“This way,” Nick said.
Steeling himself for the walk, Joseph made his way down the path until he’d caught up to Nick.
It was early in the summer evening and the sun was low in the sky. It still cast a warm glow, but the trees to the west blotted out most of its light. The shadows cast by the tombstones and grave markers were long, but not particularly thick. Instead, they seemed more like smears of dark pain along the ground. As the wind blew, it brought the smell of fresh grass and damp soil to both men’s noses.
“I get the impression that you haven’t done this work your whole life,” Joseph said.
“Is that a knock against how I maintain this place?”
“No, not at all. I was thinking more about how you handled a gun. You don’t normally see that sort of grit in an undertaker.”
“Actually, my father groomed me for this line of work since I was a kid,” Nick said. “The rest…came a bit later.”
“My father ran cattle from Kansas to Texas. He taught me an awful lot about my work as well. Mostly, he showed me the benefits of planting roots and starting up a ranch rather than riding from town to town with the herd.”
“Smart man. Is he still around?” Nick asked.
“Nah. He died not too much before…before Laurie was born.” Those words stung Joseph, but he choked back the pain and sucked in a breath. “What about yours?”
“My father’s still about,” Nick said. “He came with us to California, in fact.”
“Where is he?”
“He started up a small cabinet shop along the Coast, not far from San Francisco. Also does some masonry work when he can. I’m just glad I convinced him to stop digging holes for a living. At least this way, he won’t break his back before I’m able to pay him another visit.”
“Sounds like you two get along pretty well,” Joseph said. “Me and my father were always squabbling about something.”
“Actually, we fought about plenty. It wasn’t until recently that we didn’t come to blows damn near every time I came within a few paces of him.”
“That why he lives so far away?”
Nick put his hands in his pockets and shrugged. “He wanted to be near the ocean and I just wanted to visit it. Besides, riding with him all the way here from Nebraska was more than enough for both of us to appreciate being apart.”
Both men shared a bit of laughter and kept walking slowly among the burial plots. Joseph looked up at the orange-tinted sky and pulled in a lungful of fragrant air. He could feel the sunlight brushing against his face like a warm breath. When he looked down again, he saw Nick standing at a pair of freshly turned piles of earth.
“Here they are,” Nick said.
The uncertainty in Joseph’s steps turned quickly into another bout of dizziness. He knew the feeling didn’t come from any wound. At least, not from a wound that could be seen by the naked eye. As he walked closer, he kept his eye on the ground between the two graves or the grass around them. Even when he got directly in front of them, he wasn’t able to lift his head right away.
Placing a hand on Joseph’s shoulder, Nick said, “If you don’t want to do this right now, I can always bring you back later.”
The dizziness subsided enough for Joseph to shake his head. Slowly, he raised his chin and brought his eyes up to the graves. They were just piles of dirt of roughly the same size. Although there wasn’t anything particularly distinctive about the dirt, he knew he would remember the position of every last groove in the soil as well as every individual pebble.
But the sight wasn’t nearly as jarring as Joseph had expected. That was due to what he saw when he moved his eyes a bit past the graves and slightly up. At the head of the first grave was a stone marker with Anne’s name carved in elegant letters into an image of a scroll that went from the stone’s top to its bottom. Laurie’s marker was carved in a similar fashion, but what distinguished them from each other were the figures that had been carved into the sides of the stones. They were obviously not quite finished, but were far enough along to be appreciated.
Anne’s bore the image of an ethereal woman in a wispy dress, gazing down toward the next stone. On Laurie’s marker, there was a carving of a younger figure dressed in a shorter dress made from the same wispy material. The younger figure looked up and directly into the eyes of the mother on the stone to her left.
“My God,” Joseph breathed. “They’re beautiful. Did you make those?”
“Yes. I left room for more on an inscription if you wanted one. Also, I didn’t know their birthdays. I can add all that on if you like.”
“And the carving? The pictures?”
“I thought it would be nice.”
“But…when did you have the time for this?”
“I started the day after I brought you into my home,” Nick said.
Reaching out to run his hand along the carved stone, Joseph said, “But you couldn’t have gotten these done so quickly. You would’ve had to work night and day.”
“Pretty much.”
“This is more that I could have asked for. I don’t even know when I can pay you.”
“You don’t owe me a penny,” Nick said.
Joseph kept his hand on the face of the rock, moving only so he could alternate between his wife’s and his daughter’s stones. Keeping his fingers on top of Laurie’s marker, he looked over to Nick and found the tall man standing quietly with his hands clasped in front of him. “Isn’t it customary to take photographs of the dead before they’re buried?”
Nick reflexively winced at the sound of that, but managed to keep it all but hidden from sight. “Yes. It is.”
“I want to see those photographs.”
“Joseph, you need to remember your family the way they were. I did my best to clean them up and make them presentable, but…”
“I want to see their faces.”
Nick looked into Joseph’s eyes and stared all the way down to the burning embers of rage at the other man’s core. Even in the face of all that hatred, Nick kept his own face calm and his voice steady when he told him, “I didn’t take any pictures of your wife and daughter.”
“What?”
“You heard me.”
“But that’s part of your job.”
“I know what my job is and most of it pertains to the folks left behind. You must remember how they looked before I got to them. Trust me when I tell you that’s the way you’ll want to remember them.”
Now it was Joseph’s turn to wince, but he kept pulling in haggard breaths while forcing himself to stare directly at Nick.
“You can’t tell me,” Nick went on to say, “that you or your boy would get anything good from having pictures like those around. I did you a service by making certain they wouldn’t even exist. I had to grow up with one of those damn pictures and all it ever gave me was nightmares. Remember how Anne and Laurie were on their best day, not their last one.”
“I don’t need any help in remembering their best days,” Joseph snarled. “I want to make sure their dead faces are in my head the next time I see the bastards that put those two angels in the ground. Thanks to this,” he said while stabbing a finger toward the wound on his temple, “that night’s already starting to fade.”
“Consider that a blessing,” Nick replied. “I’ve got memories of my own that I wish could fade.”
“I’ll hold onto this pain until I can visit it upon those fucking killers who took my girls from me. It may take a while to find them, so I want to make sure the fire’s still burning inside me just like it was that night.”
“It’ll always burn,” Nick told him. “In the meantime, though, maybe this will give you something else to think about.” With that, Nick dug into his pocket and fished out the small book he’d taken from his shop earlier that day.