rind from orange. I dared to look over my shoulder and saw Jesus gazing down at me with smooth white eyes and open arms. Three of the fingers on his right hand were missing, and I wondered if he could still bless me with those gone. And even if he could, given what I was there to do, would he?
A bedsheet was unpacked and unfolded. It looked to be a twin of that knotted across my father’s bed. He slid the segment of sod onto the sheet and slid it away. Exposed now was a perfect square of dirt—skin peeled from a torso in preparation for surgery.
Thirty to forty minutes for a fresh grave, he told me; two hours for an old one. Waterlogged it can take upwards of four. There was a flashlight but he didn’t use it; to prevent accidental illumination the batteries were kept in a separate bag. Come closer, he gestured. I didn’t want to leave Two-Fingered Jesus. My father used his voice now. Come closer if you want to learn.
Experimental jabs were made. They were nearly silent and my father approved. Lessons began. Five feet, he said, leaning into Grinder. That was all we had to go. There was something funny about this, and it took me a moment to remember: my hole, back at the cabin, really had been too deep.
The scooped dirt landed precisely upon a bowled tarpaulin stretched across the adjacent plot. When it came time to return the dirt, I realized, we could fashion a funnel and pour it back in. The chunk of the shovel, the splat of clods shattering against tarp—the volume was excruciating. Perhaps it was due to all the hard surfaces, because everything else was louder, too: that skittering leaf, that squirrel, those branches ticking past one another overhead.
The only thing that whispered at an appropriate volume was my father. The taking from graves, he said, is the oldest profession there is. Early man took what he needed from the mounds of his fallen fellows. Egyptian masks and sarcophagi, Chinese jade burial suits, all were useless to the soil and therefore recycled back into the world. Da Vinci stole bodies from the morgue to study anatomy, he told me. Michelangelo, too, though he didn’t have the stomach for the necessary dissection. My stomach lurched—two feet more and the unwilling stomach would be my own.
He was deep now, three feet. After a brief period of rest, said my father, Michelangelo resumed his studies, and this is the mark of a true artist, to have the mettle to see what truly lies inside of man. I inched forward so as to not miss a word. He was a better teacher than any at Bloughton High, better than any I had ever had. The mess of his life—maybe it was only a mess when seen from a limited perspective. The possibility suddenly existed to me that there was other knowledge of such importance that it overwhelmed the world’s quotidian concerns, and such knowledge came from the inside: bodies, bones and tissues, and maybe even another layer deeper, souls.
A bullet crack threw me to the ground. It was Grinder, striking her quarry. My father knotted a swath of velvet around the blade. The subsequent sounds were muffled. I crawled near and caught glimpses of neighboring coffins peeking through the dirt—buried too close together, my father complained. At the bottom of the hole, the casket’s surface shimmered through the dirt like water. I looked there and saw my reflection.
His hand reached up from the grave, startling me, and grabbed a mallet and a crowbar that had been modified with a right-angle bend. There followed a blast of metal crunching through fiberglass, and to me it was the sound of my mother’s bones splintering a windshield and popping headlamps. Pay attention, said my father. Fragments of casket lid hopped through the air as he cranked the crowbar. It was amazing how cleanly the lid split in two. I was struck by the swift perfection of his motion, the exacting way he guided his tools. I was still marveling when he set aside the lid.
A green thing that used to be a woman was screaming at me, jaw slung open to the neck and eyeballs flickering with animation. She was alive—I swooned and grasped at the headstone for support. The smell was to the cabin odor what being immersed in the ocean was to tasting a grain of salt. Somewhere my father’s lessons continued,