cemetery ground will become something other than a cemetery. Every single casket will be disinterred from the earth and reinterred somewhere else.
My father called such an event a relocation. Old graves, new graves, mausoleums, aboveground tombs—like a going-out-of-business sale, everything must go. Aside from even rarer events (like a grave-digger strike and the resultant stacks of unburied caskets), there was no better way to study up on decomp and burial techniques in a concentrated span of time. For these reasons, said Harnett, relocations became impromptu conventions. No Digger could stay away. My stomach stirred in anticipation of meeting these men of the night.
We sped through southern Illinois; by the time we hit Indiana I was asleep. When I awoke outside of Cincinnati, Harnett picked up right where he had left off, babbling about legendary relocations, like the six-hundred-year-old Cimetière des Saints-Innocents in Paris, which was dug up in 1786, razed, disinfected, and covered with cement while its human remains were squirreled away in underground catacombs. It was the middle of the night when we stopped for fuel and coffee near Kentucky’s Daniel Boone National Forest, and over the ticking of the pump Harnett droned on about the ten years it took to relocate ninety thousand remains from San Francisco in the 1930s, and how the ground itself was then built upon by a college. Little did school administrators know that the cemetery relocation itself had served an educational purpose.
My clothes had long since dried, but I was still cold. I used my biology text to block a crack in the door and shut my eyes. Only lack of movement jolted me awake. Peach morning light textured the dusty office windows of a roadside motel. I heard a crackle—the last of several bags of Cool Ranch Doritos that Harnett was polishing off. He sucked cheese from fingertips that smelled of kerosene and turned off the motor.
“We’re here,” he said. “Let’s drop our gear and get to town.”
“Will he be here?” I asked. I didn’t have to speak his name.
He crumpled the bag. “You read the letter.”
Indeed I had. Knox’s writing style was overreliant on abbreviations, but communicated well enough a greeting (K./J.—), the details of the relocation (Dec. 15–24, Mt. Rgn., WV), an apology for the letter’s lateness (lately tkn w/brnchitis), and, in a postscript, the admission that it had been over two years since he had last seen or heard from Boggs (B. MIA. 2+ yrs). In all likelihood, Knox wrote, Boggs was dead (B.—prbly. dec’d). Harnett’s feelings on the matter were unclear. I thought about my mother’s death—quick, brutal, and unexpected—and wondered if a gradual destruction was even worse.
The relocation itself seemed improper, big machines rattling crypts and sneezing black exhaust across gravesites while dozens of men stomped and hollered and crouched with their sandwiches and coffee. Harnett planted his fists in his pockets and strolled down the bordering sidewalk, his eyes bright and watchful. I imitated him and absorbed what I could. There were cranes and dozers and backhoes and dump trucks. A foreman used spray paint to mark a number on the side of an exhumed coffin. There was a cordoned lot full of caskets parked like miniature cars. Harnett’s eyes spun over the bounty and his lips moved in silent memorization.
Once we had circled the cemetery, Harnett turned his attention to the neighboring storefronts.
“Here,” he said. “We want to set up camp right here.”
Across the street were an insurance office, a shoe store, a VFW hall, a diner, and a coffee shop.
He grimaced. “I hope you’re thirsty.”
In truth it was shoes I really needed—some more insurance probably wouldn’t have hurt, either—but after the long drive the need for coffee trumped both. We skipped across the asphalt, entered the shop, and stood in line. Once I was enveloped within the warm and spicy atmosphere, my stomach growled and I tugged on Harnett’s sleeve to point out the muffins and scones. He shrugged noncommittally and then, when it was our turn with the barista, I hid my face while she monotoned the definitions of tall, grande, and venti. “I just want a large coffee,” Harnett pleaded after almost a full minute of negotiation.
“And a cranberry scone,” I added. “No, blueberry.”
The shop had plenty of window space, and we situated ourselves at a table allowing an unobstructed view of the excavation. On one side of us, a kid my own age moused languorously at a laptop. On the other side, an old man dominated by a beard hanging halfway