A rule-breaker is a rule-breaker, no matter how careful, righteous or iron-willed. It only takes one crime. Then, one steps over into the other category, a place swirling with liberating and endangering notions. The grandiosity of ethics shrinks to become the simple, precipitously imminent but equally innocuous possibility of being caught, a state of mind adorned with cryptic talismans: skepticism, alienation, freedom. These are the traits carried by those who, through their vengeance or underhandedess or bumbling, become rule-breakers. They are the traits that shrink the conduit to fear and facilitate the crossing into a world with fewer boundaries.
And so Rudder came to be walking his last beat tonight – sweeping through the cemetery – with a box of pizza in his hands. You weren’t supposed to do that while you were on duty. Rudder’s sergeant always said, you’re not done working till you’ve got your slippers on. What if he needed to reach for his radio, or flashlight, or gun? Well. He didn’t actually have his gun. He’d forgotten to bring it to work. That was the start of it: today he’d been slipping down the slope that speeds you to your next not unintentional mistake. No matter how much guilt or regret he’d felt about leaving his gun at home (he’d been sweating in his collar nonstop, nervous someone would notice) he never corrected his error, and so he’d made another: buying the 18” with sausage-and-peppers.
Rudder was known in the small town for being the by-the-book guy, the 23-year cop who’d managed to accrue not a single disciplinary action write-up. He was fair, and that meant that the grocer sometimes got a speeding ticket, but so did the owner of the pickup parked in the grocer’s loading zone. His reputation for fairness wasn’t a point of pride. Rather, it was just a confirmation of how Rudder liked to do things. Now that he had the box in his hands, however, he felt like a perfectly useless police officer. Despite his years of unblemished service, it turned out Rudder was a shlub.
He didn’t exactly have the thought, “as long as I’m screwing up, I might as well buy some pizza to bring home for dinner.” But after forgetting to slide his gun into his holster, it seemed like a less treacherous decision – what’s one mistake next to another? Things really weren’t that bad, anyway. Other cops had reputations for being corrupt, abusive, dangerous (if nothing else, it was very clear tonight that Rudder was not dangerous). He told himself these things as if in self-defense, and didn’t wonder at how easily such small justifications placated him.
It was October. He could feel chill, moist air against his wrists and ankles. There was a half-moon, shining dully, doing its very best to light up the cemetery through the gnarled, leafless branches. It illuminated the tops of the gravestones, bringing out sparkling bits of their amalgams. Leaves scratched across leaves.
There was a fear in him. Always a small particle of fear letting out black radiation, quickening his heart and his breathing. Rudder wouldn’t say he was scared. He wasn’t. But he knew the fear’s presence. This was a thunderous, unknown cloud looming inside of him, so close that he couldn’t get a good look at it. Despite walking through these graves in the dark dozens of times, despite occasionally lying on the grass before heading home, looking up at the branches and never being able to memorize them, there was nevertheless food for fear in the darkness of a graveyard.
He wanted to bring a pizza home for dinner so Elena wouldn’t have to do dishes. He would have cooked something, but there would be dishes, and she would insist on washing up. This way, with the pizza, they saved time. Time was needed for other things like having tea and warming each other on the couch, talking about the garden and the seasons, pushing the minute hand of the clock well-past bedtime. She might want to watch a movie, one of those black-and-white ones with Cary Grant that her mom liked. They were wholesome at first. No nudity or gore or frightening tracking shots. But when Rudder tuned into the story and the words, they would drip with eroticism and combative wordplay. The courtships played out like a lost, perfected art, something you see in a museum without thinking, “I could do that with crayons on my lunch break.”
The cemetery was large for such a small population. Rudder wondered if it was very old, or if too much space was allocated, or if nearby towns exported bodies here. Who wouldn’t want to be taken here, in death? he thought. There are high trees and brick sidewalks and a New York-style deli, rare in this part of the south.
