Emily Feuz Jensen
The year the graveyard flooded, strange things began to happen in the town of Smallwood. The town, as the name implies, was a small, little community. Think less of a town, and more a collection of roads and houses outside the nearby city of Tremonton, which, incidentally, was less of a city and more of a small town. Both were settled in the northern mountains of Utah and thrived mostly on three large factories and one rocket manufactory.
Ed Rosing had worked in all three factories throughout his life (though never the rocket plant), but by the flood year he had long since retired. He lived alone in a rundown home with white siding and chipped blue shutters. His wife lived next door in the Smallwood Cemetery. Ed had been caretaker of the graveyard as long as anyone could remember. It seemed to many of the younger generation that Ed had been alive as long as anyone could remember. He was small and stooped and walked with an old knobby cane he’d fashioned from a fallen tree. Every morning and evening, he took a walk through the three streets of his cemetery, clearing away windblown trash and changing the flowers on the graves he knew. By the flood year, that was most of them.
The flood came in February and stayed well into spring. The snows had fallen hard and often through December and January, but February opened unseasonably warm. People wore light jackets and enjoyed the whisper of sunlight on their skin. The snow puddled into ponds in Ed’s front yard. Typical spring runoff, a little early, but typical.
Then came the rain. It poured into the already full rivers and streams until they spilled past their banks. Roads turned into rivers two to three feet deep. The earth was swallowed.
If Ed had made the trek downstairs into his basement, he would have found it flooded in three feet of water, but Ed was more concerned with the flooding next door. Where once there had been quiet paths and tidy headstones, there was now a floodplain. Caskets heaved from the ground and were carried away in the night. Flowers floated atop the small lake amid branches and other debris.
And with their homes so rudely disrupted, the dead began to wake.
On Saturday, with their homes sandbagged and dry, Ezzie Cole and a few of her friends took kayaks on the swollen irrigation canals that wound through the flooded fields. They’d been studying for the ACT, but the bright, drowned world had seemed too improbable to stay indoors. The sun glistened on the wide swatch of water, and the houses appeared on the shores like Atlantis raised from its watery grave. Ezzie let her hands dangle in the water, feeling the memory of snow in its touch.
She hadn’t heard about the flooded graveyard, or perhaps she’d have been more cautious where she put her hand. As it was, she didn’t know any better, and so when she trailed her hands in the canal, her fingers tangled with the bones of another. At first, she thought it was a branch, and she peered closer at the water. When she saw the white knob of bone, she screamed and flung herself backwards.
You can’t fling yourself backwards on a kayak without falling out the other side or tipping the boat, and in the case of Ezzie, both occurred. She plunged into the frigid water and tangled with the corpse. She opened her eyes beneath the water, and two dark sockets gazed back at her. She let out a muffled scream, and kicked furiously away from the bones.
She broke the surface gasping for breath, her body shivering with the shock of cold. Her friends brought their kayaks close, and they spoke over top of one another in a great flood of words.
“There’s a body down there!” Ezzie cried through teeth-chattering breaths. “I mean a real body. Bones and skull and everything!”
Of course, it wasn’t everything; bone doesn’t stay attached without flesh to knit it all together. But she had encountered a great majority of someone’s body, strewn in pieces and floating idly along. Marjorie Mae Johnson, actually. A young woman who had died in a viral flu outbreak shortly before she was set to take a world tour. There might have been a finger or two mixed in from her sister, Bethany. Their graves had been flooded, their poorly-made coffins all but rotted through, and they’d been sent down the canal. They’d traveled together briefly—a touching reunion—but parted ways at a culvert. Bethany cozied up with a fallen tree, and Marjorie continued down the stream, enjoying a dream of a pleasant river cruise until said dream was interrupted by a girl’s fingers, followed by the girl’s body. If Marjorie’s lower jaw hadn’t gotten caught up in her sister’s tryst, she’d have screamed too.
Ezzie’s friends pulled her and the capsized kayak to shore and draped their jackets around her shoulders. Someone called 911 on speaker phone.
“911, what’s your emergency?” A woman’s voice answered. She sounded altogether too pleasant and calm for a dispatcher, Ezzie thought.
“We’d like to report a murder,” someone offered. Another girl shushed them.
“A murder?” The woman’s voice sounded almost gleeful. Smallwood emergencies generally consisted of the occasional heart attack and brush fires in the summers. Murders were virtually unheard of.
“Well, a body,” someone else amended.
“A skeleton, in the canal.”
The dispatcher sighed and asked for their location. The girls looked at each other bewildered. Why wasn’t the woman more concerned about the body in the canal?
Someone asked aloud. The lady sighed again.
