He could not bring himself to ask if this were the place where his dead son was going and he walked on. If there were other burials in preparation he would see them.
In an older part of the cemetery he saw some people strolling. Elderly gent with a cane, his wife on his arm. They did not see him. They went on among the tilted stones and rough grass, the wind coming from the woods cold in the sunlight. A stone angel in her weathered marble robes, the downcast eyes. The old people’s voices drift across the lonely space, murmurous above these places of the dead. The lichens on the crumbling stones like a strange green light. The voices fade. Beyond the gentle clash of weeds. He sees them stoop to read some quaint inscription and he pauses by an old vault that a tree has half dismantled with its growing. Inside there is nothing. No bones, no dust. How surely are the dead beyond death. Death is what the living carry with them. A state of dread, like some uncanny foretaste of a bitter memory. But the dead do not remember and nothingness is not a curse. Far from it.
He sat in the dappled light among the stones. A bird sang. Some leaves were falling. He sat with his hands palm up on the grass beside him like a stricken puppet and he thought no thoughts at all.
In midafternoon an old Packard hearse came wending through the woods leading a few cars and circled the canopy on the hill and parked on the far side. The cars came quietly to rest and people in black emerged. Steel doors dropped shut softly one by one. The mourners moved graveward. Four pallbearers lifted the small coffin from the funeral car and carried it to the tent. Suttree came up over the hill in time to see it go. Some flowers fell. He walked up the hill above the gravesite and stood numbly. The little bier with its floral offerings had come to rest on a pair of straps across the mouth of the grave. A preacher stood at the ready. The light in this little glade where they stood seemed suffused with immense clarity and the figures appeared to burn. Suttree stood by a tree but no one noticed him. The preacher had begun. Suttree heard no word of what he said until his own name was spoken. Then everything became quite clear. He turned and laid his head against the tree, choked with a sorrow he had never known.
When all the words were done a few stepped forth and placed a flower and the straps began to lower, the casket and child sinking into the grave. A group of strangers commending Suttree’s son to earth. The mother cried out and sank to the ground and was lifted up and helped away wailing. Stabat Mater Dolorosa. Remember her hair in the morning before it was pinned, black, rampant, savage with loveliness. As if she slept in perpetual storm. Suttree went to his knees in the grass, his hands cupped over his ears.
Someone touched his shoulder. When he looked up there was no one there. The last of the motorcade was moving down the little drive toward the gate and save the two sextons crouched in the hillside grass like jackals he was alone. He rose and went down to the grave.
There among flowers and the perfume of the departed ladies and the faint iron smell of the earth to stand looking down into a full size six foot grave with this small box resting in the bottom of it. Pale manchild were there last agonies? Were you in terror, did you know? Could you feel the claw that claimed you? And who is this fool kneeling over your bones, choked with bitterness? And what could a child know of the darkness of God’s plan? Or how flesh is so frail it is hardly more than a dream.
When he looked up the gravediggers were watching him from the side of the hill. He called to them but they did not answer. Thinking him mad with grief perhaps. Perhaps he addressed his God.
You two. Hey.
They looked at each other and after a time rose slowly and came shambling down across the green like ordinaries in a teutonic drama. Suttree was sitting in one of the folding chairs. He gestured loosely at the grave. Can you fill this in now?
They looked at each other and then one of them folded his arms and looked down. Orville’s comin with the tractor, he said.
We was just supposed to fold these here chairs and stack em, the other said. They got to come out and take the tent down.
Suttree stared at them. The one with his arms crossed began to rock up and down on his heels and look about.
Orville and them be here directly, the other one said.
Suttree rose from the chair and pulled back the canvas drop where it was thrown over the mound of earth. A few racks of flowers toppled. A pick and two spades lay there and he took up one of the spades and sank it into the loose dirt and hefted it and sent a load of clods rattling over the little coffin.
The two men looked at each other.
We got to get them straps, the one said.
You better get em then, said Suttree, swinging a spadeload of clay. Well hold up a minute.
The smaller man stepped down into the grave to free the straps and the other one hauled them up.