Another Halloween Treat- here's Figaro's Eye

Figaro’s Eye by Susan Buffum, (2018)

The air is heavy with the raw odor of approaching winter, the sky slung like a charcoal-colored pall overhead, sway-bellied with cold rain struggling for release. The scowling faces of black clouds scuttle by, shape-shifting until dissipated by stronger gusts of wind at higher elevations.

It is no more than half past three on a raw November afternoon, the graveyard still but for the subtle chattering of oak leaves reluctant to part way with branches and twigs, and the occasional nattering scold of a squirrel disturbed by my presence as if fearful that I may be scouring the dry-headed grass in search of acorns. However, it isn’t acorns that I am contemplating, but rather death.

I pause to visually scan the area I have found myself in, realizing that this is the older section of the sprawling cemetery, one established in the 1830’s when many rural cemeteries were given the label arboretum. This was when a variety of trees were planted and allowed to grow along the cobbled lanes. This was when people came and picnicked in the cemetery as if it was a park. But dining amid the dead had always been a rather disturbing notion to me. Whenever someone mentions this I always envision ghouls gnawing decomposing forearms or ragged thigh bones, ribbon-like tendons wedged between their jagged teeth, dark blood dripping from their misshapen lips and jutting jaws.

Here, the ground rolls under foot where the wooden coffins buried long ago have succumbed to damp rot and borer beetles, where the occupants of those wooden boxes have become food for writhing earthworms. I imagine scraps of soiled material scattered amid clumps of dirt and ordinary, jumbled stones, the organic material heaped upon the coffins when they were interred long ago. I imagine earth-stained bones adorned in tattered finery, gaudy bits of paste jewelry, and perhaps something that had once shone brightly under the sun, something that had escaped the grave robber’s gruesome greed.

These whimsical and idle thoughts drift through my mind as I navigate the damp, clingy grass, the mounds and dips harboring their secrets from the likes of a rambling ponderer of arbitrary notions such as myself on a blustery, late, autumn afternoon. For instance, I am presently contemplating the recent death of my brother, Roger. Roger had been found dead in his bath only three weeks ago.

He and I, you may already have surmised, were quite close when we were children, but we’d had our share of disagreements, the usual childish squabbles over the odd toy, which of our parents loved us more, and the furtive snooping into one another’s diaries and journals, the spilling of secrets we’d thought had been safe from prying eyes. By adolescence we had drifted apart as we’d made friends from among our classmates. We’d outgrown the reliance we’d had upon one another for play and companionship that we’d had when we were children and had been kept indoors because Mother had always felt that the neighborhood children were too rough and vulgar for us to associate with.

Our childhood friends had been a giant, pink and white panda that Father had won for Mother at a carnival when they’d been courting. Pinky was its name. And there had been a black and white plush cat named Figaro, from the Disney animated movie Pinocchio. When I was eleven years old, Roger had pried off one of Figaro’s yellow, black and white felt eyes. He’d told me that Figaro had poked his eye out on a rose cane in the garden.

I’d cried for weeks over the lost eye until Aunty June had glued one of Uncle Henry’s black eye patches over the excelsior oozing wound and told me that Figaro was now a seafaring cat aboard Captain Hook’s pirate ship. I’d smiled wanly, sad that Gepetto had lost his cat, too, that it was no longer the same cat, but rather a snarly cat that bared its fangs at me when no one was looking.

Roger was buried in the newer section of the cemetery. The earth was still raw, the grass patchy and scraggly over his grave, like a livid scar. I had a scar, but it wasn’t visible to the naked eye. It was a seamed wound, unsteadily stitched across my throbbing heart. Figaro had scratched me there one night. Roger, when I’d told him, had scoffed at me and called me a brainless ninny, but the wound had bled continuously , spurting ruby blood with each pulse, every beat, threatening to empty my blood vessels until they were hollow blue tubes lying flat beneath my skin and laced through my muscles, wrapped like blue ribbons around my bloodless internal organs.

The Sandman had stitched the wound. At least that’s who I assumed he was, creeping into my room in the dead of night where my eyes ached from staring into the darkness trying to discern the deeper darkness heralding his arrival, him emerging like a dense black shadow from the corner closest to the closet, shuffling across the carpet, sprinkling me with sand as black as soot that stained my face and made my eyes burn as if smoldering embers had been deposited beneath my lids.

I think about Roger now lying in his gunmetal gray casket, in his bed of pearl-gray tufted satin, all dressed up in his Sunday best, as if he had been a churchgoing man. Only my brother could make a mockery of death like that. One of his eyes had not stayed glued completely shut. There had been a dull glint beneath the lashes of his left eye, his sinister eye, if you will allow me that nod toward the Latin we’d been made to learn in school. He was sinister. I was dexter.

