Read Mosquitoes of Summer Online
Authors: Julianna Kozma
“Okay, we’ll go,” said Hannah finally. There was absolutely no hesitation. “But I’m going to ask our friend Lucy to come with us. We usually go to the Cavendish Cemetery and do grave rubbings. I like to hang the rubbings in my room. They’re really interesting. I found one last year of 10-year-old girl called Leila Rose. She died in 1888. There was a lamb carved on her white tombstone. I thought it was pretty cool.”
Jack Jack’s mouth hung wide open.
“What’s wrong, Jack? Your chin’s touching your shoes!” Emily smiled, all innocent-like. “Did you actually think we would say no?”
Hannah also smiled to herself. People were always shocked when she mentioned her grave rubbings. She loved doing them. Tombstones, especially in the older graveyards, had so many stories to tell. Her mom found a really interesting one last year in Cavendish. A woman died at the age of 43, sometime in the late 1800s. Her entire family was buried all around her grave. There were two markers for her babies who died a few years apart at the age of one and two years old. Then her son died at the age of 18. And finally her 23-year-old daughter died two years after the mother. A tragic story, thought Hannah. This woman must have had a lot of sadness in her life.
“Well … okay,” stammered Jack. “I guess I’ll see you after supper then. We’ll pick you up at seven o’clock.” In a daze, Jack headed back to his house. Shaking his head, he muttered “They actually said yes! I just don’t get them…. Girls!”
Four shadows quickly flitted past the rows of fishing boats tied up in the harbour at French River. The slowly setting sun cast a warm glow on everything, bathing the still water with a golden light. There was Wayne Simpson’s
Lost Horizon
. Wayne looked up from the stern of his boat as the children passed silently by.
“Them kids look like they’re up to something,” he mumbled, staring off after them. Then, without a second thought, he went back to his repairs. A couple of nails peeked through his pursed lips as he hammered in a loose plank. Seeing Lucy reminded him of the upcoming supper at the Smiths. He just loved Alice’s home cooking, even though he would die a thousand deaths before he admitted it to her. Although his cod cakes were second to none, at least according to his old girlfriend Nancy, Alice’s were even better. He hoped that she’d make some more of that tomorrow night.
Meanwhile, Jack led the three girls farther up along the path. A few minutes after leaving the relative peace of the harbour, the sandy road turned sharply to the right and the group made their way towards a small copse of woods. Beech, elms and maples gently rustled their leaves and cast long shadows in the darkening evening. Every once in a while, a branch creaked in the wind, stirring up birds settled down for the night.
Suddenly Jack stopped and three bodies bumped into him, thump, thump, thump, sending him sprawling in the red dirt.
“Why did you do that for?” he demanded, sitting up and brushing the dirt off his bright yellow sweater that sported thick black stripes.
“Next time don’t stop like that without warning us, Bumblebee,” said Lucy.
“If you weren’t following so closely I would still be standing,” he shot back. “Now listen up. The graveyard is in those woods. Once the sun sets it gets pretty dark. I don’t want you girls getting scared, so if you want to turn back, now’s the time.”
“Nope, we’re fine, thanks,” Lucy assured him. She was all for joining the girls and their new friend on this mission of discovery. Although not interested in making her own grave rubbings, she enjoyed exploring this long lost cemetery. She and her parents had found this cemetery a few years ago while chasing Meg. It was perhaps half a kilometer away from the open sea and Arrowhead Beach. Many of the grave markers were overgrown with brambles and grass gone wild. Most of the lost souls buried here lay under unmarked graves, but every so often Lucy managed to uncover a tombstone that had a name and date etched faintly into the greying and mouldy rocks.
Shrugging his shoulders, Jack resumed walking. Glancing back he said “Just don’t come crying to me if you get scared.”
Hannah snorted. She wasn’t scared. Now, where was her flashlight again? Ah yes, the top front pocket of her coat. Lucy told them to dress in pants and a jacket. The nights get cool on the island, but it was the mosquitoes that were worse. They were voracious pests and swarmed the unwary victim, sucking up all of her blood. Vampires with wings. Shaking her head, Hannah forced herself to think happy thoughts. She was too good at scaring herself.
