A Burial
Short story by Tammy Huffman

Could people really be so thick?

This was the second time she’d got stuck babysitting the old geezers over a whole weekend. And for the same reason both times. Harry. The first time, it was to get him dead and buried. This time, ten years later, it was because he wouldn’t stay dead and buried.

What was she supposed to do to keep entertained while grandma and grandpa worried and moped? How stupid, to worry that the bottom of the casket might be rotted and he would fall out when he wasn’t even in there. People.

Bored, Joy left the house to walk around the neighborhood. She thought she might stop at the general store for chocolates. Holmes Grocery Store was the only store in the tiny backwoods, backwater town of Lock Springs.

Spring had finally come. The grass was yellow with dandelions. Blackbirds darted in the honeysuckle vines. A man and a woman hoed a garden. Some teenage boys were washing a new-looking red pickup with a hydrant hose outside a garage. Cute boys, but of an age more interested in 1963 Fords than girls.

She passed the cemetery. It was an old, old cemetery with tall cement spires and ugly flat slabs. It was from a time when people died young of scarlet fever or consumption or the croup.

A guy she knew but couldn’t place, was getting Harry’s new grave ready for him. Well, at least the government was spending its own money moving Harry from the soldier cemetery. The government paid for a new casket and a new marker. The soldiers cemetery was flooding or something. They were moving every grave.

The guy wasn’t using a spade and pickaxe like when they buried Harry in the soldier cemetery a decade ago. He was using a backhoe. A small tractor with a loader was parked nearby. He saw her and waved greeting like he recognized her and jumped off the backhoe.

“Well, it’s ready for him,” he said. “It’s just a hole. But I guess they throw us all in a hole and then go back to the house to drink tea and eat fried chicken. Anyway, it’s a nice spot, nice view.”

“I don’t get why they bother,” she said. “There’s nobody in there.”

“Well, that’s the case for him and Jesus both, I guess,” he said. “What’s a body? Food for the birds, the beasts, the worms.”

She looked him over with a critical eye. He had on dirty jeans and muddy work boots. A pair of filthy yellow gloves stuck out of a back pocket. He smelled like sweat and the sour smell from laundry put away wet.

"Are you a gravedigger?”

“Not by profession, if that’s what you mean. I volunteered to dig Harry’s grave. We grew up together and he was my best friend. It was something I could do for him.”

Why on earth, she wondered, would somebody consider that a favor.

She continued along the sidewalk and he fell in step. Well, she was a pretty girl. She had wavy hair and shapely legs. Of course he would notice her and want to get acquainted. A few steps later she realized he limped. Immediately she scrubbed him from her list of potentials.

“How are Ava and Carl holding up?” he asked.

“Oh, about the same as the first time they went through this.”

Then, as now, grandma sat in the rocking chair and stared out the window. Stared and stared. Grandpa went out to the shed and pounded iron with a big hammer. A retired blacksmith, he ran out of horses to shoe a long time ago. So he pounded iron for nothing.

His arm brushed hers. He was flirting. She wouldn’t give him the heave-ho just yet. Let him dream.

“Do I know you?” she asked him.

“You should. I’ve lived in this little town my whole life. I’m a neighbor of your grandparents. I grew up with Harry. We played together and went to school together. We served in Korea together. I know you. Joy. Harry’s niece. I’ve seen you when your family comes to visit Ava and Carl. I’ve always thought the world of Ava and Carl. You probably never noticed me.”

***

Lock Springs was built on the Grand River. The river was foamy, slightly raised from melting snow. The Grand was always a gathering place for the town. There were community fish fries and watermelon fests and ice cream socials and cookouts.

A bonfire of brush and driftwood was flaring hot and bright orange. A half dozen children stood around it and an older woman named Lucille Barnes. Joy might not know the young man by name, but she knew Lucille. Everybody did. Lucille was wearing a baseball cap and a nylon windbreaker over a nightgown and fuzzy pink slippers. Lucille was always wandering around town and getting lost. Her grandparents said Lucille was ‘Teched in the head’.

“What are you doing?” the young man asked as they drew closer.

“We are holding a cremation for Bruce,” one of the children said. His name was Aether.  It was a funny name for a funny-looking kid. People said he was an albino. He had red hair and blue eyes and freckles big as corn flakes on his pale face. At his feet was a cardboard box tied with ribbons that were made of crepe paper. The box was decorated with glitter and crayon and balloons. The bottom leaked shreds of newspaper bedding.