Those brick sidewalks were lined with street lamps placed luxuriously close together, whose lanterns rested in plastic globes – no harsh beams of light to scorch your eye. You would walk illuminated, out of the darkness where you can be slighted, harmed, neglected. It seemed that the only place you could go to be out of sight was the cemetery. Shaded by thick canopy during the day, erased by shadow at night, it wasn’t meant to be admired by passersby. These woods had to be traversed to be seen. The paved walkways were a deep blue asphalt. They weren’t lifted into variegated, enticing mounds or crevices by tree roots, nor split by sunlight, had no cracks filled with tar. They were smooth and urban. This paving, the only bit of upkeep or attention the lot was graced with, was possibly the ugliest thing about the place.
Graves were left askew and a rampant crabgrass had taken over, preventing the growth of flowers and ferns. Rudder noticed these things on his beat and wondered if beauty was here to be found, in ugliness, or if to do such finding would be an affront to the place’s obscure identity.
There were three plots: one, where Rudder entered tonight, was half-full of recent graves and half-empty in anticipation of new ones (this is one of a cemetery’s grimmest functions: that it leaves room for the living). Another plot held seven larger tombs. Six housed old families of the plantation kind of fortune, swollen with colonnades and statuettes, and a seventh was begrudgingly placed among them, a decision accounting more for impression than guilt-by-association. The third plot was in a little corner that opened onto Rudder’s street. He would walk through it to go home. It was the first area designated for burial, way back when, and it housed the weathered stones of soldiers and farmers.
Rudder imagined Elena at home, re-reading the same paragraph of the inevitably dull dregs of the newspaper, the savory articles all finished and tossed to the side. Her mind was wandering, signaling like a clock the shifting of moments, from after-work solitude to a night with Rudder. This is how he imagined her, at least, and how she told him she often felt. It was an image he regularly tossed around in his mind on his way home. It kept his pace brisk.
The main path that led pedestrians through the headstones ran directly from the center of town to the junior high school. Despite its convenience, nobody ever took this path. It was wide, and you could walk in the middle without being able to make out the names and dates – possibly pretending you were just strolling through a park. This path made most of the land accessible to backhoes and hearses.
The small trail Rudder was walking left the main one to quickly roll down a small hillside and then narrowly wind its way from the south to the northeast. At one point – Rudder had already passed it tonight – the pavement stopped and you had to tiptoe your way between the plot of a family of four and one for a single man, buried with his cat. After this it curled around a small pond that gave off a pungent organic smell. In the daylight the water’s surface was green and brown with algae and floated a civilization of waterbugs. Near one edge a sapling sprouted straight out of the water, seeming to ignore some unspoken, general rule that trees should come out of the dirt, that you should be able to sit against them and adjust your legs on their ruts and knobs. Rudder liked to shine his flashlight to see the distorted angularity of its roots, buried into gravel and silt, silent and drowning.
Tonight he didn’t, though, because he was holding his pizza and wasn’t interested in drawing attention to himself. Not that he thought there was any attention to be drawn. As he passed the water he breathed in deeply. That small molecule of fear got over-active near this opaque pond. He still would not say he was afraid, but if he was, he’d be afraid of what could come out of there, a hungry being whose mouth might be nearly as wide as the breadth of the pond, whose teeth might be stones with his name and today’s date carved into them.
After the pond the path climbed upwards again and as he approached the crest of this rise he saw a blue glow above the headstones. Reaching level ground, he spotted a shape, which he recognized as a person not because the shape was at all discernible but because he knew the light was from a cell phone screen.
Rudder bent to put the pizza box down, nervous that he’d be discovered in his laziness or negligence or whatever it was. The grass was wet with dew, and he didn’t want to make the pizza cold, so he set the box on top of a gravestone, the kind that is set flush into the ground. It was the wrong thing to do, not a nice thing to do, to put a pizza box on the memento of someone’s last rites. Rudder couldn’t seem to do anything right. But he didn’t want the pizza to be too cold for Elena. And he needed free hands for this inevitable encounter. Because it was time to do his job.
