The Burying Ground

For Autumn and Heili

because I promised to put their names in a book

Morgan Spicer had just locked his back door and turned toward the hallway that led to his bedroom when he happened to glance through the tiny kitchen window that looked out over the rows of graves behind the Keeper's Lodge. Inky shadows chased across the ground as light from the gibbous moon streamed through swaying branches and spilled past marble markers and granite headstones. The distortion made it difficult to decipher the true nature of anything that stood in the burying ground, but Morgan was sure that he had glimpsed something odd — a glint of metal, a reflection of moonlight. Or maybe it was just the tail of a shooting star.

And then, as he squinted into the darkness, one of the shadows suddenly shifted sideways and was caught in silhouette by the moonlight breaking past a cloud.

It was a man in a John Bull hat.

Again Morgan saw a small flash of light. A man in a black hat with a dark lantern, shuttered to shield his presence. Morgan fumbled to unlock the back door. Then he rushed down the path that led past the stone chapel that stood in the centre of the graveyard.

As his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he realized that it was not one man, but two, halfway down the length of the grounds, in the middle of the right-hand rows of graves. The man in the hat turned and saw Morgan thundering down the path. With a shout he dropped the lantern. The second man tossed a spade to the ground and they both ran toward the back of the cemetery, where they scrambled over the fence and dropped to the other side. Both men disappeared into the alleyway that wound its way through the surrounding blocks of buildings.

Morgan was tempted to climb the fence and follow them, but he was winded from his run, and the men had far too great a head start for him to ever catch up. He stopped for a moment to get his breath, then he walked back through the Burying Ground to where he'd first seen the intruders.

A mound of soil was heaped beside an open grave, the granite marker knocked to the ground. The lid of the wooden coffin was pried open and the body tossed up against a corner of the hole as if to get it out of the way. One arm was draped along the edge of the hole, the bone shining eerily white as it poked through its winding sheet. The rest of the corpse slumped back into the pit, as if longing to slide back into the earth.

With a sigh, Morgan retrieved the discarded lantern and opened its shutters to cast some light to work by, and then he gently lifted the shrouded body back into its coffin. He used the spade the intruders had left behind to shovel the dirt back into the hole. Only when the earth was mounded over the grave again did he trudge back toward the cottage. The stone could wait until morning.

The local constable was unconcerned when Morgan reported the incident the next day.

“Grave robbers, most likely,” he said. “Resurrectionists. Wouldn't be the first time.”

“But they didn't take the body,” Morgan pointed out.

“I expect you surprised them before they had time to grab it.”

“I suppose.” But he was doubtful about this premise. “Then why wouldn't they be more careful with the marker? It would have been one less thing to put back.”

Grave robbers had targeted the Toronto Strangers' Burying Ground before. Usually the culprits tried to leave the site as undisturbed as possible in an attempt to disguise their activities. Any items buried with the body were removed and left in the empty coffin. Should the bone diggers be discovered, they would not then be open to charges of theft, as, in that peculiar way of the law, clothing and jewellery were property — a body was not. Once the cadaver was secured, the culprits would replace the earth and rake the surface level in the hope that no one would notice that it had been dug up. No such care had been taken this time. There was no point, Morgan realized. An attempt to restore the appearance of the gravesite only made sense if the burial was recent. This corpse had been in the ground long enough for the dirt to settle and the grass to grow over it. There was no disguising the fact that it had been tampered with.

“Medical students, mark my word,” the constable grumbled. “Students, or those that supply them. Why else would someone want to dig up a grave?”

“But it was such an
old
body,” Morgan protested. “It was little more than bone. There's nothing there to dissect. Resurrectionists take bodies that have been dead for only a day or two.”

“Well, if it wasn't them, then it must have been hooligans,” the constable said, sounding annoyed by Morgan's persistence. “In any case, there's no harm done, is there? The body is back where it belongs. I don't see what you expect me to do.”

In all honesty, neither did Morgan. Even if the constable was right, and the body was the object of plunder, once the culprits had secured it all they had to do was take it to one of the medical schools and sell it. There would be no way to prove where it had come from.

“I wonder why you bothered burying it again, what with the talk going around,” the constable said. “They're all going to be moved anyway, from the sounds of it.”

