Witnesses
Charles Duffie
“Digging graves by hand wasn’t in the job description,” Tom said, leaning on the shovel. Sixty-three years old, Cornel MBA, bank president, city councilman, and his All American road ended here, working wages at Oak Park Cemetery. It would have been funny, if he hadn’t lost Ruth with everything else.
A large crow leaned out from behind a marble tombstone then ducked back.
Tom checked to see if Mateo had noticed the crow, but the young man stood on the other side of the shallow hole, chunking earth with a pickaxe. Looks like Hispanic Jesus, Tom thought, with ponytail and work boots. He’s going to take out that rabbit’s foot any second now.
“The traditional ways?” Mateo said. “To me they feel more sacred. So every year, I dig one grave by hand.” Dropping the pickaxe, he drew on a thin chain around his neck until his uncle’s silver crucifix lay between smudged fingers.
And there it is, Tom thought.
“Descansa en paz, tío,” Mateo said, kissing the cross.
Tom looked away. He had been a groundskeeper at Oak Park nine months now. The cemetery was only a block square, shaded by centennial trees, secluded behind a high concrete wall and iron gate. He was moved by the outdated preference for tombstones, white marble and brown sandstone and black granite, two, three, four feet tall, kneeling like people with heads bowed, hundreds of them, still waiting for that phantom chariot to swing low and carry them home. Tom had helped return twelve of these strangers to the ground, but every hole had been clawed in 45 minutes with a skid steer loader. He was too old for shovels, especially in the rotisserie of a So Cal summer. Besides, who used full-sized caskets anymore? When everything you were came apart until nothing was left except the atoms that weren’t you to begin with, an urn and post hole digger were more than enough.
The crow peeked out then popped back. Again, Mateo didn’t notice.
Tom tugged his pants. Ruth used to say he looked like a chubby Jimmy Stewart in his single breasted suits. Now he needed a belt to hold up his Goodwill jeans, and the khaki work shirt hung so flat off thin shoulders that his name, stitched in blue, lay over his ribs instead his heart.
He walked around to the foot of the grave. The eight-by-four space looked like an earthy bed. God, he wanted to lay down. Lay it all down. He felt untethered from things, released from the personal gravity that allowed people to walk in consistent circles around the belief that this life meant something beyond itself, that it led somewhere. He slid each foot forward until the tips of his cheap tennis shoes hung over the grass ledge.
“You OK?” Mateo said.
Tom heeled the shovel. “Next time you’re feeling old school, how about a Viking funeral? That’s traditional, and it’d be a lot easier than this.”
“At least Vikings believed in heaven.”
“Valhalla,” Tom corrected. “And you better pray they were wrong. Thor would kick Jesus’ ass.”
Mateo smiled. His aunt had cautioned against hiring such a worn out sinner, especially one recently paroled. But Mateo couldn’t help it. He liked the old man. Oak Park had been Tom’s twenty-third application. Even Wal-Mart had turned him down. Burger King. Dunkin’ Donuts. The application didn’t say what Tom had done, and Mateo didn’t ask. But the number 23? He took it as a sign that maybe he could shepherd Tom to something like a fold. He checked his watch. 2 PM. If this was Friday, Tom would be leaving soon. Tom always left early on Fridays like he had a standing appointment. Mateo wondered where the old man went so religiously. Maybe to Mass?
This time Mateo saw the crow peek. As if someone had called “olly-olly-oxen-free,” half a dozen crows strutted out from behind the gravestone. Mateo sighed and dropped the crucifix under his shirt. “Look at them. Sometimes I think they’re messing with me.”
Tom dragged sweat through his white hair. “Christ, Mateo—”
“Tom, please.”
“Well, enough with the crows already. Leave them alone.”
Mateo watched the dark birds swagger between headstones. “We never had so many. And that cawing? To me it sounds like cursing. Tomorrow we go on offense.”
Tom liked the way Mateo strung sentences. The kid grew up in Choloma and Fort Worth and Covina, maybe that accounted for the occasional awkwardness. Choloma. Jesus, he knew way too much about Mateo. Still, it was a good distraction, listening to the kid. Mateo’s openness was like those unabridged audiobooks that got Tom through five years at Ironwood State Prison.
