Prologue as Part of the Body

"Guess how I spent my Halloween?" Captain Morgan asked me over the telephone. I hadn't heard his voice in nearly five years. He spoke as fast as one of his humming tattoo guns. "I spent it in a graveyard," he said, "in Salem, Massachusetts, drinking wine beside a pond with a Croatian witch!" I told him I wasn't surprised to hear it.

The last time we'd talked, Captain Morgan had sent me the text message, "Thinking of you," beneath a photograph of a granite headstone engraved with my own last name. Five years ago, a nineteenth-century graveyard in Richmond, Virginia, had brought us together. He: an artist about to leave Richmond to open a tattoo parlor in Nashville. Me: a poet fleeing a breakup in Houston and a falling out with a close friend, Lee. I believed returning to Richmond—the city in which I'd lived for most of my twenties—and renting an apartment on the grounds of my favorite cemetery would help me recover. I could get by on funds from a recent literary grant and write poems all day, I thought, gazing into a landscape of rest.

Captain Morgan had posted an ad online for the one-bedroom he needed to abandon due to his new plans: a spacious ground-floor unit in the cemetery's former caretaker's house—that grand lavender Victorian trimmed in ivory paint just inside Hollywood Cemetery's wrought-iron front gate. As I scrolled through the rental listings, I recognized the house immediately. Amid the thorny evergreens and leaning headstones, the mansion resembled an iconic haunted house, replete with gothic spires, bay windows, scarlet drapes, and wraparound porch. When Captain Morgan opened the door of the apartment to give me a tour, his arms and neck poked from his T-shirt. My eyes moved over his tattooed skin swirled in dense sleeves of ink.

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I lived for three years with Carrick in our narrow brick row house on South Cherry Street, three blocks away from Hollywood Cemetery. The graveyard, designed in 1847 and landscaped in the "rural style," rises on one side of the James River in a sprawl of grassy hills and foot paths clustered with its namesake's deep green holly trees, gnarl-kneed magnolias, bark-sloughing sycamores, and three-story cedars that smell like cookie dough after the rains. Between trees tilt irregular rows of ivy-draped headstones: grey or rose-pink granite and strange white soap-stones carved to mimic vine-shrouded oak stumps. My favorite graves: a pair of horizontal ledger slabs marking a married couple, Jonathan and Winnifred (I called them "Johnny and Winnie"), enclosed by a low brick wall at the steep riverside edge of the cemetery. The enclave formed a rhombus-shaped balcony overlooking the parallel lines of the railroad tracks below and the James River beyond. I'd nod to Johnny and Winnie, saying hello if no one else was around, and then hoist myself up to perch on the far wall and watch a coal train that idled beneath my feet or peer at clusters of sunbathers sprawled on flat rocks on Belle Isle across the river. Sometimes the wallop of bongo drums pulsed downwind.

Hollywood Cemetery houses an eclectic mix of regional skeletons, including a number of major figures of the Civil War-era South: Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederacy; twenty-five Confederate generals, such as J.E.B. Stuart; a number of victims of the November 1918 influenza epidemic; Virginius Dabney, editor of the Richmond Times Dispatch (now nicknamed the Richmond Times Disgrace), who wore sharkskin trousers and won a Pulitzer for his work championing civil rights; the suffragette Lila Meade Valentine; James Monroe, the fifth president of the United States, whose tomb juts up from the middle of a sort of gazebo-sized, iron birdcage; and the Irish schoolteacher William Burke, who tutored the teenaged and not yet famous Edgar Allan Poe. In the middle of the graveyard sit several horseshoe-shaped "whispering benches" of cool white marble designed with concave backs that amplify and channel echoes. This way...