What IS a sexton? A sexton works in a graveyard, burying people. He digs graves, positions tombstones, and fills up the graves after the coffins have been lowered into place. Sometimes, especially at the orders of the police, a sexton will dig UP graves. A sexton goes to many funerals. Since he haunts his graveyard every day, he sees many strange things. I know a sexton. His name is Joe, and from time to time Joe tells Uncialle some of the eerie events that happen in his cemetery. Some of them you will find on this page later. Sometimes this page will be Joe's and sometimes it will belong to Uncialle. Today it is mine.
Silent in the shimmering heat, a workman slaps fresh gray concrete onto a shining slab of new cement over a grave in the Grand Cayman Cemetery. Standing close in the shadow of a frangipani tree, I can hear the slap and sigh of the waves, so close that their astringent salt comes to me in the air. Another workman holds out a straight length of two-by-four and his partner grasps it tightly. Together, they smooth the top of the slab until it gleams level. Straightening up, they gather their equipment. One places his hands in the small of his back, easing an ache from bending over the grave. "That perfect," says one. "That fine," says the other. They trudge off down the highway toward Georgetown. It is a long way. Wiping beads of moisture from my forehead, I linger in the shade of the small pink-flowered tree. Faded blossoms lie scattered at my feet. It is late afternoon, and heat shimmers into the sky from the stones.
I am about to leave my refuge, thinking about the fine, perfect surface of the new gravestone and how all the graves here have surfaces above the sea because the coral limestone of the island is nearly all there is. Even far inland, soil depth can be measured by a handspan, and the water table is almost at the surface of the ground. The sea is what you think of on Grand Cayman, and so many who are buried here are rocked in its cradle, their souls drifting cold somewhere along the Cayman Wall, deep and dark and drowned.
I take a step toward the new slab. Without warning, something scutters over the fallen blossoms and rustles dead palm leaves at my feet. It is an iguana, a large one, three feet long or more. Lightly and as swift as a falling shadow, the iguana's long-fingered feet patter across the wet cement of the grave. An instant more and the lizard is gone, now deep in the shade of some oleanders. At last, I stand looking down at the slab.
No longer is the surface smooth and clear. Traced here now are the footprints of the iguana, catching the late-afternoon shadow in delicate design, etched into the hard surface as it dries: an epitaph, graven into the grave by the living, seeming to say, "Live now, life passeth by."
