A Grove of Graves

Jake Taggart was eight years old and lonely. He was as lonely as a fish out in the ocean. As lonely as a star in the night sky. A lonely wee Scottish boy in this big city of Edinburgh. O he had his school and the other kids in the foster home. He had his Uncle Tam who gave him money for sweeties and gifts on his birthday and at Christmas. He had the Sensi at the karate club who always ruffled his hair and taught him little tricks from Jujitsu. But, he didn’t have a mum and dad, and this made him feel like a jigsaw puzzle with a big hole missing in the middle.

There was one place where he didn’t feel this loneliness, as if someone or something had plucked the awful sorrow straight out of him leaving him feeling light and filled with a strange relief and joy.

That place was the local graveyard.

Seafield graveyard has a tree-lined avenue running through its centre and in the summer months these trees are luscious and verdant and the sun sends beams through their branches to dapple the gravel pathway. The grave-stones, old and new, stand like sentries along its length.

‘Arthur Zebedee Brake’ died in in 1963 while only 48 yet his wife Jenny lived on another 40 years into the present century. Now here they were buried together. Jack liked the name Zebedee and wondered what the man had been like. Was he a sailor attached to the Leith docks, maybe? Jack had been told the story about scurvy and how it was in Leith that Rose’s lime cordial was invented which treated the disease. And what about Jenny, did she not find a replacement husband, or did she live the rest of her life as Arthur’s widow?

Jake was more interested in the lives of the dead than he was in the lives of the living. The dead were gentle somehow and couldn’t hurt him. He even resented other people coming into ‘his’ graveyard but accepted that they may well have more right to it, maybe having relatives buried here. He watched them. Saw how they tidied and fussed meticulously, not house-proud but grave-proud. Maybe they were making up for a lack of concern when the dead person was alive? As if somehow they had to wait until the loved one was dead before they could show tenderness.

“You spend too much time in that graveyard, wee Jake. It’s morbid!” This from his Uncle Tam who spent too much time in his favourite pubs up and around Leith Walk.

“Ye need to get yerself some pals that are among the living”

Jake dreaded being fostered again in case it took him far from this area. Although he cheered himself by knowing he’d find another graveyard. The dead were everywhere.