Grave Goods
In the years just prior to World War II, young Gus Kenny was studying philosophy at the University of California. He did not fare well in this department ruled by analytical philosophers, for he dearly loved to talk of the marvelous. In essays submitted to his professors, he found it pleasant to play poetically with the thoughts of the ancients. His mind moved in ways like the fogs that billowed in from the Golden Gate, shrouding the university in cold gray obscurity. Unfortunately, then as now, this style of thinking is not much encouraged around university campuses.
Gus Kenny by temperament was one of those people who believe everything is connected to everything else—yet he had a hard time demonstrating this to others, at least in a convincing fashion. In his investigations into the nature of things, he supplemented what he gathered from his five senses with wayward notions picked up from old books and the discourses of dead philosophers who came to visit him in dreams. He obtained some peculiar insights in this way, but most were lost. For instance, one night Charles Darwin showed up and presented him with a complete accounting for the mechanism behind natural selection. Evolutionary biologists would have regarded this bit of information as quite a boon, but the dreaming Gus Kenny never got an adequate handle on this or any other ghostly wisdom. When he awoke, the whole thing dissolved faster than autumn frost in morning sun.
For a couple years, the Philosophy Department suffered the irregular Gus Kenny, much as the village does its fool. It came to an abrupt end when he submitted his senior thesis. He was supposed to write a critical assessment of the philosophy of Nechepso-Petosiris; instead he turned in a speculative reconstruction of the first map ever made by an ancient Greek to cover the entire known world. The original was drawn over twenty-five hundred years ago by Anaximander, but nobody has seen it since. We only know about it because subsequent Greek writers made so much fun of it. “I laugh,” writes one of them, “when I consider that many have drawn maps of the world, but no one has ever set it out in a reasonable manner.” When Anaximander himself showed up one night in a dream to present Gus Kenny with the map, the old guy was still pretty bitter about the treatment he had received. Too bad for Gus Kenny his own efforts fared no better in the hands of critics.
A map? His professors demanded to know how this should count as philosophy. They were already in the habit of dismissing anything that didn’t sound like Bertrand Russell, so from where they stood, Gus Kenny’s project made no sense. For his part, the young scholar tried to get the professors to see the practical applications of his work. He explained that Anaximander was renowned for his ability to predict earthquakes, and this, according to Gus Kenny, had something to do with the map. It was a handy bit of lore, fanciful in its elegance. If nothing else such a map might have some use value, at least here in California.
Ah, but this was a university. Clarity was the only achievement these professors prized. They likened it unto a rare plant that grew only on the slopes of some faraway mountain, say Tamalpais across the bay. A life spent in diligent bushwhack up those steep slopes through impenetrable thickets of chaparral and hidden dens of snakes was hardly sufficient to catch even a glimpse of it. Granted, such methods seldom reveal a truth, but they do flush out gaunt syllogisms and tone the mind, which is all that counts. Oddly, none of these professors had ever actually been to Mount Tamalpais. No problem—when the weather was good they could see it from their office windows, so they felt comfortable using this metaphor.
After giving due consideration to the map, the professors warned Gus Kenny to give up philosophy. One of them described his thinking as “weedy.” Another said it was “unbounded nonsense.” Still another complained that this student had always been a lost cause, only now he has drawn a map to lead others astray. In the end, the professors rejected both map and Gus Kenny—they banished him from the groves of academe, or more precisely from the eucalyptus groves there at the foot of the Berkeley hills.
Committed nevertheless to his calling, Gus Kenny took his map and left the university, setting out in his solitary way to investigate philosophy. “Buddha, Socrates, and Christ,” he reckoned, “when it comes to wisdom, the best stuff is from freelancers.”
The world now lay before him, but he needed a job. He looked around for something that would pay the rent yet admit time to pursue his studies. As luck would have it, he found the perfect gig: a night watchman job across the bay in San Francisco.
* * *
In its day, Laurel Hill Cemetery was San Francisco’s most prestigious burial ground. Along with the Masonic, Odd Fellows, and Calvary Cemeteries, it was part of a huge graveyard complex, locally referred to as the “Big Four.” They spread around the base of Lone Mountain, like the severed arms of a stony-lonesome starfish cast up on a coastal hill. As the city swelled, its graveyard population grew apace, but over the course of time these melancholy neighborhoods suffered a decline in attention as vital interests moved elsewhere.
