Thicket

From the highest spot on the farm where my mother lives, you can look across the fields of fescue and soybeans to a stand of cedars that rise along the fence that marks the boundary of her property. In the shade of that thicket, among the briars and vines that grow there, stand the headstones of an old cemetery. It is a place where shadows thicken, a place where things that were long remembered have now been long forgotten. 

One of the oldest graves there belongs to a man named John Seymour, who, as his weathered headstone tells us, was born on December 19, 1799, in Halifax County, Virginia. Ninety-three years and one day later, on December 20, 1892, he died in Kentucky. The details of the long life he lived in between those dates are unknown. 

When I was in high school, my father made a point of taking me late in the day one cold December 20th, the anniversary of John Seymour’s death, to watch the sun’s orb sink into the hills perfectly in line with his gravestone. My father had noticed this phenomenon the year before, and the alignment, he speculated, was no accident.  

There’s an odd energy in that graveyard, something unresolved and residual. Under what might seem the constancy of the stillness in that place, just beneath the predictable patterns of wind and leaf fall and starlings chattering to their roosts at twilight, you sense disturbance, rupture. 

Many years later, when our children were young and we visited Kentucky for summer break and for the holidays, they liked to spend time in the old graveyard, just as I always did. 

One Christmas break, they came back to my parents’ house near dusk with what was clearly a filigreed iron handle from a nineteenth century coffin. They’d found it lying on the ground among the graves. My first guess was that groundhogs, burrowing in that area, had brought the old handle—and lord knows what else—back to the surface, back into the light. But could this theory be correct? How far down could a groundhog possibly dig?  

When I googled the question on my phone, the answer, highlighted in blue, read “no deeper than six feet.” 

Davis McCombs lives in Fayetteville, Arkansas. He is the recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. His latest book, Antenna: A Book of Haibun, is forthcoming from Tupelo Press in 2028.  

This essay is a Short Reads original.