The Grave I Dug for My Father

Four feet by eight, five deep

Floyd had a measuring stick, a length of old oak lath with notches cut in it every six inches and a deep notch at five feet. It was Dad’s stick. Floyd had inherited it with the plat book.

Every few buckets he’d step to the edge and drop it in, check it, and hold up fingers to show me how far I had to go.

Three fingers. Two. One. At five feet, he held up a fist, and I lifted the bucket out for the last time and shut the machine down.

The silence after a diesel shuts off is something else. I could hear a meadowlark somewhere out in the pasture and the cedars moving a little in the wind and my own heart going.

I climbed down. My legs were shaking a little, from the cold or from something else. Floyd had laid a short wooden ladder down into the hole, and he handed me the flat spade.

“Corners,” he said.

I went down. The walls were good, better than I’d expected. But a backhoe bucket leaves the corners round, and a round corner was never good enough for Ernie Haldeman, so I started at the head end on Mom’s side and shaved them square, one thin slice at a time, the way he showed me when I was fourteen.

It took the better part of half an hour. Floyd stood up top and every so often pointed and said, little more there.

When I finished the fourth corner, I stood in the middle of the floor and looked at all four walls, and they went straight down and met square, like the inside of a box.

I started to climb out. Floyd put his hand out flat to stop me. Then he reached down and handed me his own shovel, the round-point one he’d been leaning on all morning.

“Your dad always took the last scoop by hand,” he said. “Every grave I ever watched him dig. Said it was the one that belonged to the family.”

I took it. There was a little loose dirt at the foot end where the bucket had dragged. I scraped it together, lifted that one shovelful, and set it up on the edge of the grass beside the tarp.

That was the last of it. I stood down there with the shovel in my hands and cried, and Floyd turned around and looked at the cedars until I was done.