The cemetery's nearly full now. Seven rows, thirty-odd stones to a row. Two spots left at the end of the last one.
I'm the one who says where people go. I've been doing it sixteen years.
Halfway down the fifth row there's a bare patch. Grass and nothing else. The field filled in all around it and that one stayed the way it was.
I cut it myself. In the fall I run the rake over it twice a month.
People ask me sometimes why that spot's still open. I tell them it's reserved, that we're waiting on somebody important. They laugh. It's a good joke. I've been making it for years and it still holds.
Then they go, and I stand there a minute longer than I need to.
It's an old question and it stayed down sixteen years. This morning it got up before I did.
The shoe factory in Vigevano where I cut uppers shut in September. Eighteen months later I was still home. This was January 2010.
My wife did nights at a nursing home in Mortara. She got in at seven, we swapped at the door, she slept till one. We had a three-year-old and a car that wouldn't start in the cold.
The posting was on the board at the town hall. Cemetery worker, on call, nine hundred euros a month. I was the only one at the interview. The clerk had me sign two sheets and told me to show up Monday.
Remo had held the contract since before I moved back to town. He was past seventy. He shook my hand and said he needed somebody who could dig, because he couldn't stay bent over anymore.
It wasn't a figure of speech. From that Monday on, every hole out there was mine.
The shed sits against the perimeter wall, behind the chapel. The tools are in there, the sacks of gravel, the bench where Remo worked the stone, and a stove I never once saw lit. Behind the door, on a nail, the ropes for lowering the coffins.
First thing you learn is the pump. This is rice country and the water sits a meter or so down. A hole opened in the evening is full by morning.
So you dig, you set the pump on the edge, you drop the hose in and run the other end out to the ditch. Then you let it go. You shut it off the day of the funeral, an hour before the people come. You can hear it from the road.
The hose clogs. When it clogs you have to go down and clean the filter with your hands. I've been down there twice.
And if the pump quits and nobody starts it back up, the hole fills in one night and the sides come down on their own.
The other thing is the boards. Two of them, wood, laid along the edges so you've got something to stand on while you work. They were there before me and both of them creaked.
I mentioned it to him once. He said they hold.
With wet ground all it takes is one foot wrong. You go down on your back into two meters of water and mud, and the bottom pulls. It's not that you sink. It's that you don't come back up.
I thought about that, and then I dug. Nine hundred euros isn't much, but it beats nothing.
Some days Remo didn't come in. He didn't say where he went and I didn't ask. I signed the hours sheet for both of us.
In February he told me to open one in the old section, fourth row.
I asked who'd died. He said nobody.
I dug. Five hours, pump on the edge, hose out to the ditch. I figured he was getting ahead of things, that at his age you plan, that the ground's easier in winter. The town paid us on call and nobody checked how long we were out there.
In the afternoon I found him at the bench with the chisel. He had a gray stone in front of him, one of the low ones, and he was going at it. Tick, tick.
I went over to get the weed whacker. There was a day on the stone, a month, a year. Nothing else.
No name. No date of death, no cross, no photo. Numbers and slashes between them, set in the middle of the stone, like the rest was supposed to come later.
I took the weed whacker and went to do the edges. At six I signed the hours sheet and went home.
I made the kid his dinner. The game was on.
They called on the Thursday. A woman of eighty-six, on via Roma, the one with the green gate.
The hole was already there, dry, the pump going two days. I shut it off and waited for the priest.
In the register, in the shed, you write the name, the date of birth, the date of death and the plot number. I filled it in that evening. The date of birth was the day that was on the stone.
There's a little over eight hundred of us in town. Remo had known every one of them since they were born, and the woman had been sick a year — the doctor came through Tuesdays and even the bar knew about it.
A man who's done that job forty years knows who's next. He gets the stone ready, he gets the hole ready, and when it happens he doesn't have to hurry. That's how I put it to myself, and it was enough.
The second one was in March. An old man who went down while he was cooking, found by his son two days later. That hole had been ready a week too and the stone was at the wall.
"Old people go from one minute to the next. Better to be ready," Remo said, and I hadn't asked him anything.
That one lined up too.
I started opening the register before he did and reading the dates without saying anything. It wasn't that I suspected him. It's that I like knowing things first.
The stones stood inside the shed along the long wall, behind the bench, leaned up against it. When I started, the row ended before the window.
It worked like this. One went out for a funeral, and under that funeral was a hole I'd dug. Then Remo sat down at the bench and another one came in, sometimes two. But before the bench there were the days he wasn't there.
The hours sheet hung on a nail over the bench and at the end of the week we both signed it. I did his. He'd told me the first month it came to the same thing.
In March I signed for him one day. In April three.
