods, and it was against that scrub that I parked my creaky 1977 Chevy Caprice. While I was buttoning my civilian shirt, I noticed a small sign set back in the trees, three-quarters strangled by vines and grizzled branches that had been slowly annexing it since the McKinley administration. I stepped closer, excavating enough to establish that it was a historical marker heralding a Revolutionary War-era cemetery hidden somewhere nearby.

Because I was eighteen years old and still believed that life had side quests, I clomped into the woods to check it out. The industrial park disappeared behind me almost immediately, and the road noise thinned as I pushed through brittle weeds and thorny little branches that enveloped and hooked themselves into my clothes like elderly relatives asking me about college plans that I hadn’t made. Finally, as the modern world stepped out for a cigarette, the air changed and the light dimmed as the trees opened into a clearing that was, unmistakably, the cemetery the sign had advertised.

It was feral.

Invisible to the rest of the world, the forest canopy enclosed the whole plot like a lid, sealing the necropolis in a little bubble of the 1780s that the succeeding centuries had forgotten to bulldoze. The weeds in November had mostly died, conceding the field to the cold, but the dead architecture they left behind implied how completely they’d owned the place during warmer months. With the weeds withered and folded over themselves, I spotted gravestones rising out of the ground at odd angles, some upright, some leaning, some collapsed entirely.

These headstones were old in a way that modern headstones are not old, and none of the dates cleared the 1790s. Most of them had been cut from the soft local red sandstone that colonial New Jersey and New York used for nearly everything, which withstands two hundred years of weather about as gracefully as a sugar cube withstands a tropical cyclone. Many were chipped, crumbling, and shedding little brown crumbs that lay strewn across the ground like a Nature Valley granola bar violently disassembling itself after a week at the bottom of a backpack.

I read the markers that were still legible. I drifted past a family plot cordoned off by the ghost of what was once a fence and a few fallen headstones, two of which I righted out of some indistinct obligation to long gone strangers. While kneeling, I picked up a loose fragment — a broken corner of someone’s disintegrating monument — without actually intending to. It was one of those absentminded gestures your body performs while your brain is elsewhere, the same way you pick up a pen during a phone call with your mom and suddenly realize you’ve unconsciously doodled a dozen cubes and a reasonably convincing duck on the back of your water bill.

As my brain was still trying to work out that stylized “S” we all used to draw on our textbooks, I came to a gravestone that was lying flat on the ground, toppled from a few centuries of the Atlantic seaboard insisting on having seasons. The deteriorating text etched on its surface informed me that the grave belonged to a gentleman named John William, a veteran who died in 1780 when he was around the age of 40.

And laying on top of John William’s fallen tombstone was…

John William.

I’m assuming, anyway. I’d never met him and possessed no real basis or context for the identification. In any event, he was not at his best.

What I was looking at were the dusty, more-or-less-articulated remains of a man, laid out across his own toppled gravestone with a neatness that somehow made things incalculably worse. If the bones had been scattered or poking up out of the ground, my brain might’ve classified them as “bones” and then gone through whatever emergency filing system handles that, but these were carefully arranged. His skull sat askew, jaw open, blankly regarding me out of two vacant eye sockets still packed with two centuries of sleep and agglomerated lower Hudson Valley clay.

I stood very still.

There are moments in one’s life when the mind refuses to process the information that the eyes are delivering, and instead begins frantically paging through unrelated material, and that is exactly what my mind did. It did not say, “You have discovered exposed human remains in a historical cemetery and should contact the proper authorities.” It said, “I wonder what Revolutionary War activities took place in and around Rockland County in 1780, and also I wonder where the nearest pizzeria is.” Before I could stop it, my brain had already catalogued the Battle of Young’s House about ten miles away from where I was, the hard winter of 1779-1780, and any number of random, undocumented, espionage adventures that could have claimed a colonial soldier.

A few feet away, a small orange flag had been planted in the ground.

That flag seemed important. Perhaps, I thought, some collaboration of erosion, frost, and bad luck had washed this poor fellow from his grave. Maybe a volunteer historian, municipal archaeologist, or tired county worker with a clipboard and a bad back had found him, marked the spot with a flag, and arranged him on the stone temporarily until someone else could come and do the official, respectful, and properly permitted thing. This is what I hoped happened, because all the alternatives required more imagination than I was comfortable applying to skeletons.

Still, in that moment, I was alone in the woods at dusk with a Revolutionary War-era skeleton named John William.

Manners are one of the few remaining social technologies available in such a situation. I tried to think of the polite thing to do when you’ve unexpectedly encountered a dead man lounging in a hidden cemetery whilst holding part of somebody else’s grave marker, and did the only thing that seemed appropriate:

I introduced myself.

I did not shake his hand.

Nothing happened, so I felt I should say something else. “Sorry to, uh, barge in on you,” is what I mumbled.

John William stared back at me in silence, which I chose to interpret as the reserved dignity of a veteran, rather than the only thing that a 216-year-old skeleton is functionally capable of doing.

“I got a little lost,” I explained, which seemed unnecessary because the evidence was abundant. “I just got off work, right? And I wasn’t absolutely sure where I was, so I just drove in one direction, like you do, figuring I’d hit a highway eventually, but I didn’t and now I’m, er, here.”

