Chapter 4
I n the two weeks following the homecoming dance, my life pretty much returned to
normal. My father was back in Washington, D.C., which made things a lot more fun
around my house, primarily because I could sneak out the window again and head to the
graveyard for my late night forays. I don’t know what it was about the graveyard that
attracted us so. Maybe it had something to do with the tombstones themselves, because as
far as tombstones went, they were actually fairly comfortable to sit on.
We usually sat in a small plot where the Preston family had been buried about a
hundred years ago. There were eight tombstones there, all arranged in a circle, making it
easy to pass the boiled peanuts back and forth between us. One time my friends and I
decided to learn what we could about the Preston family, and we went to the library to find
out if anything had been written about them. I mean, if you’re going to sit on someone’s
tombstone, you might as well know something about them, right?
It turns out that there wasn’t much about the family in the historical records, though
we did find out one interesting tidbit of information. Henry Preston, the father, was a one-
armed lumberjack, believe it or not. Supposedly he could cut down a tree as fast as any
two-armed man. Now the vision of a one-armed lumberjack is pretty vivid right off the
bat, so we talked about him a lot. We used to wonder what else he could do with only one
arm,