The Grave I Dug for My Father

On the hill

It was a few minutes after noon when the cars came up the gravel road to the cemetery. Maybe sixty people.

That’s a big funeral in our township. Half of them were old men who’d stood at the edge of a grave Dad dug for somebody they loved.

Dale’s men had set the lowering frame over the grave and laid the green carpet around the edges, but they’d left the foot end open, because the frame sat back from it a few inches.

You could see the walls going straight down, and you could see the corner.

The hearse backed up as close as it could get. The six men got out and lined up behind it, three on each side, waiting for Dale to open the back.

And that’s when Lyle saw the tracks.

I watched him see them. He was standing at the back of the hearse, settling his hat, and his eyes went down to the grass, and then they followed those two lines of tire tracks all the way across the cemetery to the old yellow backhoe parked by the windbreak, where everybody on that hill could see it.

He knew the machine. He’d have known it from a mile off. His eyes came back along the tracks, slower, to the open end of the grave, and stopped on the corner. Straight down. Square.

Behind me I heard old Jim say, low, to somebody, “That’s Ernie’s machine.” And somebody else, “Look at them corners.”

And it went through the crowd like wind through wheat, just a murmur, and then it stopped, and nobody on that hill was talking anymore.

Lyle looked at the corner for a long time. Then he looked at me.

I didn’t look away. I didn’t nod or smile or do anything at all. I just stood there in my white shirt with Lisa’s hand in mine and let him look.

I wasn’t trying to win anything. I just didn’t want to hide what I’d done.

Lyle took his hat off.

He held it against his chest a second. Then he stepped out of the line, away from the hearse, and walked across the grass toward me.

Sixty people watched him do it. Karen started to say something and Matt touched her arm, and she stopped.

He stopped in front of me. Up close, I saw that his eyes were red and he hadn’t shaved very well, and that he looked more like Dad than I’d ever noticed, the same heavy eyebrows, the same deep lines down from the nose.

“You dig that?” he said. Quiet, for just me.

“This morning,” I said. “With Floyd.”

“In a white shirt.”

“It’s his rule.”

My brother looked down at the grass between us. His jaw was working.

For a second, I thought he was going to walk back to the hearse, and I’d decided before I ever got on that machine that I could live with that.

Instead he reached down and took me by the wrist. His hand was rough as a corn cob, and he didn’t say anything.

He just walked me back across the grass to the back of the hearse, where Dale had the door open and the casket rolled halfway out on its rollers.

He put my hand on the rail. The front rail on the left side, his place, the place for the oldest son.

He held it there a second with his own hand over mine, pressing down, like he wanted to make sure it would stay.

Then he stepped back and stood beside me, close, with his hat in his hands.

“Lyle,” I said.

“Carry him,” my brother said. His voice broke on it. “You dug it. You carry him.”

Six men and one more

Dale looked at the two of us, and then at the line, and he didn’t say a word. He just nodded to the others.

Matt was on the rail behind me. He looked at his father and then at me, and he gave me the smallest nod.

We lifted. My father was heavier than I expected, the way the dead always are, and lighter than I’d been carrying him for twenty years.

Lyle walked beside the casket the whole way, one hand flat on the lid, not carrying, just keeping it company.

It was maybe forty steps from the hearse to the grave. I counted every one.

We set him on the lowering frame, square over the hole, and I stood there a second longer than I needed to with my hand still on the rail.

When I stepped back, Lyle was right there. He didn’t move away.

The pastor said the committal. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Dale lowered the casket with the crank, slow and even, until it rested in the vault, and everyone looked at those straight walls.