The Mourners
Earl Burdette had to drive halfway into the ditch to get past the vehicles parked along the narrow blacktop: a big backhoe on a flatbed; another flatbed equipped with a crane; a third flatbed, empty; several pickups—all of them in the puke-lime with black lettering of Dittman’s Construction. Workers standing between the vehicles looked at Earl as he drove past. Another was smoking in the shade of a hickory tree on the opposite side of the road. Earl slowed, rolled down the window, and called to him, “You ought to be working now before it gets even hotter.” The worker flicked his cigarette in Earl’s direction and said, “We’re waiting on you.”
Just beyond the last Dittman vehicle was the Dry Spring Baptist Church. Earl turned off the blacktop and parked in what once had been the church parking area, now just a weedy field. He walked through the weeds toward the church, imagining chiggers crawling up inside his pantlegs to get at his sweaty flesh. Probably ticks, too.
Out of the church came Paul Dadd. Now Earl was really happy.
Earl called to Paul while they were still twenty feet apart, “Did you tell those guys they couldn’t start until I got here?”
“I didn’t tell them a goddamn thing,” Paul said.
You had to admire a Baptist preacher who used goddamn so freely, Earl thought. But he doubted Paul said it much. He probably saved goddamn for Earl.
They’d known each other since they were in short pants but had never gotten along. At an age when other kids were wanting to be cowboys and astronauts, Paul had already announced his intention to become a preacher, and that made him hard to warm to. He’d achieved that goal, but didn’t try hard to be liked like most other preachers did, so he was respected, because it was pretty much the law in Arkansas that you had to respect a Baptist preacher, but liked, no, not by many. Earl couldn’t take much satisfaction being in the majority on that one because folks didn’t like him much, either.
It had been different when he was younger. Back in his school days, he’d been friendly with just about everybody. True, he’d never had a really close friend, but that was all right, too, because he never felt the need of one.
But at some point he’d started drinking, and he wasn’t a good drunk. To his credit, he’d been on the wagon for over three years now, but that hadn’t improved his disposition. The only reason he kept getting re-elected county sheriff was no one else was stupid enough to take on all the headaches for such lousy pay.
Today was another headache.
The state was in the process of building a dam on the Black River. A small lake to be created by the dam would serve as a reservoir supplying water to Prospect, Marseilles, Marshall, and other little towns in that part of the state, all subject to periodic water rationing in the frequent droughts. Once the lake reached its full extent, the church and its cemetery would be under water. Consequently, the dead interred there were going to be dug up and moved to the Valley Baptist Church cemetery in Prospect, Paul Dadd’s church.
When the good reverend phoned to tell him about the grave removals and said, “I thought you might want to be there,” Earl was just about to ask him why the hell would he, but then it came to him. It had been in the news a week or so before, over in Kentucky, maybe, a cemetery moved for some reason, and some nutcase had opened fire because he didn’t want his mama dug up. Several wounded. One dead. A preacher, if Earl remembered correctly. So, although he wasn’t much worried about anything violent going on here, Earl had come to the cemetery on the off chance he’d get to see Paul Dadd shot.
At least that’s what he told his deputy when he left the office that morning. The truth was he’d come because it was his job. Even during the worst days when he was drinking, he’d done his job. It wasn’t so much a sense of duty but a feeling that—divorced from his wife, alienated from his son, no social life—the job was all he had, all he was, really. If he didn’t have the job, he’d just vanish, disappear, and it’d be like he’d never existed.
He eyed Paul sourly.
“I checked the plats over in Marseilles, just to make sure Dry Spring Baptist really is in Lafayette County.”
“No, you didn’t,” Paul said.
Earl flushed. Of course he hadn’t checked the plats. Why had he said such a thing? Some notion of getting under Paul’s skin, but that hadn’t worked, and now Paul was standing there not smirking, exactly, but you could bet he was thinking smirk.
What was it Paul had against him? Earl couldn’t remember ever doing anything to him, not even when they were kids. Earl had been big enough he could have been a first-class bully if he’d wanted to, but he never bullied, not even Paul. Paul he’d mostly ignored. So why the grudge?
There was that time though . . . . It came back to him, only a fragment, he standing at the door of the parsonage, and Paul really giving it to him, almost spitting hatred. What had that been about? Sheriff’s business, nothing personal, Earl was sure of that. And yet . . . hatred.
It wasn’t surprising that he couldn’t remember the details. He had gaps from back then, when he was really going after that bourbon, holes in time where he’d lost part of his life, and it wouldn’t come back to him. In fact, it would happen once in a while even now that he was sober—a gap, a hole, an aftershock from the years of booze, a flashback to nothing.
Earl looked around, didn’t see anybody other than the Dittman workers.
“Where is everybody? I thought there’d be a crowd of people out here raising hell.”
Paul snorted. “Who’d be raising hell? There were only six people in the congregation when they closed the church. They come to Valley Baptist now, of course. We tried to contact as many relatives of the interred as we could find. We did locate several who were interested in paying their respects, but most of them are waiting for the reburial in Prospect.”
