Shy middle-aged gravedigger Henry Bale accepts his solitary life in the English hamlet of Chalk, until the arrival of twenty-seven-year-old teacher Caroline Ford brings thoughts of love, relationships, separation, and loss.

The Gravedigger

By Rob Magnuson Smith

UNO Press

Copyright © 2010 Rob Magnuson Smith
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-60801-010-3

Chapter One

Henry Bale stepped back from the open grave. He was tall, strong, and broad-shouldered. His overalls and boots were splattered with mud. Though forty-one, his appearance hadn't changed much since late adolescence. Dark hair covered his head and ears. His beard was poorly trimmed. His lumpish nose looked as if it had been punched and left to settle on its own. Women called him handsome, and he didn't know why.

Across the churchyard, Hetherington the undertaker inched his procession toward the grave. Water had started seeping into the bottom, but it wasn't bad. Henry dropped a bucket down. He dragged it by a rope down the length of the grave, catching what he could. There was no rush. Hetherington always took his time. Henry pulled the bucket clear and dumped it over a rosemary bush. Then, taking his wheelbarrow, he retreated to the boundary hedge.

Wind blew across the neighbouring sheep pasture. It was two in the afternoon, and the February frost sat fat and undaunted on the ground. Henry pointed his chin across the churchyard, still feeling in his bones the first turn of his spade. The frozen soil had wobbled his wrists like cement. His hands remained ungloved from the heat of the work.

The hearse finally came to a stop beside the path. The bearers opened their doors cautiously, shuddering in the wind. There were four of them. They wore black suits stained with bits of breakfast, and their cheeks were already colouring in the cold. Opening the back, they hoisted the coffin onto their shoulders and over to Henry's webbings—seatbelts from his father's old Vauxhall. The coffin was small, he noticed, glad for it. Though he always added his clearances, he dreaded the ornate caskets with great gold handles that locked in place, and made a mess of his grave walls.

"A nice young willow," Henry said under his breath, admiring the curving branches of the tree beside him. He spoke more often when he was alone.

"The Lord is full of compassion ... slow to anger and of great goodness ..."

Wind scattered the vicar's committal. Stray phrases whipped around monuments, as if searching for open ears. There wasn't anything for Henry to do at this point except keep out of the way. Yesterday he'd left a bit of his lunch in his pocket, a corner of a cheese sandwich that had kept him occupied. Above the grave, the bearers played out the webbings. They tracked mud across his mats, Henry noticed. It would mean some scrubbing this weekend, if the weather allowed.

The coffin sank evenly into the ground. The vicar blessed Hetherington's brass pot—a sign of the cross, a moment with his eyes closed.

"The days of man are but as grass ..."

Hetherington knew his part well. He extracted a pinch of mole dirt and sprinkled it over the grave with an artful turn of the wrist. The wind blew most of it away. The vicar drifted past the mourners toward the church, his white robe flapping like a sail. He stopped to adjust his belt and the mourners caught up to him, milling and vulnerable. They snatched glances at the cross hanging from his neck, and the Bible in his hairy hand.

Hetherington raised his trousers above his ankles and made his way between the grave rows, grinning. "Hello, Henry!" he shouted. He took little mincing steps the closer he came, making a production out of his journey. At last he came to a stop at the handles of Henry's wheelbarrow.

"Hello, John," Henry said, rubbing his nose. Hetherington always smelled of cologne. His grin seldom left his face, even during a service.

Hetherington made a show of searching the ground. He squatted and peered around Henry's boots. "No Jack today?"

Henry glanced to his right where his dog would have been. "Something's the matter with him. I'm taking him round to Tracy's tomorrow afternoon."

"Nothing serious, I hope?"

Henry pictured his Jack Russell terrier, wheezing in the wicker cot. "I'm not sure."

Hetherington was still grinning. "Well. He is old, Henry."

The sound of an engine rumbled over the headstones. Hetherington whirled. "They'll be leaving me behind yet!" The vicar and the mourners had gone. The hearse pointed at the gate, and the driver smoked a cigarette from the open window.

"See you tomorrow at Burgess Green, then? Two o'clock?"

Hetherington held out a cheque, folded at the centre, tucked between his index and middle fingers. He always offered the payment like this—as if a gift from a godfather, or a bribe.

Henry pried the cheque from Hetherington's fingers and put it in the pocket of his overalls. The undertaker traipsed across the burial mounds toward the hearse. "Say John, can you ask your bearers not to track mud across—"

"Blast it!" Hetherington cried, turning round. "I just remembered it's a Catholic service tomorrow. Mary McGinty. Only a reopening, her husband Patrick's already in. Sorry, Henry—it'll have to be a noon burial. The Catholics like getting in the ground early." Grinning, he knocked on the passenger door to the hearse. "Think about it this way—you'll be home in time for lunch!"

* * *

Henry turned north off the motorway and into the fields surrounding Chalk. The sky was grey but didn't threaten rain.

Near the turn to the village, a sign above an iron gate read Wembles Manor. Behind the gate, a road lined with towering silver firs led to a manor house that tilted toward a nearby duck pond. It was a difficult time for royalty. Chalk had become a tax burden, and Samuel Wembles was starting to sell pieces of it off. Henry had heard the rumours—in the post office and at the shop, or walking past The Black Ram, where Chalk's parishioners hunched grumbling over their pints. The land grant to the first Lord Wembles would have been a poorly disguised insult, even in the sixteenth century. No river ran through Chalk. No hills surrounded it. It was a flat, degenerate parcel of grass, menaced by slate and deep deposits of chalk. The village was hidden. When found, it was forgettable. The nearest train station was a six-mile walk. An old bus passed through once a day, mostly out of charity.

As a young man Henry had been embarrassed, coming from Chalk. In East Sussex, a tourist county known for its seaside resorts and fertile downs, the village was a fossil. People thirty miles away didn't know it existed. He'd been tempted to flee to nearby Peacehaven, or even Brighton—places with names that inspired hope. But over time he realised, as his father and mother had, and their fathers and mothers before them, that Chalk suited him because of its shortcomings. His father Frank, now almost eighty and living out his days in a pensioners' home in Brighton, had been a gravedigger as well. Embarrassment slowly evolved into a sort of martyr's pride, a sense of doom that kept Henry's eyes lowered each afternoon as he returned home to his brick and mortar tenant cottage, wooden gate, and tiny front garden. Past the church, his house was the third on the left, its entryway so small it seemed built for a child. When Henry came inside, he had to duck.

In his wicker cot across the sitting room, Jack shivered under his blanket. His white bearded chin pointed at the fire, his eyes squeezed shut in a fight with pain. Henry had been studying Jack's chin for days now, as if to divine the dog's problem in it.

"Jack? Hello, Jack!"

The sitting room was...