So the city hired Uncle Morty to erect a retaining wall along the bank to keep every body in place. It’s hard to build a wall on the face of so steep a bluff. And even if you get the wall in place, it’ll block the drainage, which increases the weight and makes the problem worse than it was before. What you have to do is drill drainage holes under the graves to allow the excess water a way to escape. And I can tell you, from my time as a driller’s apprentice, that’s one tricky feat of engineering.
It’s risky work too. I almost went over the edge myself one day when I sat on a stack of twenty-foot PVC piping. The stack gave way and about half the pipes rolled over the cliff. Eddie tried to blame me for it, but Uncle Morty said it was Eddie’s own fault for putting the pipes too near the edge and for not keeping an eye on me like he was supposed to. I sided with Uncle Morty in that argument. So it was Eddie’s fault we lost half a day’s work getting the pipes back up to the work site.
The time I didn’t side with Uncle Morty was when he tried to fire Eddie. I know Uncle Morty was under a lot of emotional strain, because Aunt Eileen had just told him she was leaving him for somebody else. That came as a big surprise to me. Things had been peaceful at home, with nobody ever saying anything to anybody, so I’m not sure why Aunt Eileen was so unhappy. In any case, it was understandable that Uncle Morty might have been a little on edge. But Eddie hadn’t done anything wrong all day, everything was going just as smooth as could be, when Uncle Morty drove up in his Cadillac and got out, already mad as I’d ever seen him. He told Eddie he was fired and good luck supporting his new girlfriend without a paycheck. Eddie said he’d file a union grievance and bring the whole project to a standstill. That stopped Uncle Morty on the spot. He paced around for a minute like he was about to explode, and then he said, “Fine, then you’re not fired. But you’re not the foreman anymore.” Then he pointed a finger straight at me. “You work for him now,” he said, and Eddie looked at me with his eyes squinted and his forehead wrinkled.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Eddie asked him.
Uncle Morty got a satisfied look on his face. “From here on out, you’re his apprentice.”
Eddie seemed baffled, and maybe a little angry too. “That moron don’t do shit around here,” he said.
Uncle Morty smiled, but not like he was happy. “You’re free to quit if you don’t like the job,” he said.
That was a proud moment in my life. After years of being everybody else’s apprentice, I finally had an apprentice of my own.
Eddie wasn’t happy about it, though. I still had Ted, the bulldozer operator, to watch, and a bulldozer is a pretty interesting piece of equipment. But all Eddie had to look at was me, and I can tell you I’m not that interesting. I tend not to move much, because watching something closely takes a lot of concentration. That’s what makes me a good apprentice. So Eddie had a pretty dull time of it. At first he complained a lot. He said nobody could treat him like that and get away with it. But after a few days he calmed down, and took on a whole new attitude. He told me dirty jokes and offered me chewing gum and sometimes he’d put his arm around my shoulder like we were golfing buddies. He asked me a lot of questions about my accident — which is not a proper thing for an apprentice to do, but I didn’t correct him. It was kind of nice having somebody take an interest in me. In just a week’s time, I had more conversation with Eddie than I’d had with anybody else in all the years I could remember. And Eddie listened to everything I said, almost like Dr. Myles. Sometimes he even took notes like Dr. Myles, which was certainly flattering. Eddie said he disagreed with most of Dr. Myles’s diagnosis. He didn’t think I was paranoid at all. And he thought it was unfair that Uncle Morty wouldn’t let me run any of the heavy machinery, especially since I’d studied how to operate every type of excavator we had.
One day we took a walk around the old part of the cemetery on a break — sometimes you just need to stretch your legs — and we walked by the black wrought-iron dog near the top of the first hill inside the main entryway. I told him that dog had been made in my family’s ironworks factory before the war. It’s a cute dog, life-sized, and it stands watch over the grave of a little child. Sometimes people leave toys there at the dog’s feet, which is sweet I guess, though not very practical. Anyway, that got me talking about my family’s history. One thing led to another, and pretty soon I was telling Eddie about the loss of my family’s fortune after the war. I thought he’d just tell me to get over it, like everybody else, but he didn’t. He took a genuine interest in my pain, and promised to look into the matter for me. I didn’t know at first what he meant by that. But the next day, which was Sunday, he called me up and told me to meet him right away out at the cemetery. He said he’d be waiting at the Jefferson Davis gravesite. He said he had the answers I was looking for.
It took me awhile to get there because I had to take the bus, and then I still had to walk a good ways after that. By the time I got there, Eddie had already put up construction tape across the car paths at that end of the cemetery. I asked him what the tape was for, and he said we needed privacy to sort everything out.
“Sort what out?” I asked him, and he explained it all. He said he’d got on the Internet and found out that Jefferson Davis had spent all the years after his presidency collecting evidence that certain prominent families of Virginia had been swindled out of their fortunes by carpetbaggers, and that my family was among them. He said that President Grant had been obsessed with preventing the Davis papers from ever coming to light.
“The Grant administration was the most corrupt in history,” I told him.
“Well, there you go,” he said, obviously pleased that I’d know such a thing.
The problem, Eddie explained, was that all the incriminating documents had disappeared when Davis died. But if somebody could find those documents, the government would have to pay restitution to the victims’ families.
“And here’s the interesting thing,” Eddie said, smiling. “Jefferson Davis died in New Orleans, and that’s where they had his funeral.”
“But he’s right here,” I told him, and I pointed to the life-sized stone likeness of the president of the Confederacy standing atop the gravesite.
“That’s what they want you to think,” Eddie said.
“But they shipped his body here and reburied it,” I said.
Eddie shook his head. “Not his body. A coffin. And nobody every looked inside.”
Then he laid it all out for me, and it made perfect sense. The government had used President Davis’s death as a cover to hide all the evidence that would have brought down so many of those who had prospered illegally after the war. All the papers that would restore my family’s fortune were stashed away inside the president’s casket — the last place anyone would ever think to look.
“And here’s the clincher,” Eddie told me. He put his arm around my shoulder again and led me over to the Davis grave. I looked down at the broad, flat stone that claimed to be covering the remains of President Davis and his wife, Varina Howell Davis. Then Eddie pointed to an adjoining plot directly in front of the stone statue of the former president. Not ten steps from the foot of the Davis grave, a more modest tombstone rested on a well-trimmed patch of ground, and it had a single word carved into its face: GRANT.
I was dumbfounded. There’s no way the president of the Confederacy would be placed in a spot where his statue had to stare forever at the name of the man who brought about his ruin, the man responsible for the fall of Richmond itself, the man who forced Lee’s surrender a few weeks later at Appomattox Courthouse. I felt a chill run up my spine.