I looked up at Uncle August. “Thank you,” was all I could manage to whisper.
He gathered me into his arms. “You’re the pearl, Samantha,” he said. “You’re the pearl.”
I nodded at the old woman, who nodded back and left my side. I gripped my shovel’s handle, contemplating the humble tombstone at my feet. Ernest Smith, it read. 1855–1872.
No other words. Nothing indicating how young Ernest — aged seventeen at time of death, precisely my own age — had met his fate.
I bent to the ground, with my index finger tracing letters on stone. “What happened to you, Ernest?” I whispered. “What happened?”
The foreman, striding among the headstones, spotted me. “Get up,” he said.
I stood, shovel in hand.
Rudiman considered me. His eyes beheld my shorn, capped head, then took in my smooth cheeks and jaw. His gaze lingered at my collarbone, where the top button of my shirt was unfastened against the warmth of the day. From there, his eyes roamed the length of my body and came to rest on my long, booted feet.
He gazed upward, meeting my eye. “Get to work, boy,” he growled.
I took up my spade. My arms, in Uncle August’s shirt, were wiry. Plain of face, with no brothers to assume the fieldwork and no prospects for leaving my father’s homestead and becoming some other farmer’s wife, I’d left school at fourteen and taken my place in the fields. There, I’d been paid nothing for my work. But here on this rubbled turf, laborers would earn twenty-five cents for each body we removed from the ground and transferred to a new casket. Undertaker McGovern, I suspected, was being paid many times that amount by the city. Rudiman, self-importantly stomping amongst the workers, likely also received a healthy cut.
But I would earn nothing unless I started to dig.
Nonetheless, I was careful. I removed dirt from Ernest’s grave, the mound piling up until I encountered a rotting wooden box, sunk in the middle and exposing a skeleton’s torso.
Ernest had lain here for over twenty years, almost as long as the cemetery existed. What had he done? How had he died?
Gently, I shoveled my way around the decrepit box. When enough of the ramshackle casket was exposed to begin raising it, I set aside my spade and bent to the earth.
“Need a hand?”
A fellow laborer, young and handsome, smiled at me. I admired the well-defined shoulder muscles I discerned through his faded cotton shirt. His beard was full and neatly trimmed. I had to resist an impulse to touch it.
We each took one end of Ernest’s crumbling coffin. As we raised it, the bottom collapsed. A stench erupted, and I covered my nose with my neckerchief. The corpse, primarily skeleton but for a few persistent scraps of flesh, tumbled to the earth.
I fell to my knees. “I’m so sorry,” I whispered to Ernest Smith’s remains. “I should have been more cautious.”
My associate knelt beside me. “It’s all right,” he said. “You did your best.”
We looked at one another, and without a word folded our hands in prayer.
“May God have mercy on this dear, departed soul,” my companion said.
“Amen,” I finished. “Amen.”
On the second day, we sat amongst the dead eating our noontime sandwiches. I had my Dickinson with me, and I read beneath the shade of a cottonwood.
And so, upon this wise I prayed, —
Great Spirit, give to me
A heaven not so large as yours,
But large enough for me.
“Rise, you men!” Rudiman shouted. “Cease your loafing and get yourselves unloading.”
I looked up. A fresh shipment of caskets had arrived. Tucking the book into my knapsack, I got to my feet.
Hauling coffins from wagon to ground, we noticed something portentous.
Someone spoke. “Sir,” he said to Rudiman, “these caskets are mighty small.”
Shielding my eyes from the noonday sun, I observed that the man who spoke was none other than yesterday’s fellow precant over Ernest Smith’s remains. Again, my fingers itched to stroke the smooth hair along his jaw.
Rudiman approached, joined by our employer, E.P. McGovern. “What’s your name, man?” McGovern asked.
“Walter Perry,” came the reply.
McGovern lowered his hat over his brow. “Well, Perry, I don’t see as how it’s your place to ask questions. But as you ask, these caskets are all I was able to get on short notice.” He held up his hands in a gesture of helplessness. “You hear about the accident at that mining site out in Utah? Can’t tell you how many dead, but every remaining full-sized casket in Denver has been shipped west. Can’t find one to save your life — much less theirs.” McGovern waved a hand dismissively at the graves, then shook a finger in Perry’s face. “Way I see it, sir, you got two choices: either you find a way to fit these bodies in the caskets provided, or you set aside your shovel and leave the work to those who have the stomach for it.”
McGovern and Rudiman waited. Walter Perry eyed one man, then the other. Then he stuck his shovel in the ground and crossed the field. Exiting the cemetery, he broke through the assembled onlookers and disappeared.
The undertaker and foreman exchanged chuckles. “Anyone else?” McGovern called out. “Or are the rest of you real men?” He looked around the decaying field. “Your decision, gents.”
I felt my shoulders stiffen. I saw no possibility that a grown man’s body could fit into so small a casket. And yet, I lacked the courage to do what Walter Perry had just done — simply walk away.
My dilemma seemed to elude the others. Indeed, it appeared that they relished the task ahead. With fresh enthusiasm, shovels were raised. Skeletons were hacked apart — torso, upper limbs, pelvis, and lower limbs separated with the swift strike of metal on bone. Skulls were carelessly cracked from the rounded bone at the pinnacle of the spine. All of these bones were then crammed into tiny caskets, intended for children who left this world before their third birthdays.
Naturally, most of the disconnected frames did not fit, no matter how valiantly the men — at first — attempted ramming them into the miniature boxes. The remains of these unfortunate souls were, instead, distributed to secondary and sometimes tertiary caskets. “All the better,” one worker said. “We’re being paid by the casket, right?”
Overhearing him, McGovern grinned. “That we are, mister.”
Something else happened then too. Perhaps the men had exceedingly enjoyed the contents of their whiskey flasks during the noon hour. Or perhaps it was simply that the notion of what was being asked of them, the notion of dismantling and cramming adult skeletons into diminutive caskets, brought out something animallike in the workers.
I can’t say what it was. Regardless of the reason, tactics became increasingly macabre. Men warmed to the task, and their inhibitions, if they had any, loosened. They worked faster and rougher, gleefully shouting obscenities at one another and at the cemetery’s remains.
Then began the looting. Laborers examined bodies for jewelry. Cigar boxes filled with treasured possessions, buried alongside some of the deceased, were opened and rifled through. Anything of worth was stuffed into laborers’ pockets.
I glanced about. The old woman was nowhere to be seen, but I could hear her words in my head: Respect them.
I nearly put up my blade. How could I go on? How could I, recalling young Ernest Smith’s decomposed body, continue this mockery of a job that McGovern and his henchman Rudiman required? How could I — remembering my first exhumation, the one in an Iowa cornfield, remembering my uncle’s kind eyes and warm words — how could I, under these circumstances, attempt to transform such gruesome work into art?