The View from Castle Rock

atlases.
    Peabody, Scone, McCullougb Lake.
That was what he had written down.
    Farther north than we had thought-just beyond the boundary of the territory we had been doggedly covering.
    So we found the right cemetery, and the grass-grown crypt looked just as surprising, as primitive, as we remembered. Now we had enough time to look around. We saw that most of the old slabs had been collected together and placed in the form of a cross. Nearly all of these were the tombstones of children. In any of these old cemeteries the earliest dates were apt to be those of children, or young mothers lost in childbirth, or young men who had died accidentally-drowned, or hit by a falling tree, killed by a wild horse, or involved in an accident during the raising of a barn. There were hardly any old people around to die, in those days.
    The names were nearly all German, and many of the inscriptions were entirely in German.
Hier ruhet in Gott.
And
Geboren,
followed by the name of some German town or province, then
Gestorben,
with a date in the sixties or seventies of the nineteenth century.
    Gestorben,
here in Sullivan Township in Grey County in a colony of England, in the middle of the bush.

    Das arme Herz hienieden
    Von manches Sturm bewegt
    Erlangt den renen Frieden
    Nur wenn es nicht mehr schlagt.

    I always have the notion that I can read German, even though I can’t. I thought that this said something about the heart, the soul, the person buried here being out of harm’s way now, and altogether better off.
Herz
and
Sturm
and
nicht mehr
could hardly be mistaken. But when I got home and checked the words in a German-English dictionary-finding all of them except
renen,
which could easily be a misspelling
of reinen
-I found that the verse was not so comforting. It seemed to say something about the poor heart buried here getting no peace until it stopped beating.
    Better off dead.
    Maybe that came out of a book of tombstone verses, and there wasn’t much choice.

    Not a word on the crypt, though we searched far more thoroughly than we had done before. Nothing but that single, amateurishly drawn cross. But we did find a surprise in the northeastern corner of the cemetery. A second crypt was there, much smaller than the first one, with a smooth concrete top. No earth or grass, but a good-sized cedar tree growing out of a crack in the concrete, its roots nourished by whatever was inside.
    It’s something like mound burial, we said. Something that had survived in Central Europe from pre-Christian times?

    In the same city where I was to have my biopsy, and where I had the mammogram, there is a college where my husband and I were once students. I am not allowed to take out books, because I did not graduate, but I can use my husband’s card, and I can poke around in the stacks and the reference rooms to my heart’s content. During our next visit there I went into the Regional Reference Room to read some books about Grey County and find out whatever I could about Sullivan Township.
    I read of a plague of passenger pigeons that destroyed every bit of the crops, one year in the late nineteenth century. And of a terrible winter in the eighteen-forties, which lasted so long and with such annihilating cold that those first settlers were living on cow cabbages dug out of the ground. (I did not know what cow cabbages were-were they ordinary cabbages kept to be fed to animals or something wild and coarser, like skunk cabbage? And how could they be dug up in such weather, with the ground like rock? There are always puzzles.)
    A man named Barnes had starved himself to death, letting his family have his share, that they might survive.
    A few years after that a young woman was writing to her friend in Toronto that there was a marvellous crop of berries, more than anybody could pick to eat or dry, and that when she was out picking them she had seen a bear, so close that she could make out the drops of berry juice sparkling on its whiskers. She was not afraid, she said-she would walk through the bush to post this letter, bears or no bears.
    I asked for church histories, thinking there might be something about Lutheran or German Catholic churches that would help me. It is difficult to make such requests in reference libraries because you will often be asked what it is, exactly, that you want to know, and what do you want to know it for? Sometimes it is even necessary to write your reason down. If you are doing a paper, a study, you will of course