A Strange Kind of Hunger | FIRST DRAFT

The Gravedigger's Son

Dr. Jonathan Deere is not a small-town man. Born and raised in one, yes, but separated completely from the comfortable placidity required to live in one. The townsfolk of Hermansville, Wisconsin all have varying theories as to why this was. He had been dropped as a child, the worried mothers say; he is the devil's own bitch, grumbles the pastor, noticing once more an empty seat in the Deere family pew. A New York education filled his head with empty ideas, the fathers trying desperately to clip their sons' wings plead; it seems everyone had their own opinion. A few might have been close to the truth, if Jonathan himself could parse out what really was the truth from his tangled desires. What he concludes, is that the truth is death.

In January, 1853, he witnessed his first death in a professional capacity. The woman was old, she had been ill for some time — no-one doubted or debated the fact that her time was about to come. Creeping into the house that day, Jonathan was merely there to provide her with laudanum and make sure her exit proceeded as it should. Still, the haggard face left a lasting mark on him, imprinted on his mind if not his very flesh. Once it was over - and it was over in a heartbeat, or rather, the lack of one - the family could grieve. They could close her eyes and never see their wild, straining look again; he wandered from the place like a ghost, scrubbing his eyes in something of a trance, scarcely feeling the cold.

That face stays with him when spring began to creep in, turning from thaw to tentative blooms. By now he has birthed stillborn twins, treated a small child who died of pneumonia, seen many more faces in death and on the brink. He puzzles out, then, why the face of a woman whose name he was never told or never cared to ask refuses to leave. She was his first, Jonathan supposes: the one to draw the curtain of separation between him and the rest of the town.

He begins to visit the graveyard some time in early June. What Wisconsin has, he refuses to call summer, but it allows enough flowers to grow that the woman's unnamed grave is never left bare. Breathing in the crisp, fresh air, he marvels at how content he feels, how alive. He watches the gravedigger's son read while perched on a headstone: an action the pastor deems deeply disrespectful, but seems almost reverent in its gentle, commonplace way.

Jesse Goodwin, the gravedigger's son, is the youngest of four children. His face is as fresh and pretty as a young woman's, all spun-sunlight eyes and strawberry-plump lips, framed by soft, gilded curls. It was his father's ambition that the young man should leave town and start a business of his own, but that hasn't come to fruition. Silver-souled Jesse, gentle-handed, sparrow-voiced Jesse is too precious to abandon to the cold, uncaring world. Treading lightly through the graveyard, he's as quiet as a corpse most days, yet never fails to steal Jonathan's breath away.

The weather has just begun to blossom into the apogee of its summer warmth when Jesse disappears - and so does the warm feeling in the pit of Jonathan's stomach that makes him feel like a human being again. At first he waits, stood like a moody guardian angel next to the headstone from which he has watched the other young man for months. Next he paces, feeling a keen sense of loss as if he is beside that first bedside all over again, about to be cut off from his fellow townsfolk. He can't bear it, the hole that seems to have been carved out in the world. It takes six days before he resolves to knock on the door of the gravedigger's house.

Staring down the door knocker, Jonathan swallows the knot of apprehension in his throat. He isn't scared. He isn't scared. Rationality dictates that the house is just a house, just a broad-stripped, slate-roofed structure like all the others in the town — yet he can't shake the feeling that the door is glaring at him with a hard, peeled-paint stare. Marshalling his thoughts and his courage, he knocks.

In the seconds between his three firm knocks echoing off the wood and the door opening, he remembers his mother telling him to fear houses of the dead. Perhaps, he thinks, when a hand turns the door handle and yanks it open, the reason he isn't afraid his because his mind, too, is a house of the dead.