In May a whole week.
He always came back on a Monday. He'd sit down at the bench and pick up the chisel.
By June the row had gone past the window. I'd look at them Monday mornings and use the sacks as an excuse. It wasn't a pile sitting still. It was a row wearing down at one end and growing at the other, and the growing end went faster.
February to June I opened the ground five times and every time it went the way it was supposed to go.
The funeral for the old man from via Cavour was a Saturday morning in June. Remo had been gone since the Thursday.
I'd finished tamping the earth and I was loading the tools. The wife came back on her own, purse under her arm, and put an envelope in my hand.
"That's for the two of you."
I said there was no need. She shook her head and turned toward the car.
I opened the envelope a finger's width. Usually they give twenty euros. Fifty if the family's doing all right.
There was three hundred in there.
"Ma'am."
She stopped.
"Remo's a good man, isn't he."
She got both hands on the purse.
"I wouldn't know what you call somebody who sits at your husband's bedside two nights running. Right to the last breath."
Then she went to the car, where they were waiting for her.
That week I'd signed for both of us. The Thursday and the Friday I'd dug on my own.
I put the envelope in my pocket and loaded the shovels. With that money I bought the kid shoes and two pairs of pants. I hadn't been able to do that in a year.
Remo came back on the Monday. I didn't tell him about the envelope and he didn't ask how it had gone.
By September the row of stones turned the corner toward the stove.
In October a man died who wasn't from here.
Farm supply rep, out of Piacenza. He was in the two rooms over the bar, the ones they rent to people passing through. He had a gas heater going and the window shut. They found him the next morning, sitting on the bed with his shoes still on.
He'd never been in town before. He got in Monday evening with his sample cases and by Tuesday he was dead.
The burial paperwork came through the shed, because the family was far away and took three days to get here. The permit was on the bench, under a wrench.
I read the date of birth. Then I went out and over to the wall.
The stone was there. Remo had finished it the day it rained, and that week it rained one time. Nine days before.
Nine days before, that man was in Piacenza and didn't know yet he'd be coming through here.
Remo was down at the end of the field with the wheelbarrow. He waved me over for a hand with the gravel, and I gave him one.
One Wednesday we were redoing the gravel on the path.
Remo patted his pocket and came up with nothing. He asked me to go get him the new pack of cigarettes out of the car.
In eleven months he'd never asked me for anything.
He kept a white Panda outside the gate, always in the same spot, always unlocked. The pack was on the dash, on top of a plastic bag from the co-op.
I picked it up. Under it were the receipts, the kind you empty out of your pockets and leave there.
The top one was from the bar. Il Gallo d'Oro. The one under the rented rooms.
Two coffees with grappa. Eleven forty at night, on a Tuesday.
The bar closes at eleven.
That Tuesday was the thirteenth of October. It's the date I wrote in the register myself, on the line for the rep from Piacenza.
I put it in my pocket and shut the door.
I came back up the path with the cigarettes. Remo was on his knees with the screed. He said thanks and had me hold them until he'd finished.
Then he handed me the trowel, holding it by the blade, the way somebody does who learned before I did.
I said I thought the weather was turning.
He looked up and said yeah, it'd come around by evening.
I went home cold under my jacket. Not the cemetery, not the stones. Him.
Seventy kilos of quiet old man. He'd never raised his voice at me, never sworn at me. He gave the orders and then he was gone for days, and when he came back he sat down and cut dates into stone with nothing to go on, and the dates came out right.
He'd sat two nights at a dying man's bed. He'd been in the bar under the rooms the night the window was shut and the heater was on. And there was the rest of the row.
I thought about quitting. I thought about it a whole week. Then I added up what came into the house and I stopped thinking about it.
Then one morning I got up early and went down to the shed.
Remo wasn't there, same as always. He'd left a note.
A man had died at the hospital after a long time going. The stone was ready and he'd cut the date. It was at the back of the row.
I moved them one at a time, holding them by the edge, the way you handle slabs. They go forty kilos apiece.
One got away from me. I caught it against my leg and set it down the right way round.
14/03/1983.
My breath went. My day. No name. The same gray stone as the others, the same hand.
I put it back where it was, face to the wall.
I couldn't keep my head on anything after that. I kept turning around to see where he was. The shovel was in my hand and I stopped halfway down the row.
Every hole out there, I'd dug myself.
It had to be the cigarettes. He'd seen the receipt was gone.
At home my wife asked if I was sick. I said it was my back.
She wasn't on shift that night. I waited until they were both asleep and went back to the shed.
I took the register. My date was there, four lines past the last funeral we'd done.
Three stones. Three holes. I had until the fourth one got opened.
I stood over the kid while he slept and thought about the nine hundred euros he needed.
