down his chest looked listlessly at a newspaper while an old hound dog slept at his feet. I inhaled the scone while Harnett sipped his venti and watched coffins rise.
“They call this silt coffee,” he muttered a half hour later. Nevertheless he looked longingly into his empty cup.
“You should try the vanilla latte,” I suggested. “And these blueberry scones are the shit.”
He considered the intimidating barista before giving me a pitiful look. I sighed, took his money, ordered another scone and drinks for both of us, and returned, sipping my Americano while trying not to laugh at Harnett’s suspicious swishing of his vanilla flavoring. We settled into silence, watching heavy machinery jerk around tight cemetery spaces, tiny plumes of breath making the men themselves look like steam-powered machines. Occasionally something would happen—a backhoe would topple a headstone, a decrepit coffin would be draped with a tarp to protect sensitive onlookers—but mostly it was tedium. This, too, was school, I reminded myself, and as the hours wore on I became increasingly impressed with my father’s dedication. The hiss of cappuccino steam, the ringing of spoons to cups, the piped-in acoustic rock—these sounds clamored for my attention, yet Harnett was inviolable.
We were both on our fourth cups when the bearded man with the dog spoke.
“I found a way to get corpse-stink out of hair.”
I choked and spat; coffee spotted the table. Harnett, though, just stirred his cold latte and shrugged.
“That’s what you said ten years ago,” he said.
“True.” The man scratched crumbs from his beard. “But this way involves egg whites and Lemon Pledge.”
The two men sat nearly back to back, scanning different angles of the same cemetery. They did not turn to look at each other.
“Can’t say that sounds promising,” Harnett said.
“I didn’t say you should drizzle it on your ice cream. But if you’re looking to neutralize your odors, you could do a lot worse. Only problem is once I got it in, Fouler spends the rest of the week trying to eat my hair.”
At the mention of her name, the old hound raised her chin from the ground, leaving behind a dollop of slobber, and swung her droopy lips in my father’s direction. Harnett lowered a hand and scratched beneath the dog’s paisley kerchief.
“Hey, Fouler,” he singsonged. “Hey, girl.” He opened his palm and let the dog lick it. His nod toward the bearded man was almost imperceptible.
“Crying John,” he said.
The man lowered his newspaper so that our eyes could meet.
“Morning, Joey,” he said.
I could not conceal my surprise. Tufts of the man’s massive beard rearranged as he laughed. “That’s right. I know you. You’re the new Digger.”
“Don’t scare the kid,” Harnett griped. “And I’ll let him know when he’s a Digger, not you.”
“Oh, he’s a Digger, all right.” The man examined me as if searching for flaws. “Knox said how you handled yourself with that woman. Now, that was something. Something like that takes a special touch.”
“Kid doesn’t need a big head.”
“You think you could’ve sweet-talked a lady like that? I know exactly what the great Resurrectionist would’ve done. He would’ve taken his shovel and gone bang. And dragged her out by the hair. There’s your sweet talk for you.”
The man guffawed. Fouler whined in concert before dropping her chin between her paws. Harnett studied the cemetery.
“Right.” The man sighed. “Well, Joey, I’m Crying John. And this slab of fat down here is the Befouler.” He nudged the animal’s ribs with his toe and she bared her grimy canines in a lazy display of irritation.
I didn’t know what to say. I cleared my throat.
“How old’s your dog?”
Crying John’s voice flipped into falsetto. “Who, old Fouler here? Ole Foulie? Aw, she’s just a baby. Just a big old fat baby-cakes, ain’t you, Foulie?”
“Sixteen,” Harnett said. “Give or take.”
“No, sixteen’s exactly right.” He slapped the dog’s flank. “Raised her from a pup. Best Digger working today, present company included. Ain’t no one better than old Foulie. Ain’t no one feistier, either.”
Fouler’s tongue curled in a yawn.
“I’m sure you’ve already seen plenty of things you never thought you’d see,” Crying John said. “But you haven’t seen anything until you’ve seen Fouler here run out into a mess of twenty thousand stones and go directly—directly—to the hole that needs diggin’.”
“That’s an old wives’ tale,” Harnett said.
“Then I’m an old wife. What she’ll do, see, is start sniffing around the premises, over and over in smaller and smaller circles, until she gets dizzy and sits her butt down, and that right there is