He wondered if he was in danger without his weapon in a situation like this. He would be late getting home if this person turned out to be drunk or hurt or doing something less savory than merely relaxing in a cemetery after hours. He realized he had seen nobody but a jogger on these nightly walks here, and for a moment gratitude flashed in his mind, that someone else may have an appreciation for these trees and stones and paths. At the same time he was thinking these things there was a running dialogue: he was deciding what to say to this stranger.
Rudder approached, pulling his flashlight from his belt. The light from the cell phone flicked off and he heard the sounds of rustling pages. When he reached the point where the path passed nearest to the gravestone against which, Rudder could now see, this person was propped up against in a seated position, he turned on the flashlight and aimed it.
About 60 feet away the beam lit up a young man in his mid 20s who sat against the grave with his cell phone resting on his outstretched leg. A binder and an old book sat on top of a deflated-looking backpack next to him. The man put his hand over his eyes to protect them from the light. There was a smoking cigarette sticking out from between the fingers.
Among the things he could have said: “Cemetery’s closed,” or “What are you doing out here?” or “Put your hands in the air,” or “What’s in the bag?” or “Put out the cigarette,” or “Are you seriously sitting on someone’s grave right now?” Instead, he didn’t say anything at all. He told himself he was still gathering information, checking the size of the bag to see if anything else was in it, eyeing the shape of the man’s clothes to look for a concealed weapon, checking his eyes for intoxication, searching for a wound, measuring his breathing to see how stressed he was.
“My name’s Dan,” the man said. “I’m planted here in civil protest.”
“You know the cemetery is closed, sir?” Rudder said. “I’m going to have to ask you to leave. Stand up slowly. Is anybody else here with you?” The man didn’t stand up. He didn’t move his hands, either. Rudder asked again, more forcefully.
“I’m alone. Nobody here but us. I’m sorry officer – I assume you’re police? I can’t quite make out your uniform with the light in my eyes – normally I would do whatever you asked, but the sitting is very important to me right now. This is my protest.” The man raised his hands over his head, squinting his eyes shut. “Please check my bag if you’d like. I’m not dangerous, I’m not drunk.”
“I’m not going to check your bag. Stand up and walk towards me slowly.” The man still didn’t move. Rudder took several steps forward, standing now about 40 feet away, holding the flashlight steady.
“Here,” the man said, looking down at his clothes, “here, I’m going to reach into my pockets, okay? With one hand, slowly, okay? I’ll turn them inside out. I’ll take my jacket off, too.” Hand went into pockets, pockets reversed out, a couple of coins fell into the grass. Jacket slid off one arm, then the other, and was tossed to the side. He stared at Rudder now, dressed in a white v-neck t-shirt and jeans, feet in white socks rolled down at the ankle, orange running shoes. Rudder looked for a familiar resemblance: brown short hair, an unkempt, scruffy, short beard, dark brown eyes and a small nose. Nobody he knew.
“What’s your full name?” he asked.
“Dan Morgan,” the man said. “My parents didn’t want to bother with a nickname by naming me Daniel, so I’m just Dan. I’m not from around here – I drove down from Akron. In Ohio. It took about thirteen hours, since I stopped to rest a lot. I’ve got a bad knee from sitting in tiny library chairs all the time. I did a little sightseeing, too. The whole time I was thinking about this guy here, right under me now.”
Rudder didn’t reach for his radio. He couldn’t be seen without his gun. He had to do this without backup. Why would he need backup? He just needed to throw an unarmed guy out of a cemetery. But he didn’t want to turn off the flashlight, and he needed both hands to search him and his things. He set his flashlight on top of a headstone carved in the shape of a Celtic cross. It took him a moment to rest it in such a way that it wouldn’t roll off the top. Now the beam of light shot over the man’s head and he lowered his hand. It seemed he could see Rudder more clearly. Rudder wondered if he noticed the empty holster. He took another few steps forward, now within about 5 feet of the man. Of Dan.
