the doll cemetary

On Sundays Grandee used to come, making the drive all the way out from the city. Each and every Sunday it was practically the same, she would arrive and have lunch with Nola and her parents and then right afterwards she would take Nola to the cemetery. Nola’s parents never went with them, not once. As soon as everyone had finished eating Kate would make herself busy clearing the table and doing the dishes while Graham muttered something about having a few things to take care of and headed off to his study. Grandee would sit at the table and announce loudly that she was heading off to the cemetery and taking Nola with her if anyone else was interested in coming. But no one ever was.

Grandee said over and over again that it was important someone from the family look after things at Ethan’s grave. She would often say to Nola, “Promise me that when I’m gone, when I’m there with your grandfather and our sweet Ethan, promise me Nola that you will come here and take care of us, will you do that for your old Grandee?” Nola always vowed she would, and Grandee would pronounce her a good girl.

The cemetery was barely half a mile from the house, on Ramsey Road, the same main road their little street was off of. It was a small graveyard, not much more than four acres. Once there had been a church next to it, and if you went into the woods at the back of the property beyond the last row of headstones you could see the old stone foundation, the granite slab steps leading to nothing more now than a patch of scrub oaks and young birch saplings surrounded by the stacked stones that once supported the church floor. “It must have been a small congregation,” Nola’s grandmother would often muse. “Not like the great cathedrals of Manhattan.”

During nice weather Nola and her grandmother would walk to the graveyard pulling an old Radio Flyer wagon full of gardening supplies and the flowers that Grandee always brought with her, week after week. On a few especially nice days when the weather was just right they’d even skip lunch with Kate and Graham and pack sandwiches instead, eating them picnic style on the grass beside Ethan’s grave while Grandee would talk to him like he could hear her. She’d tell him all about some cookies she’d baked that were his favorite, or about some boys she’d seen playing games in the park that were about his age and how she knows they would have been, “great friends.” Often Grandee would tell Ethan about Nola, about her accomplishments at school or how pretty she looked. She would try and get Nola to talk to him too, but Nola would find herself strangely tongue-tied there in front of her grandmother. Grandee would always say, “no matter, your sister’s just shy, but she loves you dearly, know that sweet Ethan.”

On holidays Grandee would bring special things to leave there, like a heart balloon for Valentine’s Day, flags for Fourth of July, a bunny statue for Easter, or a colorful paper turkey for Thanksgiving. On Christmas Grandee paid the cemetery staff to put a blanket of evergreens over Ethan’s grave. Even in the dead of winter she and Nola would make the trip to the cemetery, only they’d just go by car instead. If it was especially bitter or snowing out Grandee would make Nola stay in the car with the heat on. Nola would watch her grandmother through the foggy windshield as she dusted the snow off the headstone, bowing her head and quickly making the sign of the cross, that’s what she called it. Then Grandee would stand there a few moments, perfectly still, head bowed, eyes closed, lips moving. Nola asked her once what she was talking about to Ethan when she did that and Grandee answered snippily, “I’m not talking to your brother, child, I’m praying, which you’d know how to do if that mother of yours ever sent you to Sunday School.”

Nola’s parents didn’t believe in God. Her father said he went to confession and mass every week until he was seventeen. Then his father, Granda, Grandee’s husband, said it was up to him. He never set foot in a church again. When Ethan was born Grandee told Nola that she begged her parents to have him baptized but “sadly they’d have none of it.”

But when Ethan died, when he was in the hospital before they turned off the machines, Grandee said she brought in a priest to give the last rites; that’s what they do if you are going to die so you can get into heaven, she’d told Nola. Grandee said, “So now sweet Ethan is our angel, he’s with his heavenly father and the Holy Mother will take care of him until it’s our time to join him, God willing.” Nola had asked her once what would make God unwilling, but for some reason Grandee got mad and told her, “that’s a question you should ask your heathen father, that is.”

Even when Grandee was mad, though, Nola liked the way she talked. In fact sometimes she even sounded better when she was flustered or angry. Grandee had what her mother called an Irish brogue, an musical accent from when she was raised in Ireland. The lilt of her phrasing made everything sound magical and believable, you would accept anything she said as inscrutable truth. When Nola was with Grandee she almost could believe there was a God and that Ethan was with Him, looking down on them all.

