“Can we go right ahead with it?”
“Don’t you remember how it was before? There’s got to be the permit, and they’ve got to have vital statistics for the records, and there’s the fee.”
“The office is closed.”
‘A know. They used to stay open Saturday morning, but not lately.”
‘Eve got a copy of the death certificate here, and I’ve got her birth certificate, marriage certificate, and final decree of divorce. Here, you can have them.”
He tools them and then tried to give them back to me, saying, ‘I don’t have anything to do with the office part.”
“And if the permit hasn’t gone up since last time, here’s the fifty dollars.”
He hesitated and finally took it. ‘] guess we could do it now and I could give them this stuff Monday. But don’t you want any words said? She said the words for her brother.”
The Green Ripper
“As I will for her.”
The Tuckerman plot was in that part of the cemetery where the stones were flush with the ground which, as he had mentioned when I had seen him before, made mowing a lot easier. While he went to get the post-hole digger from his shed, I opened the carton. The urn was shinier than I had expected it to be, and more ornate. It looked like a large gold goblet with a lid.
She had owned a small worn book of the collected poems of Emily Dickinson. She had read two of them over her brother’s grave. She had marked the ones she liked best. There were three short ones I wanted to read.
I could just make out the place where the old man had dug the hole before, for John Tuckerman’s urn. He chose a new spot and asked me if it was all right. I approved of it and asked him if I could dig.
‘leave the dirt close and neat,” he said.
He watched me as I chunlred the tool down, lifting the bite of earth in the blades, setting it aside each time, close and neat. Once it was down over a foot, it began to get me in the small of the back. It is an awkward posture, an awkward way to lift
When it was deep enough, he stopped me. I lifted the urn out of the box and, kneeling, lowered it to the bottom of the hole. I stood up then and read the first two poems, the longer ones. My voice had a harsh and meaningless sound in the stillness, like somebody sawing a board. I said the words I saw on the page without comprehending their meaning. Then I read the one she had read to her dead brother, called “Parting.”
“My life closed twice before its close It yet remains to see If Immortality unveil A third event to me
“So huge, so hopeless to conceive As these that twice befell. Parting is all we know of heaven, And an we need of hell.”
I bent and dropped the faded blue book down the hole, and then, kneeling, using both hands, I cupped up the dirt and filled the hole and tamped it down, replaced the circle of turf I had cut with the digger, and with the edge of my hand brushed away the loose dirt into the grass roots.
‘No marker for her either?” he asked.
“I don’t think so. Neither of them had children to come and look for the place.” The oblong of marble, level with the earth, reading TUCKERMAN, was enough.
“Those words were line the ones she read that time. Is that some kind of one of these new religions?”
`’Sort of.”
The Green Ripper
‘I thought so. There’s a lot of them these days. I guess having one is better than having none, but it makes you wonder.” He looked down toward the office and the road. “Where’d you park?”
“I walked out from the bus station.”
“Where are you going? Back to Florida?”
“I haven’t decided.”
“This town isn’t as bad as some. If you need work, maybe I can think of somebody you could go ask. You look sort of down on your luck, mister.”