“A few figs from thistles…”

by Howard A. Tabor

“R.I.P.”

If you think these abbreviate the phrase “Rest in Peace” or its Latin origin “requiescat in pacem,” you’d be wrong.

Probably the strangest memorial at The Shades, Agincourt’s non-sectarian burial ground, is a full-size, cast bronze shovel — technically a pointed digger. It appears to be leaning against a nearby tree, rather than firmly anchored in the ground. A closer look reveals an inscription on the shovel’s blade: “NEIL KLIEN–1909-1961. We were there at his beginning. He was there at our end.” Klien had been the cemetery’s sexton for twenty-eight years.

Orphaned in high school during the Depression and earning the label “melancholic loner”, he may have been a poor choice for grave digger. But the tragic deaths of his adoptive parents tainted public perception of Klien’s circumstances; the job might have relieved a measure of community guilt. So, for twenty-eight years, he dug our graves. Then, nearly fifty years later, a nasty storm toppled several headstones and a mystery ensued.

Concealed on the stone’s underside, a handwritten inscription in red lead seemed an editorial comment on the grave’s occupant, a prominent banker: the appropriately prominent chunk of granite was, it suggested, “hard as the banker’s heart, but smaller than his ego”. It became a clandestine “hobby” to look for other such private editorials. The collection is more interesting than it is large. And it hardly merits becoming a book — or does it?

Was Juvenal Juvenile?

For two reasons, the epithets have been attributed to Neil Klien: first, they date from his tenure as sexton, and he was in the best position to these these time capsules for whatever circumstance might reveal them. With few exceptions, they range between cynical and sardonic, critical observations on the lives of those interred below. And as a collection, they’re not in league with Hemingway’s “Six-word Novels” or Felix Fénéon’s “Novels in Three Lines”. Juvenal’s satires come to mind (from a class I vaguely recall as an undergraduate). But as shards of our local history, there is nothing quite like them.

• For an accountant and amateur photographer who died in 1922 but whose headstone wasn’t set for more than a decade, the inscription reflects rumors of the time which suggested his wife had arranged the explosion that took his life: