TRIED & TRUE : For a Little Relief, Crayons Rub Tombstones the Right Way
Nobody whistles past a graveyard anymore.
That’s right, graveyard. Not cemetery or, God help us, memorial park. No, the modern versions all look too clean, too tidy. They’re almost invisible, with the stones set flush with the green, perfectly mown grass. Visit your local memorial park, and you don’t know whether to toss around a Frisbee or hit a few eight-irons. You couldn’t get spooked at one of these places if zombies started crawling out of the crypts (which look more like Burger Kings than burial vaults anyway).
‘Tis the season to be creepy, and you just can’t do it by strolling among ground-hugging grave markers that might as well be engraved with dancing Care Bears for all the willies they generate.
No, you have to find yourself some real headstones, the ones that jut belligerently out of the sod and look like mini-mausoleums. The ones that are big enough for at least three ghouls to hide behind at night. The ones that weather and crack and eventually mutate into shapes that look hideous in shadow and dim moonlight.
Still, if you want to be really creepy, you have to take some of that gloom home with you. You need to do a wax rubbing or two.
That’s right, the same sort of thing all those people on their knees in every cathedral in Europe are doing, apart from praying. It’s usually referred to as “brass rubbing,” but that’s only if the object beneath the paper is made of brass, as so many objects in all those musty old European rock piles are. Otherwise, it’s possible to transfer an image of just about any object that has a bit of gentle relief onto a sheet of paper using a stick of colored wax.
The technique is a cinch, as I learned from the folks at the London Brass Rubbing Center, which is in residence not in London but at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Long Beach until Nov. 21. A touring exhibit of more than 50 reproductions of medieval brass markers depicting knights and damsels and lions and lambs, the center also sells paper and colored wax to anyone wanting to learn the centuries-old technique (though a thick crayon works just as well on most headstones).
Not to usurp the center’s staff, but here’s how it’s done: 1) tape the paper tightly over the object; 2) rub the surface of the paper like crazy with the colored wax until an image emerges.
This works beautifully on the small brass relief objects at the center, and the detail that emerges can be impressive. The surface is, after all, well-defined and absolutely smooth. But what about an old headstone, I wanted to know? One of the women from the church who was helping to staff the center disappeared into a back room and emerged a minute later with an armload of rubbings some of the church’s kids had done in one of Long Beach’s old cemeteries. They had been done with crayon on rice paper, but the results looked acceptable enough for the most picky Halloween party decorator. I bought a couple of sheets of white butcher paper and a stick of black wax, climbed into the car and headed back to Orange County and Anaheim Cemetery.
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If a walk through this cemetery at night is creepy, a stroll during daylight is a history lesson. These were the original settlers of Anaheim, sodbusters all, who grew grapes before they grew oranges. These were people who lived an elemental life and who were serious about death, or at least the commemoration of death. No soil-flush stones with mere name and dates for these bauern (there are a few of those sprinkled about, aberrations from the modern 1930s), but rather ornately carved obelisks, filigree, bas-relief drapery, drippy 19th-Century sentiment, even a few Civil War regimental stones.
I picked what appeared to be a real classic: white limestone, basic inverted U-shape, carved in both Roman and italic, and in German. It marked the final resting place of one Friederich R. Horstmann, born in Harpstedt, Hanover. Died on July 19, 1868, at age 35.
Sorry to tread on your grave, pal, I thought as I snapped off a few strips of masking tape and fixed the butcher paper over the face of the stone. I checked to see if the stone were loose; the last thing I wanted was to tip Friederich over. Satisfied that all was solid, I lightly marked the edges of the stone on the paper and began filling in the middle.
After about five minutes of relentless elbow grease, sweat dripping onto my eyeglass lenses (you have to bend over double to get enough leverage to rub properly, and that wax is hard ) I could hear Friederich laughing.
“Next time use a crayon, dumkopf!” he howled, watching me dance around the front of the stone, trying and failing to get a smooth image to appear. Finally, I realized that I wasn’t going to get the same pristine image the brass rubbers did, not grinding away on a stone that had been weathering for 125 years.
Still, it worked. Not quite spiffy enough to hang in the Smithsonian, but certainly legible--and creepy--enough to cause comment at a Halloween party.
I rolled up my prize and stole away, whistling.