At Christmas time once a year Grandee was allowed to take Nola to the local Catholic church for a special service. They had a life-size creche set up in front of the chapel and everyone would stop and look at the figures before going inside. Nola could imagine that the baby Jesus was Ethan, being watched over by Mary and Joseph. She told her grandmother that once and it made her cry. Nola never knew when something she said about Ethan was going to make someone cry or smile, it was very hard to predict.

When she was very little and still played with dolls Nola would pretend that different ones were Ethan and that she was his mommy. Then he would get very sick or fall off of something really high up, and he'd die. Nola would pretend to cry and be very sad, sometimes she did it so well that she shed real tears and everything. After that she would carefully put the dead doll in a box and place little toys and trinkets all around it and slide it reverently under her bed. She would never take it out after that because once you were dead that was it, you couldn’t play anymore, you were stuck in the ground and couldn’t come out ever again, forever and ever.

Once when her mother found several of the dolls all boxed up in their pretend coffins, Nola had to tell her why they were all there under the bed and not in her doll basket. She thought Kate might get mad or cry...or perhaps even smile, it was one of those times she couldn't tell what reaction she was going to get. But Kate didn't do any of that. Instead she just closed her eyes real tight, scrunched up tight like she didn't want to see anything around her, not the dolls, Nola, not anything. Then she left the room with out a word. Nola’s mother never looked under the bed again after that, and she never gave her any more dolls, either. But that was okay, there wasn't that much more room under the bed anyway.

namesake

“In those days you didn’t call for a doctor unless you had money, which we didn’t. You took care of things your self; there were all kinds of home remedies about. When my sisters both got sick at the same time we didn’t think too much of it at first, we didn’t know anything about the Spanish flu, didn’t know anything at all. Besides, they were strong, beautiful girls; handsome we used to call them. They were so strong as to be able to do nearly the same work as any hired man, my father used to brag. Course there weren’t many men to be hired back then, what with the war.”

“Anyway, my sisters got worse so quickly there was barely time to realize it, we didn’t even have time to get the priest. They’d gotten sick on a Sunday after church and by the next morning you could hear the death rattle in their heaving chests and there was a strange foam coming out of their mouths. By the evening they were both dead, within an hour of each other. My parents were in shock; I don’t think they could believe it had happened. I remember thinking they were very strong because they didn’t cry, but now I wonder if they were just so stunned they couldn’t.”

“People were laid out at home back then, and since there were two of them they lay side by side, barely fitting on the dining table that was moved into the parlor. I remember they had coins on there eyes too, but now I can’t recall what that was for. I think it was because sometimes the dead’s eyes wouldn’t stay closed. Yes, I’m pretty sure that was it. I was very young at the time, you have to realize, so a lot of things didn’t seem clear to me.”

“Both Mary and Katherine had their Sunday dresses on and so did I. My father had picked a small bouquet of flowers and placed each of the girls’ hand around it, so they were both joined together with those posies. I remember thinking that they looked so pretty and clean and I wondered aloud how that happened because when I saw them last in their sick beds they looked awful, Mary’s red hair was wild and tangled and Katherine’s dark eyes looked big as saucers, like she had no pupils at all, they were just black empty holes against ghostly white skin. But my aunt told me that she and my mother had stayed up the night before bathing them and getting them fixed up and dressed. Then she started crying and said, ‘It should be the other way around, our children should be dressing us for the grave.’ She had five children herself. By the end of the winter she was dead too, and so as my uncle. I don’t know what happened to my cousins. We couldn’t take them in, we were barely scraping by.”

"It was just a few days after my sisters died that my baby brother, Nolan got sick. You know that’s where your name came from, don’t you? Yes, of course you do, I’ve told you that before. Nolan was named after my father’s mother, Nolan was her maiden name and the name of the village we lived in, Nolan Hill. I remember my father used to sing a little song he must have made up, something about ‘Rollin, Nolan Hill, God bless us yes He will.’ I wish I could remember the words. He had a lovely voice. "

"My mother seemed to go numb when baby Nolan took sick, but my father got crazed, he got desperate. He began cursing God and yelling at my mother to do something, not to just sit there weeping like an idiot. He wanted her to nurse Nolan as she had Mary and Katherine, but I just don’t think it was in her, I think she knew it would do no good. She was already in mourning for the boy. But my father wouldn’t believe it, he tried anyway. When the poor baby’s fever spiked and his breathing started to become hard I watched as my father did what looked to me then with my young eyes like torture the boy. He wrapped him in thick woolen blankets and held him tightly, the baby’s fever made him strong for a bit and he struggled against my father’s sturdy arms but eventually he resigned himself to it, I guess. You see, the thought in those days was that you needed to sweat a fever out to break it, so they’d cover you in blankets and put hot water bottles ‘round you even."