By the turn of the century, urban growth had transformed the graveyards into the geographical heart of San Francisco, a development municipal planners found worrisome. One of them publicly lamented the city was being “split in two by this death-dealing cemetery ridge, where every wind that blows carries anguish and desolation to some home.” Land brokers jealously eyed the seventy square blocks of prime real estate now occupied by the dead, so in 1901 the city outlawed burials and the sale of cemetery plots within its boundaries. After that, the graveyards just went to hell.
Nevertheless the Lone Mountain graveyards blossomed in the wake of human neglect. From the untended graves and rogue outcrops of serpentine, native vegetation burst forth in an effusion of grassland and soft chaparral. Beds of poppies, lupines, and buttercups sprung up across the abandoned acres, spreading far and wide a living light like the sunset sky. It was ideal habitat for bees, songbirds, and covert sweethearts. Even the tombstones went feral, taking cover among the rank growth along with all the other wildlife. Although in effect they constituted a vast city of the dead, these graveyards became—as far as plants and lovers were concerned—the last refuge of pristine California on the San Francisco Peninsula.
Yet things wouldn’t remain this way. Over the course of its history San Francisco, ever boastful of its lifestyle, has never been cordial toward death and its precincts. By the time of the Gold Rush, the city’s oldest burial ground—Mission Dolores—had already become a horrid block of unmade beds for the dead. The deceased, if they received any postmortem care at all, were placed in shallow sandy graves soon disclosed by wind. More often, the corpses were just tossed into the graveyard enclosure without ceremony, usually at night. A putrid stench gripped the neighborhood at all times, and citizens avoided passing anywhere near the place. People seen in the vicinity were presumed ghouls. Turkey vultures cut endless circles in the sky, and sheep grazed heedlessly across the grounds, nibbling on tufts of grass that popped up like blessed isles in a sea of old bones.
At the outskirts of town, unsanctioned burial grounds proliferated faster than fast food strips do today, but the city soon extended beyond even these far flung boneyards. Commercial factions started demanding their removal. On February 7, 1853, the Daily Alta California ran a grisly story about a botched effort to relocate bodies from an informal North Beach graveyard to the new and “official” Yerba Buena Cemetery. The article reported that “the dead were disinterred without much regard, then pitched into heaps by the roadside, thence shoveled into carts and driven off. The coffins that were much decayed were burnt, but the sound ones sold for firewood.” The new Yerba Buena Cemetery quickly reached capacity and was closed in 1861. The bodies once again were dug up, then relocated to Golden Gate Cemetery, which in turn filled to overflowing and was shut down in 1909. This time they didn’t bother removing the bodies, only the tombstones. Today, at the Lincoln Park Golf Course on Legion of Honor Drive, you can tee off and play eighteen holes on top of all those forgotten California pioneers.
Every once in a while, however, they do come back to stir our memory. As in 1993, when, during a seismic retrofit of the Palace of the Legion of Honor, a few hundred of them were unearthed, a good many still wearing their vintage Levis. This unexpected resurrection generated excitement among a few archaeologists and historians, but it frustrated those who had bills to pay. The museum, for one, was obliged to cover steep surcharges for the delays caused by the discovery. “I suppose it’s interesting,” remarked one of its officials wearily, “but it’s not exactly King Tut’s tomb.” On the other hand, genealogists of all kinds began making frantic inquiries. The manager of the firm handling the excavation grumbled, “We get imploring letters and faxes every day from people wondering if we’d found their great-grandfathers.” With all the moving around that goes on in the City by the Bay, it’s sometimes difficult to distinguish the living from the dead. And as far as family trees go, you will sooner find your ancestors in heaven than anywhere in the San Francisco earth.
