The Empty Grave of Edgar Allan Poe

A PRACTICAL MAN

          The early Christians had adopted the pagan sites of worship and built their churches on the altars of other gods, older gods. The early Christians were very practical men. The Reverend Pynchon’s church was not that old, only a hundred years or so, but it had replaced an earlier stone church, which had replaced an earlier wooden church, which had replaced, and so on back to the days when the druids held their ceremonies beneath the shade of the old yew tree. The same yew tree that the Reverend Pynchon was now gazing at from his bedroom window.
          It was a just a matter of utilising the space available. It was a practical problem and the Reverend Pynchon was a practical man. In the olden days when all was fields there would have been plenty of room to bury the dead, but the village had grown into a town and the church and its graveyard had been squeezed between factories and shops and the terraced houses of the people. So many people. Living in their brick boxes, row on row, until they reached the end of their allotted span and swopped brick for wood and were lined up in the graveyard. And now the graveyard was full. Or nearly full. The Reverend Pynchon looked at the old yew tree and the empty earth below its branches and made a very practical decision.
          “Chop it down,” the good Reverend said to his sexton, Jeb Marsh. And old Jeb felt the ground beneath his feet shiver. “Chop it down and burn the stump and dig out the roots and we’ll have space for twenty more graves.” But old Jeb was not a practical man, he felt that things should be left the way they are, particularly old things, very old things like the ancient yew tree. And so he questioned the Reverend's decision. Told him that all graveyards had a yew tree growing, that the evergreen leaves gave folk a sign of immortality.
          “The cross is our sign of immortality,” declared the Reverend. “We need no pagan symbols planted in Satan’s honour defiling our land. The sign of the cross bears witness to the resurrection of our Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ, and in time we shall all sit at his right hand in Heaven, apart from those of a more superstitious frame of mind who are destined to spend eternity in a different place. Chop down the tree.”
          And so the sexton did as he was told, he chopped down the ancient yew tree and burnt the stump until it was but ash and dug out the roots, as best as he was able. And the Reverend Pynchon looked upon the clearing in his churchyard and he was proud of his practical solution.
          The first inhabitant of the new patch of land was a potter’s labourer by the name of Hughie Sims.  He had fallen into one of the machines they used to prepare the clay at Grimley’s potbank and had been variously hacked and crushed and pummelled to death. What was left of his body, including his left arm which had been torn off in the accident, was given a good Christian burial, although there were a few mutterings among the bereaved that the grave did not look as deep as a grave usually did and old Jeb Marsh caught a few black looks which were cast in his direction. He could have explained the problem with the tangled roots of the old yew tree but he decided it would be best to respect the solemnity of the occasion and so he said nothing.
          He maintained his silence the next day as well when the police officers asked him what had happened to the Reverend Pynchon. He admitted to having seen him taking his customary constitutional in the churchyard around dusk. But he did not mention the dog which must have disturbed Hughie Sims’ fresh grave. Disturbed it enough to retrieve Hughie's severed arm from his coffin and leave it lying by the locked church door. Old Jeb thought it would reflect badly on his grave-digging skills and he felt that was unfair. So in the morning, before the disappearance of the Reverend Pynchon had become a cause for concern, old Jeb threw the arm back into the hole and tidied up Hughie Sims’ grave.
          Eventually it was decided that the good Reverend was not coming back, although no one had any clue as to where he had gone. It was a very strange thing to do for such a practical man, to vanish from the face of the earth like that. But life goes on. The vicar who replaced him was of a different character altogether. When he saw that his churchyard was lacking a yew tree he insisted that his sexton plant another immediately. If the graveyard was full then so be it; his parishioners would just have to take advantage of the brand new facilities of the Council crematorium.  And as old Jeb Marsh hurried off to perform the task, he could have sworn he heard the new vicar mutter, “It’s the only thing that keeps the buggers down.”