The frozen green orb swings heavily in the frigid pre-dawn air. With a creaking groan, the crunch of contracted tires packed thick with snow slush and yesterday’s mud, strain left into the iced over intersection; the steering wheel, sliding and spinning gently through the warmth of leather bound hands and fur cuffed wrists.
The automobile rights itself, pushing into the iced over intersection, shifting awkwardly until the wheels run parallel to the length of Mount Hope Cemetery.
Burial home of Frederick Douglas, the famed abolitionist and Susan B. Anthony, pivotal in the women’s suffrage movement, Mount Hope Cemetery stands enclosed in fencing, gorgeous and frighteningly sharp black wrought iron posts and finials with deadly spear points, gracefully crafted. These posts have stood guard since 1838; Victorian in form; standing the test of time, multitudinous seasonal changes, alterations and vagaries, politics and peoples.
Years ago on a morning, a large buck, antlered and graceful and very, very dead, rested tragically impaled on one of the weaponized finials. He had attempted to spring in the darkness into the park from the edge of the narrow sidewalk; cement lying squeezed between the more heavily trafficked road and the quiet solitude of the sloping hill. Perhaps he observed the shadows of headstones and monuments. Perhaps he noticed the lovely rise of the hills, the large trees, the imagined respite of quietude. He lept home where death lay in wait to meet him; the specter himself resting patiently, waiting and watching on the tip points of the deadly enclosure.
Today out of pitch coal black air, there appear three bobbing, dodging lights moving quickly along the length of the deadly spikes; headed west up Mount Hope, in the general direction of the car; jouncing awkwardly up and down. They appear as a phantasm, resurrected spirits from the older graves, disturbed and disgruntled memories; frozen lights bouncing along the horizon in the black air.
The car rolls slowly past these lithe joggers, the snow runners; perhaps medical professionals from the large hospital around the corner; those dedicated to getting in the exercise, hours before the normal work day begins for most travelers along this old street.
Runners in the cemetery. They traverse the fine line between the past, the present, the invisible spirit of the impaled buck; the sleeping Victorians and the demands of the abolitionist and the suffragette.
690 Saint Paul 