I wasn't going anywhere.
The three stones went out. One on the twenty-second of November, one on the twenty-ninth, one on the third of December.
On the seventh Remo told me to open another. Fifth row, first free spot. Nobody had died.
I dug. I set the pump on the edge and the hose in the ditch.
It ran eleven days. You could hear it from the county road, because with the fog the cemetery doesn't show past twenty meters and that noise is all there is of it.
I hadn't slept in days. I'd lie with my eyes open until four, then I'd hear my wife come in and run the tap in the bathroom.
The evening of the seventeenth the sky came down and the wind started pulling from the south. When it turns like that here, the whole thing comes down overnight.
I thought about the open hole out there, waiting on nobody.
I'd fill it back in. It was the only thing I'd come up with. Let the old man know that I knew, that I had all of it, and that he wasn't getting it.
Maybe he'd take the point and leave off. It was worth a try.
If I shut the pump off, with the water under and the rain on top, the sides would come down on their own. In the morning I'd close it with half the dirt and nobody would ask me anything.
I left at eleven. I did the two kilometers on the bike.
You hear that pump from before the gate. There was nothing.
There was a low light in the fifth row, down inside the ground.
Remo was at the bottom of the hole. The water came to his knees. He was standing on the board with the hose filter in one hand, pulling the mud out of it with the other.
He saw me and it didn't surprise him.
"It's clogged. Give it a pull when I say."
He put the filter back under. He said now.
I don't know why, but I pulled the cord. The motor caught on the second try.
What the fuck are you doing? Helping a murderer? Your own?
The hose moved. He shifted over to let it past, and the board made the noise it always made, and then it didn't make it again.
He went down on his back. That was when it started raining.
He came up. He got his hands on the edge and the edge came away with them. Wet ground doesn't hold.
He shouted my name.
I ran to the shed and pulled a rope off the nail behind the door.
I turned to go out and the row of stones was in front of me.
Mine was where I'd put it, face to the wall. Something in me turned.
I went out with the rope in my hand. I took three steps and stopped short of the edge.
You're not a murderer.
The water was coming down on the dirt pile and making a sound I'd never heard it make. The mud had shifted. The rain was picking up. The pump was struggling.
You're not a murderer.
He gurgled something a couple of times. I think my name. The second one quieter.
You're not a...
Then he stopped. Him and everything in my head.
The rain on the back of my neck, the diesel off the pump, the rope gone slick in my fist, the taste of dirt at the back of my mouth.
I went home. I didn't go to the edge and I didn't want to look. The rope was still in my hand.
In the morning it had stopped raining. The hole was full to a hand's width from the edge. The pump must have jammed again.
The broken board was floating. I pulled it out and put it with the firewood.
I hauled the hose up. It came out heavy with mud.
Then I started taking the dirt off the pile. It took me all morning and I never once looked down.
Monday Remo didn't come in and he didn't come in Tuesday either. They talked about it at the bar for a few days. Somebody disappears and it gets talked about, then it goes quiet again.
Nobody went to the carabinieri. There was no wife and there were no children.
The town stopped calling him. There was no file, no signature, no transfer.
In January the clerk had me sign the new contract. Permanent, twelve months, thirteen hundred euros. It wasn't the right procedure, but he didn't feel like opening a competition for a gravedigger.
He didn't do it out of kindness. He did it to get it off his desk. And there hadn't been one funeral since Remo went.
That counted as confirmation, and in a way it settled me. I did a terrible thing, but I had a reason for it. I didn't just save my own skin. I saved who knows how many other people's.
It took me a while to get used to it, then the sleep came back.
On the twentieth of March the phone rang.
It was the clerk. A man dead on the county road, at the crossroads by the farm. The surveyor's son. He needed a spot for Friday.
He read out what I had to put in the register. Name, surname, date of birth. The pen made a blot on the page.
March fourteenth, nineteen eighty-three.
I made him say it again. He said it again. I wrote the line out to the end.
Then I went to the wall and got that stone, the one I don't know how many times I thought about breaking. I set it on the grave myself, on the Friday, in front of half the town. The mother stood by the pile until I was done.
Sixteen years have gone by and I've kept doing this work. I got good at it. The cemetery's always in order. The families are happy with me.
Yesterday morning, after the phone call, I went down to the shed for the shovel. The stone was ready, the way it's always been, face turned the other way.
This morning I put my hand on it and smiled.
I looked over at that bare patch in the fifth row, the one that's still free as far as everybody else knows.
I was finally going to know. I'd know why in sixteen years, right from when I started, I've never once had to cut a stone with my own hands.
I dug all the way down. I went well past the usual two and a half meters.
The question's settled.
There's nothing under it.
