As for Geraldine, if she knew about what I had done, and whom I’d loved, she never spoke, and I was always grateful to her for that. But although I have never told her the truth of my before, what occurred in Pluto, I’m sure that she knew why I stayed single for so long, and lived so quietly with my mother all those years before I met her. I never told her that it started when I was a boy not out of high school. I never told her about my first love or explained the difficult hold it had on me — I never told her about C.
I wish that I could say on the night following our wedding I thought of only Geraldine. But the crumbs in our bed and the honey in our tea reminded me of other times, and a different bed. I do not think it was disloyal of me to lie next to Geraldine and recall that history, so sad in many ways. For at the same time I was quickened with wonder, and gratitude. After I was stung, I never thought that love would come my way again. I never thought I would love anyone but C.
Demolition
THE FIRST WOMAN I loved was slightly bigger than me. In bed, C. moved with the agility of a high school wrestler; she was incredibly quick. First she’d be on top and then in a split second underneath me with no break in the fluidity of our motion. It was like we were going somewhere every time we got in bed, cross-country or on a train trip, and we’d have trouble with hunger while making love. In certain favorite positions I’d get famished and weak. She’d make a sandwich or two and bring the food to bed. Sometimes there would be a glass of milk on the wooden table beside the headboard, and there was always a little squeeze bear full of honey, which she drank from like a bottle. She was a great believer in the restorative powers of milk and honey. On occasion, to rejuvenate me, she’d squirt the honey into my mouth, then dip a cloth into the cool glass of milk, and wipe me down. In summer, I soured in the heat, and one day my mother noticed when I walked in the door. My love affair with C. was clandestine, and I told my mother on the spur of the moment that I’d gotten work at the creamery.
She misheard me.
“What? The cemetery?”
“Yes,” I said.
Which is how I really did end up working in the Pluto cemetery. So that my lie would not be found out, I walked over there the next day hoping to get a job. I was hired by a man named Gottschalk, who had been there most of his life. His little office was plastered with news clippings and obituaries. He had mapped out the graveyard and knew everything about each person buried there: when they’d come to the town and what they had done, how the family had come to choose that particular stone or monument, cause or moment of death, what property they’d left behind. My grandfather Coutts was buried there already, his grave marked by a tall limestone obelisk with these words at the base: Qui finem vitae extremum inter munera ponat naturae. It is as natural to die as to be born. There was a space next to him for his wife. She’d remarried and never taken it. There was my father, too, with a nice dark stone wide enough for two. He also was given to quotes, though not in Latin. He liked Thoreau (perhaps why he stayed in North Dakota), and he detested all trivialities. Blessed are they who never read a Newspaper, for they shall see Nature, and, through her, God. My mother had already had her name incised next to his, along with her birth date. There was a blank for her death date, which I didn’t like, but she was comforted.
Gottschalk pointed out some additional space and observed that my grandfather had bought a large family plot. There was room for me and my wife, even a couple of kids. It seemed far off and laughable then, but as time has passed I have become increasingly grateful that those places next to my ancestors lie empty and waiting. I have also looked at Geraldine and wondered if she would consent to be buried next to me, but have not yet had the courage to ask.
I was seventeen when I began digging graves for the Pluto dead. I measured with string and used four tent pegs to anchor the string in a rectangle. Later, we bought a chalk roller of the same sort they used to mark the high school football field. I took the grass off in sections, peeling it like a scalp, and laid the squares on a piece of wet burlap. I used a toylike backhoe and finished the graves by hand with a straight spade. After the burials, I’d cover up the coffins and make a mound so that the ground wouldn’t dent once the dirt had settled. I cut the grass, too, with a finicky gas mower, and learned how to trim the trees so that they would grow in a graceful, natural shape. I learned how to keep the death records in order, and after a while I knew the cemetery map as well as Gottschalk did. I could easily guide people when they needed assistance finding a relative, or wanted to see the war memorial, the ornate Russian ironwork crosses, or the humble, common fieldstones that marked the graves of a family murdered here long ago.
The thing is, this was just supposed to be a summer job before I went to college. But once I started having sex with C., I couldn’t leave sex, or leave her, or leave the town. Besides, once I started spending my days among the dead, I grew used to the peace and quiet, as Gottschalk had told me I would. I even started adding to his clippings of interesting people, places, or events. One controversy at the time was the proliferation in our town of bars that featured striptease dancers. There was a community battle as to exactly how naked they should be allowed to get. We clipped and posted all of the editorials.
“If people could see things as we do,” said Gottschalk. “No matter how small the G-string or how big the pasty, we all end up in the ground.”
Six months after that remark, I dug his grave. I prepared his last resting place with unusual care, as befitted one who had so precisely cared for the journey of his fellow citizens. There was really no one else to take Gottschalk’s place, and so at the age of twenty I became the manager of the Town of Pluto Cemetery, which helped a great deal in keeping my love secret — nobody wanted to date me.
I don’t mean that women were put off by my line of work. On the contrary, it often seemed to fascinate them. But there was a certain lack of future in it, which girls could see. Once it was discovered that I was contented with my work, I wasn’t bothered, even though I went to bars and such. I got on the radical pro side of going entirely topless because I liked watching Candy, who took suckers from her regulation G-string and tossed them to us. They were hygienically wrapped safety pops. At one time a patron of the bar had inhaled a straight stem sucker, perhaps in delight at one of Candy’s novel moves. I hadn’t had to bury him, but it was close. So she gave out the same kind of suckers as grocery stores give kids. In fact, that’s where she got them — free. I got to know Candy, wanted her to stay in business, and was delighted to make C. jealous enough to fight with me.
While I was seeing Candy, or actually, just flirting with her, C. renovated her old house in order to be near me.
At one time the cemetery was set on the western edge of town, but the neighborhood has grown and now it is bounded by blocks of houses, all with their backs turned, politely or in dread, away from the gravestones and monuments. After the fight about my friend the stripper, C. moved her office to her house, which had a yard abutting the cemetery. She remodeled the living rooms and built-in the porch as a reception area. She left the back leafy and private. I could leave Gottschalk’s old office, which had become mine, or walk from our equipment shed, which was set just outside a windbreak of pines, and enter C.’s back door without being seen. The thing is, we never could part, though C. did lose weight, shrink down considerably, and after a while she was no longer bigger than me.