Today I paid a visit to one of the Outer Cape’s old burial grounds: the Pine Grove cemetery in Truro. It’s a remote spot, some distance down a wooded dirt road off one of Truro’s smaller byways.
The place has some notoriety: in 1969, a man named Tony Costa murdered, sexually violated and dismembered (in that order, apparently) four young women in a small brick crypt there. You can read about it here. The little crypt is still there, with a loose wooden door. I went in; the inside contains some macabre graffiti. It’s a strange thing, to be in such a place, and I didn’t linger.
I did spend some time looking around the graveyard. It being a Monday afternoon in February, a time when the Outer Cape is almost deserted, I had the place, and its silence, all to myself.
The cemetery goes back over 200 years, and the names on the older graves are familiar out here: Ryder, Rich, Lombard, Atwood, Higgins. I am always affected by the way old cemeteries telescope the lives of families — lives as rich and complex as any of our own, with the full measure of joy and sorrow, hope and disappointment, toil and leisure, love and loss — into a few names and dates, and a mossy patch of earth. You see the tiny graves of young children — “Dear Bertie” was one — and you can’t help adding up the dates to imagine the loneliness of a woman who survived her son by forty years, and her beloved husband by twenty.
One thing I noticed was how many of the men were lost at sea, and how young. Many of them were in their teens. I thought about their brief lives and awful deaths, and the worry, waiting, and, finally, grief of a mother or a wife — all of it borne so long ago, and all of it put away forever, now, under some moss and grass in a piney wood under an empty sky.
Another thing I noticed: how many of the women in the older graves were named “Thankful”. These “hortatory” names were popular among the Puritans of Sussex, but less so among the East Anglian communities that were the source of so much of early New England settlement. It makes me curious about the geographical origins of these Outer Cape families.
“Thankful”. Not a very fashionable idea these days, I’m afraid, despite all we have to be thankful for. Quite the opposite, it seems.
2 Comments
A comment over at American Digest pointed me to your site. Great, though creepy murder, story on the old graveyard. The old cemeteries, so fascinating, in a mournful way. And now, I mourn the loss of my Dad. He died this past summer at the age of 92. But he was a huge part of my life as a vibrant man right to the end of his days. I am reminded of him because as I’d visit him, drive up from the Cape to Watertown at least once a week, we’d often drive through touring the amazing Mt Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge marveling at the stories cast in stone as well as the landscaping.
Thanks, Jaynie. Sorry about your Dad.
You live on the Cape? You might enjoy this old post.