The judge and I walked slowly down the slope between the headstones and the crosses. On one grave was a carved stone lamb, and a stray live one had lain down beside it. Milk-bottles blossoming with petunias and lard-pails filled with earth in which bloomed yellow nasturtiums made a brave display. Tall Lorraine crosses, with Portuguese names carved in the weathered wood, were lettered in red and gold. The wreaths were of beads, such as they use in the Western Islands, from which far lands the fishers had brought the customs of their forefathers. Many little mounds were enclosed with a low wooden fence, marked with a headboard at one end, as if an open-bottomed crib had been set down on the grass. Here and there an old musket stuck into the ground or a cheap flag, faded since last Decoration Day, showed that from this village, too, our country had taken toll in the fighting of its wars. Some of the soldiers’ graves were dated 1777.
At one side of the hill, where the grass dwindled away into the encroaching sand, was a sort of potters’ field, with unpainted pine crosses of uniform size. Thinking that perhaps it was a military section, I bent down and read the names.
David Lester, Lost at sea, 1856.... Jo Lippa, aged 19. Lost on the Veronica, off the Great Banks, 1890.... Capt. Miles Longsworth, 1790-1830. Drowned with six of his crew on an Iceland Voyage.... Samuel Polk, 1880-1915. Lost at Sea.
A group of them would bear the same dates, as if half a dozen had been drowned in the same disaster.
“What does it mean?” I asked.
“They are all sailors,” replied the judge, gravely, “who were lost at sea. When their bodies are not recovered, their families feel better if they can give them a grave with the others on the hill. Sometimes we have the funeral, too, if many have gone down together. Last year there was eleven on one vessel.”
I remembered what Ruth had told me about wrecks and the “graveyard of the cape.”
“But I would rather have my boy’s cross here,” I vowed, “than there!”—with a gesture back toward the Hawes’s big vault. “Passers-by at least may know what these sailors’ names are and that they once have lived.”
The old judge bowed his head.
I put my hand in his rough hand and led him on. “I’m sorry,” I said.