“If you don’t stand up right now I’m going to drag you out of here,” Rudder said.
“Just hear me out, officer. You don’t wanna be the guy who hurt a citizen making a peaceful protest, do you? This is the grave of S.G. Caldwell, a soldier in Grant’s army when they first tried taking Vicksburg. Or at least, that’s how he died. He was a terrible man.”
Rudder didn’t know what to do, exactly. Dan didn’t seem dangerous. He did want to search the bag. But Rudder couldn’t risk hurting him if he really was here in peaceful protest. He thought about the pizza. He thought he could talk down Dan.
“I’m just going to take a look through the bag, then I’ll hear what you have to say. Dan. Toss it towards me.” Dan flung the bag with one hand about halfway between them. Rudder walked forward to take a look. There was a half-empty carton of Marlboro Reds, two bottles of water, trail mix, a cell phone charger, some receipts and cough drop wrappers. Nothing concealed in the binder or the book. Rudder stepped back and nodded. “So what’s this protest about?”
Dan took a drag of his cigarette and re-adjusted his posture. He placed his hand on the binder next to him and looked down, away, back to Rudder, and down as he started talking.
“Caldwell advocated genocide. I have copies of his journal entries here. He names black Americans, enslaved and freed, who he targeted or wished to target. He implies that he even killed two himself. I traced their names and the information he gives. He was from a town just twenty miles from here. I don’t know how he ended up in this cemetery, so far from Vicksburg, but this is the guy. It turns out that he did kill those two, Lucy and Scipio. Those were their imposed names. It took a while to find their records. Luckily people kept a good accounting of their belongings. What they thought belonged to them.”
Rudder recognized the political angle. He didn’t have much of a stomach for talk of slavery and that time period. He didn’t entirely understand his own position, and found it hard to keep everything in his mind when he was reminded of the pain inflicted on people, human beings, in a time not-too-far-passed. He did, of course, have every sympathy. But what good did that do? He wasn’t knowledgeable on the subject, didn’t have a political stake of his own, and knew that as a southerner, he was automatically suspect.
“Is that why you’re sitting on his grave? Aren’t there worse murderers out there? Big-time slave-owners you could look up?” Rudder started to forget that he wanted to expedite things. Dan’s passion didn’t make sense. It was so oblique to come here to do this sort of thing. It was at-random. He didn’t seem to have that crazed rage that other protestors had, the kind that came with a doubled-edge. Something that looked to Rudder like embarrassment. Dan was not excited to tell the tale.
“This isn’t a very calculated protest,” Dan started again. “I’m a student. I first came across these stories in a little library over in Mississippi. That was six months ago. The narrative has been on my mind for a while. I’m not sure what sparked it, but lying awake in bed last night, staring at the ceiling so hard it became a swirl of colorful little dots – you know how it does that sometimes, the dark ceiling? – the phrase came to mind: I’m going down there to sit on that asshole’s grave. S.G. Caldwell does not just get to lie here in uninterrupted peace.” Dan took a drag from his cigarette, which he seemed to have forgotten, and smushed it out on the ground. “Hey, what’s your name?”
“It’s Rudder. Listen I have a wife to go home to. I can’t be here all night. I want to go my separate way. I’m not gonna report you or anything. Just don’t be an idiot.”
“Wait, Rudder. Please take a look. It’s a quick read.” Dan motioned to the notebook, which Rudder had placed in the grass near Dan’s feet. “I wouldn’t keep you if I didn’t think it was worthwhile.”