Tom used a tree to help lower himself to the grass. He pressed against the corrugated trunk, wincing as he stretched his legs. “The crows aren’t cursing. They’re laughing.”
“In a cemetery?” Mateo bent for the pickaxe. “That’s even worse.”
A crow cawed. Another answered.
“See?” Tom said. “It’s not caw. It’s ha. Ha! Ha ha! Ha!”
“So what’re they laughing at?”
“You’re kidding, right?”
Several crows joined the conversation.
Tom translated. “Ha! Ha ha! Ha!” His gray eyes looked blue when he laughed.
Mateo didn’t think it was funny, but he smiled. He liked seeing the old man happy.
*
Tom rented a room above a converted garage. He woke as always hours before dawn. Even the arches of his feet burned as if he had walked on coals all night. That must be from kicking the shovel. Stringy biceps were so tight, forearms so stiff, his fingers shook and he poked his eye trying to rub out crusted tears. Jesus, you’d think he had dug his own grave yesterday.
My real life George Bailey. How many times had Ruth given him that benediction? They had watched It’s A Wonderful Life every Christmas for thirty-nine years, sitting on a shag rug in her dorm and a futon in their first apartment, a Sears sofa bed in that Hollywood rental, a pair of Italian leather recliners in the foothills. She never got tired of it, the way some people never got tired of church.
But what if George Bailey had really stolen the money? What if George was working for Potter all along? What would Clarence, Angel Second Class, have said then?
Go to hell, George Bailey.
Jesus, more tears. Maybe this was it, the day when the reasons he stacked like counterweights to hoist himself out of bed wouldn’t be enough. Or maybe this was the morning he’d shave, put on his brown parole suit, walk to the tracks, stand with one Payless tennis shoe wedged against each rail, open his arms, and embrace the 5:48 Metro to L.A.
Somewhere down the alley, a crow cawed.
Today was the first salvo in Mateo’s avian war. That should be good. What else? He liked the morning walk. Oak Park was a community cemetery: porches, front lawns, mailboxes, sprinklers, Big Wheels, strollers, minivans, then slap, graveyard. Death in life. Mateo didn’t appreciate the humor in that juxtaposition. The young man’s faith in a fictional world took the edge off losing the real one. And without loss, was anything really funny?
Crows laughed in the alley. Tom sat up and rubbed the baby blisters on his old palms. That was funny too.
*
When Tom walked into the cemetery that morning, Mateo showed him a baggie filled with blanched almonds. “Soaked in poison. Got the recipe from a groundskeeper on Twitter.”
“Christ, Mateo—”
“Tom, please.”
“I thought you Catholics loved birds and hated war. All that birds of the air and turn-the-other-cheek business.”
“It’s not war,” Mateo said. “It’s not personal like that.”
Mateo scattered the almonds in the grass near the memorial fountain. Crows watched from nearby trees.
Tom spent the afternoon filling gopher holes, fogging wasp nests, spraying oak and elm against gypsy moths, wrapping trees that had been wounded by bore beetles. He thought of his old office, decorated with plaques and degrees and honors and memberships, bestowed on him because he was good at moving money around. But outside that office, what did he know? Jesus, back then he couldn’t even mow his own lawn.
Now he knew how to use the phosphorus in banana peel clippings to make roses bloom, plant evergreen saplings deep with a rototiller, compost flowers and grass into power mulch, train star jasmine on trellis wires he himself had leveled and anchored in the concrete wall. He could dig out and replace drainage pipes, use circuit testers and check fuse boxes, clean and restore wood, brick, granite, and steel, patch cracks in the asphalt road that circled the cemetery, work a skid steer loader, drive a mower the size of a golf cart.