“We are looking for ashes to ashes in the Bible,” said another child. “But we can’t find it.”

“That is because it is not in there,” Aether said. “It is in the Book of Common Prayer. Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.”

“Bruce was a good dog, but he got old and tired,” Lucille said. “He was about as old and tired as you can get and still be alive.”

“I’m sorry to hear about your dog, Lucille. He had a good life. He got to die a natural death,” said the young man.

Lucille gasped and her eyes filled up with tears and she looked at her fuzzy slippers.

Aether said, “That is not exactly what happened. Bruce came up missing. It was suspected he had gone off alone to die in peace the way old dogs do. But Lucille would not leave it alone. She drove around for a week honking the horn and hollering for him. One night he ran out in the road and she -- being as old and blind and deaf as he was -- ran over him.”

“I was still glad to find him,’ Lucille said. “Despite the horror.”

They walked along the river and Lucille and the children followed them at a pace.

“What did you do over there in Korea?”  

She’d heard Harry’s company, some kind of bridge paneling company, didn’t do much of anything.

“Oh, when we weren’t building bridges we got drunk. Chased the local girls. Harry always liked the ladies.”

“I heard you were behind the lines.”

“Not far behind. We still got cold, homesick, shot at. I have the wound to prove it.” He patted his thigh. “Harry had his own scars. He took everything hard.”

She was only a little girl when Harry went over to Korea. She remembered him as young and handsome, a real charmer. When he got back, his folks were ecstatic. They whooped and saluted him and called him “sir.” But, even as a child, Joy saw that he had aged; gotten fat and bald; looked weary. Whatever charm he’d had, he’d lost, and she wondered what the fuss was about.

“I remember Harry talking to my brother after he got back,” she said.

It had been a hot day on the front porch of grandma and grandpa’s during a family visit. She remembered how Harry smoked and paced the porch and couldn’t keep still until he finally sat down by her brother on the porch swing and held his head in his hands and wept. She had been too young to understand the grownup talk.

“He told my brother that he had no girl, no job, no friends,” she said. “He had a gun.”

The young man looked off across the river. “Yes. I know he was afraid he might hurt somebody.”

At the boat dock, a green tent had been staked on the sand. Only one small boat was tied to the dock. A man and woman were at the boat fooling with fishing rods and nets. A very old man was sitting under the dock fishing.

“Lacey and Jeff are newlyweds,” Aether said. “They are on their honeymoon.”

“A honeymoon spent camping?” Joy said. She couldn’t picture it. All she could picture were bugs and fish scales and moldy tents. “Sleeping on the cold, wet ground. It sure doesn’t sound very romantic.”

“Could be the coals of hell for all they care,” Aether said.

“You hush, Aether,” Jeff said.

Then Lacey said to Joy: ‘We can’t go far. Not as long as the old man needs tending.”

The old man was sitting on a lawn chair with a walking cane and fishing rod at his feet. He had a red bobber on the end of his line that was tangled in riffraff. He was wrapped in a quilt with a stocking cap pulled down over his ears.

“He looks dead,” Joy said. His eyes were as gray and watery as the sky.

“Oh, since the stroke he is dead for all the world and to all the world,” Lacey said. “He wears diapers and eats pureed one end and shits it out the other.”

“But you take care of him still?”

Lacey looked at her oddly. “Well, he ain’t no old dog you can put down when the time comes.”

“Or commits suicide,” said Lucille.

“He’ll always be alive in here,” Lacey said. She touched her chest.

Lucille and the children had gotten out of the wind behind the pillars under the dock. The children ran in circles and sang a song:

“Jeff and Lacey sitting in a tree.
K-I-S-S-I-N-G.
First comes love,
Then comes marriage,
Then comes baby in a baby carriage.”

Jeff tried to chase them off with crawdad pincers but the children howled and danced their strange dance.

Lacey and Jeff climbed in the boat. Lucille threw confetti at them which was only torn newspaper left over from the dead dog’s bedding. “Don’t rock the boat you two,” she said. “You will cause a tidal wave.”

The couple waved and grinned foolishly.

Joy started to walk back to the road and the young man asked her two questions he should not have.

“Are you alone?” he asked her. “Are you afraid?”

She shivered. She was getting cold. She still wanted her chocolates. She wasn’t interested in him and she might as well stop leading him on. She continued toward the house.