One by one, each graveyard in the city was excavated, evacuated, bulldozed, and built over. By World War I, only the “Big Four” remained, and these had reverted to an eerie pre-human landscape. To developers this represented a dark hole of wilderness in the otherwise bright urban universe. Coyote brush, coastal sage, and poison oak now choked the gravel paths. Over the course of time, tombstones had been toppled by earthquakes and vandals. Statuary, such as brooding angels and mournful Madonnas, had become bedraggled and weather-worn, their broken off wings, arms, and legs strewn among wooly thickets a-buzz with bees and cicadas. It was as though, in the presence of unruly nature, all human notions of death had dropped to the ground of exhaustion. Real estate agents and investors were appalled that Lone Mountain had been left to lie such a waste. Something had to be done.
In California, where not even death and taxes are certain, the only thing to count on is development. Thus it surprised no one when in 1914 Mayor “Sunny” Jim Rolph, Jr. signed an ordinance to rid San Francisco of its remaining graveyards. He nevertheless offered a few words of explanation for what was about to happen. “No feeling is more honorable or creditable than respect for the dead,” he intoned, “but the duty of government is more to the living than to the dead. We must provide for the expansion of our city. It must be a city of homes and not tombs.”
He failed to anticipate just how difficult the dead can be to move. Public outcry over disturbing some of the city’s most illustrious citizens from their eternal rest delayed relocation efforts for more than a quarter century. By the time the last of the bodies were evicted from their mournful tenements around Lone Mountain, the mayor himself had joined their company. Even so, the “Big Four” were finally erased, first from city supervisors’ maps, then from the landscape itself. Laurel Hill Cemetery was the last to go.
* * *
The Laurel Hill Cemetery Removal Project got underway on the morning of February 26, 1940. Later that day, just as the sun was going down, Gus Kenny entered the graveyard through an old graystone gate on California Street and walked up along a narrow twisting lane toward an old graystone chapel. The cemetery grounds sloped upward in a dismal chaos of tombstones, obelisks, and vandalized vaults. Near the old chapel was a distinctive serpentine outcrop crowned with a thick and low-lying mat of shrubby vegetation, its spindly brown-red branches and narrow gray-green leaves flopping down in masses over the sides of the chrome-gray rock.
In the gloomy distance, Gus Kenny could see ancient cypress trees spreading their arms over disheveled graves and weary cemetery workers—day-laborers, whose grim forms might easily have been taken for shades amid the deep cypress shade now handing over the hours to the still deeper shades of night. Just then, the five visible planets appeared together above the western horizon, hustling after the sun like some celestial clean-up crew.
As night watchman for the Laurel Hill Cemetery Removal Project, Gus Kenny took up his post in the old graystone chapel. The atmosphere was dank and musty. The pews and altar had long since been stripped out and hauled away. There was no electricity, no phone, no running water, and the roof leaked. The only furnishings were a rickety chair and a makeshift desk of old pine planks laid across a couple of wobbly sawhorses. An old kerosene lamp on the desk huffed out what light it could, along with dark clouds of smoke.
Gus Kenny had brought along a lunchbox and his big book of Plato. Wearing a freshly pressed watchman’s uniform, he sat down in the rickety chair at the pine-plank desk and began to fathom philosophy. All night long, while moths rattled at the dingy lamp, something could be heard scuttling around in the cellar below, something else fluttering in the rafters above. The next day, Gus Kenny brought the map given by Anaximander in a dream. He hung it up on the bare wall above the desk. Now his office was complete.
The night watchman was expected to guard against vandalism and malicious mischief. Over the years, Laurel Hill Cemetery had become a haven for grave robbers, pranksters, and horny teenagers. On foggy, moonless nights, shadowy apparitions could be seen flitting into and out of the decrepit mausoleums. From time to time, ominous clanks and moans resounded across the grim expanse of the graveyard. Such racket usually meant the gates of hell had been flung open; either that or some sledge-swinging ghoul was at it again, looting vaults for gold teeth, silver coffin handles, and bronze mortuary urns. Likewise, when mysterious flames leaped up on the dark ridgeline, it was either witches holding a black mass, or the local high school students having another bonfire rally, feeding the blaze with old fence stakes pulled from grave borders.
