Nickel Mountain

1

All morning there had been a gray truck parked in the cemetery on the mountainside across and a little down from where they hunted, and fifteen feet this side of the truck two men were digging a grave. Henry Soames wondered about it from time to time, when he sat resting for a minute on a rock or when he stood helping his boy with the rifle. They were burying someone he knew, most likely — only people from close around used the cemetery — but he couldn’t think who it would be. Henry was always one of the first to hear about births and deaths, partly because of his running the diner (as he still sometimes called it, though the big sign in front of the new building said RESTAURANT, and it was no longer the Stop-Off but The Maples, which was more elegant, Callie said), but mainly because Henry Soames was the kind of man he was, interested as a spinster aunt in the life of the whole county and a partisan. Maybe it was Charley Benson’s mother, it came to him after a while, and, not realizing he was doing it, he took off his cap and held it over his stomach a minute, thinking and looking at the ground. She was ninety-seven, and likely to go at any time. But it was odd that he hadn’t heard. Maybe on the way back home he and Jimmy would cross over to where they were digging and find out for sure.

They were regular, hired grave-diggers, not relatives or friends of the family: They had a shade-canvas up, and they worked slowly and steadily. Over their heads the sky was bright blue, like the middle of summer, with a long, pale mare’s-tail off to the west, and the maples, exploding to red now, were as motionless as trees in a dream. The shade under the trees looked cool and comfortable (here in the open it was hot as a day in the middle of August) and he thought of the creek over there, out of sight from where he stood, and the thought made him thirsty. The tombstones would be smooth and comfortable, some of them, for sitting on.

Jimmy seemed not to have noticed the truck, or at any rate he hadn’t grown curious yet. A boy’s curiosity took time to move out from wherever he happened to be standing, if where he was was unfamiliar. He wanted to know why the old barbwire fence was here, where as far as a four-year-old boy could see there had never been anything but stiff gray weeds and berry bushes and big rounded rocks. (There’d been a house here, years ago, a place where three old-maid sisters had lived, named Riddle. You could still find the chimney, down under the woodbine and burdocks, if you looked, and you could see where the road had been, and three of the stone supports of the smokehouse. There was one old pear tree, dead and white and brittle as bone, standing all by itself in the brambles like a stubborn old Baptist waiting for the Judgment.) The boy wanted to turn over every old stick or flat stone they found to squat down with his arms on his knees and study the crawling things underneath. Henry would stand patiently or would sit, if there was a stump handy, giving his son his way. It was good for a boy to look things over. And then, too, Henry could use the rests. As it was he was farther from home than Doc Cathey approved of his going. He could look behind him and see his house and restaurant a half-mile down, way to the right of the cemetery, over by the highway: the house a little white box in the shade of maples and three pine trees scraggly with age, no grass around it to speak of, cinders instead for the trucks to park on — in front of the house and off to the left the red walls and the black roof of the restaurant. There was only one car there now, a Volkswagen; no one he knew. He looked over at the grave-diggers again and shook his head.

Then Henry forgot about the cemetery for a while. In spite of the noise they’d been making shooting at cans and sticks, earlier, a rabbit walked right out in front of them, and Henry fired at it. The rabbit flipped when the bullet hit and flopped around in a half-circle, dead already, and lay still. They went to pick it up.

2

Any other time he might have picked it up at once, almost without looking at it, and might have stuffed it into his canvas bag and might have forgotten about it. But the boy hadn’t seen a dead rabbit before — hadn’t seen anything dead, in fact, as far as Henry Soames knew, except maybe flies — and so Henry stood with the rifle clamped tightly under his right elbow, barrel out, pointing off to the right, away from the boy, and held the rabbit on his open left hand for the boy to see and touch. He watched the boy’s face and for an instant he felt himself slipping away again into that sense that he stood outside time, involved and yet dispassionate, like a man looking at far-off mountains, or like Henry Soames’ father sitting motionless and huge on a broad stump, watching chipmunks or listening to the brook move down through the glen, rattling away forever, down and down. Or as Henry himself sat nowadays, more and more, thinking thoughts that had never before occurred to him, surprised and bemused at the way things fit together. He saw the boy’s face as though it had nothing to do with himself, a face in an old, old photograph. His hair was the color of clean old straw, white almost, but with yellow glints and dust-gray shadows. It needed cutting; that was the way his mother liked it. His blue eyes had a pink cast, as they always did when the light was strong, and his eyebrows, white against the flush of his face, lifted up and out like wings. He stood bent forward, his trousers halfway down his hips, his hands behind his back in one of those old-man poses he was always getting into, and he looked at the rabbit with curiosity and no distaste. For him, too, the sun had momentarily paused, if it ever noticeably moved in a four-year-old’s world. At last, tentatively, he touched the soft, short fur on the back, gray-brown fur speckled with a pure white (the rabbit was young), and stroked from the tips of the ears to the turned-down tail. The bullet had hit in the neck, snapping it clean, and the head lay now at an angle not natural in life, as though the back of the head rose straight from the shoulders, as if in ecstasy. There was very little blood: a stain around what seemed the insignificant wound on the side of the neck.

