The Witness

A Blues Brothers Fan Fiction

By Ella Roberta Reamy

© 2003

A/N: Yeah, so I'm getting dark and sad again, but since I seem to write it out so well, I just go with it. :)

I sat in the cemetery one day and watched the maintenance crew dig a grave. I was sitting on an ornamental bench in front of another, triple grave. I read the names: the Normans-Sheila, Joseph, and Destiny. I remembered reading about them in the paper. The family had been killed in a car accident in Wheaton on the way back from a high school graduation a couple of springs ago.

Funny that I could remember that, but I couldn't remember last night or the day before. Or the last few days. In fact, I couldn't even remember coming to the cemetery. Just that I had somewhere, sometime decided to go, and then I was just there. Or so it seemed. I really didn't know.

I watched the crew fire up the backhoe and rip through the topsoil. The hole, at first, seemed to be just a random pit, but then I saw the coffin-length rectangle begin to slowly refine itself.

Then a hearse pulled up to the gates of the cemetery. It wasn't a fancy hearse from a funeral home, but the glaring white coroner's hearse. I knew already. It was an "unknown," someone with no family to arrange their funeral or put an obituary in the paper, so the city did it by themselves. Quickly and quietly. Elwood and I had been to a few of those.

I still wondered why I was watching the burial preparations for a complete stranger. If either of us were prone to morbid activities of this sort, it would definitely be Elwood, not me. (Elwood gets dark like that sometimes.)

I watched the crew set up the mechanism that lowered the casket into the ground. The hired pallbearers, four of them, took a generic-looking, plain wooden casket out of the back of the hearse and carried it over to the open grave. An elderly priest slowly got out of the front passenger seat of the hearse and made his way over too.

The funeral was brief. The priest said a short prayer for the deceased. Only the four pallbearers and the two maintenance workers were in attendance. I felt sorry for the guy in the coffin. Nobody that he knew was there to send him off. I guess none of them minded me being there, if they noticed. Maybe they thought I was there to visit the family grave I was sitting by.

When all was said and done, the coroner's people and the priest piled back in the hearse and left, leaving the maintenance crew to lower the coffin into the deep hole.

I don't know why or how, but it seemed that I blanked out or something, because the next thing I knew, the hole had been covered up and only one of the maintenance guys remained. He was setting a small grave marker into the ground. It was one of those plaques that laid flat in the ground that the caretakers could easily mow over.

I was tired of sitting, and also curious as to whom they had buried. Hell, I might coincidentally know the person.

I walked over to where the guy was on his knees working.

"Nice weather, huh?" I said, for lack of a better conversation opener. The guy didn't say anything. Didn't even look up.

"Oookaaay…" I said. I tried again. "Small funeral. Kinda sad, isn't it?"

The guy still didn't respond.

"Hey, buddy, you deaf or what?" I asked. The guy shifted his position and continued poking loose dirt around the stone.

"Okay, fine, I can take a—" I stopped, finally catching a glimpse of the stone.

"No way," I said aloud. "No fucking WAY this is happening!"

I looked at the stone again. And again, closer. I sank to my knees and put my face less than five inches away from the thing.

"I'm dreaming," I told myself, thought I wasn't sure I even believed it.

The maintenance guy brushed the dirt off his hands onto his jeans, got up, picked up the small spade he had been using, and walked away.

"WAIT!" I shouted after him. He kept walking.

I fell to the ground, lying on my stomach, dazed.

I don't know how long I lay there. Hours, days, seasons, years, no time at all, for all I knew, passed. I lay there, staring off into space, not really seeing anything around me, tracing the embossed letters on the stone with my fingers until I knew them by touch.

JAKE E. BLUES

1949 – 1982

When I got up, the grass had grown over the grave. My…grave…

THE END

A/N: I used Belushi's birthday/year for the stone. I always use the actors' birthdays because they're easier for me to remember.

BETA-READ BY JENNIFER HUBBARD & REVISED BY THE AUTHOR NOVEMBER 2003.