"All night my father held the boy in his arms, just sat there at the kitchen table and rocked little Nolan back and forth, singing until his voice was just a hoarse whisper. No one sent me to bed; I sat there with him and my mother. I fell asleep with my little head on the table. In the morning when I woke it was obvious the boy had died sometime during the night, he was limp in my father’s arms, wrapped in all those damp, sweaty blankets.”

"I think that drove my father over the edge; I think that’s what killed him. He went shortly after Nolan. It was just my mother and me then. We had to leave the farm in the spring because there weren’t enough men, what with the war and all, to help work the farm. We had to move to the city where we could both find some work. My mother always said we’d get enough money together and go back, go back to Nolan Hill. But we never did. I’ve never been back and now that your grandfather lies here in this plot with your own baby brother, I’ll rest here someday too, instead of with my parents or brother and sisters back in Ireland. That’s what you do, Nola, you marry and go where your husband takes you, you make a life out of what you can and hope God doesn’t give you too much to bear. That’s all you can do."

mistakes & miracles

“I have brought you something, but you must promise me that when you are not playing with it you will keep it in your room, alright?”

Nola promised she would.

Grandee took a rectangle of thick lavender wool from the brown bag and laid it across her lap. “I knit this when I was pregnant with your father. But I was new at knitting and realized soon after I started it that it was going to turn out smaller than I’d thought. I’d misjudged the gauge of the yarn, you see, but thought I might as well continue with it since I needed the practice, to say the least.” And then she added in a conspiratorial whisper, “Truth be told I thought I was going to have a girl and she might could use this as a wee doll blanket. I never had my girl, until you that is,” she said squeezing Nola’s hand. “So, now this is yours. I think it’s perfect for Bear-Bear while he recovers, don’t you?” And with that she wrapped him up in the blanket. She held the swaddled Teddy bear like a baby and rocked him in one arm while stroking Nola’s hair with the other hand. Nola looked at Grandee rocking her wounded bear wrapped tightly in that thick blanket and remembered, “Just like baby Nolan!”

Grandee had been staring off into space, lost in the motion of rocking and stroking Nola’s hair for a moment, but at the sound of her brother’s name she stopped and looked intently at Nola, “what was that?”

“Like baby Nolan. You said they wrapped him up tightly in a warm thick blanket and your father rocked him all night. But baby Nolan died anyway.”

Grandee’s expression changed to a pained grimace, she grabbed Nola and pulled her onto her lap, hugging her tightly with the bear still clasped to her chest surrounding both of them in her strong arms, “Nola, is that what you’re thinking about, my poor brother, may he rest in peace?” and Grandee made the sign of the cross as she always did when she spoke of Nolan or Ethan. “Sweetness, Bear-Bear isn’t dead, and he will never die. As long as there is a scrap of fabric left to him, even a few measly torn bits, this bear will live forever.”

“Like a miracle, Grandee? Is it a miracle Bear-Bear was saved?”

Her grandmother looked at her and smiled, “Maybe, yes, yes I suppose he is a miracle bear. Why, he survived the terrible jowls of certain death,” she proclaimed with dramatic flourish, making Nola giggle. “Ah, there, now that’s the true miracle…a smile like that on a day like this.” And Grandee snuggled Nola’s cheek against her own, still clutching the swaddled bear and the child both.

“Nola, do you know what today is? It’s been years now you know. Ten years since your own poor brother died. Today is the anniversary of the accident, I think perhaps that’s why your mother isn’t herself, she wasn’t thinking. She didn’t mean for anything bad to happen.”

“Grandee?”

“Yes Love.”

“Do you mean she didn’t mean anything bad to happen to Bear-Bear or…?”

“Both, she didn’t mean for anything bad to happen to either of them.”

“But it still did.”

“I know, I know.”