“He’s killed, isn’t he?” Jimmy said.

Henry nodded.

“Are you going to shoot him again?” Now a hint of distaste did come, but mainly the boy was curious.

“No point in shooting things after they’re dead,” Henry said.

The boy continued to move his hand very gently on the fur, his question not fully answered, Henry knew, because really it had nothing to do with shooting: a question about what death was, how a thing so unreasonable could be tamed, made to fit in a world of waterbugs, trees, mountains, customers at the restaurant. He said, “Why?”

“A thing can only die once,” Henry said. “Things live and then they die.”

He looked past the boy at the pine woods that began some fifty feet up the slope from where they stood, beyond where the Riddle place used to stand before it burned. It was utterly still in there and dark as a church. Needles on the ground kept out all growth, and wherever one entered, long, gloomy aisles radiated out straight and clean. The CCC boys had planted the trees in 1935 or so. He could remember coming here with his father to watch them work. The Riddles’ place had been gone even then. His father would sit on a rock biting the sweet white tips off timothy shoots and he would chirp at sparrows or meadowlarks as though he were one of them and fond of gossip. Henry had come here two, three times when he’d first found out he was going to die. Self-consciously, sentimentally (as he’d come to see), he would slip into his father’s poses: He would lean his gun against a stump and lower his great, loose body down beside the gun, plant his elbows on his knees, tip his cap back and stare in at the gloomy aisles that led away to the darkness farther in. But he’d gone on living, taking his pills when he needed them, and gradually he’d gotten used to it, and it had come to him that it wasn’t the same. The gloomy aisles weren’t there yet when his father had come, it was spindly new trees he’d looked at, and blowing grasses and birds. If he looked he could see the cemetery, across from here, the narrow gray stones in the shade of the maples and beeches there, but it wasn’t that that had drawn his attention. If he ever looked there, he saw it with the same calm, like a man who’d been married to all that for fifty years. Though Henry couldn’t have predicted it — you had to get to that point yourself to know that somebody else had been there — he saw now that that was inevitable. Everything passes, the carved-out rocks by the brook proved it, and the excitement of fear was no more enduring than anything else. A bad heart was the beginning of wisdom.

“Look at his eyes,” Jimmy said.

He nodded.

“They sort of squint, don’t they? Why do they squint?”

“Because he’s dead,” he said.

(Callie’s mother had said, “What do you get out of it, shooting defenseless rabbits?”

He’d shrugged, and Callie had said, “Now, Mother, don’t you go butting into Henry’s business.”

“It keeps him from shooting Baptists,” Callie’s father had said. “He, he, he!” And Henry had said, a little righteously, as it seemed to him later, “I don’t want to shoot Baptists. It’s not that at all.”

“Well, then you’re a goddamn fool,” Callie’s father had said. He kept beer in the refrigerator, purely as an affront to her, and he could swear like a trooper. He was her cross, she said. But he’d prayed, the time Jimmy had gone into convulsions, and Henry had understood it, whether Callie could or not. There’d been nothing they could do, once they got him to the hospital. Jimmy had been not quite two. At first he’d had a crazy look in his eyes, a clouded look, like the look of an animal dying. Henry had reached into the crib for him, Callie’s father looking over his shoulder (it was up at their place it had happened), and there’d been that look in Jimmy’s eyes, his face white in the dark room, and Jimmy had drawn back in terror, not knowing his own father; and then when Henry had him in his arms, Jimmy’s eyes had rolled up and he’d gone stiff all over, and Callie’s father had said “Holy God!” and on the way to the hospital he’d started to pray, with Callie’s mother sitting stiff as a board beside him, holding the baby, keeping his teeth apart with her bare fingers, and Callie was glaring through the windshield like a madwoman, almost more furious at her father than scared for Jimmy — and that too was natural, it seemed to Henry, even good; yes. He’d driven like hell was after them and it was a wonder they’d any of them made it.)