He didn’t think that he would be enticed to read something anywhere but here, in the cemetery. It seemed that every night he was in here the world twisted a little, twisted around its axis like a rag being wrung out. He liked the twisting, if only because everything the next day was straight as could be. And, if he was honest, more than a little dull. Students were always trustworthy in Rudder’s eyes. Not that they couldn’t be wrong. They were often dead wrong. But their noses pointed in the right direction, philosophically. He opened the binder. It contained plastic sleeves. The left side of each held photocopies of a yellowed journal, surprisingly intact at the edges but smeared with dirt and grease. On the right were transcriptions of the nearly illegible text. Rudder picked a page at random.
the land has become dark with a shadow close and tight. It is a shadow that cannot easily be extricated. It constricts us. I can feel it in my sleep. I know they are there around outside and in. I feel a presence in my mind that doesn’t let up but nobody sees it but me. Mother has her arm around one tonight. Father always has his arm around one. They don’t see the waste and the fury I am alone with theese thoughts. One day I hope to have my arm around one. But I won’t love it I hate them. My arm will have a knife. I want a freedom that nobody sees a freedom that isn’t shared.
Rudder didn’t turn the page. He looked over the words. The privacy of the journal – any journal – shocked him. He could hear Dan lighting another cigarette. Rudder’s first thought was that he was reading the journal of someone deranged and hateful but for some reason he kept thinking about the breach of privacy needed to access historical records, and how Dan probably read hundreds of journals and let himself into the houses of minds long dead. He must have a strong stomach for this kind of thing.
“Today he would be diagnosed with some variety of social disorder,” Dan said. “But pathology aside there’s an intentional prejudice in the writing. He did know what he was doing. I wouldn’t excuse his hatred.”
Rudder was surprised at the precision of Dan’s purpose. Sitting on Caldwell’s grave was a thought-out transgression. While Rudder bumbled through his day, Dan was sharp and analytical. He felt stupid to be caught in the gun-and-pizza situation he’d created. Dan was here to judge the people whose names were on the stones. Dan understood the words engraved under these branches as a representation of the cemetery’s meaning, a meaning to be picked apart and assailed by the mind. Meanwhile Rudder sought its tranquility and complexity. This didn’t bother Rudder, it didn’t change the way he thought about graves like Caldwell’s. But it did expand the distance between Rudder and Dan. The distance that lies between everybody, that gets closer with time spent together, that widens during realizations like this one: that Dan saw things differently.
Goosebumps were raised on Dan’s arms. Rudder told him to put his jacket back on. He thought about what to say to end the conversation, something that would bring things to an appropriate close, that would say what needed to be said: Rudder had to go home, Dan had to not get caught and not tell anyone about the pizza or the gun, and the topic had to be resolved. Not just the topic of the protest, but the fact that this encounter actually happened, or meant something, or produced an intended result. Rudder was in an existential rut, he supposed. It must have been the setting.
“Evil,” Dan said, then stopped, looking up at the tree branches, hunching and sliding himself slightly to the side to get the light out of his eyes. “Evil is often accidental, but that still makes it evil, right, Rudder? This isn’t a protest against evil, though. Just one man’s terrible actions and beliefs. When I hear myself say it, it leaves me with a bad taste. Protesting beliefs. Protesting a single person. It sounds both very American and very un-American. Maybe those aren’t too far from being the same thing. Probably I’m having thoughts like this because it’s nighttime in a graveyard; I’m not usually so abstract. Anyway I’ll keep up with this. S.G. Caldwell does not just get to lie here in uninterrupted peace, right? I’m sorry if I ruined your walk home, though. I didn’t intend to interrupt your peace. ”
“Dan, you can protest whatever you like. You’ve got that freedom. But don’t wear yourself out on this stuff,” Rudder said, attempting pithy wisdom. “Now I have to go home and bring dinner to my wife. If I hear you did something stupid, like defiling these graves, I’ll pull you apart myself.” He noticed the irony: was placing a pizza box on top of a grave defilement?
