The Legend of Youngs Corner IV

PART IV
Little Christopher

A large, stone slab was sticking up through the ground, surrounded by fallen tree limbs, brush, and old leaves. I picked up the limbs, kicked the leaves, and scattered the brush to reveal that the stone slab was about 2 feet high, 1 foot across, and 2 inches thick. It was a gravestone! That explains it, that explains the pillars! They were guarding a cemetery. I looked to the left and right of the slab. There were two stones, rectangular inlets stuck in the ground. They were holders for two other gravestones long removed since! It was a cemetery, but how old was it, and who was buried beneath my feet?

I knelt down to the gravestone. “Christopher F., son of Christopher F. and Libby H. Cox.” it read. “Died: February 18th, 1864.” 1864! This grave was one hundred and forty years old! I read on: “2 years, 2 months.” It was an infant! A little boy! And at the very top of grave was etched: “Grieve not that I die young.” That was a bit eerie. A 2-year-old boy, a 140-year-old grave, was buried 20 feet from my bedroom. A boy, surely nothing but a skeleton now, from the mid-19th Century laid beneath my feet. He is wearing clothes from the era of the Civil War. Are they farmers’ clothes, since I can assume his parents were most likely farmers? Or is he wearing a more formal ware for his passage to the afterlife? Are there any trinkets or toys or other accessories from the past century in the coffin, buried with the boy? I had to stop thinking of such thoughts. But those two others stone inlets - were they stones for his parents, Christopher and Libby? Why then were they taken? But even more intriguing- why was Christopher Jr’s not taken?

What sort of significance was in Christopher’s stone? There was a mystery here, one that, at the time, I was too young to solve, let alone begin! But there was a thought, a pestering postulation stuck in my head, a feeling I couldn’t ignore- Was this, could this, all be related to the old woman of the Northern Woods?