Gus Kenny didn’t bother to investigate any of these ordinary commotions. Not that he feared ghosts or ghouls, witches or jocks, but he was loath to abandon his studies. Every once in a while, he just stepped outside the door to perform a cursory inspection, as much to clear his lungs as to take a look. Nearby was an old crypt, nearly collapsed upon itself but still attended by a tottering piece of statuary, a nearly fallen guardian angel. This, he was told, had been the tomb of a famous nineteenth-century poet, but San Francisco’s drastic graveyard ordinances so scared the family they had the body removed and cremated. The ashes were carried away to a safe and secret place, long since forgotten. The poet’s name went there too.
Days and months passed. As more and more of the dead were grubbed out of Laurel Hill, Gus Kenny pursued his studies for the most part undisturbed. During the day, while he was sleeping in his rented room in the Sunset District, gangs of day-laborers were fencing off sections of the old graveyard, digging up bodies, putting them in pine boxes, and shipping them out in trucks to Colma, south of the city, where they would eventually be reinterred in new earth.
Often the day-laborers ran out of light and would have to leave a stack of loaded pine boxes just outside the chapel door. At first, Gus Kenny resented this intrusion, but after a while grew fond of his moldering visitors. He found them companionable enough, and soon came to refer to them as his “darlings of the dirt.” Propriety, however, kept him from delving too deeply into the dark privacy of their domain.
If he harbored any doubts about the unlikely place he was now seeking wisdom, they were laid to rest when he came across this passage in Plato’s Phaedo: “Ordinary people are not likely to be aware that those who pursue philosophy aright study nothing but dying and being dead.” After reading these words, Gus Kenny stood up from the rickety chair, walked to the chapel door, opened it, and looked out. The fog that night was so thick he couldn’t see a thing. Ah, but his heart—perhaps it was due to all those rumpled graves out there—his heart was gripped by a certainty that shivered him all to pieces.
That’s when it occurred to this college dropout, this reject from the philosophy department at the University of California—that the City of San Francisco, with all its ordinances against the dead, with all its haste to subdivide, multiply, and hide the truth, was in effect banning philosophy. How can you study and practice something that’s kept hidden from you?
He went back into the graystone chapel and resumed his work, plunging ever deeper into the big book of Plato. Every now and then, he looked up through the lamp smoke at the outlandish map. Such was his routine, more or less, every night for the next sixteen months, which is how long it took the day-laborers to remove the 38,000 bodies that lay in Laurel Hill.
* * *
1940 passed in due course. For most of his time on the job, Gus Kenny didn’t see a soul, but that didn’t mean they weren’t out there. One night shortly before the removal project got underway, a local biology teacher was caught in Laurel Hill with a gunnysack full of skulls. He said he wanted to stock the specimen cabinet in his classroom and put on a good display for the students. The idea had come to him a few days earlier while talking to a friend who regularly botanized in the graveyard.
“There’s so much good stuff out here,” he tried to explain to the authorities, “you can’t just let it go to waste.” They relieved him of his booty and let him off, but this kind of thing had to stop. That’s when they decided they needed a night watchman.
Not long into the job, Gus Kenny was visited by the day watchman, a sluggish old man with skinny hands and oxidized complexion. His name was Pickthorn. Gus Kenny had been warned about him. Pickthorn was one of those old-timers whose memory had become a potter’s field. Nothing gave him greater pleasure than to dig around there, preferably in front of a witness or two. Gus Kenny had some familiarity with this type of person, and he knew that reckless exhumation of one’s psyche wasn’t simply the mark of a dotard. He had friends his own age over in Berkeley who did the exact same thing; they called themselves artists.
That evening when Pickthorn appeared in the chapel, Gus Kenny looked up from his big book of Plato and saw this strange man’s eyes glittering with intention. He knew what was about to happen—everything would go Ancient Mariner or maybe Flying Dutchman—so he just closed the big book with a sigh. “What brings you here at night, Pickthorn?”
The old man sat himself down on a stack of old boards and launched into a monologue. He didn’t so much speak as pant out his words, a sour ghost hitched to every breath. It was the story of his life. The edited version goes something like this.
For more than sixty years Pickthorn had served as caretaker for the Laurel Hill Cemetery, the only job he had ever had. He would have stuck with it till the end, if the removal project hadn’t forced his retrenchment. The planners felt bad about this, so they hired him on as day watchman. Small compensation, though, since the days on this job were numbered—when the bodies ran out in Laurel Hill, so would Pickthorn’s luck.
