Graves Garden

The guillotine struck the earth, pulling shards of soil backwards, miniscule crumbles slid from the sides to slip back into the now deeply grooved crevice. The dirt, worked for years, quivered under the onslaught of vibrations of man at work. Or in this case, woman at work. 1

Edna Graves worked the hoe like a practiced master. She had reached the age where everyone she knew had died off and she herself was on borrowed time. She dressed as any normal, hard-working gardener would: wide-brim straw hat, long sleeved denim shirt and cool khaki pants. The attire wasn’t the most practical in terms of the century but it was what she had grown up with and what she still considered to be acceptable for working outside. The only thing that had evolved with the times were her tennis shoes. She sported Nike Air’s with a vibrant ruby red swish on the side, courtesy of Dennis Graves her adopted nephew. Dennis had passed on a few years back, fatal car accident, but she still carried around his memory with her, namely on her feet.2

Edna paused to wipe the sweat from her brow, her withered frame suffering from the mid-morning oppressive heat. The need to get the soil turned and ready for its seasonal planting kept her diligently outside even when her own worst enemy was creeping higher into the sky. Nowadays, the sun pickled her skin with large brown spots and deepened the worn lines across her face. She always started working at daybreak but was usually inside around mid morning to avoid the worst of the sun, but today it couldn’t be helped.3

Her garden was her sustenance and her supplement. She had managed for the past fifteen years surviving on her own gardening; selling her wares at the local farmers market. Hers were always the best selling, sweetest tasting, and healthiest of them all; she had the awards to prove it. Edna always said that she didn’t care about all that, but that wasn’t really true. She had long tried to get her garden growing and never found success until she unlocked her very own secret. When approached about this secret she always gave whoever was asking the same reply: her soil.4

What folks didn’t know was that when Edna said it was her soil, she literally meant it. Henry Graves had been the one to start her on this life’s mission; he had been the one to give her the key to her gardening. Gardening had been and always would be the only thing that she had held dear, besides Henry himself of course. Henry had been working as a local gravedigger for five years before Edna had caught him out back by the old wooden barn, his worn butcher’s apron splashed with fresh blood of the deepest red. S5

Henry hadn’t always been a gravedigger. In his youth he’d worked as a carpenter and a butcher before finally settling at working for the old cemetery. But the truth of the matter was Henry just couldn’t work around people. He’d spent seven years of his youth in a prison for deadly assault, a sentence for an unproved attack with a hammer against his former employer. After his release he had worked at the local butcher’s until an incident involving some children had resulted in Red Browning, the owner, respectfully asking Henry to leave. Henry just needed to be by himself. He couldn’t stand people in general, never no mind what they were about. He didn’t like the things they did or questions they asked and he certainly didn’t like it when they made his work more difficult. It had only been the common bond of quietude that had finally resulted in his and Edna’s marriage. Then that incident with the hammer had him sent away after their third year. Edna didn’t really like to think about those times.6

Henry had finally found his lot in life working at the cemetery and had continued on until he died, God rest his soul. Some say it was fate, with Henry’s name and all. Like hand and glove, they’d say. But it was his need for solitude and his demand for respectfulness of all God’s things that finally had brought out7


It was this last bit that had finally broken the camel’s back so to speak. Henry had settled on working as a gravedigger for almost fifteen years when Edna caught him out back. It seems that while most people ignore gravediggers, gravediggers do not always ignore most people. Henry had explained it as a means of distraction. They’re picturesque: somewhere off in the back, a rake and a wheelbarrow ready at hand as they tidied up the cemeteries. Grieving people look to focus their attention somewhere else then the plot at hand and usually focus on any other activity in the cemetery. They are truly invisible, yet are synonymous with the cemetery itself. 8

It seems a poor grave robber was the cause of Henry’s dilemma, and his blood encased apron on that special day. Most cemeteries do not employ gravediggers anymore. There’s just no need for them. Henry had a job at a historical cemetery, making sure that he had enough work to supply him with until he died. But working in a historical cemetery meant that there were always some people who could never let the dead rest in peace and were always looking for something. Henry had caught many of them over the years and none were too stupid to comeback after that first run-in with an enraged Henry Graves. Except one sodden fellow. This young fellow, of rusted auburn hair and lithe body had thought poor Henry Graves too old and frail to follow through with any of his threats. Henry had shown him there are things that never die with age.9

Henry told it that he had been livid with the destruction of turf at Whitaker’s grave, the gravesite had been in shambles, the ethereal, stone Mother Mary lying face down in the sod, the young buck covered in mud. He’d straightened him out right though. He’d knocked the man unconscious with his shovel and then used the wheelbarrow to cart him off venturing to his own stretch of land. He’d went to the barn, strapped on his butcher’s apron and set upon dismembering that lad for all he was worth. Edna didn’t just take his word for it; she’d actually seen it. She walked with him out to the barn and there the man was, stripped naked and hanging upside down from a butcher’s hook that was suspended from a beam, the man’s feet bound with rope. The scythe lay propped against the window, its usual job of reaping crops had changed and now it had a new purpose. The man was no longer alive, a bloody stump of flesh hanging in the darkened back right corner of the barn, his severed arm barely attached by straining tissue. Edna had turned surprised eyes on her husband and he himself had moved over to collect the scythe in his hand, meeting her eyes across the distance, waiting for the next move.10

Edna herself had never been scared of her husband; he had never raised a hand against her and had never even raised his voice to her in all the years they had been married. The black look he had had in his eyes was new and one that she didn’t particularly want to test. Her mind sifted, distorted. Her memories came to focus, things she had never at that time accomplished in her life. Her years of fighting with her garden, struggling to make ends meet. Years of struggling to give Henry a child, years of disappointment when she had been on her own while he was upstate in prison, years of prostituting herself as an only way to make ends meet. Henry was not the only one in this family who was angry. Edna looked back at the corpse, and the puddle of blood that had collected underneath him and ran in crimson lines with his shadow. She might not be able to get everything she wanted but she still had time to get one thing. Her mouth twisted as she looked back at Henry, and saw his fist tighten on the wooden handle. She gave him her full attention as she asked him, her mind sifting through the articles she’d read about decomposition and tender, enriched soil. Her only question, stated blithely while raising her hand to rest on her cocked hip: “You have any plans for that meat?”11