But now the boy had lost all interest in the rabbit, and Henry thought, Well, all right, then; everything in its time. He dropped the rabbit in the bag.

The boy said, “What are they doing over there?”

Henry looked over where the boy was pointing. There was a car parked in back of the truck now, and a woman stood watching the grave-diggers. They were strangers, city people from their looks. The man had on a suit and hat, and the woman had on a gray coat and a hat with flowers in it. Both of them were old.

“They’re digging a grave,” Henry said, taking off his cap again, as if absentmindedly.

“No they’re not,” Jimmy said, “they’re digging somebody up.”

“Mmm,” Henry said. Hardly noticing, he pulled up Jimmy’s trousers and tightened the belt. After a minute he took the boy’s hand and they started down.

“There’s four of them,” Jimmy said. “One, two, three, four.”

“Mmm,” Henry said. He stopped a minute to rest, then began again.

3

The world had changed for Henry Soames because little by little he had come to see it less as a yarn told after dinner, with all the relatives sitting around, and more as a kind of church service — communion, say, or a wedding. The change had in a way begun when they’d built The Maples. He’d felt a kind of awe, watching the place go up: not only awe at the looks of it (a gabled building like an old-fashioned Catskills barn, twice the size of Henry’s old diner, with planter-boxes inside and out, and twelve tables, and a fireplace at one end), but awe, too, at what his wife had done to him, scooping up his old life like wet clay and making it over into her own image, and awe at how easily she managed it all and how easily, even gladly, he had accepted it, in the end. It was as if it was something he’d been thinking all along and had never quite dared — though God knew it wasn’t. Her ideas had given him the willies, set in his ways as he’d been by then, and they’d probably have given him the willies even if she’d caught him younger; but he’d found there was no stopping her: She was hard as nails and mean as her mother when there was something she had to have. So he’d given in, and when he’d done it, not just in words but totally, freely choosing what he couldn’t prevent, he’d felt a sudden joy, as though the room had grown wider all at once (which by that time as a matter of fact it had), or as if he’d finally shoved in the clutch on the way down a long straight hill it was no use resisting. He’d stood out by the road with Jimmy, watching the carpenters work and after that the nurserymen and the painters (all this a year ago now), and he’d given up all thought of the mortgage and whether the truckers would still pull in, and he’d mused like a man only half-awake on how it had all come about, the long train of trivial accidents, affirmed one by one, that made a man’s life what it happened to become. It was a good life, he had to admit it, now that he could look at it, with nothing to do from morning to night but keep an eye on little Jimmy and from time to time catch up their books. (Callie was no good at the bookkeeping. The figures had a will as stubborn as her own: Twos, fours, sixes were as intransigently twos, fours, and sixes as stones were stones. She could no more juggle the bills than juggle dead tamaracks, and she would cry, and Henry would take over, and he’d have it all straightened out — as well as it could be — in no time.) He’d grown mystical, or, as Callie said, odd. He had no words for his thoughts; the very separateness of words was contrary to what he seemed to know. It began, perhaps, with his thought of what marrying Callie had done to him; if she’d made him into her own image it was nevertheless her own image discovered — for the first time to her as well as to him — in him: Henry Soames as he might, through her, become. Once he had fairly tested it, he knew beyond any shadow of doubt that the new life she had shaped was his own, it fit him the way his father’s old coat had one day, to his surprise, fit him, and from that moment on he didn’t just wear the new life, he owned it. He felt like a man who’d been born again, made into something entirely new, and the idea that such a thing could happen had startled him, and he’d seized on it, turning it over and over in his mind the way you turn over a hundred-dollar bill. But the new life he’d found in himself had no settled meaning yet: It was all a-shimmer and vague, like a dream. It lacked the solid reality that would come when he’d lived it long enough to know it had something in common with the old — long tedious hours in the middle of winter when no one came in, days when Callie was short-tempered and Jimmy had a devil in him.

