'Here is what I would like my daughters to remember': A journey to Spider Gates Cemetery
Here is what I would like my daughters to remember.
It was Columbus Day. They were out of school, so we went to lunch.
Afterward they both said they wanted an adventure; something spooky for October. I racked my brain and finally suggested that we go again to find the scariest place I know — a place I last saw 20 odd years before; a haunted cemetery called Spider Gates.
We drove, it seemed, for hours — mostly because I couldn’t find the road; I thought I knew where it should have been: recalled dips and turns; thought I recalled how the light should look. Remembered there was a turn off after a steep hill. Remembered the drop from the road into trees and their walled gloom.
Then — and here is the part I hope they both hold tight to, if nothing else; let me now address them directly, and let me believe they can hear me … Emily, you were 8, and impatient as always; you suggested we stop for directions. Martha, you were 14 and you calmly said to her, “Sometimes the journey is more important than the destination.”
Martha, I know that doesn’t sound like you. You were likely just as impatient, I know. Maybe I’m the one who actually said those words as I attempted to stave off an 8-year-old’s contempt. But someone said it, I’m sure, and I want it to have come from your mouth.
I want to believe that that day you two eventually got along with each other, and that I got along with you both. Want to remember that that day, we eventually found those cursed stones and didn’t turn back defeated, angry, silent; together but alone in the same car.
I think it matters that it was Columbus Day. I know these days some celebrate it, and some mourn. Right now, though? I’m choosing to look at that journey with new eyes. All those nights on the sea? Standing at the rail with a dream and a blank map he filled in as he went along?
Then I think of my own teenage stories of Spider Gates. Suburban high school legends of baby sacrifices; ice-blue fires burning in the dark above the headstones; silence and blood in the midnight grasses — are kids still telling those tales somewhere? Where are they now?
The door to memory is a spidergate. It catches some facts while others break through. What you remember must be by rights stronger than true.
Here is what I hope my daughters remember.
The journey was easy. The road was right where I thought it was. We easily found the place. I told you the stories. We got along. It was brilliant and just warm enough. The trees along the way were in full fall fire and showed only hints of their skeletons beneath their flame.
Emily, Martha; I want you to remember that your old man did OK that day.
Tony Brown is a poet living in Worcester, and the winner of the 2022 Stanley Kunitz Medal.
This article originally appeared on Telegram & Gazette: 'Spider Gates': A prose poem
