The Plague of Doves - Louise Erdrich [124]
I was seventeen when I began digging graves for the Pluto dead. I measured with string and used four tent pegs to anchor the string in a rectangle. Later, we bought a chalk roller of the same sort they used to mark the high school football field. I took the grass off in sections, peeling it like a scalp, and laid the squares on a piece of wet burlap. I used a toylike backhoe and finished the graves by hand with a straight spade. After the burials, I’d cover up the coffins and make a mound so that the ground wouldn’t dent once the dirt had settled. I cut the grass, too, with a finicky gas mower, and learned how to trim the trees so that they would grow in a graceful, natural shape. I learned how to keep the death records in order, and after a while I knew the cemetery map as well as Gottschalk did. I could easily guide people when they needed assistance finding a relative, or wanted to see the war memorial, the ornate Russian ironwork crosses, or the humble, common fieldstones that marked the graves of a family murdered here long ago.
The thing is, this was just supposed to be a summer job before I went to college. But once I started having sex with C., I couldn’t leave sex, or leave her, or leave the town. Besides, once I started spending my days among the dead, I grew used to the peace and quiet, as Gottschalk had told me I would. I even started adding to his clippings of interesting people, places, or events. One controversy at the time was the proliferation in our town of bars that featured striptease dancers. There was a community battle as to exactly how naked they should be allowed to get. We clipped and posted all of the editorials.
“If people could see things as we do,” said Gottschalk. “No matter how small the G-string or how big the pasty, we all end up in the ground.”
Six months after that remark, I dug his grave. I prepared his last resting place with unusual care, as befitted one who had so precisely cared for the journey of his fellow citizens. There was really no one else to take Gottschalk’s place, and so at the age of twenty I became the manager of the Town of Pluto Cemetery, which helped a great deal in keeping my love secret—nobody wanted to date me.
I don’t mean that women were put off by my line of work. On the contrary, it often seemed to fascinate them. But there was a certain lack of future in it, which girls could see. Once it was discovered that I was contented with my work, I wasn’t bothered, even though I went to bars and such. I got on the radical pro side of going entirely topless because I liked watching Candy, who took suckers from her regulation G-string and tossed them to us. They were hygienically wrapped safety pops. At one time a patron of the bar had inhaled a straight stem sucker, perhaps in delight at one of Candy’s novel moves. I hadn’t had to bury him, but it was close. So she gave out the same kind of suckers as grocery stores give kids. In fact, that’s where she got them—free. I got to know Candy, wanted her to stay in business, and was delighted to make C. jealous enough to fight with me.
While I was seeing Candy, or actually, just flirting with her, C. renovated her old house in order to be near me.
At one time the cemetery was set on the western edge of town, but the neighborhood has grown and now it is bounded by blocks of houses, all with their backs turned, politely or in dread, away from the gravestones and monuments. After the fight about my friend the stripper, C. moved her office to her house, which had a yard abutting the cemetery. She remodeled the living rooms and built-in the porch as a reception area. She left the back leafy and private. I could leave Gottschalk’s old office, which had become mine, or walk from our equipment shed, which was set just outside a windbreak of pines, and enter C.’s back door without being seen. The thing is, we never could part, though C. did lose weight, shrink down considerably, and after