Finally, after an uneasy 10 minute walk, they reached the edge of the woods and paused to ready flashlights.
“Here we go,” said Emily softly, not at all convinced that she should be here. She gripped her flashlight tightly in one hand, and grabbed hold of Hannah’s coat with the other, reluctantly following her sister into the darkening woods.
As soon as they stepped into the old forest, the sunlight disappeared and the air turned cool and damp. The trees were tall, and grew close together, obliterating the sky with their leaves. Very little light penetrated this thick canopy. The dark giants stood watch, swaying in the wind, their creaking trunks the only noise in the eerie silence that filled this corner of the island.
“I don’t think I like this very much,” complained Emily. “This is spooky.”
Unfortunately, none of her compatriots seemed to have heard her, or cared about her plight for that matter.
“Ahhhhh!”
Jack went down again, tripping over a large rock half-buried in the mossy grass.
“You might be better off on your hands and knees instead of walking upright,” laughed Lucy, relieved that the scream was not ghost-related. “It seems you have too much trouble staying up.”
“Ha ha! Funny,” said Jack. “It’s all these rocks. You never know where they’ll pop up next. And I bet I scared you all.”
“They’re not rocks,” said Lucy, ignoring his teasing. “They’re tombstones. Or at least grave markers. Some of the dead were buried without anyone knowing their names. So the locals marked the burial spots with rocks. If you look closely, you can see a cross or an anchor scratched into the stone. Some of the bigger ones even have dates of when the bodies were found.”
Thick brush grew throughout the forest floor. Bright green ferns and thorny brambles wrapped themselves around tree trunks and caught tight to the kids’ jeans as they slowly made their way through the dense undergrowth. Hannah walked over to another bump in the grass and started digging around the edges. Sure enough she uncovered a large rock the size of a basketball. After brushing off the damp earth she could just barely make out the faint outline of a ship. No date though. Oh well.
“You’ll find bigger stones farther in where the trees have grown in more thickly,” instructed Lucy. Hannah, Emily and Jack followed her advice and broke apart, moving in different directions towards the ghostly white shapes.
Somewhere close by, an owl screeched a warning cry. Four white faces peered uneasily up into the trees, wondering if he was hooting at them.
“Wow, here’s a gorgeous one,” exclaimed Emily, excitedly jumping up and down. Hannah quickly joined her sister, helping to clear away some of the bigger branches of a wild chokecherry bush. “The trees and bushes have really gone wild here. No one’s come to clear any of this away, and it’s probably been over a hundred years that this place has been left alone.”
Shining the flashlight on the leaning tombstone, Hannah squinted, trying to focus on the inscription. “Here lies Ebenezer Scottsdale. May his sails catch the winds and carry him up to Heaven. Departed from this life in 1851, aged 27.”
Standing directly behind them, Jack spoke up suddenly and startled the two sisters. “You’ll find a few graves from the 1851 sea disaster when a whole fleet of American fishing boats went down in this huge storm. And if you notice, many of the tombstones are facing out towards the sea. I think that’s very creepy, as if the ghosts of the dead could actually look out to sea. Who would want to look out for all eternity at the place where they actually died? Sometimes adults make absolutely no sense!”
The sisters turned in the direction of Jack’s pointed finger and saw more tombstones. Although the setting sun was barely visible through the trees, the girls could still see that yes indeed, the graves faced west. The sun was setting, slowly sinking below the horizon, beyond the sea. Hannah approached the nearest grave marker, whipped out pencil and paper, and started rubbing the impression from the stone.
In the meantime Lucy was unsteadily weaving her way through what looked like a bramble of fallen twigs and wild rose bushes. Trailing vines wrapped greedy suckers over the branches of a nearby yellow birch, slowly choking the young tree. It seemed like everything wild and thorny was triumphantly taking over the burial ground, reclaiming the dead. The tombstones, monuments to past lives, were now being swallowed up by creeping green vegetation, ultimately suffocating in this woody embrace.
“Ouch!” yelled Lucy. “This darned rose bush has a lot of thorns. Guys, come help me clear it away. It seems that someone has already started removing some of the branches, and I want to see what they thought was so interesting.”