He had always looked down on manual labor. But these past few months had revealed a basic fact his financial career had missed: actions have consequences. Overwater the poppies and the poppies die; fail to fill the gopher hole and someone breaks an ankle; ignore a wasp nest and you get stung; set the mower blades too low and the roots burn. He wondered if he would have made different decisions had he just spent more time in the garden. That almost made him laugh, until he felt the heat of tears behind his eyes. He breathed them back down and stared at the tombstones lined up like dominoes.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Mateo said, following Tom’s line of sight, taking in the sacred view. “You’re thinking, Life is still good.”
“You got me,” Tom said.
Mateo rested a shovel on his shoulder like a baseball bat. “See? There’s hope for you.”
“Hallelujah,” Tom said.
*
The next morning, Tom got to Oak Park early, curious to see how many crows Mateo had bagged with his poisoned almonds.
Three marble angels stood just inside the cemetery gate. As usual, the first wouldn’t even look at him, her holier-than-thou eyes locked on heaven. The second smiled like a parent at a kid who had lost nothing more than a kite in a tree. But the third stone angel tilted her head in sympathetic mourning, left hand hiding her face, right hand lifted as if feeling her way through the world. Tom always gave her a sandpapery high five as he passed.
When he reached the memorial fountain, the pale almonds were still there, nested like tumors in the grass. A pair of crows dipped their beaks in the water; one tilted its head at the old man as if asking a question.
“What?” Tom said.
The crow waited.
Mateo walked up and saw the almonds. He drew on the chain and pinched the crucifix.
The crows cawed.
“Hear that?” Tom said. “They’re laughing at you.”
Mateo grinned. “OK. Now it’s personal.”
*
Oak Park was small enough Tom could see across the entire space. He had to admit, it was a comforting illusion: grass mowed, fountain bright, statuary clean, trees trimmed, flower beds filled with color. It got to him sometimes, the blind hope of it all. The fairy tale felt true, that was the problem. Eternal life felt more factual than death, just like the sun rising felt more true than the earth turning. You’d think watching Ruth’s time-lapse in that hospice bed would have done the trick, but he still felt it. The evolutionary wiring to survive ran too deep.
Tom spent the morning on the graves near the fountain, using Q-tips and coffee sticks to scrape dirt out of the chiseled letters. As he stood and stretched, gunshots burst through the cemetery. Tom fell, knees slamming the grass. The tops of several trees shattered into dark fragments and morphed into crows, flying away, cawing. Looking around, he saw Mateo, arms raised as if at gunpoint, laughing like a kid.
Spotting Tom, Mateo ran over and crouched by the old man.
“Tom, you all right? It was just firecrackers.”
Adrenaline seized Tom’s body. Mateo’s voice sounded far away.
“See?” Mateo pulled a red papery package from his shirt pocket. “To scare the crows.”
Mateo helped Tom to a marble bench.
“Christ, Mateo—”
“Tom, please.”
“They’re just birds.”
“Not birds. Corvids. Last night I read about it online. Crows are from the corvid family. Smartest birds in the world. Some corvids? Smarter than the great apes.”
“You got to be kidding?”
Mateo sat. “A few crows are OK. But there are too many now. It bothers our visitors. Crows feel like symbols of death.”
“Well, it is a cemetery, Mateo.”
“I read that crows hate loud noises, and I had firecrackers leftover, so…”
Ten minutes later, a dozen crows came back. Mateo lit another pack of firecrackers. The crows shouted, flew away, and came back an hour later, as if testing the limits. Oak Park was about to open, so Mateo gave up on the noise offensive.
“I don’t know about great apes,” Tom said, “but they’re smarter than you.”
*
At noon on Friday, Tom and Mateo walked behind the wood fence that hid the maintenance yard from the rest of Oak Park. Several crows pecked around the trash bins.
“Wait,” Mateo said. “Walk that way. To the crows.”
Tom held up a brown paper sack. “It’s lunchtime, Mateo.”
“It’s a bagel. It’s always a bagel. And you never eat it on Fridays anyway. Just walk.”
Tom let out a breath, then moved toward the crows. One large bird kept an eye on him, but the others didn’t bother to lift their heads.
