There are three cemeteries within a quarter-mile radius of our home. This is the kind of fact with which you become conversant when you have a dog. Dogs need to be walked, and pretty, wooded park-like areas are much better than streets. Cemeteries are even better than parks, because there’s something to read. I can entertain myself for an hour altogether piecing together the narratives represented by the tombstone inscriptions. Death narratives can be sad, like the couple who lost three infants within five years, the last two named “Hannah” after their mother — I hoped they had some children who lived to adulthood and were buried elsewhere, with their own spouses and children — but there are lots of people who lived to a ripe old age, too.

Aside from the odd monument to a 9/11 victim, most of the stones in these cemeteries commemorate people long dead. The oldest cemetery in Port City is the one adjacent to the park across the street. Its occupants were largely born in the 1700s and early 1800s. It is not easy to navigate, for there are no neat paths or formal landscaping, but it is situated on a small hill and is terribly picturesque. Even the name, Old Hill Burying Ground, is quaint. Port City’s notables are buried there, like Lord Timothy Dexter (famous for staging his own fake funeral), Thomas Savage (Bermuda’s first recorded silversmith!), General John Titcomb (Brigadier-General of the Militia in the Revolutionary War), and, of course, Jim Morrison. The place is a madhouse on weekends.

The prettiest of the three is the Oak Hill Cemetery. It is of more recent vintage, established in 1842. I call this the High-Rent Cemetery: big monuments, pretty lanes, nice landscaping. There are large family plots here bearing the names that still grace the town’s streets, businesses, and institutions today: Jaques, Lunt, Greenleaf. It is what Husband calls a “squirrel-rich environment.” When we let Dog run off-leash there (only on the most desolate days, because it is now banned), he is half-crazed.

The New Hill Burying Ground is the sad cemetery. It’s across the street from the Old Hill Burying Ground, but it couldn’t be more different: treeless, weedy, and surrounded by an ugly chain-link fence. This graveyard is notable for one thing: its headstones bear the only ethnic names in town. Sure, most of them are WASPy Smiths, Lowells, Johnstons, and Coffins, but there is one small Armenian section and a tinier corner devoted to the Greeks.

For me, the discovery of these graves prompted a question: Where are all the other ethnic minorities in town? Where are the Poles, the Italians, the Germans? Over the years, Port City’s industries have included shipbuilding, silverwork, and mills; surely these jobs must have attracted people other than WASPs, but they’re not represented here. Of course, many of them would have been Catholic, but there is no Catholic cemetery in town. What happened to them all?

It’s Hallowe’en, and I don’t see enough dead people.