"So from start to finish, how long does it take?"
"It'll take about three hours to do my end. Could even take four hours. Depends on the dig. My son's a good digger – takes him about two and a half hours more. It's a day's work. I usually come in about six in the morning, and my son comes in around ten. But he's busy now and I tell him he can do it when he wants. If the weather's hot, he'll come at night when it's cooler. With Jewish people we only get a day's notice, and we got to do it quick. At the Christian cemetery" – he pointed to the large, sprawling cemetery that lay across the road – "the undertakers will give us two or three days' notice." "And you been doing this work how long?" "Thirty-four years. A long time. It's good work. It's peaceful. Gives you time to think. But it's a lot of work. Starting to hurt my back. One day soon I'm turning it all over to my son. He'll take over and I'm moving back to where it's warm year round. Because, don't forget, I only told you about digging it. You got to come back and fill it up. That takes you three hours. Put the sod back, and so on. But let's go back to when the grave is dug. My son has finished up. He's squared it up, it's flat on the bottom. It's six foot deep, it looks good, you could jump down in the hole. Like the old guy used to say who I first dug with, it's got to be flat enough to lay a bed out on it. I used to laugh at him when he said that. But it's so: you've got this hole, six foot deep, and it's got to be right for the sake of the family and right for the sake of the dead."
"Mind if I stand here and watch?"
"Not at all. This is nice diggin'. No rocks. Straight in."
He watched him dig down with the shovel and then hoist up the dirt and heave it easily onto the plywood. Every few minutes he would use the tines of the fork to loosen up the sides and then choose one of the two shovels to resume the digging. Once in a while a small rock would strike the plywood, but mostly what came up out of the grave was moist brown soil that broke apart easily on leaving the shovel.
He was watching from beside the gravestone to the rear of which the gravedigger had laid out the square patches of sod that he would return to the plot after the funeral. The sod was fitted perfectly to the piece of plywood on which the patches rested. And still he did not want to go, not while by merely turning his head he could catch a glimpse of his parents' stone. He never wanted to go.
Pointing to the gravestone, the gravedigger said, "This guy here fought in World War Two. Prisoner of war in Japan. Helluva nice guy. Know him from when he used to come visit his wife. Nice guy. Always a decent guy. Got stuck with your car, the kind of guy who'd pull you out."
"So you know some of these people."
"Sure I do. There's a boy here, seventeen. Killed in a car crash. His friends come by and put beer cans on his grave. Or a fishing pole. He liked to fish."
He cleaned a clump of dirt from his shovel by banging it down on the plywood and then resumed digging. "Oops," he said, looking out across the cemetery to the street, "here she comes," and he instantly put aside the shovel and pulled off his soiled yellow work gloves. For the first time he stepped up out of the grave and banged each of his battered work shoes against the other to dislodge the dirt that was clinging to them.
An elderly black woman was approaching the open grave carrying a small plaid cooler in one hand and a thermos in the other. She was wearing running shoes, a pair of nylon slacks the color of the gravedigger's work gloves, and a blue, zippered New York Yankees team jacket.
The gravedigger said to her, "This is a nice gentleman who's been visiting with me this morning."
She nodded and handed him the cooler and the thermos, which he set down beside his tractor.
"Thank you, honey. Arnold still sleeping?"
"He's up," she said. "I made you two meat loaf and one baloney."
"That's good. Thank you."
She nodded again and then turned and went out of the cemetery, where she got into her car and drove away.
"That your wife?" he asked the gravedigger.
"That is Thelma." Smiling, he added, "She nourishes me."
"She isn't your mother."
"Oh, no, no – no, sir," said the gravedigger with a laugh, "not Thelma."
"And she doesn't mind coming out here?"
"You gotta do what you gotta do. That's her philosophy in a nutshell. What it comes down to for Thelma is just diggin' a hole. This is nothing special to her."
"You want to eat your lunch, so I'm going to leave you. But I want to ask – I wonder if you dug my parents' graves. They're buried over here. Let me show you."
The gravedigger followed him a ways until they could see clearly the site of his family stone.
"Did you dig those?" he asked him.
"Sure, I did them," the gravedigger said.
"Well, I want to thank you. I want to thank you for everything you've told me and for how clear you've been. You couldn't have made things more concrete. It's a good education for an older person. I thank you for the concreteness, and I thank you for being so careful and considerate when you dug my parents' graves. I wonder if I might give you something."
"I received my fee at the time, thank you."
"Yes, but I'd like to give you something for you and your son. My father always said, 'It's best to give while your hand is still warm.'" He slipped him two fifties, and as the gravedigger's large, roughened palm closed around the bills, he looked at him closely, at the genial, creased face and the pitted skin of the mustached black man who might someday soon be digging a hole for him that was flat enough at the bottom to lay a bed on.
In the days that followed he had only to yearn for them to conjure them up, and not merely the bone parents of the aging man but the flesh parents of the boy still in bud, off to the hospital on the bus with Treasure Island and Kim in the bag his mother balanced on her knees. A boy still in bud but because of her presence showing no fear and shoving aside all his thoughts about the bloated body of the seaman that he'd watched the Coast Guard remove from the edge of the oil-clotted beach.
He went in early on a Wednesday morning for the surgery on his right carotid artery. The routine was exactly as it had been for the surgery on the left carotid. He waited his turn in the anteroom with everyone else on the surgical schedule until his name was called, and in his flimsy gown and paper slippers he was accompanied by a nurse into the operating room. This time when he was asked by the masked anesthesiologist if he wanted the local or the general anesthetic, he requested the general so as to make the surgery easier to bear than it had been the first time around.
The words spoken by the bones made him feel buoyant and indestructible. So did the hard-won subjugation of his darkest thoughts. Nothing could extinguish the vitality of that boy whose slender little torpedo of an unscathed body once rode the big Atlantic waves from a hundred yards out in the wild ocean all the way in to shore. Oh, the abandon of it, and the smell of the salt water and the scorching sun! Daylight, he thought, penetrating everywhere, day after summer day of that daylight blazing off a living sea, an optical treasure so vast and valuable that he could have been peering through the jeweler's loupe engraved with his father's initials at the perfect, priceless planet itself – at his home, the billion-, the trillion-, the quadrillion-carat planet Earth! He went under feeling far from felled, anything but doomed, eager yet again to be fulfilled, but nonetheless, he never woke up. Cardiac arrest. He was no more, freed from being, entering into nowhere without even knowing it. Just as he'd feared from the start.