The past couple Saturday mornings have yielded an interesting sight as I walk past Holy Cross Cemetery’s southwest corner. Spring is clean up time everywhere and it seems that a group of six or eight men–just the far side of middle age–take on the chore of righting gravestones, putting down fresh drainage (!) gravel, and resodding.
Although this morning is overcast and cool, they are working hard enough that, just past 9 am, they have already discarded jackets and sweaters, which are neatly hung across some stones while they work around others. Their tools are, for the most part, a thousand years old: shovels, a wheelbarrow, muscle. Jelly rolls of sod are stacked on a flat grave close to the sidewalk iron fence. They call to each other companionably, word of going to get more of something, the need to move a piece at an angle.
Graveyards are both delicate and firm: stone and sod and trees take a beating from nature and, probably here as well as anywhere, the occasional ghoulish vandal. Along the South Street side of Holy Cross, I can see a number of broken markers–some thin old tablets, others multipart granite pedestals-that-held-crosses. The damage doesn’t look like it came from gravestone topplers but from hard weather or changing temperatures. Some large chunks of rotting tree trunk make me think the damage might be Juan-related.
On the southeast side of this cemetery there is a patch of ranked military markers. Canadian military tablets are more decorative than US ones, not a lot, but some: they each bear an engraved wreathe rather than the surprising simplicity of the American’s unadorned shields. For a relatively small urban burying ground, Holy Cross seems to have “neighborhoods”–no big mausoleums, but soldiers here, families of fortune there, a patch of wood crosses to the north.
June 9, 2008 at 9:22 pm |
Holy Cross cemetery is also the final resting place of one of Canada’s early prime ministers. If you walk toward the north-west corner (i.e. on South Park St) you will encounter the tombstone of John (or was it David?) Thompson, who died in office, I believe, in the late 1800s.
What makes this so interesting is how unadorned and low-key the gravesite is. This was a personal grave site, as opposed to something bought and funded by the government – it pales in contrast to the final resting places you might see of American presidents, for instance. The grave site of Alexander Keith, the former mayor of Hfx (and notorious brewer) is much grander in scope and scale. (His grave is found near the centre of the cemetery bordering the public gardens.)
One final note: St. Mary’s Basilica still performs mass in the tiny, tiny Holy Cross chapel once a year or so..