A leaf fluttered in the breeze near John William’s shoulder, but otherwise he carried on being exanimate.

I mentioned that I was thinking about getting dinner and asked whether he’d like me to bring him back a calzone. John William considered the offer inertly, with the open-mouthed gravitas of a man who’d fought and died in the service of birthing a nation and was now being asked about Italian takeout by a teenager next to an industrial park.

While he weighed his options, I began, very slowly, to walk backward.

Backing away slowly seemed like the thing to do because running seemed disrespectful, and also because some primitive part of my brain had decided that ancient skeletons might operate on predator rules, so I should probably maintain eye contact and try to look big. Once I was a sufficient distance away, I turned and walked briskly through the woods to my car, then drove away as fast as I could.

Despite what I’d told John, I did not get dinner. I didn’t say a word. I’m not even sure that I breathed. Instead, I drove in a direction that was anywhere except that cemetery, eventually finding a highway I recognized, and then sped straight home while my brain repeatedly attempted and spectacularly failed to place the evening into an existing category. I didn’t even notice, until I was idling in my own driveway, that I hadn’t once opened my fist around that broken piece of Newark brownstone grave marker I’d picked up. It was still in my hand.

There are a few ways to describe the sensation of realizing you’ve inadvertently stolen a fragment of someone’s grave immediately after meeting the exhumed skeleton of a Continental Army veteran from 1780, but most of them are just different spellings of “NO.” I felt terrible and a little guilty but, most importantly, I felt profoundly strange. I didn’t know the rules governing this situation but felt confident that “keep it” was not among the recommended courses of action. I knew the hunk of headstone was going to have to go back, and I was going to have to take it there.

I turned my attention back towards the fragment in my hand and noticed that it was still cold.

When I say it was cold, I don’t mean regular “it was November and had been outside” cold. This was cold with gusto, like it had been stored for an extended period in the basement of the universe. It hadn’t warmed in my hand or in the Venusian heat of my Chevy’s V8 and by the time I was sitting in my driveway staring at it, the surface seemed almost to be steaming, faintly, like dry ice in a school science demonstration run by a substitute teacher who no longer cared if he died from carbon dioxide poisoning.

The next day, in the full light of midday, I returned to the cemetery. I thought that daylight would make the experience better.

Daylight did not make anything better.

The industrial park was still there, as were the woods and the (mostly) hidden sign. I parked in roughly the same spot I had the previous day and carried the still-cold piece of gravestone back through the thicket and into the cemetery with the care one tends to put forth when transporting an over-tall stack of plastic storage containers filled with lighter fluid and nitroglycerine.

Things looked different in midday, but not necessarily kinder. The enclosed trees still filtered out most of the sunlight, keeping the tiny envelope of eighteenth century grief bathed in a dim twilight, but I could make out more detail than the previous evening… more broken stones, more dried weeds, more of the small depressions in the ground where time and gravity had pressed their thumbs to remind us of our own mortality. I walked to the spot where I thought I’d first picked up the headstone piece and gently placed it back on the ground.

“Okay then,” I said out loud because I was apparently the sort of person who needed to narrate his restitution. “There you go.”

Then, because I couldn’t help myself, I went to check on my new acquaintance.

John William was gone.

His grave marker was still there, lying on the ground right where it had been the night before. The orange flag was still there, too, though it had been knocked over, or blown over, or maybe just fainted from the strain of public service. Either way, John William was no longer on his stone.

I looked around.

Though I was not exactly a frontier tracker, I didn’t see any footprints, disruption of the leaf litter, or obvious signs of fresh digging. There were no tools, and the ground didn’t look disturbed. Everything was quiet.

Maybe someone official, or at least official enough, had come and collected him and taken him somewhere respectful. Maybe two guys named something like Pete and Daryl had loaded him into the back of a county truck, under a moving blanket, and taken him to spend a few days at a historical society or archaeology lab. The important thing was that John William was no longer lying on top of his own grave in the woods.

That was the sensible explanation.

Unfortunately, the sensible explanation shared space with another much less sensible explanation, which was that John William had noticed an idiot teenager absconding with a chunk of his contemporary’s grave marker and got up to look for it. This was ridiculous, but also difficult to dismiss entirely. I’d returned after John William disappeared. He wasn’t there to see me standing in front of his grave with a cold rock in one hand and a warm calzone (which I thought it’d be rude not to bring after offering) in the other. As far as John William knew, that small piece of Passaic Formation conglomerate sandstone was still in my possession.

This thought stayed with me longer than it should have.

For months afterward, I half-expected him to appear when I was least ready. I imagined that I’d be out with friends, sitting in a booth in a diner somewhere. The door would open, and a gritty old skeleton would rattle inside, look around, and adjust the tricorne hat he’d picked up from Spirit Halloween after somebody tried to return him for store credit. He’d clatter across the tile floor and slide into the booth beside me, scattering road salt, dust, and colonial disappointment across the vinyl seat.

And all I’d be able to say would be, “Not again.”

Anyway.

That’s my patriotic story.

John William, so far, has not found me.

Then again, he’s from New Jersey. He may still be looking for a highway number he recognizes.

AJH