“Now watch,” Mateo said. The young man put one foot in their direction—and the crows flew away. “See that? They recognize faces! I learned about it on YouTube. They bring acorns and stuff to people, like presents. But you bother them, like I do? They remember! This morning they followed me around like dogs, barking. But I got them now. Come on, I’ll show you.”
In the office, they sat at a table with a big cardboard box between them. Tom looked inside: four plastic owl heads stared back at him. Mold-cast bodies and wings lay stacked in separate piles.
“They hate owls,” Mateo said. “The heads and wings? Move like real birds. There’s a speaker inside too. All solar powered.” He opened a steel lunchbox. “Look. No cold cuts today. My aunt made us chick-en sal-ad.”
He said the words like a celebration. It annoyed Tom how little it took to make the kid happy.
“Here,” Mateo said, offering a baggie-wrapped sandwich.
“Christ, Mateo—”
“Tom, please.”
“Well, I keep telling you to stop with the sandwiches.”
“And I keep telling my aunt, but for some reason she thinks you’re a sad, lonely, mean old sinner who could use a sandwich.”
Tom almost laughed. The kid could get to him sometimes.
Mateo offered the baggie again. “If you don’t accept, you’ll hurt her feelings.”
Tom took the sandwich and set it aside. “Tell her thanks. I’ll eat it later.”
Mateo wanted to ask yet again, What is it about Fridays? Monday through Thursday, Tom ate the sandwich and bagel, stayed till dusk even though he was only scheduled until 3, walked out the gate, and turned left. On Fridays, he didn’t eat the sandwich or bagel, quit at 2, walked out the gate and turned right. But Mateo knew better than to ask. In the last few months, he had shared his story, his uncle’s story, his aunt’s story, his fiancé’s story. But any personal questions thrown at the old man bounced back like stones off a wall.
Tom reached into the box and pulled out an owl’s head and body. He pressed a button on the back. The body gave a melodic hoot. He glanced at Mateo. “You’re kidding, right?”
Mateo nodded. “It’s going to work.”
Tom twisted the owl’s head onto its hunched plastic shoulders. “You know this can’t last. There are too many people to bury. There’s not enough room for us all.”
“I know,” Mateo said, taking an owl’s head out of the box. “In some countries? They have what they call vertical cemeteries. Just a building downtown, you’d never know it was sacred from the outside. Some are ten, twenty stories tall, stocked like a supermarket but with urns. You go in, swipe your ID card, and conveyor belts bring your urn to a viewing room. Other countries are doubling up, putting names on both sides of tombstones. It breaks my heart, but you know what? It’s going to get worse. At the last ICCFA convention—”
“The what?”
“The International Cemetery, Cremation and Funeral Association. They meet in Vegas.”
Tom laughed.
“I’m serious,” Mateo said. “You should see the vendor hall. This one company turns ashes into glass beads. You know, like you see in vases at Ikea?”
Tom laughed again.
“Another company,” Mateo said, “mixes ashes with concrete. Then they drop it in the ocean. Like a reef? They say it’s good for fish and sea anemones.”
“Sea anemones,” Tom said, slapping the table.
Mateo shook an owl’s head at the old man. “It’s not funny, Tom. These technologies are disrespectful. Like resomation? That’s where they dissolve the body into a liquid. Flush it right into the sewer. People in the industry call it toilet burial.”
Tom collapsed on the table.
It really wasn’t funny, Mateo thought. Actually? It was sacrilegious. But watching the old man laugh into thin arms, white hair so short he could have been a blond-headed boy, Mateo had to laugh too.
*
Mateo saw Tom leave that afternoon. Sure enough, the old man turned right again. Every Friday. Mateo looked around. The cemetery would be fine for an hour or two, but morally? His uncle would have said, “This isn’t your business, sobrino.”
Mateo kept a block between them. The old man never turned around, never lifted his head or glanced to the side, like a soldier walking in a trench. They passed through Montclair and Upland, then on up to Foothill, old Route 66. It was 4:15 now. Mateo had to get back. But where was the old man going? And why walk when buses passed every few minutes?
