My high school girlfriend’s parents didn’t trust me much.

Maybe it was because she was the oldest – their first girl to go out in the big world. Maybe it was because she was fifteen and in traditional Mormon culture she wasn’t yet old enough to date.  Or maybe it was because I was a dumb teenager and they didn’t want to trust their precious daughter to an absent minded sixteen year old with a penchant for getting in trouble. I don’t know.

All I know is that every time I went over to pick up Melanie, I got the evil eye.

The welcome was always cordial, if cold, but I’d always get the real story when Melanie and I were out of their sight. At the time, I couldn’t see what all the fuss was about, but I tried my best to live with the rules they had set down for dating.

And the list was long: No official dating until she was sixteen. No dating alone. No staying out past 11 p.m. (not even on New Year’s Eve!) And if I came to pick her up to go to a school dance, her little brother had to go with us. Her brother Bryan was as embarrassed by this as anyone and quickly disappeared as soon as we got to the high school. Since Bryan was too young to get a date himself to go to the Junior Prom, her parents signed up as chaperones.

There were other rules that they made up as they went along, but these were the ones that seemed to be set in stone.

Technically, we kept the rules, but I’m not sure we lived up to the spirit of the law. We still managed to find time to be alone – even if it was alone in a crowd.

One night after leaving Bryan at the high school, instead of going to the dance, my friends and I decided to take a few girls to the cemetery. Both the high school and the cemetery were on the North end of town, separated only by the county fairgrounds. It was a short walk from the high school over to the cemetery gates.

I love cemeteries. I always have. There are very few of them that creep me out. I see them more as a vault holding the individual histories of a city or town, usually summed up in the most essential details – birth date, death date, military service, husband or wife, mother or father – and carved in stone. Since we were first married, Pam and I have searched out the town cemetery as we visit places on vacation in big cities or the tiniest towns. Each one has its own personality. My favorite is only ten miles from where I grew up: the old Ephraim cemetery. The cemetery was established in the early days of the settlement of Sanpete County. At this time, the relationship between white settlers and Native Americans already living in the area were strained. It isn’t uncommon to find headstones in the cemetery with the accusatory epitaph “KILLED BY INDIANS” chiseled under the name of the deceased. Today there is a granite monument in the center of the cemetery that recounts a raid on settlers working the potato fields on the south end of Ephraim (from the settler’s point of view, of course) by Indians that sparked what Utah historians now call the Black Hawk Indian war.

 In fact the abandonment of the cemetery was due in no small part to its isolated location. It was far enough from the Ephraim’s northern municipal boundary that setters were afraid to attend funerals in such a vulnerable position. Older cemeteries were placed far from town for a practical reason – to remove from view the unpleasantries that accompany poorly prepared graves. It wasn’t uncommon for winter burials, for instance, to be dug too shallow because of the frozen ground, only later to be unearthed by coyotes or for graves to collapse as the coffin and its contents decompose, leaving a sinkhole from which bones could resurface as water levels swelled in the spring. There were more than a few of these sinkholes in the old Ephraim cemetery. I saw in some the weathered wood from the lids of coffins lay bare and I suppose that if I had lifted the planks, I would have seen the occupant staring back in whatever state a hundred years of laying in the alkali soil of the desert will leave a body. I never summoned the nerve (or gall) to do it. The new cemetery is perfectly manicured and constantly decorated with flags and flowers, but I prefer the old one with its weedy patchwork of ground and rusted wrought iron fences. It’s Sanpete’s own Boot Hill.

The Manti cemetery is closer in atmosphere to the later one in Ephraim, even though it was established about the time of the older one. Manti’s has adapted with the times, but there is still a section near the southwestern corner where row after row of children were buried around 1902, when an influenza epidemic spread across much of Central Utah, that gives hint to the graveyard’s history.

As we walk our dates through the old section, we make sure to point out the children’s graves speckled by the shifting shadows from the headlights from passing cars filtering through the lilac bushes that line the fence along the highway. At sixteen any guilt we may have felt for exploiting the grave of a sick child is overridden by the possibility of our dates sliding a little closer when they feel a chill from the effect.

In the center of the cemetery is a life-size figure of a woman hovering in robes on a marble plinth about five feet above the ground. We tell the girls of an old ritual that my dad taught me, where anyone in the cemetery under the moonlight can converse with the dead by walking clockwise around the statue three times repeating “Lady, lady, what can you tell me?” to which the statue will reply “Nothing, nothing at all.”

One of the girls takes up the challenge in disbelief and when she is done entertaining us we tell her that the ritual worked. The statue did indeed say nothing, as expected.

I get a smack for exposing her gullibility and we laugh at her expense, until we see the lights at the North end of the lane.

A car has just turned into the cemetery, and at first we can’t tell if the occupant can see us or not. We are standing in the shadows of the marble monument of the lady, hoping, I guess, to be mistaken for another statue as the car moves slowly down the road. We can hear the pop of gravel along the roadway being compressed by the tires and flipped like tiddlywinks against the curbs on either side of the lane, but with the headlights directly facing us, we can’t make out what kind of car it is.

Not until the spotlight comes on, that is.

“Omigosh! It’s a cop! Everybody run!” We take off toward the wooden fence that marks the western border of the cemetery and hoist ourselves over the planks into the fairgrounds as we hear the “TWEEP!” of the police car and see the red and blue strobes light our way before we fall into the shadows on the other side. It was at this moment that we realized that when we bolted from our position by the marble lady that none of the girls followed us! What were they thinking? Even worse, what were they telling the cop? Would my parents find out? Would Melanie’s parents find out?

“Just great,” I think to myself. “She’s not even sixteen and I just got her arrested for trespassing while we were supposed to be at the school dance. Something tells me we are never going out again.”

We sit on the other side of the fence, trying to see if the cop was following us, but it looks like he isn’t getting out of the car. He talks to the girls for a couple of seconds and then shines the spotlight in our direction. That’s enough to startle us and we run full tilt for the grandstands on the other side of the fairground. Convinced that we are no longer being followed, but not completely willing to take any chances and return to the cemetery, we walk the long way around the exposition pavilion and hop the fence just north of the tennis courts behind the high school. As we walk around to the front of the school, we see the cop car pulling out of the parking lot. The girls are all standing by the flagpole waiting for us, and none of them look very happy.

There is no way we can see to put a positive spin on this so we approach them prepared to meet our fate.

“What happened? Why didn’t you run?” we asked.

Melanie’s friend points at her heeled shoes and says, “Are you kidding?”

We didn’t think of that.

“The cop gave us a ride back to the school.” Melanie says.

“Did he ask who we were?” we ask, hoping there is some honor among trespassers as there is among thieves.

“Yes, and we told him.”

Okay, the ‘honor’ thing may have been expecting too much.

“So what did he say to you?” I ask, dreading what the answer may be.

“Oh he was really nice and asked us if we needed a ride back to the high school.”

“That’s it?”

“No, he also asked us what kind of jerks would run away when the cop shows up and leave a bunch of girls standing in the cemetery by themselves!”

Twenty some years later, my daughter is now fifteen - the same age Melanie was that night I left her standing in the cemetery. Hopefully, I’m not as dogmatic, but many of the rules that Melanie’s parents had, I now insist upon with my own daughters. It isn’t that I don’t trust my daughters; it’s just that I know how stupid I was at sixteen.

Now, if Joshua were only old enough to chaperone…