The Toronto Strangers' Burying Ground was nearly full, its six acres crowded with those no church would bury. Strangers, as its name indicated — those who had no nearby family to see to a fitting burial: indigents, suicides, madmen, alcoholics, murderers. By 1826 there were enough of these in York County that their interment became a civic issue. It was the little rebel, William Lyon Mackenzie, who wrote fiery editorials in the
Colonial Advocate
, calling for a section of land to be set aside as a Potter's Field. The corner of Yonge Street and the first concession line north of Lot Street was chosen as the site for this non-denominational graveyard, the land purchased with donations from the public. It was in “The Woods,” far from the city at the time. Over the years it became the final resting place not only of outcasts, but also of those unaffiliated with any of the established Toronto churches, which disdained the burial of anyone not their own.

But no one could have foreseen how fast the area would grow. Now, in 1851, the bustling village of Yorkville crowded in on the Burying Ground. It was swelling to envelop the cemetery, and its citizens were calling for the bodies to be moved to the newly established Necropolis, farther still from the growing city. There, the park-like setting along the bank of the Don River could easily accommodate the unmourned of Potter's Field. If the colonial government could be persuaded to agree, this stumbling block to future growth would be conveniently removed. But no one seemed to know how long this might take.

Morgan's midnight labour in reinterring the body was no wasted effort as far as he was concerned. He'd found it such a sad sight, the body ripped from the earth, the arm bone wrenched from the comforting folds of its shroud. He had wanted to restore it to what, after all, was supposed to be everlasting rest.

He thanked the constable for his time and left the man to fret over the wayward pigs and tavern licensing that comprised the normal concerns of a village policeman. And then, as he walked home, he realized that he would also have to make a written report to the Board of Trustees. This august body seldom met, consisting as it did of a number of prominent Toronto gentlemen who had far more important things to do with their time than to concern themselves with the day-to-day routine of the Strangers' Burying Ground. Still, they would have to be informed.

Morgan wanted to put his sense of outrage into words, to make the board understand that he, too, felt violated by the desecration. That, as Keeper of the Burying Ground, the crime had been committed as much against his office as against the body. But words had never come easily to him, especially when they had to be written down. As he struggled to put the report to paper, scratching and crossing out, leaving blots of ink along the edges, he kept wishing that he could have simply escorted the gentlemen through the graveyard and shown them white bone against dark brown earth.

The skeleton in Dr. Christie's office was giving Luke Lewis a bad case of the collywobbles. The problem wasn't so much that the bones represented all that remained of a human being. He had seen plenty of dead human beings in 1847 when he'd helped bury typhus victims in Kingston. He'd also dissected two bloated and foul-smelling cadavers during his medical training at McGill University. The act of plunging a scalpel into a gelatinous, putrefying body hadn't sickened him at all. He had been too eager to see what lay underneath the flesh, to discover firsthand the hidden organs and systems that coursed beneath the flesh of a person. He knew that as far as Dr. Christie's skeleton was concerned, his agitation didn't stem from squeamishness.

It was more, he thought, the way the bones were wired together. The skeleton hung on a stand in an upright position with one hand resting rakishly on a jutting hip. The other arm was outstretched, the index finger pointing in admonition from an otherwise clenched fist. This accusatory finger seemed to follow him wherever he moved, whether he was seated at the oak desk in the middle of the room or standing at the cabinet that served as a dispensary. Combined with the slightly opened jaw, wired to give a good view of the teeth, the overall effect was a bony caricature of mocking, sneering contempt. But it was the finger, Luke decided, that bothered him the most.

He had read of pictures that were so well-painted that they unsettled observers in the same manner — ancestral portraits hung in dining rooms or depictions of public figures in civic halls that drove people mad by the way the painted eyes followed them around the room. Likenesses of ancient forebears come to life to cast disapproving glares at the antics of their descendants. Murdered wives seeking revenge. Bygone martinets outraged that history had passed them by. But that was the stuff of novels, allegory, he supposed, for the wrath of God. And he had certainly never heard of a skeleton that could have the same effect.

Dr. Christie was quite proud of the bones that graced his office.

“Boiled him down myself,” he told Luke during the initial tour of the premises. “Back in '11 in Edinburgh. Made a devil of a smell.”

“Where did you get the body?” Luke asked.

“From the university,” the doctor replied. “They were finished with him. He'd been sliced and diced by seven or eight of us and there wasn't a lot left for anyone else to see, so I took him. They were glad enough to be rid of him. Saved the disposal fee.”

“Were cadavers hard to come by in Edinburgh?” An adequate supply of bodies for the purposes of dissection was a chronic problem for the medical school at McGill. Sometimes a whole crowd of students would be assigned to the same corpse, making it difficult to see the component parts as they were coaxed into the open, and one careless slice on the part of one of them could spoil the exercise for everyone else. Some of the students had taken matters into their own hands, extricating newly buried bodies from nearby churches and fattening their purses by selling the corpses to unscrupulous lecturers.

