From the Tales of Saint Anthony, the Johnny Holiday Mysteries
These short stories follow the lives of people who populate the fictional city of Saint Anthony (Minneapolis, Minnesota), and make their appearance in the first Johnny Holiday novel, The...
Mike Caldwell was old and tired, but he couldn't sleep.
He sat on his stool under the awning of the maintenance shed and watched the storm make a mess of Lakewood Cemetery where he worked as the groundskeeper and gravedigger.
There were limbs down and whole trees fallen over. At least one that he knew of had been struck by lightning; he had seen it burst into flame and had watched it light up the night with an eerie orange glow. He could smell the smoke and char of the burnt-greenwood even through the rain.
The winds had been strong, especially in the past hour, but now it was nearly midnight, and the worst seemed to be over. It was still raining, but soon he would be able to walk the grounds with his lantern and surveille the damage.
Mikey knew that there were a half dozen open graves that he would need to pump the water from before the funeral services that were scheduled for the next day. He was hoping their would not be too many obstructions on the grounds, regardless, he was eager to get a jump on the work that lay ahead.
The electricity had gone out around 9:00 pm, and he didn't expect it come back on anytime soon, so he got up and went to the kerosene stove, lit it and started a pot of water to boil, scooped some coffee grounds into the pot. Then he folded up the cot he had been trying to sleep on and neatened up the work space.
Mikey's hands were shaking as his long-gnarled fingers gripped the can and spoon, then he emptied the last drops of clear-corn-liquor out of a mason jar, into his tin cup. He went back to his stool and sipped the acrid moonshine as he waited for the water to boil.
He told himself that he needed the strong liquor to lubricate his limbs, and prepare him for the day ahead.
Mikey thought about his wife sleeping at his grandmother's rooming house south of the lake and west up-over the hills. He knew she wouldn't be thinking of him at all, unless it was to assume that he had gotten drunk, maybe got lost in a dice game and decided not to come home.
Not that he had a choice...his wife was a prurient woman and didn't want him around if he had been sipping.
Mikey slept in the shed on most, he knew better than to cross her; if he had gone home there would have been a fight.
He was out of the grounds after a little while, walking over the hills of the cemetery in his slick poncho, making mental notes of the work that would need to be done...there was plenty of it.
After a couple of hours he was coming back around to the shed when he saw something going on across the southside fence, over in the Bird Sanctuary.
There was a very large man, constructing what looked like a platform out in the cattail marsh.
He hadn't been there when Mikey started his walk, there was quite a bit of lumber in the platform. It was hard for Mikey to believe that he had hauled it all in by himself, and built the rig in such a short amount of time...but apparently he had.
Mikey stood beneath an old elm, doused his lantern and lit a Pall Mall. He took a swig from his flask and watched the man at work, who appeared to have hauled a body on top of the platform and was now performing some kind of ritual.
He thought there was a good story here, and he made the decision to call his friend at the newspaper, rather than report it to the police.
I might get a fin for the tip, he thought.
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