The Caretaker

The Caretaker

I watched the old man rake the leaves under the ancient oaks. He shaped the leaves into neat, tidy piles, then scooped them briskly into giant, green plastic bags. Then he moved to the following graveyard plot and did it again, and so on, as we moved up and down the rows in the cemetery.

“Do you ever talk to them?” I asked the old man

“Sometimes I do. Sometimes, I think that they hear me, but there are a lot of headstones in the cemetery, and some days, I forget.”

The old man moved slowly to the next plot. He moved that way, slow, not methodical, just slow, the result of bone, muscle, and nerve damage from a car wreck twenty-five years ago. He looked up at me while he scooped the last leaves on this plot into the plastic bag.

His face was oddly askew, one cheek depressed and the eye riding lower on that side. His eyebrow on that side swept up on the corner in a question of constant query. His nose was smashed flat and crooked. He turned from me and brushed a stray leaf from one of the three headstones there, one large and two small plain, grey granite stones noting the end of the names chiseled upon them. The stones remembered the names of a mother and two small children who had died in the same car wreck the old man had suffered.

“Do you know who they are?” I asked the old man as I pointed to the stones.

The old man looked confused for a moment, then realized the meaning of my question.

“No”, he shook his head, sadness on his destroyed face. “But I am drawn to these more than the others. Somehow, I think these might hear me more than the rest. Anyway, I do talk with them.”

He picked up all his tools, and I did the same. The sun and sundown orange clouds were dimming on the horizon. We stored our tools in the maintenance shed for the night.

“See you tomorrow?” he asked as he always did, perhaps thinking that I would somehow disappear, that he had imagined me. He had asked me the same question every night for five years. I figured it was just another effect of the brain damage he had sustained in the wreck.

“Of course,” I nodded my head to him. He smiled and walked with his hunched-over gait, dragging his damaged right leg as he left.

I looked around the cemetery, enthralled by the peace and serenity. Fall had slipped in, exploding in the color of leaves—reds, oranges, bright yellows, and browns—that would lay a new carpet to greet us tomorrow, and the ones still flickering on the trees would gleam in the morning sun.

These trees were old, stately, and tall, rising eighty feet or more, their limb tips scraping the sky. These were trees you could measure your life upon, custodians of the last few hundred years. I pictured the decades of funerals they had seen, the bereaved trailing the casket, then laid to rest, planted in the ground, topped with lettered granite remembrances.

Before I left, I stopped at the last three stone graves we had ministered to, cleaned for tomorrow, their names enshrined in a granite eternity. A mother and two children are taken too soon, but then, aren’t we all mostly taken too soon?

The darkness grew more profound, and I made my way home. I walked the mile to my apartment, trudged up the stairs, and waved hello to Mrs. Glenn, who was coming down. She was a nurse heading to her night shift at the hospital, and her husband worked the day shift at a local factory. With three children under six, they barely got by on their two modest incomes. They were good people, noble in their daily struggle to survive, and I greatly admired them. I was reminded of the old man’s family, now destroyed.

I turned my key and entered my apartment, turning on the light with an absent-minded flick of my right hand. In the glare, I looked around wistfully, wishing that someone had been waiting for me to come home.

My room was sparely furnished, more spartan than comfort. I have an old but reliable refrigerator with some fresh food. I don’t like wasted food and don’t buy anything that must be thrown away. Food is much like hopes and dreams; don’t let either wither away.

I ate, washed the dishes, and sat on my couch to read. I am not a fan of television. I like news, but I don’t like partisan news. When I watch, it is CNBC because money has no party, and the news is mostly true.

Tonight, I had trouble concentrating on my book, the words losing the battle with my distractions. I looked at my ancient wallpaper, peeling in wrinkled patches like an old man ages, easily torn and broken and hard to heal. I thought of the old caretaker. It had been many years; he had not healed and likely never would. I sighed, defeated by my distractions, and went to bed.

I had strange dreams. I dreamed I was in a world where I had the power to change anything I wanted to, but the changes would never last and would snap back worse than before I had changed it. I stopped changing people and events, ending up just watching events unfold to their endings, driven by each person's choices. I wondered if that was what God had done, set up the universe and rules, then left us to our own choices, accepting the joy or pain that came. That’s why he stayed out of it, as he could only make things worse. Did our prayers move the needle by themselves?

I awoke in a sweat, my heart pounding. I sat up. And drank some water from the glass beside my bed. Soon, my heart and sweat calmed, and I thought about the dream. Perhaps it held some insight. I had long held the belief that the purpose of our lives was to show us the results of our own choices and the impact of the choices of others. I decided that whether my dream was insight or just self-fulfillment, it did not matter. I still had to dress and go to work. So I did, leaving dream philosophy behind.

It was another beautiful, many-colored fall day. Overnight winds had shaken loose another shower of leaves, and a new carpet had been made. Small banks of violet clouds floated in the rising dawn. My limbs loosened as I walked quickly in the morning chill, and the sun started warming the air. The old man was already there, raking and sweeping leaves that had fallen overnight. I fell into our familiar pattern of several years now.

“Do you talk to them?” I asked him. The same question I had asked yesterday and every day since I had moved here to be with him. He did not remember. Even my last name escaped him.

“Yes, I do,” he said. “Mostly, I just do the talking, but sometimes I imagine them talking back, telling me the stories of their lives, so many stories that I can’t keep them straight. I know that is sad in its own way, but at least it keeps them new.” He smiled a rueful smile at me.” There are so many things that I wish I could remember.”

We worked the rest of the morning in silence. It was a comfortable silence, not filled with any pressure to end it. If we talked, we talked. Neither of us felt any need to change. I enjoyed my time with the old man. This was as close as I could get to having a father. I had grown up in foster homes for years. My family had been devastatingly broken by a freak and deadly car wreck. Mother and two children died. One child and a broken man remained.

We passed close to the three graves that we cleaned every day. They were especially dear to the old man, and to me as well. He paused in his work and looked at me, trying to dredge something up from his damaged brain. Perhaps today would be the day but he turned away to his work.

I sighed; perhaps tomorrow, I thought, perhaps tomorrow. I looked again at the three headstones, one big, two small and wiped some dirt that had collected. You see, they were my family too, mother and sisters. But I had lost more than them that day. My father no longer remembered me; his memory of me was lost in the brain damage. I lost my whole family.

I returned to raking the leaves. Perhaps tomorrow, perhaps tomorrow