Rudder walked back to where he’d left the flashlight and the pizza box and turned off the light and came back to Dan with the box in his hands. He wanted to put into words the near-absolute non-contiguousness of his and Dan’s place in the world. There was no time, and possibly no language available to do so. So, he had to go. Dan had a look on his face that said the conversation was unfinished. But he had his task.
“Maybe you can tell people about Caldwell,” Dan said, “or learn more about the history of this cemetery. I’ll keep my eye on it, maybe take down some names. I don’t think it’ll be the subject of my thesis: I’m more interested in early colonial stuff. Consequences of European writings about native peoples. But someone else in the department might be interested. Hey, are you just park security or something?” Dan frowned, maybe he almost smiled too. “Where’s your gun?”
Rudder’s heart picked up speed. What could this guy do, though? There was the small chance another cop found him and he ran his mouth. Suddenly, Rudder dearly needed something from Dan. That need squeezed the rest of the encounter into a tiny space, compartmentalizing it. Experiences do that – they shrink as you put distance between yourself and them. As they shrink, they become like dreams, which are so small that you are liable to drop them in the morning before getting the chance to examine them.
With the shrinking of his talk with Dan, the silence and the shadow of the cemetery enlarged at equal pace. This void of sensation (he couldn’t see much, he couldn’t hear much) pushed against his mind and made space for that particle of fear that was always with him. It grew like a goldfish, unconfined and ravenous. It emitted these thoughts, like poison: soon Dan would be discovered by another officer. He would say that Rudder sanctioned his protest. Rudder? Yes, the officer with the pizza. Maybe he was just a park cop. He didn’t have a gun. Dan would say these things and Rudder would be pulled into his sergeant’s office in the morning. He’d be torn to pieces.
The result was this: Rudder needed to ask Dan to keep quiet. It was a different type of conversation entirely.
“Dan, I heard you out. I’m gonna let you stay. I just need a favor because I have a problem. I don’t have my gun. I could lose my job if my sergeant hears I left it at home and didn’t throw you out as soon as I saw you. If another cop comes, you’re probably going to have to leave. You might even be fined. But please don’t tell them about me.”
Dan laughed. “I think the only chance someone will hear about this is if I wanted to tell this story to my classmates. A gun-less cop with a pizza found me and I taught him a thing or two about Tennessee history. He kept me quiet with a plea. No, it’s all good. I didn’t see you, you didn’t see me.” He laughed again and turned his eyes to his binder, lighting them up with his phone. “Good night.”
Rudder was satisfied. He had to be. No harm would come from Dan; at least, no harm that could reasonably be policed. He nodded at the protestor and turned back to the path.
He was sweating as he left the cemetery gate ten minutes later and crossed onto his street. He tried to stick to the shadows, walking across lawns to avoid the glow of street lamps. While he lurked in the dark, he thought of Dan, proudly sitting on Caldwell’s grave with his phone illuminating his face in the middle of the cemetery. Though he was unlikely to be spotted in such a remote theater, Dan was still not afraid to be seen.
As he turned a corner, rounding downslope, tracing his way past hedges and mailboxes, his house came into view. The downstairs lights were on, the couch and chairs in the living room lit up, the light over the front door creating a golden gate through which Rudder planned to pass into safety. His fears subsided. The doom of his situation wasn’t absolute – it emerged in the despair of his fear. He was being paranoid. Easier excuses were at his disposal, probably. He could think of them in the morning. He knew he would.
As he walked the stones to the front door, adjusting his step so that his feet would land on each stone rather than the grass in between them, he stopped to check the time on his phone. They still had almost three hours before their agreed-upon bedtime. He thought about what to say to Elena when he saw her. He thought about whether to hug her and kiss her. They should watch a movie. He put his phone away and looked up. A car was pulling in at the other end of the road. Probably a neighbor. A voice on his radio bubbled up, and though Rudder thought he heard the word “cemetery,” he turned it off without listening to any more. As the car passed the house, he smiled into the headlights.
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