The Grave of God's Daughter (29 page)

T
HE PRIEST HAS BROUGHT THE FUNERAL
to a close. I have heard nothing he has said, nothing except the sound of the wind blustering against my coat, flickering the grass and sending a hushing rustle through the trees. The other mourners step back, away from my mother’s grave, preparing to take their turns in line to throw dirt on the coffin, but they are waiting for Martin and me, courtesy for kin.

“Do you want me to go first?” Martin asks quietly.

I can only manage to nod.

Martin scoops up a handful of dirt from beside our mother’s coffin and clutches it in his fist, then opens his palm and lets the dirt drop in one heavy torrent.

“It’s your turn,” he says, moving aside, away from the coffin, leaving it all to me.

I fill my hands with dirt and the soil feels as solid as stone, the cold giving it heft. I spread my fingers and the dirt falls away, sifting and catching on the breeze, refusing to come to rest on the coffin. A few granules of dirt skitter over the top and glance off the wood, making brief contact, but that is all. This was how my mother knew love, only in passing. It was a thing that never stayed, lingering just long enough to make you miss it once it was gone. Her father, her mother, her brother, her husband, her God, and the one man she cared for, they had all left her, and their departure twisted her heart inside out. There was no room inside, no place to put Martin or me.

“You have to let them go now,” Martin tells me, touching my arm. The other mourners are waiting.

I step back, giving them room, and each man and woman toss their handful of dirt onto the coffin, then they head off down the rutted path from which they came.

“Do you want to stay for a while?” Martin asks.

“I don’t know.”

“You can,” he offers. “They can’t make you leave.” He is trying to joke, then he realizes the vague irony in his choice of words. After a moment, he adds, “I’m not going to stay. Not unless you want me to.”

“No, not unless you want to.”

Martin furrows his hands deeper into his pockets. “No, I’m going to go.”

“All right then.”

“Are you staying in town over night?”

“No, no I hadn’t…” I let my voice trail off.

Disappointment dulls his reply. “That’s okay. It’s a long drive back.”

My brother knows I have a family now, a husband, children, another life, a life that is waiting for me somewhere else.

As we stand there in silence for a moment more, I yearn to lean over to him and take his hand from his pocket and put it in mine.

“I’m gonna get going,” he tells me and I don’t stop him. “I’ll be down…well, you know where to find me.”

Martin looks around one last time straining to come up with something else to say. “Don’t stay too long. Looks like rain.”

With that, my brother turns from me and hastens along the path toward town. I watch him walk away then vanish down the road into nothing. In the distance, beyond the high point of path, lays the potter’s field. The rows of headstones stipple the land in wide, uneven arcs. I vaguely wonder which one was his, which one belonged to the priest, my father. There are so many, too many to count.

The cemetery’s caretaker appears, plodding up the path with a shovel slung over his shoulder, a wool scarf wound around his neck.

“Oh,” he says, surprised to see me. “I thought everyone had gone. I’d come back later, but…” He gestures to the sky and the looming clouds.

“No, it’s fine. I’m done here.”

“You sure?”

I nod, but don’t make a move to leave. “What do you do now?” I ask.

“What? With the grave?” He is hesitant to answer. “I’ve got to
lower the casket and fill it back. Then I have to relay the grass. Put a little fertilizer on so it takes.”

“Are all of the plots here sold?”

“No, not all of ’em. But most. This is an old cemetery, you know.”

“What about this one?”

An empty stretch of grass waits next to my mother’s grave, a so-far-unclaimed plot.

“What? Right here?”

“Yes, right here.”

“These are good spots. Most been bought a long time back. I can tell you this one was bought over forty years ago. Bought and paid for by—” The man motions at my mother’s grave and stops himself, embarrassed. “I don’t know if the one next to ’ers been bought,” he replies. “Have to check.”

“Could you do that?”

“What? Right now?”

My silence is my reply. A gust of wind surges over the ridge, thick with the scent of impending rain, and the man’s face sours. He glances back at the open grave ruefully.

“All right, I s’pose,” he huffs, hoisting the shovel back onto his shoulder. “I’ll check.”

The man trudges toward the cemetery’s front gate, disappearing down the path as Martin did.

I am alone as the first raindrops fall, landing softly on my mother’s coffin and rolling lazily down to the dirt. I was wrong. The rain has come. Not a downpour or a deluge. Just a simple rain falling in the only direction it has to go.