story. There’s no pain down there. You remember that woman. You sat next to her. You touched her. Her life was pain, too, but down there all that was gone. Remember?”
I said nothing.
Harnett fanned a hand through the grass like he was petting an animal. “There are things down there you wouldn’t expect, kid. Solace. A little bit of power. There’s so much to be had down there, and everyone,” he said, waving a hand at the sky, “everyone is reaching up, up.” His caressing fingers became a fist that pounded once upon the dirt. “They’re reaching in the wrong direction.”
He gathered the splinters of Grinder, the shovel he had used since long before I was born, and stood. We were an arm’s length apart and for just a moment I thought about reaching out.
“That hole you dug,” he said. “It was a terrible hole.”
“I didn’t have time.”
“The hell you didn’t.” He walked away. Near the corner of the cabin, he looked over his shoulder. “It was terrible and you know it.”
“Okay,” I croaked. “It was terrible.”
Late that night, as I tossed with nightmares, I thought I heard my father rustling through the forest and the halting sounds of lesser tools digging a hole; and finally, even later, the bone rattle of Grinder’s pieces being tossed into a shallow depression, the great burier buried at last.
28.
AND SO THE LESSONS began in earnest. I spent the next night writing a paper for Gottschalk, only to find it five feet under at dawn. Harnett was there, nudging my sleeping body with his toes and thrusting into my hands a brand-new shovel with a gleaming silver blade. The shovel was mine to name, he told me, if and when inspiration struck. When I complained that I had no clue what one was supposed to name a shovel, he told me only that I would know when the time came. He ceased complaining about the Merriman grave in Lancet County; instead he offered me an onion from the garden as he bit into one of his own. I declined. Fifteen minutes later, I dug for my life while he squatted a ways away, staring into the trees and eating.
“Dying is a tragedy,” he lectured from the darkness. “Death, though—death is just science. When we’re dead, A happens, then B happens, then C. None of it’s pretty. When the embalmers, those crooks, when they get their hands on us, they do their worst. They suture our anuses to keep everything inside. Kid, I’m just telling you how it is. But they can’t stop science.”
Science—Gottschalk’s paper. I set my muscles to the rhythm of Harnett’s speech and doubled down.
“A wooden casket, six months after it’s gone under, we’re talking about some body discoloration, maybe some mold. An airtight job, same amount of time, and we’re looking at the kind of mess we saw the other night. Those caskets are ridiculous. The inner liner’s bolted, the outer liner’s cemented shut, and sometimes they put the whole thing inside a concrete vault. And then they bury it five feet down? You should be asking yourself what’s the point of all this nonsense. Who are they protecting the body from? It can’t be rain, it can’t be decay—they both find their way in anyway. It’s us, kid. After all these years, it’s still us.”
I found better ways into the dirt, new angles of attack, cunning trajectories.
“Was a time when the opposite held true. Everyone was scared of being buried alive and wanted an easy route out. Coffins had gadgets, little rods attached to bells above the earth, mausoleums with switches inside to activate lights and buzzers. You can sort of sympathize. Medicine wasn’t what it is today. Mistakes were made. Imagine disinterring a loved one and finding the underside of the lid covered with their scratches.”
There were animal bones down there, graves within graves.
“Why bury them in a box at all? Good question. Why put them in clothes? Funeral directors run up bills into the millions just dressing up corpses and poisoning the dirt with chemicals. We Diggers are ecologists by nature, kid; if I could, I would remove every body and plant it naked back in the dirt. Composting is the ideal. Instead we pay three thousand bucks for a four-by-five-by-seven plot, a plot that can get sold out from under us if the cemetery gets lazy setting aside their twenty percent for upkeep. There’s a funeral director in Michigan who held a body for four years while