Now he’s dead, and I am still alive, still free to ramble and roam above ground, to do a little dance upon the dirt atop his final resting place, if I so choose to do so, when no one is around to observe me, that is.

My ears, still keen, pick up a curious chuff of sound, like someone blowing across the mouth of a bottle—a dull , deep almost musical note. I raise my head and look all about for the source of the sound, and hear another. And then another. A series of somber notes vibrate along the air currents. Searching for the source, my eyes fall upon the pudding stone chapel near the newer section of the cemetery. This seems to be the source of the eerie, low notes drifting like a dirge to my ears.

I wander in that direction. I am about fifty or so yards from the door when the mournful music abruptly ceases and a strange stillness falls upon the cemetery. The rustling of the leaves halts. The scolding of the squirrels I have disturbed becomes a profound silence. My eyes rise briefly to the sky and even the clouds seem to have stopped their fretful meandering and merely hang above my head like dark curtains ready to be wrung down upon the completion of a play, after the final curtain call.

Something moving in my lower field of vision causes me to return my gaze to the chapel, to the door to be precise. It appears to be ajar. It was closed and locked when I walked past earlier this afternoon. I had wanted to peek inside at the stone floor, the sturdy pews, the simple altar before a central stained glass window depicting a white cross draped with lilies, the surrounding smaller stained glass windows each containing one tumbling full blown rose. The door had been firmly fastened against potential vandals.

I peer harder and see a dark form emerge. It appears to be a man in a dark suit, perhaps a funeral director preparing the chapel for a funeral tomorrow? Or a minister? Surely the cemetery caretaker wouldn’t be dressed so formally this late on a Sunday afternoon, with the sun already dipping behind the trees, the shadows stretching inky limbs toward me from all directions. It will be full dark soon.

Night is already bleeding across the face of the chapel and pooling at the feet of the dark figure that slowly begins to turn toward me as if sensing my presence, although I have grown as still as one of the chiseled marble statues, like the angel with the broken wing tip that marks the grave of the unfortunate Kate Turner who, back when I had been fourteen years old and a classmate of hers, had been thrown from the cliff onto the rocks below, whose broken body had been carried out to sea by the swirling surf to become food for the slippery fishes lurking beneath the dark water.

She had been the first of my peers to perish under suspicious circumstances, her murder and many others that followed, had been similar in nature to hers, all of them never solved. Roger had been seventeen-years old when Kate had died, seventeen and already full of cruelty and secrets.

My eyes are able to discern a purple handkerchief folded and tucked like an origami flower into the breast pocket of the charcoal-colored suit coat the man wears. I am familiar with it because I am the one who had tucked it there, a random, ridiculous gesture really. It was just that his pocket had seemed so flat and empty.

I gasp, my eyes rising to the face of the man. A sound flows up the back of my throat. I cannot swallow it back, therefore, it rushes out from between my cold lips. I hear my own name coming toward me in the still air, “Rose.” I know that voice only too well and shudder.

We stare at one another like opponents on a battlefield, the last two enemies left standing after a bitter, bloody, lengthy fight. I clench my fists and find my hands are empty, no weapons in my grasp. He raises his hand, his left hand for he is sinister, as I have already mentioned, and points his index finger at me as if pointing a gun at my heart. “Bang,” he says, the word flat, startlingly loud.

For a moment I consider doing likewise, shooting him with my finger and saying, “Gotcha, you’re dead!” like we used to do when we were young, ducking behind the furniture, popping up like jack-in-the-boxes to shoot at one another with our finger guns. Only there is a sharp ache in my breast. I risk tearing my eyes away from him to look down, frowning at what I see. A dark stain has blossomed on the front of my coat like an exotic, flower. It glistens in the dying light that bleeds now from behind the trees as the sun sinks lower toward the horizon. “What?” I murmur before my knees buckle. I drop to the cold grass, the brown tips crisp beneath the knees of my slacks. “What?”

My eyes search for him, but he is no longer on the path leading to the chapel door. I twist slightly as I fall onto my side. From the corner of my eye I see him standing above me, looking down at me through that one eye that was partially open when he was lying in his casket not so long ago. “Like Figaro,” he says.

My mind goes reeling back to childhood, to the eye he tore off the plush cat. Although the gathering dark seems to be slithering in closer all around us, I watch him reach into his breast pocket. He tosses something onto the grass close to my face. I shift my gaze, struggling to focus on what he’s thrown down upon the cold earth. It looks like a miniature fried egg with a charred stain at the center before my eyes discern its thin layers—white, yellow, and black. I know what it is now. It is a felt eye; Figaro’s eye.

He’s had it all along, the evil bastard!