With the passing of time he became in reality what he was, his vision not something apart from the world but the world itself transmuted. He’d hired Billy Hartman by this time, so he could rest himself more, at Doc Cathey’s insistence, and he never served customers himself now except on special occasions — a birthday, say, or a wedding. His new detachment encouraged the mystical drift of his thoughts. He would sit with Jimmy eating supper and watching Callie at the cash register, everything around her a-glitter — the glass on the counter, the green and silver mint wrappers, the cellophane on the twenty-five-cent cigars, the glossy knotty pine wall behind her, with the picture of the pheasant on it — and Callie there in the center of it all like a candle — and he would be so moved, all at once, his eyes would fill. He was proud of her, and had a right to be proud, because she too had been changed. She would have been beautiful in any case, one way or another, Henry knew, but marrying him she had found out possibilities not only in him but in herself as well that she might never have found some other way. She never spoke of loving him but sometimes when they locked up the restaurant together she would hold his hand, or when he sat holding Jimmy, reading to him, she would pat the bald spot on his head. And so like a man half-asleep he thought about marriage, which was the same thing as love or magic or anything else he could think of (he could no more distinguish between what was happening from day to day between Callie and himself and what happened between himself and his son than he could tell the difference, except in degrees, between those and the way the restaurant changed him and he, in turn, the restaurant), and he knew, not in words, that it was true, as Emmet Slocum had said once, that people sometimes killed themselves because of the weather but nevertheless they killed themselves by choice.

So it was that Henry Soames had discovered the holiness of things (his father’s phrase), the idea of magical change. And listening to Callie’s mother talk he began to see, he thought, why people were religious. She seemed to know nothing of holiness, Callie’s mother, no more than the preacher at Salem Baptist seemed to know; but listening to her it came to him that the words she bandied about made a kind of sense. She would sit at the piano, up at her place on a Sunday afternoon, and would sing old hymns in her shrill, hard voice, and Henry would sit over by the window in the corner, staring vaguely at the African violets by the lace curtains on the window seat, patting the knee of the child in his lap, and it would come to him that the whole thing might be true. In whisp’ring grass 1 hear him pass. Maybe he’d been wrong; maybe they’d discovered the same thing he’d discovered, and differed from him only in trying to talk about it: a vision of dust succinct with spirit, God inside wasps, oak trees, people, chickens walking in the yard. Maybe like him they had come to feel kindly toward old clothes, farmwomen’s wrinkled elbows, the foolishness of young people, expensive suits, even the endless political talk at the GLF down in Slater. And if he was wrong, he was wrong too to keep himself apart from them: What religion was was a kind of formal acting-out of what every human being felt, vague fears over things he could do nothing about, vague joys over things only partly his doing — the idea of holiness. So one day he had taken Jimmy to the Presbyterian Church in Slater.

It was the church where Henry had gone with his mother as a child. He’d sent Jimmy up to the Sunday School and then had walked around to the front and started in himself to listen to the service. There were people on the steps, not a soul he knew, mostly young or middle-aged, one old, old man — all beautiful as lovers, as it seemed to him, in their Sunday clothes, and all happy-looking, laughing, talking — so happy he thought they must really know what he’d guessed they knew, or not knew, felt: And he had felt humble, ashamed of his monstrous bulk and remoteness, and had crossed the street to look at the washing machines in the Salway Store window until they’d gone in. Then, steeling himself, he crossed again quickly. When he went from the sunlit street to the foyer it was so dark at first he could barely see, but even so he noticed at once a frail, coy-looking elderly woman in a dark blue dress, white hat, white gloves, and he knew by instinct that the woman was there to greet him. His heart leaped, and he snapped his fingers as if he’d just remembered something and turned on his heel and fled back into the light.

For maybe fifteen minutes he walked up and down on the sidewalk, sometimes looking at the maple trees on the church lawn, the gray stone walls, the arched windows, sometimes studying the washing machines, his blood all the while in such agitation he was afraid he might have an attack. When he got up his courage to try it again the woman was gone and the foyer was empty except for the ushers. He could hear the minister praying inside. The ushers left him to himself, and he went to the table where pamphlets were laid out. He picked up the first one that caught his eye, Predestination? in bright red on yellow, and carried it over to the door to leaf through it. It upset him. According to the pamphlet all Christians believed in Predestination, works were of no account whatever (What is human righteousness beside the perfect righteousness of God? it said), and the whole secret was to renounce the arrogant wish for free will and joyfully accept God’s Plan. When he finished reading his hands were shaking. It wasn’t so much that he disagreed; he couldn’t tell whether he agreed or not. He minded the fact that they’d spelled it out: It was not what he wanted, what he wanted was — God knew. “Idealists,” his father would have said: ministers, or the New York State troopers, or Welshmen who ran their families like the army. And then a new thought had come to him. Surely there weren’t ten people in there who knew Predestination from a turnip. They accepted whatever the minister said, and forgot about it, and carried away a vague feeling that it was better to be good than bad, unselfish than selfish, if a man could keep his mind on it, and that somehow things made sense — like the hymn they were singing now, “Faith of our Fathers,” whatever that was, not that it mattered, finally, in the least. And he felt unworthy to go where they were worshipping, and he left again to go stand humbly by the washing machines, waiting for Jimmy.

