There was a short, plump elderly woman at both the funerals who wept so uncontrollably that she seemed more than a mere friend of the dead and instead, impossibly, the mother of both. At the second funeral, she stood and sobbed only a few feet from him and the overweight stranger next to him, who he assumed was her husband, even though (or perhaps because), with his arms crossed and his teeth clenched and his chin in the air, he remained strikingly aloof and apart from her, an indifferent spectator who refused any longer to put up with this person. If anything, her tears would seem to have aroused bitter contempt rather than sympathetic concern, because in the midst of the funeral, as the rabbi was intoning in English the words of the prayer book, the husband turned unbidden and impatiently asked, "You know why she's carrying on like that?" "I believe I do," he whispered back, meaning by this, It's because it is for her as it's been for me ever since I was a boy. It's because it is for her as it is for everyone. It's because life's most disturbing intensity is death. It's because death is so unjust. It's because once one has tasted life, death does not even seem natural. I had thought – secretly I was certain – that life goes on and on. "Well, you're wrong," the man said flatly, as though having read his mind. "She's like that all the time. That has been the story for fifty years," he added with an unforgiving scowl. "She's like that because she isn't eighteen anymore."
His parents were situated close to the perimeter of the cemetery, and it was a while before he found their graves by the iron fence that separated the last row of burial plots from a narrow side street that appeared to be a makeshift rest stop for truckers taking a break from their turnpike run. In the years since he'd last been here, he'd forgotten the effect the first sight of the headstone had on him. He saw their two names carved there, and he was incapacitated by the kind of sobbing that overpowers babies and leaves them limp. He elicited easily enough his last recollection of each of them – the hospital recollection – but when he tried to call up the earliest recollection, the effort to reach as far back as he could in their common past caused a second wave of feeling to overwhelm him.
They were just bones, bones in a box, but their bones were his bones, and he stood as close to the bones as he could, as though the proximity might link him up with them and mitigate the isolation born of losing his future and reconnect him with all that had gone. For the next hour and a half, those bones were the things that mattered most. They were all that mattered, despite the impingement of the neglected cemetery's environment of decay. Once he was with those bones he could not leave them, couldn't not talk to them, couldn't but listen to them when they spoke. Between him and those bones there was a great deal going on, far more than now transpired between him and those still clad in their flesh. The flesh melts away but the bones endure. The bones were the only solace there was to one who put no stock in an afterlife and knew without a doubt that God was a fiction and this was the only life he'd have. As young Phoebe might have put it back when they first met, it was not going too far to say that his deepest pleasure now was at the cemetery. Here alone contentment was attainable.
He did not feel as though he were playing at something. He did not feel as though he were trying to make something come true. This was what was true, this intensity of connection with those bones.
His mother had died at eighty, his father at ninety. Aloud he said to them, "I'm seventy-one. Your boy is seventy-one." "Good. You lived," his mother replied, and his father said, "Look back and atone for what you can atone for, and make the best of what you have left."
He couldn't go. The tenderness was out of control. As was the longing for everyone to be living. And to have it all all over again.
He was walking back through the cemetery to his car when he came upon a black man digging a grave with a shovel. The man was standing about two feet down in the unfinished grave and stopped shoveling and hurling the dirt out to the side as the visitor approached him. He wore dark coveralls and an old baseball cap, and from the gray in his mustache and the lines in his face he looked to be at least fifty. His frame, however, was still thick and strong.
"I thought they did this with a machine," he said to the gravedigger.
"In big cemeteries, where they do many graves, a lot of times they use machines, that's right." He spoke like a Southerner, but very matter-of-factly, very precisely, more like a pedantic schoolteacher than a physical laborer. "I don't use a machine," the gravedigger continued, "because it can sink the other graves. The soil can give and it can crush in on the box. And you have the gravestones you have to deal with. It's just easier in my case to do everything by hand. Much neater. Easier to take the dirt away without ruining anything else. I use a real small tractor that I can maneuver easily, and I dig by hand."
Now he noticed the tractor in the grassy pathway between the graves. "The tractor's for what?"
"Use that to haul the dirt away. I've been doing it long enough that I know how much dirt to take away and how much dirt to leave. The first ten trailers of dirt I take away. Whatever's left I throw up on boards. I put down plywood boards. You can see 'em. I lay down three plywood boards so the dirt doesn't sit on the grass itself. The last half of the dirt I throw out onto the boards. To fill in afterwards. Then I cover everything with this green carpet. Try to make it nice for the family. So it looks like grass."
"How do you dig it? Mind if I ask?"
"Nope," said the gravedigger, still a couple feet down, standing where he'd been digging. "Most folks don't care. With most folks, the less they know the better."
"I want to know," he assured him. And he did. He did not want to go.
"Well, I have a map. Shows every grave that's ever been sold or laid out in the cemetery. With the map you locate the plot, purchased who knows when, fifty years ago, seventy-five years ago. Once I got it located I come here with a probe. There it is. That seven-foot spike on the ground. I take this probe and I go down two or three feet, and that's how I locate the next grave over. Bang – you hit it and you hear it. And then I take a stick and I mark on the ground where the new grave is. Then I have a wood frame that I lay down on the ground and that's what I cut the soil to. I take an edger first and I cut the sod to the size of the frame. Then I size it down, make one-foot-square pieces of sod, and put them back of the grave, out of sight – because I don't want to make any kind of mess where the funeral will be. The less dirt, the easier it is to clean up. I don't ever want to leave a mess. I lay down a board back of the grave next to it, where I can carry the squares of sod to it on the fork. I lay 'em like a grid so it looks like where I took ' em out. That takes about an hour. It's a hard part of the job. Once I've done that, then I dig. I bring the tractor over, and my trailer attached. What I do is, I dig first. That's what I'm doing now. My son digs the hard part. He's stronger than I am now. He likes to come in after I'm done. When he's busy or not around I dig the whole thing myself. But when he's here I always let him dig the harder part. I'm fifty-eight. I don't dig like I used to. When he started I had him here all the time, and we'd take turns digging. That was fun because he was young and it gave me time to talk to him, just the two of us alone."
"What did you talk to him about?"
"Not about graveyards," he said, laughing hard. "Not like I'm talking to you."
"What then?"
"Things in general. Life in general. Anyway, I dig the first half. I use two shovels, a square shovel when the digging is easy and you can take more dirt, and then I use just a round pointed shovel, just a standard shovel. That's what you use for basic digging, a regular common shovel. If it's easy digging, especially in the spring when the ground isn't real solid, when the ground is wet, I use the big shovel and I can take out big shovelfuls and heave 'em into the trailer. I dig front to back, and I dig a grid, and as I go I use my edger to square the hole. I use that and a straight fork – they call it a spading fork. I use that to edge too, to bang down, cut the edges, and keep it square. You've got to keep it square as you go. The first ten loads go into the trailer and I take it over to an area in the cemetery where it's low and where we're filling that area, and I dump the trailer, come back, fill it up again. Ten loads. At that point I'm about halfway. That's about three foot."