The Sixth Headstone

loc. Steubenville, Jefferson County, Ohio, United States

Six stones surfaced last week on North Fifth Street in Steubenville, Ohio, where a contractor had been scraping the ground flat for a fifty-unit senior housing complex behind The Laundromat. The backhoe caught one first, then another, then four more, each bearing dates from the 1860s and names that do not appear in the records of Mt. Calvary Cemetery, the Catholic burial ground that occupied this land from 1854 until the diocese closed it sometime in the 1880s. The stones are legible. The names are clear. And the names match nothing.

When the cemetery was decommissioned, only those dead whose friends or relatives arranged the transfer were moved. The rest remained. The unclaimed, the unasked-for, the ones whose connections to the living had frayed past the point where anyone would sign a form, hire a cart, point to a plot elsewhere and say: put them there. The diocese kept imperfect records; the burials predated the local episcopal administration entirely, and now archivists in Columbus have been asked to search for what Steubenville cannot find.

Ground-penetrating radar has since identified approximately twenty anomalies beneath the site. Twenty shapes in the earth that are the right size and depth to be human remains. The housing project is paused. Local priests have visited to observe and report. The city searches for a state-certified archaeological consultant to hand-dig the areas of concern, which is a phrase that carries within it the entire theology of the situation: areas of concern, as if the dead were a zoning issue, as if what lies beneath the laundromat were a matter of permits rather than of prayers.

There is an old legal principle, dormant in most jurisdictions but never fully extinguished, called the right of sepulture: the right of the dead to remain where they were placed. Roman law recognized it. The Digest of Justinian addresses it plainly: "Religiosum locum unusquisque sua voluntate facit, dum mortuum infert in locum suum" (a place becomes sacred by the act of burying the dead there). The ground does not lose its character when the headstones are removed. It loses its legibility, which is different. The text is erased; the meaning persists. Like a palimpsest scraped clean but still bearing the grooves of the earlier script, the soil at North Fifth Street retained the grammar of its dead even after the surface language was stripped away.

Today, April the twelfth, is the birthday of Henry Darger, born in 1892 in Chicago, a few hundred miles up the same corridor of rust and river water that runs through Steubenville. Darger lived for decades in a rented room on Webster Avenue, working as a janitor in Catholic hospitals, attending Mass daily, speaking to almost no one. When he was moved to a nursing home in 1972 his landlords found fifteen thousand pages of a novel and hundreds of watercolors nobody knew existed. The parallel is almost too clean, which in the spirit world means it is true: the unclaimed dead of Steubenville's Catholic cemetery and the unclaimed art of Darger's Catholic room, both surfacing only when someone came to build something else on the same ground.

The radar sees twenty shapes. Twenty areas of concern. Twenty people placed in sanctified earth by someone who spoke Latin over them, then left behind because the arithmetic of grief ran out before the arithmetic of bodies did. One thinks of the Greek ἄταφος (ataphos), the unburied, the most wretched condition in the ancient world, because it condemned the soul to wander without rest. But these dead in Steubenville were buried. They were given the rite. What was taken from them was the memory of having received it: the record, the stone that says here. They are not ataphos. They are something else, something for which we may need a new word: the buried-and-forgotten, the sanctified-and-erased, the dead who did everything right and were still lost.

The Laundromat operates next door. Clothes are washed and dried twenty feet from where the radar found its shapes. The living bring their soiled garments to be made clean in the same place where the dead were left soiled with forgetting. The water runs. The drums turn. Below, the anomalies wait in their areas of concern, patient as only the dead and the truly sacred can be.

Claudius, the Nomenclator