Not a lot happens in the life of a graveyard caretaker. The same is true for most people. What does occur is neither interesting nor dull, save for in the telling. In accounting for himself, Pickthorn employed an abundance of wayward maxims: “A dead bee makes no honey.” “Read a book, find a ghost; read a tombstone, lose your memory.” “Where the Devil won’t go, he sends in his grandmother.” He intended these adages not as moral reflections but as histories of actual events he had participated in. It was as if the story of his life had been loaded into old boxcars of folk wisdom and superstition, then strung together into a phantom train and hauled down the tracks by an engine losing steam. Now poor Gus Kenny was caught at an isolated railroad crossing; all he could do was watch in quiet exasperation as the slow freight rolled by, no end in sight.
He worried that Pickthorn’s presence in the chapel that evening was just the shadow of bleaker things to come—such as the old man showing up every night to disburden himself of his life’s details. But as it turned out, Pickthorn did get everything off his chest—or at least as much as he needed to—because after taking his leave, sometime well after midnight, he went home to his caretaker’s cottage at the far edge of Laurel Hill and quietly passed away in his sleep. The project supervisor stopped by the next night to give Gus Kenny the news.
“I pity those poor stiffs,” the supervisor said, gesturing with his thumb toward the gouged out graveyard. “Pickthorn’s with them now. He had no family, so we took him down to Colma along with everybody else.” These tidings gave Gus Kenny an unexpected chill. When the supervisor left, the young scholar returned to his big book of Plato with renewed attention. Months passed without further interruption.
Yet by the end of August, his studies had not yielded the philosophical riches he had hoped. At that point, he was deep into Plato’s dialogue called the Ion, all about the nature of poetry and its relation to knowledge. The piles of notes he had heaped up around his desk left him feeling at a loss. Compared to the work already accomplished by the day-laborers, who in six months had made a significant dent—indeed, ten thousand of them—in Laurel Hill, Gus Kenny’s progress in philosophy was paltry. Besides, all that tossing of cemetery earth had laid a pall of unwholesome staleness over the place. He tried not to breathe too deeply, but it left him feeling drowsy; he often dozed off now while reading, his head pillowed on the big book of Plato.
Most disappointing, though, was his languishing relationship to the other dead philosophers—they had stopped paying him visits in dreams. He worried they were jealous of the time he was devoting exclusively to Plato. On the other hand, he sometimes was able to find a way through sleep into the aviary of his own mind, where he watched delightful notions, swift and rare and lovely of wing, catching fire as they shot across the ceiling of heaven. In such moments, at least, Gus Kenny was truly a philosopher! But inevitably, upon rousing in the dim and smoky chapel, with a crick in his neck and his big book damp from drool, he was galled by the realization that the magnificent ideas flashing across the firmament of his dreams were, in waking life, no more distinguished than starlings around a block of suet. He needed a new approach.
Swearing off amateur bird watching, he pledged himself to some rigorous ornithology. He laid aside the big book of Plato and turned to Aristotle’s Rhetoric, only to discover—to his great dismay—Plato’s most able student was adamant in demanding clarity, not wisdom, as the goal of philosophy; and worse, that the principal care of the philosopher was not for the soul but to avoid ambiguity at all costs. One passage was particularly troublesome. After urging his readers to adopt a transparent style of expression, Aristotle concludes: “Unless, indeed, you definitely desire to be ambiguous, as do those who really have nothing to say but pretend to mean something. Such people are apt to put these things into verse.”
It was clear to Gus Kenny: Aristotle was the John J. Audubon of the mind, blasting exotic birds out of the sky in order to paint pictures of them more pleasing than anything actually found in the field. Something about it reminded him of his old professors back at Cal, who treated philosophy as if it were a cemetery removal project, and truth just one more Laurel Hill.
For a long time Gus Kenny stared down at the piles of notes around his desk, then, as if possessed by a mighty spirit, gathered up the papers, took them outside, and—with the tottering guardian angel looking on—deposited the whole lot in the vacant tomb of the unknown poet, just as the morning star made its appearance. That done, he returned to the graystone chapel for one last activity before ending his shift that night—he composed a poem.
