Once I Was a Digger of Graves
By John Hodgen
Once on a Saturday on the way back to work, to Pine Grove Cemetery, one
grave down and another to go, walking down Athol Road from the Templeton
Diner with my friend Freddie Maahs, co-digger of graves, whose father was a
drunk, and mine, dead for six months, whom I had argued with, who wouldn’t
go to church with me, and whom I’d told to go to hell a week before he died,
we had decided, Freddie and I, young men that we were, sophomores in high
school, walking back to work, that we wouldn’t be going to the diner anymore,
too much money we thought, two hot dogs, a NuGrape with chips, thirty-five
cents, plus the twenty-cent tip, and the walk there and back probably making
us late. Not a good idea with Mr. Brown either, our boss at Pine Grove, who
was waiting for us, and who probably wanted to kill us, Mr. Brown, who looked
like Robert Frost, and acted like him too, no two roads diverged ever with him,
just the one true way, and who, a month later, would be killed himself when
his pickup truck stalled pulling out from the cemetery, a trailer truck driver
coming over the rise who couldn’t see him in time. Still, in that lunch hour
we passed Paula Hunt’s house, twice, going up, going down, and the name
the shop kids called her, Paula, who was beautiful but didn’t even know it,
and with whom we both were in love, Paula, who that summer only wanted
to be touched, but we were both afraid and didn’t know how. And there on
Athol Road walking back, Freddie on one side and I on the other, only seven
minutes more before we’d be late, he said, Freddie’s Timex in his watchpocket,
the strap broken off, I found a red rubber ball someone had lost by the side
of the road, and with all that we were up against, our damning poverty, our
numbing stupidity, our fathers both drunken and gone, Mr. Brown in the last,
vast unknown month of his life, Death coming looking for him each day where
he worked, the two of us with another grave now to dig, and Paula still waiting
as we walked by her house, only longing to be held, to be touched, in the same
way that we did without knowing it at all, and with all the gathering armies,
the vagaries of happenstance, consistency and insoluble time, like headstones
moving on the horizon, I started throwing the red ball to him, Freddie Maahs,
just for the hell of it, one bounce in the middle of the road, each of us catching
it each time in one hand, nobody missing, perfect as a pendulum, then winging
it, chucking it, faster and harder, right in front of passing cars, to see how close
we could come, the idea delicious somehow, each throw coming closer, just
being idiots, nobody stopping just yet, but us knowing they could, someone
giving us the finger, calling us assholes, dipshits, or dumb fucks, or maybe,
sooner or later, God forbid, someone really pulling over, getting out, coming
at us, arms all askew, some dumb bastard, some slack-jawed yokel, pissing and
moaning, ready to punch us both out just for the hell of it. And I knew in
that moment I would’ve just stood there, would’ve just taken it, welcomed it,
truly, the beating I so richly deserved, thinking that they’d end up feeling worse
somehow one day down the road, when they heard they’d been pounding the
dead guy’s kid, the kid from the cemetery, the weird one, the fool, touched in
the head, people would say, the idiot, who kept asking for it, wanting only to be
touched in that rough, ragged way, who kept saying with each haymaker, with
the blood in his mouth, I wasn’t throwing at you, something else I was throwing
at, something in you, within you, I don’t have anymore, wasn’t you in your living,
your fullness, I was throwing at, something moving and heavy like your life where
you are, Jesus, sweet Jesus, I just wanted to hold you, I didn’t even hit you, didn’t
touch your goddamn car.
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