Charles Wilkins - In the Land of Long Fingernails: A Gravedigger in the Age of Aquarius

MONDAY MORNING AT the cemetery, hangover and confusionPeter the Dutch gravedigger high atop his massive hydraulic thunder-lizard, revving it to the deepest recesses of its innards, forcing out such putrid clouds of exhaust that nobody in the repair shop can get a lungful of breathable air; Hogjaw, Peters Belgian assistant, ramming the tail end of a pineapple and peanut butter sandwich into his mouth, galloping across the lawn as Peter screams at him in Dutch to move his skinny zitvlak because a funerals arriving in an hour and they havent even marked out the grave; Scotty, the autocratic old foreman, a snappish slug-eyed little general, tossing back a three-ounce bracer of whisky to fortify himself against the day, emerging from his second-story office and descending the stairs just in time to see his teenaged grandson mistakenly pouring latrine disinfectant into the gas tank of a brand new Lawn-Boy; Scotty firing his grandson on the spot then lurching out after him into the Garden of the Immaculate Conception, rehiring the boy if for no other reason than it will enable him to fire him the next Monday and the next; Scotty shambling back into the shop now, where Luccio, the big Calabrese doctoral candidate, is absorbing a last-minute passage of James Joyce, while over in the corner, the cemeterys one-armed gardener mixes up a batch of diabolically smelly Robusto-brand nitrates and horseshit...

It is at this point that I make my own rather impertinent appearance, a curly-headed kid with a summer job, clattering down the cemeterys main road in my decrepit Sunbeam Alpine, late as usual, fishtailing on the gravel where the pavement branches into the Garden of the Apostles of the Living Christ, coasting the last hundred feet to a halt under a spready silver maple just as Scotty descends the stairs from his second life-sustaining gurgle of cut-rate 40-proof blended screaming Where the hell were you? and reminding me that the next time Im late Im fired once and for all, docking me a half hours pay and ordering me to get out there pronto to help Luccio get a grave ready because the mourners are gonna be there in a gawdam wink and because the dead man is the former reeve of East Township, and so on, and so on...

Meanwhile, under the customary Monday morning cloud of laziness, pettiness, halitosis, chaos, and inertia, three or four other lowly employees trudge off with the enthusiasm of ripening stiffs to begin their temporary spiritless bottom-feeding bonehead jobs, their only consolation being that, even in 90 degrees of heat, work in the cemetery is relatively easy and that if theyre resourceful they can sleep two or three hours a day under the honeysuckles out by the paupers graves where Scotty only goes when hes caught short and cant make it back to the shop to piss out all the whiskey hes consumed since the day began with its customary fits, farts and befuddlements at eight oclock in the morning.

I PROMPTLY JOIN LUCCIO, who is away out in the Garden of the Apostles, lying reading under an ornamental willow while Peter finishes the digging. The digger is a formidable long-necked mantis of a thing with a snakes knot of intestines and a barrel-sized scoop whose teeth take a bite exactly the width of a standard grave. The machine is so strong it can crash its way through two feet of ground frost in winter. Yet Peter handles it with such delicacy that Scotty, in a rare moment of appreciation, declared one day that Peter could change gawdam diapers with it. All very neat, except that this time Peter is rattled because the side walls of the grave keep caving in. As usual at Willowlawn, the neighboring graves have been dug too close in order to save space; and, sure enough, as I peer into the hole I can see the old outer boxes, single on one side, two deep on the other, the three of them as rotten as compost, the top one in danger of collapsing into the new pit.

Luccio rises on his elbow and declares that Joyce is a long-winded bore. Fortunately the man is brilliant, he adds, which prevents him from being an ordinary bore like you, Wilkins. He looks at me solemnly, reaches into his pocket and withdraws the tiny bag of marijuana that he carries constantly. He has a patch of the stuff growing somewhere on the back acres of the cemeteryhis secret garden he calls it. He rolls a stout little reefer and hands it to me to light. Peter gets a whiff and comes over, then Hogjaw the Belgian who has just driven up on the tractor hauling the coffin-lowering frame and the rugs of fake grass and all the other widgets and tittybits required to get the reeve into the ground with a proper portion of dignity. One of Scottys inarguable ordinances is that seamy earthly realities never be permitted to impinge on what he refers to as the integrity of the rites. To that end, we are diligent in disguising any stray suggestion that, say, soil is dirty, or puddles wet, or rotting flesh or embalming chemicals anything less than another olfactory grace note in a world of honeysuckle and lilacs.

Today, to quell the stink seeping from the neighboring graves, which are in effect open from the sides, Scotty has ordered the application of BalsamBlast grave disinfectant and, in order to gussy up appearances, his prized German Gratzenturf rather than plain old outdoor carpeting. The turf , he feels bound to remind us, is a luxury he is not obliged to provide, even at what he calls celebrity interments. He couldnt even offer such sumptuousness, he protests, had the citys only cemetery supply dealer not recently run out of regular indoor-outdoor, enabling him to acquire Aryan superiority at pre-Hitlerian prices. The true burn for Scotty, it might be noted, is that there actually are no celebrity interments at Willowlawn, the jockeys and mobsters and whisky magnates of the city having for decades preferred burial among the more influential stiffs in, say, Pine Hills or Mount Pleasant, real cemeteries, where the tonnage of marble alone makes it considerably less likely that the place will one day be excavated, its swamp of embalming chemicals purged from the soil, to make way for the gracious duplexes and affordable executive estates that are spreading across the city like a contagion.