By 6 they were in Rancho. Mateo’s feet burned in heavy work boots and his khaki shirt lay like an animal skin on his back. The summer sun leaned west, so they still had an hour or two of light. But in winter and spring? The old man would have been in the dark by now.
In Ontario, he followed Tom outside an empty sports arena then took a service road that curved under the towering 15 overpass. Mateo stared up, trying to decide if it was just the thunder of cars and trucks, or was the concrete bridge really shaking? He felt uneasy, like one of the characters in his aunt’s Día de Los Muertos stories, the greedy man or vain woman who followed curiosity to their doom. Mateo kissed his uncle’s cross, said a prayer, and kept going.
They entered Fontana sometime after 8 PM. Neighborhoods slowly collapsed into depressed lanes that reminded Mateo of the border town where he was born. They had been walking five hours.
The sky was near dark, the sun bruising clouds on its way down, when the old man entered the last place Mateo expected: another cemetery.
*
Tom ended each week with a sixteen mile pilgrimage to Prairie View. Unlike Oak Park, the trees here were overgrown, flower beds empty. Money-saving water rotations ensured two thirds of the grass stayed yellow all year, while the gates were chained open day and night because the groundskeeper only came on Sundays.
Each Friday evening, when Tom knelt at his wife’s gravestone, he found the dry grass covered with beer tabs and bottle caps. He had asked Mateo about it once, pretending he found the trash at Oak Park. Mateo said sometimes high school or college kids hung out in cemeteries at night, as a dare or hazing ritual. But every damn week?
Tom spent Friday nights at a Motel 6 then returned to Ruth’s grave Saturday mornings, his body stiff from the long walk. Sometimes he arrived early enough to see hundreds of crows rise from the dark trees, slowly circle the cemetery, then break off in packs. The sight put a hole in him every time, as if the birds were flying through his chest.
A few crows always stayed behind. Tom assumed they lived at Prairie View. As he cleaned Ruth’s grave, he’d toss pinches of bagel, chunks from the aunt’s sandwich. Whether he sat quietly or wept out loud, the crows were always there, two, three feet away, waiting for food, indifferent to his pain. After a few months, he found himself talking to them, responding to their stares and nods as if working a two-way conversation. He confessed his sins, told stories about loving Ruth, laughed softly at how ready he was to be done and how scared he was to be over. Reconstituted atoms, as if he and Ruth and this aching world never even existed.
He admired the dark birds. Whenever he felt that old Sunday School ache for more, for a hint of grace or consciousness built into the system, all he had to do was look at the crows. They lived how he wanted to live: on the absolute surface of things. Eating and drinking and flying and mating and nesting and working, and then one day dying without a thought. That was how to do business in a temporary world.
*
Tom stepped up to Ruth’s grave. More bottle caps and beer tabs. “God damn it.” He knelt on stiff knees and picked at the grass. President of Community First National, crawling in the dark, collecting trash. He hated seeing the pores in Ruth’s gravestone. Granite, the cheapest material, selected from the last tab of the mortuary catalog.
Go to hell, George Bailey.
Had she really said that, or had he filled in the blank of her stare?
Here came the tears again. Jesus, it was pathetic, this routine. He leaned against her stone, bottle caps cupped like coins in the net of his palms.
Another pair of hands reached into view. Tom jerked back, then saw Mateo crouched by his side. The young man gathered the rest of the trash.
Tom got to his feet. “What’re you doing here?”
Mateo heard the edge in the old man’s voice. He stood slowly. “Tom—”
“You followed me?”
Mateo reached for Tom’s shoulder. “It’s not like that—”
Tom pushed the hand away. “You walked behind me? All this way?”
“I was curious. I thought maybe you were secretly going to mass or—”
“That’s right, Mateo. This is my church. Now get out.”
Standing so close to the old man, watching tears slide over those gray eyes, Mateo couldn’t leave. Out of habit, he drew on his uncle’s crucifix.
Tom caught the cross, snapping the chain. He threw the silver at Mateo’s feet. “Take your rabbit’s foot and get out.”
Still the young man didn’t move.