It was the first of a series that in later years enjoyed some minor influence on the San Francisco poetry scene:
Black is some distraction
as when day
bends over
white is reduced
to a chute of stars
on a moonless
summer night
Venus in a leotard
Pleased with this, his inaugural effort in verse, Gus Kenny hung it up on the wall next to the map. Many more such lyrics would follow before the removal work was finished.
Near the end of October, the supervisor warned Gus Kenny to keep an especially close eye on the grounds. In previous years, problems arose when whole skeletons were disinterred and carried off for use as Halloween decorations. It was shocking. For days afterwards, household dogs could be seen trotting around the adjoining neighborhoods with unspeakable treasures clamped between their jaws.
Gus Kenny swore his vigilance, but still dozed off, as always, for long stretches at a time, dreaming his book-induced dreams. Fortunately for all concerned, the night itself came to his aid—shortly after sunset, Saturn and Jupiter rose up over the eastern horizon like the orbs of some bug-eyed warden. Thus while Gus Kenny dropped off from his watch into sleep, an inescapable surveillance was nonetheless maintained over the living and remaining dead in Laurel Hill.
* * *
Near the one year anniversary of his taking the watchman’s job, Gus Kenny was studying philosophy in the usual way—chasing it in his dreams—when a loud knock on the chapel door startled him awake. It was after midnight. The last person to visit him on the job was Pickthorn, so it was without enthusiasm that Gus Kenny—smoke-huffing lamp in hand—went and opened the door. An old woman was standing there, holding a shovel and a gunnysack. Gus Kenny didn’t like the look of this.
The old woman suddenly began to cough and took an abrupt step back, raising a gloved hand to cover her mouth and nose.
“Young man,” he heard her say through a garden glove, “what is it you do in there?”
“Philosophy. I study philosophy. I used to go to Cal but—“
“Philosophy!” she exclaimed, dropping the hand from her face, “I thought you might have been the watchman. Well then, you won’t mind coming out into the fresh air on this fine clear night to help me with a small project.”
“Forget it, lady. I won’t stop you from playing the ghoul, but you’re on your own.” Gus Kenny was having a difficult time imagining what was left to rip off from Laurel Hill.
“A ghoul! Is that what you take me for? Listen up, young man, I’m not one of those better businessmen plundering Laurel Hill. Far be it from me to disturb the dead. I’m here to rescue a special plant—that one over there.” She pointed toward the nearby hillside with its distinctive outcrop of serpentine. “Nobody will mind or even notice if I remove it. I’m going to transplant it. Now, come assist me—it won’t take long. The moon is bright and full, so please leave behind that horrid lamp. Since you are a philosopher, you can share with me with some of your sayings.”
She was already turned and walking away by the time Gus Kenny had figured out that he had no “sayings,” unless he counted those of Pickthorn. Indeed, nobody had ever asked him for this kind of thing before. Perhaps the old woman was right. A philosopher—a genuine philosopher anyway—ought to have his sayings, his little nuggets of wisdom to offer the general public. Otherwise what use is he?
Meanwhile the old woman had reached the spot where the serpentine cropped out. By the light of the moon, Gus Kenny could see her lay aside the shovel and gunnysack, get down on hands and knees, and begin to inspect the tangled mat of vegetation that crowned the gray-chrome rock.
“Is that what you’re here for?” he called over to her, “That ratty little bush? What are you, a gardener or something?”
She ignored him and continued her inspection. Then she stood up, took hold of the shovel, and began to dig.
Against his better judgment, Gus Kenny went over to investigate this matter more closely. He stood near enough to observe the old woman lifting small spadefuls of soil from around the shrub, but offered no assistance. He was still ruminating on his lack of sayings. Suddenly the old woman scolded him.
“Don’t be afraid of it, young man, it’s only a manzanita. Arctostaphylos fransiscana. Long ago it grew all over San Francisco on outcrops like this, but all those places have been built over. For the last fifty years, the only sites left to this poor species have been in the cemeteries around Lone Mountain. Now those too are gone. This particular shrub is the last one remaining in the wild. Nobody else seems to care about it, so I’m going to take it where it will suffer no harm.”
“Where’s that?” Gus Kenny asked.
