To Quiet the Little Voice - 6. The neighbors are quiet

Prompt 252

Bobby sat on his mom’s rope and board swing slowly rocking back and forth. He hated living here. His friends refused to come over to visit. The creeps at school all made fun of him over living in THIS house.

“God I hope dad is right about the party at the end of the month.”

“What could be a better place for a Halloween party than an old graveyard that no one ever visits anymore?” he had said.

***

Moving in here was the end result of a string of bad luck. First mom had gotten sick. The hospital bills were horrendous and the insurance dad’s work provided was more of a freak show than it was a funding source for medical bills. They had ended up selling their house with the huge yard and small barn out back. Bobby had turned it into a teen’s paradise. The insulation they had installed along with the full floor kept the place reasonably warm all winter long. The “kitchen”, a long counter with stove at one end, fridge at the other and a huge sink in the center, in the one huge room made for the perfect party setting. Moving the old living room set out there when mom had upgraded the house furniture was great too. He even had plans to eventually turn the loft into a bedroom and install a propane fireplace. It had gotten them a good price when they were forced to sell.

The apartment they moved into wasn’t all bad. It was small, but that made it easy for Bobby to take care of while dad worked and mom slowly recovered. The landlord was a nightmare though. If Bobby even turned on the stereo low when the old goat was home he was calling dad at work and bitching about it. When he saw Bobby and his boyfriend the first time he had started a campaign to evict them on some sort of morals basis. Like being gay was a ground for denying people a safe place to live. To quote an old bumper sticker “The moral majority is neither”.

Then dad had been “downsized” at work. A polite way to say tossed on his butt as a cost cutting measure. With the savings and most of the money from the sale of the house having gone to pay the medical bills it wasn’t long before the rent fell behind and the old goat had the excuse he needed to “evict the fag and his family”.

Moving here – well Bobby wasn’t sure yet if this was good luck to have found the place or bad yet.

Dad had come home from the employment center one afternoon and announced they would be moving. Bobby had argued against it. Said it would be too tough on mom to move a second time in six months. But being only 17 he didn’t get too much of a say in the situation, and he couldn’t argue the fact it did sound like a sweet deal. Live in the house on the property and clean the overgrowth away, maintain the property and take care of the little bit of business that occurs every year. No rent. It was an even up trade landscaping the two acres for living there. The house did need some work but the landlord would pay for materials if Bobby and his dad did the labor. Pretty sweet huh?

What his dad hadn’t told him was what the “little bit of business” was. Bobby found out the first weekend after they had moved in. They spent the rest of the week making small repairs around the house and getting settled, and come Saturday morning the guys had come over and they set about starting to beat back the brush line from the house. Two acres and when they had moved in there was only enough open space for the house and two of the three cars. Mom’s car was in a u-store lot for now since she wasn’t up to driving yet anyway.

Bobby had fired up a gas powered weed eater he found in the shed while his two friends took pruning shears to the over grown boxwood hedges along the street. As he worked his way back slowly making about a 4 foot wide path into the woods he heard the plastic blades hit something hard. Shutting the noisy machine off, he started pulling the vines by hand and froze when he saw a headstone. And worse – he was standing right in the center of what had to be the grave it went with!

Backing off of the grave quickly he shouted for his dad to come down off the roof. Dad and the boys both came running at the panicked sound of Bobby’s voice. When they got there Bobby was shaking and pointing mutely.

“Holy crap! Is that a grave??” Steve had blurted.

“Umm. Yeah. Guess I should have told you that little detail before we moved in huh?” his dad said sheepishly. “This property is a graveyard which dates back to the civil war. Last person who was buried here was an Elvis impersonator back in the 70’s. The old man who used to take care of the place stopped keeping it clean a long time ago. When he finally passed away about 5 years ago the cemetery commission had to evict his grandson when the kid refused to live up to his grandpa’s agreement to take care of the place. The kid took it to court to fight it claiming his grandpa had some sort of paper giving him title to the place. It took a long time to figure it all out. By the time they did you couldn’t even tell this was a graveyard.”

“Gross. Bobby I am sooooo not going to come visit you in a graveyard!” Paul announced handing him the pruning shears in his hands. “I’m outta here. You wanna see me come to my place dude! Are you coming Steve?”

“Nah – I said I would help and I will. But don’t be expecting me to hang out sitting on headstones or anything Bobby!”

***

It took three weeks of steady work all day long to get most of the graves uncovered and the headstones cleaned up. Most of the graves seemed to date from the late 1800’s and early 1900’s. The stones were sort of weird too. I mean weirder than the usual statues of angels and devils and the like. There was one looked like 5 foot tall tree stump with a photograph in what looked like it was supposed to be a hollow opening in the tree. The Elvis impersonators grave had a pair of shoes carved into it and at some point someone had painted them blue. Yeah – blues shoes. There was one for a little boy who died at 12 in the 40’s whose stone was made to look like a lunchbox. But the weirdest one was the huge stone tuba. The guy must have been in a marching band or something.

***

“Maybe dad is right. This could be a decent place for one whopper Halloween party. Oh well – least the neighbors are quiet.”