That afternoon he’d gone hunting again, his fat hands loving on the shotgun, and had shot three squirrels that seemed to him to dance like fire on the limbs. He became what he was, with a gun in his hands: doom and doomed and serene.

They reached the bottom of the slope and rested awhile. Henry took one of his pills, and Jimmy held the gun for him, making a show of holding it very carefully, the way Henry had taught him, the barrel aimed away and toward the ground. The earth was softer here and the grass less brittle, thick and rich yellow-green, shaded by beeches. There was a horse’s skull here somewhere, but he couldn’t think where. Hunting through the grass with his foot, he found a pair of ladies’ underpants, and he covered them up again quickly, embarrassed. They started up the hill. Above them, among the tombstones, the old man and the old woman stood solemn and silent, watching them come near.

4

They were digging up the body of their son. He’d died at fourteen, fifty years ago, and at that time they’d lived around these parts. Now they lived in Rochester, and since they were getting on in years, coming to the time when they had to take some thought about their final rest, they’d decided to move him to where they were going, a plot in a very nice cemetery on a hillside overlooking the Genesee. The woman was ninety-two, the man eighty-seven; their clothes hung on them like clothes on hangers. Inside his hat, and hanging down over his ears, the man had burdock leaves, and under the burdock leaves thick white hair. He had a brown, unadorned cane with a rubber tip. His skin was white as paper, with splotches on it, and he had white-blue eyes that bulged in his head like the eyes of a skittish horse. He made you think of a preacher, one of the old-timers, not the kind that cowered when he came to your door. The woman looked like a small, addled witch — sharp features, tiny black eyes that glinted like needles, a hundred thousand dirty-looking wrinkles from her collarbone to her hairline. She looked as if she had no water left in all her body, but the rims of her eyes were red. Jimmy clung with one hand to Henry’s belt and watched them.

“I tell Walt it don’t much matter where he lays,” the woman said, “his soul’s in Glory.” She stood sideways to Henry, her big-knuckled hands folded two inches or so below her chin, and she spoke out of the side of her mouth, her eyes fixed, as if intently, on the ground.

“Mmm,” Henry said, nodding, thinking about it.

The old man waved at her as if to hit her. “Oh, shut up,” he said. Then, to Henry: “She’s crazy. Always has been.”

“Walt don’t believe in God,” the old woman said. She smiled, sly, still looking at the ground.

Jimmy leaned forward to look around Henry at the grave-diggers. Henry put his hand on the boy’s head, glad to have an excuse to make no comment.

“He’s dead and rotten,” the old man said. He jerked his arm, with his cane dangling from the end of it, in the general direction of the grave. Again, however incongruously, he had the look of a hell-fire preacher. He said, “Now, you shut up.”

Henry cleared his throat, preparing to leave. “Well—” he said. He glanced over at the grave-diggers. One of the two men was down in the hole, throwing the dirt up — all you could see of him now was his hat. The other man stood at one corner, poking with a crowbar. Beyond them the hillside sloped away in sunlight and shadow, from thick glossy headstones to the taller, narrower markers over in the older section, past the statue of the Kunzmuller girl and the Kendall crypt with pine trees around it, and down to the creek, where the woods began. The shadow of a crow swept over the grass and out of sight in the trees, incredibly swift. Jimmy left Henry’s side now and walked a few feet toward the grave. He stood with his hands behind his back and watched.

“Fine boy you got there,” the old man yelled.

“Yes, he is,” Henry said, grinning.

“The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away,” the old woman said. She separated her hands for a minute, and the fingers shook.

Henry rubbed his nose and said nothing.

“She’s crazy,” the old man said.

“I believe in the resurrected Lord,” she said.