The old woman again ignored him, and resumed her gentle work of shoveling the thin and stony earth from around the base of the plant, until its roots were fully exposed. The moonlight imbued the gray-chrome leaves and spindly red-brown branches with an eerie significance. It looked like the wedding veil for some wraith.
“Alright, young man, now I require your assistance. If you would be so kind as to dislodge this shrub for me. I’m afraid I just don’t have that kind of strength anymore.”
To his own surprise, Gus Kenny complied. He squatted down, reached his hands under the branches, and wrapped them around the base of the shrub. Then he gave a stiff tug and it all came loose with a sound something like a hundred mouse tails being snapped off all at once. As he stood up with the tangled mat in his arms, he felt—just for a moment—as if he were in possession of some long lost shibboleth or magic word, its ancient meaning still clinging to the roots, along with clumps of fusty soil.
“Please place the franciscana in here.”
She was holding open the gunnysack. Gus Kenny slipped the spindly shrub into it like a letter into its envelope.
At that very moment, a harrowing moan went up from one of the nearby mausoleums, followed by an exhilarated teenager’s voice bouncing around among the tombstones: “Rock-a-bye baby, oh baby!”
Gus Kenny gave the old woman a sheepish look. “I suppose I should go break that up. It’s my job.”
“Young man, I thought you said you were a philosopher.”
“I am. What do you mean?”
“Look around this place. Do you think all those monuments out there are for the dead? That all the tears ever spilled around these graves were for them? No, these markers are for the tens of thousands of forgotten nights of passion that incarnated all those souls in the first place. Each tombstone is an altar to lovemaking—and that’s why the youngsters are drawn here. Graveyards are the temples of Aphrodite. Philosophers and their stern ways don’t belong here.”
With that, she hustled off down the lane toward the graystone gate, shovel in one hand, swelling gunnysack in the other, leaving behind a bewildered Gus Kenny, standing under a full moon in the not quite vacant graveyard.
Just before she slipped from sight, the old woman turned and called back: “Thank you for your help.” He gave her an uncertain wave, then she was gone.
Gus Kenny decided not to look into anything else going on in Laurel Hill that night. Instead, he returned to the graystone chapel, wrote another poem, and hung it up among all the others around the map on the wall. Then he resumed where he had left off in the big book of Plato. Soon he was back chasing philosophy in the usual way, dreaming by smoky lamp light in an old graveyard as it was passing away.
* * *
Four months later, the Laurel Hill Cemetery Removal Project came to a close. A few nights before his last scheduled duty as watchman, Gus Kenny fell asleep over the final pages of Plato’s Republic and found himself in a dream-landscape Laurel Hill that stretched out to cover the entire city of San Francisco. In fact, there was no city, only a dimly lit expanse of peninsula honeycombed with desolation—no trees, no shrubs, no vegetation of any kind, just open empty graves and sterile earth and old bones strewn everywhere. What little light there was appeared green and seemed to leak from deep within the graves themselves, oozing forth like pus from sores—a land so damned even the dead shunned it.
From atop Laurel Hill, a California golden bear suddenly emerged from one of the open graves. It was wearing a necklace of acorns. The golden bear began to walk down the wasted slope toward the vacant tomb of the unknown poet, where it stopped for a moment and seemed to look right at the dreaming Gus Kenny, who was standing in front of the graystone chapel. The golden bear then slipped through a dark opening in the shattered stone on the side of the crypt, disappearing from sight.
Acting in that foolish way of dreams and bad horror movies, Gus Kenny decided to check it out. He walked over to the crypt and stuck his head through the same dark opening. Inside he saw the golden bear lying on the spoiled earth of the tomb, holding between her huge paws a strange, shapeless bundle. She was gently licking away at it, each lap of her tongue adding a measure of form, until at last a tiny golden cub came into being. The little bear then turned its head toward Gus Kenny, smiled, and said: “Philosophy buries its undertakers.”
The golden cub then burst into a glorious light and the whole fiery swirl shot right through Gus Kenny’s eyes and out the back of his dreaming head, to assume its rightful place high in the twinkling night sky. Thus the young scholar was awakened from his dream, the last—so far anybody knows—ever to be had in a San Francisco graveyard.
When he walked out the door of the chapel to clear his head, there was Arcturus burning bright above the western horizon. He took it as an omen.
