“I don’t think it’s supposed to be like that,” Jose told his
crew chief. The two men stared at the
open door of the empty columbarium crypt. The vacant hole detracted from the
stoic stack of burial crypts at Fort
Morning fog
obliterated the world that lay beyond fifty feet. Its soft insulation cocooned them against
sounds of the Navy base activities two hundred feet below them in the harbor.
“Maybe Mr.
MacDonald forgot to lock it,” Alejandro replied.
“Maybe it
is a new tomb, with nobody in it yet.”
“But it has
a name on the door--Michael Stanley Smith, February 2, 1916 - June 14,
1954.” He reached in his jacket pocket
for his cell phone, but remembered the cone of silence the military had placed
over the peninsula. Electronics were blocked out over the strategic military
base grounds. “I better go get Mr.
MacDonald.” He walked quickly toward his
truck parked on the roadway of the cemetery, got inside and started it up.
Jose, an
intent worker bee, picked up his shovel and carried it to the flower bed where
a dead azalea plant crouched on the grassy floor. A little breeze swept damp gray cotton up
into his face. He squinted.
Alejandro
drove back a half mile through rows of headstones that followed the flow of
land over the cliff to the Pacific Ocean on the west and
the bay into San Diego Harbor
MacDonald,
a military retiree with a full head of gray hair that matched his eyes double
timed over to the columbarium wall clutching a printout of the remains for that
section of the huge wall. With over a
thousand deceased veteran graves spread over eighty acres, keeping track of
where each of them lay was his responsibility.
Having one misplaced bordered on heresy and could mean the end of his
tenure as director.
By time he arrived, the maintenance superintendent, Harold
Greevy, the beefy maintenance supervisor stepped out of the truck with
Alejandro. “Did you look around the
ground for an urn or a burial box?” Greevy asked. “We can check with the rest
of the crew for why this is open. Maybe
the door was damaged by a piece of equipment.”
His burr-cut hair contained drops of dew. He sipped from an insulated Starbuck’s coffee
cup he’d brought with him on the way into work.
MacDonald
verified the crypt number with the sheet he held, then examined the door. He found no evidence of tampering or
damage. His heart beats pushed his blood
pressure up to 180.
“It wasn’t
like that when we got here at five thirty ,”
Alejandro said, with tears in his eyes.
The enormity of the situation overwhelmed him. “Jose would have told me if he’d seen it
earlier.”
Jose stood
leaning on his shovel handle. He’d finished removing the azalea plant and
replaced it with a one-galleon hibiscus.
He suspected a vole had eaten the azalea roots and killed the plant. But
he was not an agronomist. “That is
true. It was not open earlier.” He’d been born across the Tijuana Mexico San
Diego , California three fifty pound sacks
of mulch, and he knew he could shovel for three days straight because he’d
filled sandbags that long when rain had fallen on his town in Mexico
“Drive down
toward the lighthouse and find the irrigation crew,” Greevy said to
Alejandro. “Ask if anybody knows why
this door is open.” He didn’t add and
where the remains are. “I’ll go to the
commitment shelter and find Mitchie’s crew.
They’re working on tree limbs in that section. How far did the mowers get this morning?” He couldn’t hear mowers over the entire two
miles from the gate to the lighthouse.
Nobody knew
where the mowers were. Greevy took off
at a run, tossing his coffee cup into the trash can near the vase watering
station nearby. He found his electric
cart at the maintenance shed and drove to the commitment shelter.
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