He nodded over toward the church.
“Clyde Brown and his wife are here, though, sitting over there in that big pickup, running their air conditioner,” he said with disgust, like he was president of the Sierra Club or something.
“Who’s that guy?” Earl asked, pointing at a fellow he’d just noticed, parked in the shade of a big oak tree.
“State Health Department. They have to have somebody here if you’re digging up graves. Some of these go back a century. It’s a good bet a lot of the coffins are just going to come apart when they dig them up.”
“What’s the Health Department guy supposed to do about that?”
“How should I know? Go ask him.”
Earl fluttered his fingers at Paul as he moved off.
“See you later, Sunshine.”
“I can’t wait.”
The Health Department fellow acted about as happy to be there as Earl was. He lowered his driver’s-side window just enough to speak to Earl, who asked him what, exactly, his function was.
“Look in the holes, make sure they got all the remains,” he said. Then the window went back up.
“Nice talking to you,” Earl said to the glass.
Earl turned back toward the cemetery. Finally, there was some action. They were maneuvering the backhoe down from the flatbed and moving the flatbed with the crane attachment up alongside the first row of graves.
A man Earl guessed to be the foreman of the operation was talking to Paul. They were peering at some big sheet of paper the man held.
Earl walked over to them.
“What’s up?”
“Nothing you have to concern yourself with,” Paul said.
Earl stepped in front of Paul and looked at the paper. It was a sketch of the cemetery, the gravesites as rectangles, with names of the deceased penned in.
“As I was just explaining to Reverend Dadd,” the man said to Earl, “I admit I hadn’t really thought this through. It’s not like we move a cemetery every day, after all. I’d planned on starting right here, on the graves closest to the road, then work our way to the rear. But we can’t do that or we’d wind up with a bunch of six-foot-deep holes to try to get our vehicles across as we get farther into the cemetery. So instead, we’re going to start on the far side and work our way back this way. Gotta take those gravestones up first, though, and that’s a job by itself.”
He turned to Paul.
“I doubt if we’ll get a start on the graves themselves until this afternoon.”
Afternoon! Earl was fuming. He waited until the foreman moved away and then turned to Paul.
“Well, thanks a heap, preacher man. I just pissed away half the morning for nothing.”
Paul shrugged. “Go home, then. I’ll miss you, but I’ll try to bear up under the burden.”
“Yeah, well, don’t expect me to come back this afternoon.”
“I didn’t expect you to come at all. I just called you out of courtesy on the off chance you might want to be here.”
“Want to be here? Why the hell would I want to be here?”
Paul stared at him a moment like he was trying to recognize him. Then he seemed to realize something.
He crooked his finger at Earl. “Come over here with me,” he said.
He led Earl to a gravesite on the second row of graves.
Earl looked down at the tombstone.
David O. Burdette
b. May 14, 1954
d. February 9, 2001
“My old man.”
“Yes. Your father.”
Nonplussed, Earl looked around like he was trying to get his bearings.
“I was in the Army when he died,” he said. “I didn’t make it for his funeral.”
“The Army wouldn’t give you leave to come home?” Paul asked—a question, but it sounded more like an accusation.
“The truth is, we never got along too well. But you knew my old man. He never got along too well with anyone.”
“I didn’t know him well at all, actually. But I’m not surprised to hear it.”
Earl was about to ask him what he meant by that when Paul made another “follow me” gesture. They walked over to the grave nearest the road. A worker, who’d been trying to pry underneath the tombstone with a San Angelo bar, stepped away. Earl looked at the name.
ROSE ANNA BURDETTE
June 1, 1961 – April 6, 2017
SHE IS SINGING WITH THE ANGELS ON HIGH
“Mama!”
“She had a nice voice. We still miss her in the choir. She expressed a wish to be buried out here. She was the last one, in fact.”
Earl stared down, shaking his head.
“I knew that she and the old man grew up out here before they moved to Prospect, but I had no idea she was buried here,” Earl said.
Paul made a sound—it might have been a cough, or a laugh, or something we don’t have a word for.
“Earl,” he said, “you were here for her funeral. You were a pall bearer.”
Then Paul turned and walked back toward the church.
Earl stood there over the gravemound until he began to tremble, more and more violently, like he had the DTs. But he’d never had the DTs. Bourbon had been kind to him that way.
When he got himself under control, he went over to Paul, standing in the shade of the church. He held his hands out as if he were a supplicant.
“It was the booze, Paul.”
Paul nodded and said, “Yeah, that, too.”
Earl walked away from the church, past the Browns, who’d gotten out of their car, past the workers milling around, and the man who seemed to be in charge. None of them looked at him. It was like he wasn’t even there. In fact, Earl wasn’t altogether sure he was.
• • •
Dennis Vannatta is a Pushcart and Porter Prize winner, with essays and stories published in many magazines and anthologies, including Your Impossible Voice, River Styx, Chariton Review, Boulevard, and Antioch Review. His sixth collection of stories, The Only World You Get, was published by Et Alia Press.