Christie shrugged. “There are never enough. Most of ours were criminals, hanged for their sins. This fellow probably came straight from the gibbet. I don't really know what his crime was, but I've named him Mul-Sack, after the famous highwayman.”

Luke had never heard of Mul-Sack, although he knew what a highwayman was. Travel was dangerous anywhere, road agents and pickpockets could lie in wait for the unwary even in Upper Canada.

He had given the skeleton no more thought at the time. It was only later that his disquiet surfaced. Christie introduced him to the housekeeper, Mrs. Dunphy, and then he'd been shown the parlour and the dining room and the two small rooms on the second floor that had been set aside for Luke's use. He had been given a small bedroom and an adjoining sitting room at the front of the house, “so that there's room,” Christie said, “for your father when he visits.”

After the tour he was left to cool his heels in the office while Dr. Christie went off to do heaven only knew what in the nether regions of the house. Whatever it was, it seemed to entail a great deal of shouting at Mrs. Dunphy, and a rather obnoxious smell that seeped under the door by the dispensary.

Luke's eye would catch the bony, pointing finger no matter where he stood in the room. He'd told himself that he would get used to the skeleton after a time. Familiarity would dull the effect. But the next day his unease grew worse.

He wondered if his nerves were getting the better of him again, as they had in Montreal when he'd first arrived there. He'd had difficulty getting settled at first. Lodging was scarce. The cheapest accommodation in the city was in the St. Anne's suburb, but all the rooms there seemed to be taken by the Irish emigrants who had made it no farther than Montreal in their desperate flight from famine. After two days of searching, Luke finally found a tiny, unheated attic room at the southeast end of the Récollets Faubourg. The landlady was willing to rent it to him, she said, only because he wasn't an Irishman. The accommodation seemed fine in October when he first arrived, but as the weather turned colder its shortcomings became far too apparent. The roof leaked and the wind rattled the glass in the window as it blew through the gap between the sill and the sash.

He resolved to spend every evening studying the notes he had taken each day, but when he returned to his cheerless closet of a room after a full slate of lectures, he found that he was exhausted. He seemed unable to do anything but throw himself on the narrow cot that had been provided and fall into a disturbed sleep tormented by loneliness, bedbugs, and fear of failure. He began to have difficulty concentrating on what his professors were saying, and he knew he was falling behind in his studies.

The amount of information he was expected to process was overwhelming, his ignorance laid bare by off-hand references to classical works he had never heard of and by the assumption that he already had a thorough grounding in Latin and Greek. Materia Medica and Therapeutics proved particularly troublesome, the potions and elixirs referenced by exotic-sounding names, when all too often he would subsequently discover that the lecturer was talking about some common garden-variety ingredient.

Hardest of all had been the attitude of his fellow students. Many of them appeared to know each other already and shared notes and knowledge. Luke knew no one. There were a few others in the class who appeared to be as much an outsider as he was, but although they were civil enough when he spoke to them they seemed little inclined to establish a relationship that went any further than a nod of acknowledgement when he met them in the halls.

To add to his worries, he realized that his money was disappearing far faster than he had anticipated. He had to get through two years of lectures and two years of walking the wards of Montreal General Hospital before he could be licensed. He needed to find an odd job for evenings and weekends and full employment when classes ended for the year, but every menial position in the city appeared to be firmly held down by the desperate Irish.

Only after he'd found a better place to live and a job of sorts, had he settled down and started to enjoy his studies. He was sure that it was this same reaction to the unfamiliar that was affecting him here in Yorkville. It was the novelty of his new circumstances that made him over-imaginative. After all, he had only just joined the practice. He had no routine yet, and was still taking the measure of Dr. Christie. Besides, he could scarcely ask that the offending object be removed. The older man would think him strange indeed, and Luke couldn't afford to do anything that would jeopardize this welcome partnership with an established physician.

Having completed his medical studies, Luke could have gone anywhere that was without a doctor and simply hung out his shingle. In fact, his original intention was to return to the Huron Tract, where his brothers both had farms and where doctors were scarce. Later on he had imagined that he would stay in Montreal. Then everything had changed, and he realized that upon graduation he would have no money for necessary instruments, nor a stake that would see him through the first lean months of a fledgling practice.