He didn’t follow. He skipped a rock across the brown foamy water of the river. His back was to her when he said: “I could hardly believe what happened to Harry. We fished and seined and swam in this river. Harry could swim like a fish. Do you know what happened to him?”

She stopped and turned.  She did happen to know. She considered whether to tell him or not, since he hadn’t followed her.

“I know his folks thought that after he made it through Korea without a scratch, he was safe,” the young man said. “But we are never safe from ourselves, are we?”

“Well, let’s see.” Joy found a lemon drop in a sweater pocket. She picked at the lint, taking her time. It had been a decade since Harry drowned and she got her thoughts straight, how it all had happened. Grandpa and grandma’s oldest son was foreman for a construction company. They were laying gas pipes somewhere up on the Great Lakes. The oldest son gave the youngest son a job after he got out of the service. Harry wasn’t up there a week. He stepped from one barge to another, slipped, and fell in the lake. That was it. They searched for a long time. His body was never found.

“They said maybe his waders filled up. Maybe he hit his head and got knocked out. Most likely, he came up under the barge and swam the wrong direction.”

She threw the lemon drop away. A born loser, with two choices to make, life or death, of course Harry chose wrong.

Having no body to bury, it took grandma and grandpa forever to accept their youngest child, their baby, was gone. Dead. Drowned.

Finally, her grandparents decided it. They bought a casket and had a funeral. That was the first time her parents sent her to sit with them, watch them, keep an eye on the old geezers. Now ten years later the soldier cemetery was moving all the graves and he was back making a fuss. Same old Harry that couldn’t stay still.

The young man walked up and stood very close to her. He looked in her eyes. His own eyes looked as sad and gray and old as the old man’s had looked.

“There’s a picture on Ava and Carl’s piano. Do you know the picture I’m talking about?”

How could she know? There were dozens of old dusty pictures on that piano. But she did instinctively understand that this was the reason he’d accompanied her. He wanted to ask some favor of her and it had to do with this picture. She was annoyed and uncomfortable with him being so close, but also very curious.

“It’s a picture of me and Harry and some other guys in our unit. And some girls.”

She waited, then said: “I’ve probably seen it. I don’t remember it.”

“I don’t think Ava and Carl have ever really looked at that picture. They were always blind to Harry’s faults. Do you think you could…?”

“Could I what?”

“We were just boys. We never had a lick of sense. But we change. Life changes us. We grow to regret.”

“Could I what?” she asked again.

“When I saw that picture, the look in that girl’s eyes, the pure hate, I couldn’t breathe. It was like I was drowning. I’d like to rip that picture to shreds. I’d like to tear those memories out of my head.”

He seemed so upset. And all the while she had no idea what he was talking about. She hid her smile. She tapped a knuckle against her lips; it was almost unbearable.

“Could I what?” she said.

The boys brought Harry in the bed of the shiny red pickup truck. Joy was surprised by the size of the crowd gathered at the newly dug gravesite; seemed like the whole town. The tractor was lifting the casket out with the loader; it swiveled and swayed under taut chains. Grandma and grandpa were there, leaning on each other, wailing. Lots of family had shown up. Her folks, her brothers and sisters, cousins. Whenever the casket tipped at a precarious angle, the children oo-ed and ah-ed like they would an acrobat on a high wire and that made the old geezers stop weeping and actually smile, for some reason. Joy could just not fathom people.

Well, at least he was closer. Grandma and grandpa would not have so far to go to carry on over him.

The grass was wet and mud rimmed her shoes. She saw the young man at the back of the crowd and made her way through to talk to him.

“They are taking it hard,” he said. He was hugging himself.

“Ridiculous,” she said. “They were worried sick the wood would be rotted and his bones would drop out. Can you imagine?”

Smiling, she looked at his face. He was not smiling.

“He’s not in there,” she said. “His body is still up in those lakes.”

“They put him in there,” he said. “We all did.”

Could people really be so thick?

“That’s what I’m saying,” she said. She laughed.

He looked at her carefully. Then he looked past her. She looked too and the tractor was lowering the casket into the grave. The little crowd had gone silent. The children had brought their balloons. They tipped on short strings like a final salute.

Later, when she went back to the house to warm up and drink tea and eat fried chicken, she wandered into the parlor where the piano sat. She looked at the picture. She studied it for several minutes. It was just boys doing as boys will. She shrugged and left it be.