Henry looked away, over in the direction of the old people’s car. It was an old green Hudson, as big and square as a truck. It had a stubborn look, a kind of solid inflexibility that was vaguely impressive. He wondered how people as old as they were could get it to go around corners. He said, “I guess we’d better be getting on home.” He took a step toward Jimmy, but the old man raised his arm.

“My boy,” he said, then hesitated a moment, “—was fourteen.”

“It’s a shame,” Henry said — the only thing he could think of to say, since any of the usual things one said might set the old man off. He looked at the ground, embarrassed, shaking his head and vaguely reaching for his cap.

“Just fourteen years old,” the old man said. He raised his arms again. “I loved that boy—” Again he hesitated, hunting for words, or maybe hunting for some lost emotion, but whatever he was after it wouldn’t come and he dropped his arm and said, “Hmph.” The old woman was weeping. The old man patted her arm, but absently, staring past her, still hunting.

“We kept his room just like it was,” the old woman said. She nodded as if someone else had said it, and rubbed her eyes with her coatsleeve, her fingers shaking.

The old man nodded too. “But then we moved.”

“Life goes on,” Henry said sadly, and the words filled him with a pleasant sense of grief. He thought of his own approaching death, how Callie and Jimmy would be heartbroken for a while, as he’d been heartbroken when his father died, but would after a while forget a little, turn back to the world of the living, as was right. And if it were Callie that died? or Jimmy? The question startled him, as if someone standing behind him had asked it, and instantly he put it from his mind. He glanced a little nervously at Jimmy, who’d moved closer to watch the digging.

“You never forget,” the old man said.

“Never!” the old woman said sharply, suddenly meeting Henry’s eyes. “When we meet him in Glory—”

The old man said, “Shut up.”

For a full minute nobody spoke, there was only the rhythmical scrape of the shovel and the thump of the dirt as it fell beside the grave. Far away there was a tractor plowing for winter wheat. The motor would dig in for a minute, then whir a second while the man slipped the clutch in, and then the motor would dig in again. It reminded him of something, vaguely.

“Love—” Henry began at last, philosophically, but he couldn’t think how to finish. The old man was still patting the old woman’s arm, and, noticing it, Henry Soames half-frowned, thinking something more that he couldn’t quite get hold of. Tears were still running down the cracks in her face, and her hands were clenched together.

One of the grave-diggers said, “There she is.” He said it as if to himself, but they all heard it, and the old man jumped, as if frightened, and touched his hat. A limp burdock leaf slipped down farther over one ear and he slapped at it, not knowing what it was. The old woman rolled her eyes toward the grave, her eyelids batting, and turned very slowly, reaching out for her husband’s arm with one hand, tugging up the front of her coat with the other, her black mouth open. After a second Henry went to her other side to help her over the grass. Jimmy was right at the edge of the grave now, on hands and knees, looking down.

“You keep back, Jimmy,” Henry called, but Jimmy pretended not to hear, and Henry let it go. They inched over the grass, the two old people bent forward stiffly, clinging to each other, both their mouths open now, sucking in air. The old man’s head was shaking as the woman’s hands had before, and at every step he ran his tongue over his lower lip. He leaned heavily on his cane, and the cane’s rubber tip pushed down in the ground, interfering with the progress he couldn’t have made without it. When they were within five or six feet of the place, the man with the crowbar said, “We’ve hit the box. She’ll still be a while yet.” They stopped, and the old man stood leaning on his cane with both hands, breathing hard and rolling his head.

“You ought to sit down,” the old woman said.

He looked at her angrily but said nothing, still laboring for breath.

The old woman said, “We ought to left him lay.”

“A family should keep together,” the old man said. As soon as the words were out, a coughing fit came over him. Henry watched helplessly, the old woman leaning on his arm.

“Our Bobby was struck by lightning,” the old woman said, meeting Henry’s eyes again. “It was God’s hand.”

The old man was furious, but he went on coughing.

“I believe in the resurrected Lord,” the old woman said again now, taking advantage of her husband’s inability to speak. “Walt don’t believe.” She smiled. Then she said: “He was only fourteen.”

“He’s dead and rotten,” the old man yelled, “it’s the Law of Nature! Consider the lilies—” He coughed again, a thick, racking cough that threatened to turn him inside out.

“God forgive this poor sinner,” the old woman said, grim, and the old man swung his cane at her but missed and jabbed it back in the ground just in time, thrown off balance.

“Here now,” Henry said. He glanced over at Jimmy but he hadn’t seen it, he was still looking down in the hole. He was lying on the ground now, his trousers low and his skin very white between his belt and the bottom of his T-shirt.

