The Stirlings and the Missing Statue

Chapter Nine: El Diable al Cementiri

There was no keeper of the graveyard. Not officially. It was nearly unheard of to have graves, even those with crosses or markers rotted away to nothing, left without any kind of attention. Even the poorest of souls should have some kind of care for their bones while they rest beneath the earth. But at this old ruin, there was hardly a living creature who bothered to pass through the broken gates.
Most of the graves belonged to the first settling families of the town, the descendants of which had moved and settled elsewhere. There were still signs of remembrance, even from within the last year—an altar for Dia de Los Muertos still embraced the cross belonging to a man who had died young and, evident from the mementos left behind, to violence. His stone and those placed around the same year nearby it were the newest and still carried dates from well over a century ago.
Once a week, or every other week when the rain made his joints ache, Pablo González Gutierrez takes the time to care for the resting souls—picking the weeds away from the crosses, sweeping wind-blown tufts of dried grasses and small rocks from the pathways, and planting new flowers when the old plants died. His own relatives were buried there: a great-great grandfather, a great grandfather, and likely many more beyond that line, but whose headstones had been buried over time. His mother and her kin had been interred at the new church, or the church, as it should only be called, since it hadn't been new in a great while. His father and his kin too were buried there, but there were dozens of devotees to tend to them.
As he worked at the weeds around a grave marker for María Cortez, an unmarried woman whose surname and dates of birth and death were so weather-worn, Pablo could not have guessed if she'd lived in the last two centuries, he hummed Amazing Grace, the hymn his mother would sing to him when he seemed most troubled.
Somewhere in the middle of the third verse, he began singing aloud the lyrics he'd memorized when his hair was long and full and there were no wrinkles to be found on his plump features. With the familiar and comforting Gracia on his lips, Pablo hardly noticed when the shadow of a man blocked the afternoon sun. The dark form cast over him made him jump when he recognized the shape as a tall creature with sharp, pointed horns and a swishing, forked tail floating alongside it.
"¡Sálvame Dios!" Pablo cried out as he spun himself around and made the  Sign of the Cross.
"Bon dia, Señor," the man dressed in white greeted him.
"Bueno," Pablo responded with some curiosity. With just two words, the stranger brought up memories in Pablo of his grandmother and great-aunt, originally from Barcelona, and the way they would each greet him.
The other man, seeing some confusion in Pablo's face, offered to continue in either English or, if he understood his dialect well enough, in Spanish.
"Te entiendo, señor," said Pablo slowly, as if the other man was confused and barely learning the language. He caught an air of the man's arrogance and was slightly annoyed. Clearly the man thought less of him simply because he was no longer in Europe.
Continuing the conversation in Spanish, the stranger asked if Pablo regularly visited the graveyard. Pablo confirmed and gestured around him, pointing out all of the work he'd done and the care given to the stones. But the man wasn't interested in Pablo's selfless toils.
"And is there a marker for Aurelio Reyes González?"
"Si." Pablo hesitated on the word and thought about why the white man dressed in white would be asking about a man who died over a hundred years before. The stranger didn't look dangerous, but Pablo sensed that if he delayed the man any further, he could become agitated. Pablo's very simple day of service to the dead could become very complicated. He pointed to a spot very near the west wall of the ruined church.
"Gràcies," the man said, the unfamiliar dialect adding a last moment of confusion.
He walked away, shuffling through and around the broken or sunken stones in the path and the fallen crosses until he reached the area Pablo had indicated. Pablo looked around the graveyard to see where the man had appeared from and found a yellow bulbous looking car parked across the street. The car almost definitely had severe mechanical problems and Pablo wondered why he hadn't heard it or the man approach. He tried to busy himself about the weeds again but the stranger kept drawing his attention. Curiosity won out as he observed the man circling the grave and even touching the marker there on all its sides. He was looking for something.
Pablo scrambled up on his old arthritic knees, using María Cortez (unknown)'s marker to steady himself. His legs tired from sitting in an awkward position, he hobbled over to the man and called out, asking if he could help him.
The stranger adopted a look of disgust that replaced the annoyed expression he already carried. "No," he replied, but with some fervor, like he spat the word.
"Aurelio Reyes González..." Pablo read the name slowly. "Su familia?"
"No," the stranger snapped. "Does it look like we would have been family?"
The man had gestured to his own face—puffed lids around light green eyes, a slight arch to an otherwise straight and square-tipped nose, pale skin dappled only on the forehead and over the bridge of said nose with freckles, hair a dark blonde with golden highlights. His tone again sounded disgusted or offended to be connected to the dead man in any way. Or perhaps it was simply because he had been forced to speak with such a lowly man.
Pablo ignored the insults he assumed the man was making. He reached out and brushed a layer of dust from the corner of the rectangular marker. The man lurched forward slightly as if Aurelio's marker belonged to him and Pablo had just moved to destroy it.
"Cálmate," Pablo cried with the sternness he would show to his own children when they were small. He chided the man for his defensiveness and launched into a scolding of the man's behavior. In simple terms, he told the white stranger to leave if he couldn't respect the dead or show respect in their resting place.
"Perdoni'm," the man said as he took a step back. He was still clearly annoyed and, despite his apology, was more interested in getting Pablo to shut his mouth and go away than in respecting anyone dead or alive. "Adéu."
The man backed away, nearly toppling a grave marker behind him that was hardly secure after eight decades in the ground, and strode through the gates and out to the yellow car. Just as Pablo had suspected, the engine barked and screamed as it started and continued as the man drove away with moderate difficulty.
"Gringo," Pablo said to himself once the car was out of sight. He still stood next to Aurelio's marker and he found himself tracing over the lines that made up the details of the man's life. His marker was special, well-made, and spoke of his only contributions to life—his wife, his children, and his art. Putting the encounter with the stranger away in the back of his mind, Pablo shuffled back to María's stone so he could continue his work.
Pablo found María's crumbling marker completely destroyed two days later when he made his next visit. Devastated, Pablo noticed immediately afterward that Aurelio's grave, too, had been desecrated, the earth completely pulled up to reveal the dust and bones that lay below it. Aurelio's remains had been shifted inside the rotten casket and the remnants of the clothes in which he was buried had been ripped apart. Clearly, when the grave robber—although Pablo struggled to call him that, since there was nothing in any of these graves to steal—had left, finding nothing, he'd destroyed María's stone out of spite. No other graves were touched and no other stones were harmed. Pablo did not have to think very hard to imagine who might have done such disrespectful horrors. The devil-man in white was lurking about the town somewhere, and Pablo was sure that if the dead the man had wronged did not take their revenge, Death himself was hot on the man's trail.