The View from Castle Rock

feet high instead of being a carpet on the forest floor, and vines seem to envelop every tree trunk, so that you can’t look into the roadside woods-everywhere are wreaths and curtains of green.
    We listened to music on National Public Radio, and then when that signal faded we listened to a preacher answering questions about demons. Demons can possess animals and houses and features of the landscape as well as people. Sometimes whole congregations and denominations. The world is aswarm with them and the prophesies are proving true that they will proliferate during the Last Days. Which are come upon us now.
    Flags everywhere. Signs. God Bless America.
    Then the freeways south of Chicago, road repairs, unexpected tolls, the restaurant that was built on an overpass and that is now empty and dark, a wonder of former times. And Joliet rimmed with new suburban houses, as every city is these days, acres of houses, miles of houses, joined or separate, all alike. And even these are preferable, I think, to the grander sort of new houses which are here too-set apart, not quite the same but all related, with vast shelter for cars and windows high enough for a cathedral.

***

    No deaths recorded in Joliet until 1843. No Laidlaw listed in the earliest list of the settlers or those buried in the first cemeteries. What singular folly of mine, to come to a place like this-that is, to any place that has prospered, or even grown, during the last century-hoping to find some notion of what things were like more than a hundred and fifty years ago. Looking for a grave, a memory. There is only one listing that gets my attention.
    Unknown Cemetery.
    In a certain corner of Homer Township, a burial ground in which only two stones have been found, but in which as many as twenty were said to have existed at one time. The two stones remaining, according to the lists, bear the names of people who died in the year 1837. There is speculation that some of the others might have been those of soldiers who died in the Black Hawk war.
    This means that there was a graveyard in existence before Will died.
    We go there, we drive to the corner of 143rd and Parker. On the northwest corner is a golf course, on the northeast and southeast corners are recently built houses with landscaped lots. On the southwest corner there are houses, also fairly new, but with the difference that their lots on the corner do not reach the street, being separated from it by a high fence. Between this fence and the street is a patch of land gone completely wild.
    I clamber into it, brushing aside the vigorous poison ivy. In among the half-grown trees and almost impenetrable undergrowth, hidden from the street, I peer all around-I cannot straighten up, because of the tree branches. I do not see any leaning or fallen or broken gravestones, or any plants growing-rose bushes, for instance-that might be a sign that graves had once been here. It is useless. I become apprehensive about the poison ivy. I grope my way out.
    But why has the wild land remained there? Human burial is one of the very few reasons that any land is undisturbed, nowadays, when all the land around it is put to use.
    I could pursue this. It’s what people do. Once they get started they’ll follow any lead. People who have done little reading in their whole lives will immerse themselves in documents, and some who would have trouble telling you the years in which the First World War was begun and ended will toss about dates from past centuries. We are beguiled. It happens mostly in our old age, when our personal futures close down and we cannot imagine-sometimes cannot believe in-the future of our children’s children. We can’t resist this rifling around in the past, sifting the untrustworthy evidence, linking stray names and questionable dates and anecdotes together, hanging on to threads, insisting on being joined to dead people and therefore to life.

    Another cemetery, in Blyth. Where the body of James was moved for burial, decades after he had been killed by the falling tree. And here is where Mary Scott is buried. Mary who wrote the letter from Ettrick to lure the man she wanted to come and marry her. On her stone is the name of that man,
William Laidlaw.
    Died in Illinois.
And buried God knows where.
    Beside her is the body and stone of her daughter Jane, the girl born on the day of her father’s death, who was carried as a baby from Illinois. She died when she was twenty-six years old, giving birth to