“Our only child,” the old woman said, and all at once she was crying again. The old man reached out toward her and made a patting motion in the air. She said, “But we’ve never forgot him.”

“Never!” the old man said.

She pressed her lips tight together, weeping, and the old man struggled painfully to her side, swearing at the cane as he came. They stood there leaning on each other, and Henry, free to move now, went over to stand beside where Jimmy lay at the head of the grave. Most of the top of the box was clear, and they’d dug out a two-inch slit of dirt around the sides to about halfway down the walls. The man down in the hole looked up at the man on top and nodded, and the man on top went over to the truck. He ground on the starter and got the truck going and backed it around to the side of the grave, and they unhooked the chains hanging down from the winch and lowered them into the hole. There was a rod that went between the two chain ends, just above the hooks, so when the hooks were clamped to the ends of the box the loops at each end of the rod held them tight, like tongs. When the man down in the hole had the rig on and the man on top had the winch turned so the chain was taut, the man below climbed out, helping himself up with the chain. Henry moved back a little, drawing Jimmy up on his knees and back with him.

The old woman said as if angrily, “We kept his room just like it was the day he died.”

“But we had to move,” the old man said. “The farm was played out, and I had to get some kind of work, so we moved to Rochester.”

“We had relatives there,” the old woman said.

The winch creaked, beginning to turn, and Jimmy kneeled with his hands on his knees, in the shadow of Henry’s leg. The chains pulled tighter and the rear end of the truck went down a little, and one of the grave-diggers wet his lips and shouted something and the other one laughed and nodded. Then the box came out with a sucking sound and tilted, free of the grave sides now, threatening to roll sideways and spill the dead boy out, but it righted and kept coming till it hung a little above the level of Henry Soames’ belt. The taller of the grave-diggers, the red-headed one, went around front and moved the truck a few feet forward, and when he came back they swung the box into the truckbed. The old man waved his arm. “Well, there it is,” he said. He was excited and pleased, as if he’d managed the whole thing himself. “See how easy they done it, Hessie?”

“Praise the Lord,” she said, weeping. Immediately the old man scowled and flapped his arm at her, waving her off.

The men slid the long, dirt-caked box to the front of the truckbed and chained it in place and got down and went back to their shovels. They began filling the grave. The two old people went over, very slowly, to look at the box.

Jimmy said, “Is there a dead man inside?”

Henry nodded.

The old man was patting the side of the truck. “I loved that boy more—” he began, but he seemed to lose track.

“Can we see him?” Jimmy said.

Henry shook his head.

“Are they going to see him?”

“I don’t know.”

The old woman was crying, wringing her hands. “We’ve always loved you, Bobby.”

The old man said, confused, “Shut up.” Then, finally, as if with relief, he too was crying. He began to pat the old woman’s arm.

Suddenly Jimmy laughed. “They’re funny,” he said.

Henry turned to look at him, frowning anxiously, and said quickly, “No they’re not, Jimmy. When you grow up—”

The grave-digger with the red hair said, with a look of disgust, “Just pitiful, sonny.” He hardly glanced up as he said it.

“That’s not true,” Henry said. He chewed his lip and stopped himself from saying more.

The grave-digger smiled to himself, wry, but Henry pretended not to see.

They went back to the tombstone near the front fender of the old peoples’ car, where Henry had left the rifle and the canvas bag that held the rabbit. It was after noon and Callie would be worried. I lost track of the time, he thought. I’m sorry.

“Please, why can’t I see?” Jimmy said.

“No,” Henry said. “I already told you once.”

“You never let me see anything.” A whine this time.

The old people were crossing the grass again, leaning on each other, as always, seeming to make no progress.

“You don’t like me,” Jimmy said. He started to cry.

Henry clenched his jaws; but looking at the boy’s face, seeing beyond any possible doubt that however trivial the cause, however ridiculous the words, the child’s grief was perfectly real, the injustice terrible and never-to-be-forgotten, he bent down to him and said, “Now listen, Jimmy. I love you and you know it. Now quit that crying.”

“Well I don’t love you,” Jimmy said, not looking at him, seeing what would happen.

Henry smiled sadly, reaching out to touch Jimmy’s shoulder. “Poor dreamer,” he said.

He was tired and it was a long way back. He thought how good it would be to lie down, only for a little while, and rest.