“Oh, it’s nothing new. The graveyard flooded in the night. I’ll let Ed Rosing know, but it may be awhile before he comes to collect the bones. This is the third body in the last hour.”
The first body had belonged to Anthony Brewer, only he was still entombed in his casket when he washed up on Mrs. Brewer’s front porch. He had died only a few months ago of one of those occasional heart attacks. He’d been sixty-one.
Mrs. Brewer’s home had flooded, of course, like nearly everyone’s in Smallwood. She had three sump pumps running and sandbags around the windows, though the effort was seemingly futile. Even pumped water had to go somewhere, and it usually ended up in the canal or the ditches, where it simply flooded back into the homes. Mrs. Brewer was only recycling the water in her basement as opposed to actually getting rid of it.
She’d called her adult children who lived nearby. Of the three, only one had escaped the massive influx of water. He lived on the other side of Tremonton in yet another small unincorporated community which liked to parade as a town. He left his dry high-ground home and descended from the foothills to assist his mother as she dragged boxes and furniture from her basement.
When he arrived at his childhood home, he discovered the casket on the porch, waiting there like a stray cat.
“Dad?” Anthony Jr. said cautiously as he approached.
Anthony Sr., bloated and content in his coffin, made no reply.
Only mildly alarmed, Anthony Jr. assured his mother he could handle everything, and he set about making the appropriate calls at once. This included a most peculiar conversation with Ed Rosing on the subject of retrieving the coffin.
“I figure on picking him up first thing in the morning,” Ed said. “He’s been complaining of an empty stomach, and I expect your mother can fix him up in the meantime.”
“I haven’t a clue what you mean,” Anthony Jr. said.
Ed just hmmed politely as if he hadn’t heard.
What he meant was this:
The day he died, Anthony Sr. had stayed late at the office, filing a last bit of paperwork, catching football highlights on his phone. Mrs. Brewer called him, wondering what time he’d be home so she would know when to start the meatloaf in the oven.
“I’m leaving, right now,” he’d said. Which was more or less the truth. But he’d had the strangest sensation all day long. A dull, numb aching in his arm. Perhaps he’d slept on it wrong the night before.
They found him late that night after Mrs. Brewer called the police in a panic. He’d fallen just outside his office, one arm in his jacket, the other crumpled awkwardly beneath him.
Mrs. Brewer sobbed when she heard the news. If only he’d been at home, she might have saved him or at least held him as he died. If only he’d come home on time.
Four months later, when the flood plucked him from his grave and swept him down the street, Anthony Brewer arrived home safely and quite ahead of supper.
Mrs. Brewer made meatloaf for dinner.
Rosemary Pence had lost her first baby to pneumonia. A little girl called Cadence. Cadence was buried in a plot on Second Street in the Smallwood graveyard, next to her grandmother.
Rosemary had since moved away to Salt Lake City—which, although rightly called a city, is still small as far as ‘big cities’ go—but she saw the flooding on the evening news.
She called her ex-husband on the phone.
“Mark, have you seen the news?”
On the other end of the line, still living in Smallwood, Mark Billings rolled his eyes.
“You mean the flooding?”
“Yes, I mean the flooding,” she said. “It looks like a nightmare.”
Mark glanced out his front window, where the sunset lit blindingly on the water’s surface. It was almost as if the world had been flooded with oil instead of snow and someone had just dropped a match.
“Yeah, it’s a nightmare,” he said. He was lucky. In some places—most places—the flooding was thick with mud and debris and the unfortunate contents of washed out septic tanks. Mark lived on twenty acres of farmland, and the canal had spread over top of his fields and lay there, fragile and still like a giant looking glass. His basement was raw cement, and his fields could use the moisture. It was less a nightmare and more an answer to prayer.
“Have you been to see Cadence?” Rosemary asked. “I heard the cemetery flooded.”
“And?”
“And what if her grave is washed up? What if our baby is stranded somewhere? Lost.”
“Rose, she’s dead.”
A sort of stillness hovered on Rosemary’s end. Mark shoved his hands through his thinning hair and sighed.
“All right. I’ll go check on her in the morning.”
“Tonight, Mark.”
A pause. Then, “All right.”
Mark hung up before she could ask anything else about his life. His second divorce had been more brutal on him than the first, and people were starting to talk. He lived alone on this stretch of land, and he would die alone too, he’d decided. He went to church one Sunday in ten, usually wearing a graying white shirt and his work jeans. He sat alone on a long, center bench, right in the front. He’d have sat in the back row, but it was always full of the gray-haired ladies who didn’t want to walk the extra ten steps to the front.