And then, an aging doctor who lived at the northern edges of Toronto wrote to the medical department at McGill asking for help in finding an assistant. He had himself, Stewart Christie said, trained at the University of Edinburgh, but “failing to entice anyone from that august institution to the wilds of colonial Canada,” he was willing to settle for a recent graduate from McGill who had been thoroughly schooled in the Scottish method, provided he was able to engage one who was “fit and able to shoulder the more onerous duties attendant on the practice.” The doctor was offering a small salary, a fully-equipped office, and free living quarters on the second floor of his house.

One of the surgeons, Professor Brown, had duly brought the letter to the attention of the graduating class, to a less than enthusiastic response. Luke's fellow students had never heard of Yorkville and scorned the prospect of a village practice.

“Middle of nowhere,” one of them scoffed as they trailed down the ward in the surgeon's wake.

“Farmers and ploughboys,” said another. “Not very interesting.”

But what they really meant, Luke knew, was “not lucrative.” Many of Luke's classmates had family money that would help them get started or family connections that would guarantee them a place with a prosperous city practice. Their futures had been assured almost as soon as they had been accepted at medical school.

After rounds finished, Luke approached Professor Brown and indicated that he might be interested in applying for the position. And then he promptly wrote to his father seeking his opinion on the matter.

“Able to shoulder the more onerous duties?” Thaddeus had written back. “In other words, you'd be a drudge. On the other hand, I can think of no more expeditious way for you to enter the profession you have chosen. You might be wise to consider this.”

His father was also familiar with the village called Yorkville, as Luke had known he would be.

“Although it's true that it's a small place right now, it can't be any more than two or three miles to Toronto,” Thaddeus wrote. “In a few years, it's entirely likely that the city's limits will have stretched to encompass the entire area. By the time your elderly doctor is ready to hand over the reins, you could well find yourself with a city practice after all.”

Armed with this knowledge, Luke wrote to offer his services.

When he arrived in Yorkville, he found a sleepy little village on Yonge Street, which — according to Christie, who seemed to have an extensive knowledge of the history and events of the area — had sprung up around a tollgate and a tavern, The Red Lion Inn. This public house was famous as a rallying point for the rebels of 1837.

“Brigands, all of them,” the doctor said. “Should have been sent straight off to the hangman.”

A small stream to the northeast had attracted the attention of Joseph Bloor, who built a brewery beside it in the early '30s, and then of John Severn, who did the same. The two breweries, along with the brickworks that produced a distinctive yellow product from local clay, were, Christie said, the major industries of the village.

“You won't see many grand estates here. It's mostly small houses and cottages for the local workers, more's the pity. I could do with a few clients who don't have to be hounded for payment.”

To Luke, it seemed like a very self-sufficient little community, but he could see signs that his father might well be correct about Yorkville's future. Just south of the village, the area between the Tollgate Road and Queen Street was designated by Toronto as part of its liberties — not really city, not really county — but a legislative distinction that cleared the legalities for future annexation. City factories, once too far away for the workers of Yorkville to reach every day on foot, were now serviced by omnibuses. And the Strangers' Burying Ground, a cemetery on the corner of Yonge Street and the concession line, once considered on the verge of wilderness, now formed a barrier to the ever-expanding sprawl of houses in the village. Yorkville would probably always be a small town, Luke figured, but by the time Dr. Christie finally packed it in, its fresher air and slower pace might well have attracted a more well-heeled population.

In the meantime, as junior partner, Luke was relegated to the tasks that entailed the most work. This arrangement meant that he handled the cases that required walking any great distance. Dr. Christie's definition of “any great distance” was narrow in the extreme, as the older man was disinclined to indulge in any sort of effort and much preferred that his patients come to him. Few patients ever did this. As a rule they attended to their gumboils and bunions themselves, and when a more serious ailment presented itself, they expected a physician to treat them in their own homes. This meant that Luke would be handling virtually all of the calls. That was fine, as far as he was concerned — every time he was called out it meant that he could leave the office and the sneering skeleton behind.

When a small boy pounded on the door the day after his arrival, Luke eagerly grabbed the scuffed leather satchel that contained his potions and instruments and followed the child down Yonge Street and into a side alley that led through a cluster of modest cottages.

“Hurry,” the boy said, “Pa's bleeding something fierce.”

Luke's patient was still in his back dooryard where he had been splitting firewood. The axe had sliced through the man's boot and embedded itself in the big toe of his left foot. The man had not attempted to remove either the axe or the boot, instead slumping to the ground to await the doctor's arrival. He was not suffering in silence, however, and his yells and moans had drawn a crowd of his neighbours, who hung over the garden fence to watch the drama.