Only a few days remained on this watchman job, but Gus Kenny knew his time was already up, his work here done. He went back inside the graystone chapel, took down his map and poems, gathered up the big book of Plato, and headed out for the last time. He paid a final visit to the tomb of the unknown poet, cast a glance toward the now bare serpentine outcrop, then walked down along the narrow twisting lane toward the graystone gate, and passed through it out onto California Street and into the rest of his life.
For the time being, a ransacked Laurel Hill was left to lie at the very heart of San Francisco, like some forgotten epic poem on the nature of things. Before the bulldozers appeared to clear the way for real estate development, a world war intervened. Yet by the end of the decade a bright new neighborhood of homes appeared where once stood only tombs. Gus Kenny, however, never saw any of this. He had gone off to the war and did not return.
Postscript
It’s funny how a tale such as Gus Kenny’s gets saved from the graveyard of history. Had it not been for Dirk Grattan, all of it would have been lost.
Grattan was one of those lesser-known figures from the 1950s poetry scene in San Francisco, known for publishing a little literary magazine called Shouldered Oar. Some years back while doing research on the writer Kenneth Rexroth, I came across a collection of Grattan’s papers in a library. Other than a few items gleaned from old newspapers, everything I know about Gus Kenny must be credited to Grattan’s painstaking investigation and laudable interpolations. After all, he was the one who, when just a teenager, happened upon a cache of Gus Kenny’s poems in—of all places—an old crypt nearly collapsed upon itself in the soon-to-be-obliterated Laurel Hill Cemetery. That was during the war years in the early forties.
“Reading those poems is what really turned me on to poetry,” he reminisced in a piece that appeared in Shouldered Oar. This essay coincided with the 1955 publication of Gus Kenny’s collected poems, a slim volume entitled Grave Goods. Along with the poems, Grattan discovered “this strange map that made no sense.” The story behind that didn’t come to light until years later, when Grattan ran into some drunk in a bar who claimed he used to be a philosophy professor and knew all about the map. As a literary historian myself, I admit all this sounds rather dubious. It certainly would be helpful if the map itself were available, but unfortunately it is nowhere to be found among the Grattan papers. When I asked the librarians about it, none of them knew anything.
On the positive side, the papers do provide a convincing account of how Dirk Grattan was able to track down some of the men with whom Gus Kenny served on the front over in Europe. They all spoke fondly of this man they called “The Philosopher.” He shared with them his sayings, most of which he attributed to a mysterious figure known only as Pickthorn. The veterans recalled that during the particularly cold winter of 1944-45, young Gus Kenny helped keep their spirits up, in a most unusual way. He had brought along with him a big book from which he read aloud to them on those long cold nights. When he finished a page, he would carefully tear it from the book and lay it on a small fire around which they all huddled to keep warm. This little ritual greatly pleased the shivering men, as much in body as in soul, so when Gus Kenny went missing in action, his loss was deeply felt.
It’s not surprising that a story such as his, and the poems written by this unusual man, should generate a literary stir when it all finally surfaced. Yet by the 1960s interest in him had already waned, and today few people even know his name. You can still obtain a copy of his collected poems if you look around hard enough in used bookstores, but regrettably they weren’t printed on high quality paper, so it’s rare to find one that doesn’t crumble in your hands when you open it.
From what I have been able to learn, once upon a time there was a place where the general public could go to read one of Gus Kenny’s poems. During the late fifties, Dirk Grattan raised money to inscribe one on a brass plaque and install it on a retaining wall in the new Laurel Hill Playground, close to the spot where—so far as he could recollect—the old crypt had stood where he found the cache of poems.
Last year I went to visit that playground, hoping to see the plaque for myself, but I was unable to locate it. Asking around, I finally found an older resident who told me the plaque had disappeared some years ago.
“There was a poem on it,” he recalled, and he knew it by heart. To the best of his memory, it went something like this:
Under a crumbling
Quietly passing moon,
My life is ending,
My funeral is over—
I become one with you.
___________________________________________________
©John P. O’Grady
This story originally appeared in Grave Goods: Essays of a Peculiar Nature by John P. O’Grady (University of Utah Press, 2001)
