Entry 2

The ground is dusted with a confectioner's-sugar patina of snow that’s begun to go stale and hard. A clear afternoon, cold and windless. Snowclouds still threaten a flurry overhead, punctuated by rhombi of blue like casement windows opening out onto the sky. Today I enter the cemetery from the Butler St. entrance, on the northwestern edge of the grounds, technically the cemetery’s official entryway. A grandiose Tudor-style sandstone gate complex straddles what was once the entrance to Colonel George Bayard’s farm, before all one hundred acres were purchased in 1844 to establish a cemetery large enough to accommodate the dearly departed members of the congregation of the Third Presbyterian Church. At present, it covers three hundred acres.

I’ve printed out a guide to a walking tour of Allegheny Cemetery available on their website, figuring I ought to get more formally acquainted with the land and its most notable residents. And I can’t resist a good historical walking tour. Did you know that twenty-two mayors of Pittsburgh, including its first mayor, Ebenezer Denny, are buried here?

As it turns out, I’m pretty bad at following directions, and soon end up ditching the guide after getting more than slightly lost. I keep veering off the paved roads to wend through the sprawling family plots, climbing steep hillsides made slippery by the crust of snow. Stones and trees stand out stark and sharp in the chill air. Winter has a way of crisping the edges of things, running an icy thumbnail along the fold of January’s paper. The limbs and bare branches of trees are silhouetted in black against the pale backdrop of sky, innumerable and intricate webs like the crazing in the glaze of a ceramic bowl. I collect a few leaves as I go, hoping to get a better sense of the flora that inhabit the grounds: scarlet oak, planetree maple, Norway spruce, holly.

I spot only two deer today, a pair of doe, stock-still and staring at me intensely when I turn a corner. I stop, nod awkwardly in acknowledgement, and continue around the bend of a hill. When I turn around, they’ve vanished. Only a single crow, invisible somewhere in its arboreal perch, lets out a caw, and then another, and is silent.

A surprising number of cars are driving through today, and it’s not until I spot four or five men in coveralls beside a bright orange backhoe that I realize a funeral ended not very long ago. I watch surreptitiously, about a hundred yards away as the workers dismantle the casket-lowering contraption and load it back into a large van. From my position, I cannot see the open grave. One man climbs into the cabin of the backhoe, pushes in and packs down the dirt in a matter of minutes. Perhaps this cacophony of man and machine have made the deer scarce, or perhaps the rime of snow and ice has made it difficult to scour the ground for edibles. But who can explain today’s absence of crows? It may be the case that, because it is still early, they have yet to return from their afternoon errands to roost en masse for the evening.

Farther along on my walk I notice a gravestone shared by one George Porter Hogg, Jr., and Betsy Hewitt Hogg, atop of which a blue Ziplock bag is held down by several large rocks. I brush snow off the plastic, peer in and see several sheets of paper, letters, it looks like, the top one which begins in typewritten red ink, “DAD:”. George and Betsy died in 2015 and 2016 at the ages of 95 and 96, respectively. In the center of the Hogg family plot stands a bronze angel on a tall stone pedestal, a monument (the guide tells me, making itself useful once again) cast around 1850. With one hand reaching toward the earth and one pointing to the sky, the angel seems ready to take George and Betsy's hands and ascend with them heavenward, only a temporary visitor to this mortal plane. Yet it seems as though it’s been caught here for some time, waiting, perhaps impatiently, for the dead to awaken. Its robes are tarnished to teal, and an almost fluorescent algae-green stain looks as though it’s been dripping down one side of the pedestal for a century and a half. The angel is melting, going nowhere fast.

In 1845, Margaretta Bayard Briggs, daughter of Col. Briggs whose farm this land once was, became the first burial in Allegheny Cemetery. While the guide is not too specific on its location, I believe I identify her final resting place, though I have my doubts since the text on the granite upright is almost entirely effaced. I’m fairly certain, however, that I can make out

BA               B        GS

just barely in relief on the weather-worn marker. The bed-like ledger stone to which the upright is affixed like a headboard looks to be mouldering, blemished by splotches of velvety white lichen. I try to imagine how George Briggs felt as he laid his young daughter to rest here, just one year after he sold his land, his home, only for it to become the very graveyard in which he buried his child. A plot of earth once meant to nurture new life, given over, now, to the dead.