The job went quickly as all four kids helped lift, pull and break off the abundant growth surrounding Lucy’s find. Thistle spears poked out of their sweaters and the kids’ faces and hands were covered with dirt. Finally the work was done and four pairs of eyes studied the grey stone in front of them.
“What’s so special about this one?” asked Emily, disappointed. “It looks like all the rest, except that it’s grey. It’s also facing the other way, not like the tombstones we were looking at before. See, it’s crooked. Do you think there is a reason for that?”
“I don’t know,” said Jack, frowning in concentration. “This grave is also from the 1850s. I can’t make out the last number of the year though. It’s got an anchor carved on the top, so that usually means he was a sailor or was from a shipwreck. He was 48 when he died. Can any of you make out the name? There’s a lot of moss stuck in the grooves of the letters, so it’s really hard to read.”
“I have an idea.” Hannah took out another blank sheet of paper from her backpack. “We’ll rub it. Sometimes the impressions are clearer because only the letters are coming out on the paper, and not the moss and other gunk growing on the stone. Let’s see if this will work. Shine the flashlight over here.”
The four friends squatted beside the oddly placed stone, trying to make out the writing. “The first name looks like Silas,” said Jack. Holding up the paper in front of his eyes, “The last name looks like … I think … it’s … Malone.”
Gasp!
Looking up at the sudden noise, Jack noticed the three girls were eying each other in great excitement. “What’s up?”
“Oh, nothing,” said Lucy nonchalantly. “It’s just that the name sounded familiar. But lots of people must have the same name. After all, look how many Mackenzies are buried in Cavendish. And the island is so small that everyone knows everyone else, probably because they are, or have been, related at one point in time.”
“It’s really getting dark now,” spoke up Emily, nervously looking back towards the entrance to the cemetery.
“You know, the best part of coming here is that you never know what you will find,” said Jack, completely ignoring Emily’s unease. “A couple of years ago when I was digging around here –”
“You were DIGGING?!” burst out Hannah, not sure if she should be outraged at the idea, or impressed. “In a cemetery?”
“Sure,” boasted Jack, clearly proud of the effect of his alleged bravery. “I thought I might find some old pirate bones. I was a kid back then and loved listening to the pirate stories my grandpa told me. With all the shipwrecks around here, you would think that some of those ships would be pirate galleons. And if there be pirates, there be treasure, right me maties?!”
“So what were you looking for, treasure or bones?” sniffed Lucy, not all that impressed by the fake pirate talk. Why did boys always have to show off and goof around? Adventuring was a serious business, not to be taken lightly. At least according to Lucy’s definition.
“Well, actually, I lost my flashlight in a hole which was covered by a pile of dead branches,” admitted Jack, afraid of Lucy’s impatient foot tapping. “When I finished clearing away the branches, I bent down to get the flashlight out of the hole. As soon as I went down I felt a hard edge digging into my knee. I dug around a bit in the grass and surprise! I found an old coin. Grandpa said it’s an old sovereign, all the way from England. He also said it might have fallen out of the pockets of a dead sailor. In fact, there might be more coins … or other treasure, don’t you think?”
“Yeah, yeah. There might be, but it’s too dark to look now,” said Emily, desperately staring at the path home. “The sun has set, and it’s only going to get even darker. I don’t like graveyards at night. No way. There might be ghosts. I don’t like ghosts either. They’re dead.”
“Actually, it’s the best place to tell a ghost story,” smiled Jack. Not waiting for a response, he sat down against the Malone tombstone, wriggling around until he was comfortable. Patting the grass on either side of him, Jack invited the girls for a sit down. “Not scared are you?”
“Not at all,” laughed Hannah as she sat down next to Jack. “I love ghost stories. They’re soooo exciting.”
Lucy joined the giggling duo and sat on Jack’s other side. Emily on the other hand, reluctantly dragged herself close to her sister, clutching at Hannah’s hand and trying to cover her ears at the same time. With interesting results.
Whack!
“What was that for?!?!” screamed Emily.
“You stuck
my
fingers in
your
ears!!!” Hannah yelled back. “Gross me out!”
“Well, soo—rree,” sniffed Emily, rubbing the back of her hand. Offended, she scooted over to Lucy and buried her head under her friend’s arm. Now she was ready.
With no further complaints from anyone, Jack began his story…