Tom ground the crucifix into the yellowed lawn like he was putting out a cigarette, then stepped back, waiting, hoping Mateo would do the same to him.
But Mateo just bent down and scratched the crucifix out of the dirt. He walked past Tom and knelt in front of Ruth’s gravestone.
“What’re you doing?” Tom said. “What’re you doing, Mateo?”
Mateo held his uncle’s cross in one hand, placed his other hand on Ruth’s name, and prayed. Tom couldn’t catch the words, but the fluttery softness of the voice dropped him to his knees. He folded onto his elbows, trembling above the patchy lawn, the air so dry in his mouth and throat that breathing was like eating dirt.
*
Mateo wondered if the old man had fallen asleep, lying on his back in the grass like a body waiting for burial. The half moon rose, casting the empty graveyard in flat, primal light. Trees stood in pools of blue shadow.
Mateo scooted closer. “Tom? Come on, let’s go. I’m hungry.”
Tom pulled a shiny square out of the big pocket of his work shirt. He held up the baggie-wrapped sandwich, squished and bent, cubes of processed chicken pressing like soft teeth through the white bread.
Mateo peeled the baggie. “Want half?”
“I fast on Fridays.”
“I thought you didn’t believe in any of that.”
“You don’t need God to do penance, Mateo.”
Tom felt lighter, as if half his body was already in the ground. He turned his head and saw Mateo eating the sandwich with both hands like a little boy, uncle’s crucifix hanging loose, the face of Jesus caked with dirt. Ruth would have loved this kid.
“My wife was Catholic,” Tom said. “But when the church sided with their pedophiles, she became a Lutheran thinking it was the same but different. Then she joined one of those historic peace churches, Mennonites or Quakers. I went when she asked, but she knew Sunday was my only day off. She started yoga at fifty-five, you believe that? Learned to meditate, became a vegan, which made me a vegan, at home anyway. She was my incarnation, Christian Buddhist New Age, you name it. God, I adored her.” He turned his head to see Ruth’s moonlit tombstone. No quote about love, no symbol of eternity. Just her name and dates, the only footnotes that mattered. “When she found out I was spinning the sub-prime roulette wheel—”
Mateo stared, mouth full. “That was you?” It almost made Tom laugh, the cartoon look on the kid’s face. “You crashed the economy?”
“Well, not by myself, Mateo.”
“But you went to jail. I thought no one went to jail.”
“The big guys walked, but a lot small fish got put in the tank. I guess I didn’t steal enough. The government swooped in and took everything. Ruth moved up north to live with her sister. Five years. She never visited. Never wrote back. Like I was a stranger, and I suppose I was, lying all those years. What would you do if this God you need, this love you build your life around, if you drove it away for good?”
Mateo stopped chewing. The old man should be in church talking to a priest, not in a graveyard talking to a groundskeeper with a high school GED.
“By the time I got out,” Tom said, “she was in hospice.”
Mateo rubbed his eyes. “So she forgave you.”
“I don’t know,” Tom said, staring at the moon. “She was on heavy meds. I doubt she even recognized me.”
“Dios mío,” Mateo whispered, tears running into his thin beard.
“Christ, Mateo—”
“Tom, please.”
“Well, you’re crying into the chicken salad.”
Mateo wiped his nose on his sleeve. “Why didn’t you bury her at Oak Park?”
“I couldn’t afford a place like that. I was—” Tom stopped. “Wait. You’ll like this.” He smiled and pointed at the sky. “Here they come.”
At first, Mateo saw only the half moon, a few crows slicing through the night. Then, as if choreographed, hundreds of dark birds glided simultaneously into view. They came from all directions, some soaring high and dropping, others coasting low and tilting toward the cemetery. Trees shook as birds gathered, silent except for strange coos and clicks and a deep rattling unlike anything Mateo had ever heard.
“I read about this,” he said in his church voice. “Crows used to roost at night in the countryside. But now? They know us so good, they roost right in the city.”
Tom stood, feeling a tight pull and ache in every muscle. “Listen, Mateo. I’m all right now. You don’t need to stay.”
