Diary fragment · 3 min read ·
Visit the Lilies
The caretaker of a municipal cemetery keeps counting the white lilies that bloom only on unvisited graves, and keeps being instructed, by nobody he can name, to visit them.
- dated: August, the eleventh summer of the service
- narrator: Ernest Coyle, caretaker of the Lower Cemetery
- reliability: reliable
THURSDAY, 14TH AUGUST
Counted the north strip before lunch. Forty-one blooms on the one stone, all open, all faces to the path. The strip runs behind the north wall, where the city buries the unclaimed — no next of kin on the form, no visitor in the column, fees paid out of a fund nobody can name to me. The rest of the grounds are bare this month. It is only on the strip, only on the graves that get nobody, that the lilies stand up like that, a white crowd with nowhere to go.
I filed the count with the carbon duplicate, as the office likes. Nobody reads it back. I think sometimes the triplicate is the only company those graves get.
MONDAY, 18TH
A niece came, from up-country. First visitor to that stone since the funeral, by the register. She stood a while, did not kneel, left before the gate shut. By dusk the lilies on it had closed. This morning, gone. I crossed the plot off the bloom register, and it felt like posting a letter that had sat eleven years in the tray — and it did not feel like my letter. I was only the counter of it.
WEDNESDAY, 20TH
There was a slip in the gate box when I opened up. Typed, on a Parks carbon, the way the office does things: one word, VISIT, and under it no initials, no reference number. I put it in the tray with the others and did the rounds.
FRIDAY, 22ND
The slips keep coming. One typed; one handwritten in a hand that looks like my own on a bad day; one chalked inside the shed door, where I would read it last thing before locking up. Always the same two letters' worth. Nobody in the office will own them, and when I press, the clerk goes quiet the way I know — the quiet of a man who has checked his own drawer and found nothing. I took it first for the office finally reading my register: go and inspect. But I inspect daily, and the slips keep coming after, so it cannot mean the ground. Somebody is instructing me that a visit is owed.
TUESDAY, 26TH
One stone on the strip has carried a lily since July and no relation has come for it. The name cut in it is worn nearly blank. I took a rubbing with charcoal and got letters that will not sit together, as if the stone were spelling a name it was never properly given. This evening I stood at the stone because I was tired of being told. The lily closed while I stood there. Slowly, like an eye deciding.
I do not know what that makes me to the plot. I am not kin that I know of. My people are the other side of the river, filed and finished, and my mother's stone gets flowers twice a year from me, so I know what a visit looks like from the ground side.
THURSDAY, 28TH
Read back the register tonight, eleven summers of it. The plots the lilies choose are never the neglected ones in any way the form can catch: fees paid, ground kept, stones straight. What they mark is something the form has no box for. As I would put it in a remark column: the flowers do not grow where the dead are alone. They grow where the dead are owed something. A visit, the slips say.
I will go up after the last tram on Monday, stand at the blank stone without my gloves on, and whatever comes of it I will write here first, before the office, before the duplicate. I have begun to wonder which of us that visit is being paid to — the plot, or the man who keeps being told to walk up to it.