There was one little girl he always recognized in the congregation, a chubby, precocious child with red hair and freckles. She looked nothing like his Cadence but just like Cadence all the same. She would shake his hand and ask if she could come pet his dog after church. Ash was an old, lame sheepdog Mark had unwittingly inherited after his parents passed away. The red-haired girl would show up on his porch now and again with a treat for Ash and a smile for Mark.
“Come any time,” he always told her, but her parents usually shepherded her away before he could say much more.
After a few cantankerous minutes of thinking and debating, Mark threw on his coat and tugged rubber boots over his feet. Ash was waiting on the porch, and his tangled black tail beat furiously against the ground.
“Well, c’mon then,” Mark called. Ash limped towards the truck, but Mark had to lift him into the seat.
They drove a few minutes into town—where the houses clustered marginally closer along the roads—and pulled in at the cemetery. Mark lifted the dog back out of the truck and plopped him into the waters that swelled like a swamp around them.
“How’d you do?” Ed Rosing said. He worked on First Street, righting markers, and collecting bits of loose bone and clothing.
Mark nodded briefly.
He’d come to the graveyard exactly twice. Once for his then mother-in-law’s burial, and once more for Cadence’s.
Miraculously, their graves were untouched. The graves on either side had buckled, and their caskets floated in slow, vague circles nearby. But Erma Pence and Cadence Billings lay sleeping and peaceful beneath a foot of water.
Mark stretched a hand to trace his daughter’s gravestone. The sun had all but set and it was difficult to read, but Mark touched the inscription on Cadence’s headstone and knew exactly what it said.
Families are Forever.
It was a nice saying, and meaningful, if you believed in that kind of thing. Mark had believed it at the time; maybe he still did. But his marriage certainly hadn’t been forever.
He didn’t notice Ed’s approach until the old man spoke.
“She’s been waiting for you.”
Mark looked at him sideways.
Ed nodded more to himself than to Mark. “Oh, yes, she’s always asking when that daddy of hers will come visit.”
Then, he shuffled off, carting a load of scattered bodies in his wheelbarrow.
Mark knelt at Cadence’s graveside, the cold water seeping into his clothing. He pressed a hand to the wet soil above her grave, wondering if she was there somehow, reaching back.
After the flood, Smallwood would never be the same. Church was canceled that Sunday so neighbors could help neighbors, bagging sand, dragging waterlogged furniture and clothing from waterlogged basements. Mrs. Brewer spent hours blow-drying family photo albums, while her son made arrangements for his father’s (second) burial. The first Sunday in March she stood before the congregation and bore testimony that Anthony’s spirit had been in their home. He ate a whole plateful of meatloaf! And she was not the only one with a story to tell. The Bishop rose, ten minutes after the hour, and announced to those waiting in line that they would have to wait for another time.
Children swimming in the canal that summer would find the bones of Bethany Johnson, still tangled around her tree. Marjorie was never recovered. Ezzie Cole visited the graveyard often, wondering whose bones she had touched. Whose face had gaped at her beneath the water? In college, she studied anthropology.
Cadence slept more peacefully than she ever had done, curled in beside her grandmother, knowing her father loved her. Mark now attended church one Sunday in five. He happened to attend the same Sunday Mrs. Brewer bore her testimony. He didn’t believe that nonsense, but he did believe God had sent the flood. When the red-headed girl bounded toward him after the meeting had finished, she asked if he might like to come for dinner, and he agreed. Her parents were horrified.
Ed Rosing lost his wife in the flood. They’d married young and lived a poor, hungry kind of life. Her dearest wish had been to travel, but he’d never had money for it, especially not with seven other mouths to feed. When the water rose, her casket was the first to wash away, as if she’d been waiting and ready to leave at a moment’s notice.
Ed left her grave open, like a wound gaping in the earth. People complained, but they couldn’t do anything about it. They were not a real town after all. Ed was unpaid. He could do what he pleased with the graveyard.
No one knew the day Ed died. He seemed to simply float away, like his wife before him. The graveyard grew wild and strange. The rickety white house stood empty beside it. The land never flooded again like it had that year, but the stories lingered, passed amongst neighbors like cider at harvest time. The people of Smallwood took to burying their dead in a new cemetery, on land purchased by Anthony Brewer Jr. It was in the foothills, well above the floodplain.
Emily Feuz Jensen holds a BS in Creative Writing from Utah State University and an MFA from Seattle Pacific University. She periodically teaches a community creative writing course through USU. Her work has previously appeared in Literary Mama, Exponent II, Reservoir Road, Cordella, and others. When she’s not writing, she spends time wrangling her three children, two cats, one dog, and one husband.