But Mateo was gazing up into a shaggy tree. The shape was like a hole against the moonlit sky, a portal through which dozens of crows were watching. Something in their stillness made him wonder if they were God’s witnesses on this earth.
*
The five hour walk was just a twenty minute ride, straight west on Highway 10. The moon had moved halfway across the sky when the cab dropped them off at Oak Park. They walked through the gates without a word. Mateo went to the old pickup truck and checked the back. They kept the bed loaded so they could make on-the-go repairs anywhere in the cemetery.
He moved around to the driver’s side and pulled the heavy door. “You coming?”
“I can walk home,” Tom said.
Mateo grinned. “Christ, Tom. Just get in the truck.”
As they drove, Tom stared at the moon through the windshield. He knew the light was only borrowed from the sun, but it didn’t look that way; he knew the stillness was an illusion, that the moon was traveling thousands of miles an hour, but it didn’t feel that way. There it was again, that ache, that little kid need to jump, catch the top of the fence, chin up, peek over, and find something out there.
It was 2:30 in the morning when they rolled through the gates of Prairie View. The glare of the headlights soaked high into the branches of nearby trees. Hundreds of crows leaned forward, watching the men work.
Tom used a digging bar to tip Ruth’s headstone into a wheel barrow. They slid an old wood door out of the pickup, leaned it like a ramp from ground to bed, then Mateo rolled the stone with practiced balance into the truck. Tom grabbed the long arms of a post hole digger. He remembered exactly where the urn was buried. Reaching into the hole, he felt like he was pulling the earth’s heart from its chest. He stood holding a bronze cube, the corners oxidized with white spots like a patina of stars. As Tom brushed the urn, Mateo filled the hole with sod and smoothed over the scar where the gravestone had been. He transplanted yellowed grass from near the fence, then walked over the space with a professional’s eye. No one would even notice she was gone.
Tom looked up at the crows and gave a little salute. “Adiós.”
They cruised home with open windows and mariachi music. Tom held the urn tucked in his left elbow. His right arm stretched out the window, fingers hanging from the passenger door mirror. He drank the air as it washed over his face and neck and arms, filling his sleeve, soaking into his skin. Mateo kept glancing over at the old man.
The sky softened as they placed Ruth’s stone near the memorial fountain. Tom dug the hole for the urn, and Mateo filled the gap with a plug of grass.
“You sure you won’t get in trouble?” Tom said.
Mateo shrugged. “Who’s going to know?”
The two men stood back and admired the grave.
Mateo patted the old man’s shoulder. “When you die, I’ll bury you next to Ruth. If you believed in heaven, you’d see for yourself. But you don’t, so I’m telling you in advance.”
“Thanks,” Tom said. “It’s good to have something to look forward to.”
A flock of crows circled the cemetery. Mateo drew out his uncle’s cross. “I guess my owls aren’t fooling anybody.”
Tom watched the birds descend. “What’s your next move, general?”
“You know those little helicopter drones?” Mateo said. “Some people use them to chase crows out of their gardens. I read about it on Facebook. It really works.”
*
Mateo went home to sleep, but Tom felt too awake to be anywhere else. He cleaned gravestones, trimmed hedges, watered flower beds and seeded thin patches in the lawn, looping around to Ruth’s grave every half hour like a man falling back into orbit.
By noon he felt heavy on his feet. He eased himself down near Ruth, leaning back against a tree, hands cupped in his lap. Closing his eyes, he listened to the fountain falling, and allowed himself to fall too, the weight of sleep easing him down. Leaves swayed, moving sunlight and shadow across the cave wall of his eyelids.
*
He woke to soft fluttering. A crow stood on the grass by Ruth’s gravestone. It looked at Tom, dropped a shiny bottle cap, and flew away.
about the writer
Charles Duffie is a writer and designer working in the Los Angeles area. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Los Angeles Review of Books, So It Goes (The Literary Journal of the Kurt Vonnegut Museum and Library), Atticus Review, Anastamos, Columbia Journal, Prime Number Magazine, Exposition Review, and others.