They lay in their graves, eternally contemplating their situation, worms and maggots slithering effortlessly twixt bone and putrefied flesh. . . They are the Dead, and I was their Keeper. I was seventeen and this was my first full-time job. I was a long-haired pothead with a different pair of shades for every day of the week; my buddy and cemetery mentor was Ron, a six-foot-three Ramones punk from my local kegger group. The year was 1982, and most of our clients had been deceased for many, many years in that South Amboy, NJ graveyard.
But the nature of Death being what it is, we were constantly busy interring the newly Dead. They had names like Dadovich and Maliszewski, good eastern European Christian stock with nothing to lose in their blue-collar world but their lives.
And lose them they did.
One by one they came to my workplace, and the last thing their still ears would hear was me and Ron's jabbering voices as we tossed shovelfuls of dirt onto their expensive, graceful coffins. Admittedly, this was a strange job for a kid right out of high school, but it was a truly memorable time of my life; I reflected daily on my mortality and revelled in the philosophical questions of Forever.
Ask any gravedigger what they think of their job, and they'll probably reply, "It's a living, but I wouldn't want to die there." You see, we've seen Death. We've been immersed in it. We've seen the sorrowful survivors, the penny-pinching funeral directors and ambivalent clergy. No one wants to ruminate about Death. It's too painful. Many of us have lost people close to us; I certainly have. I've even witnessed someone die a slow, agonizing, violent death. I've smelled the ether of Death in the air around me; the stillness and silence which mutes every mouth and casts nervous eyes about the scene.
It's very, very powerful.
I still fear Death, but I have grown rather analytical and fascinated with it. What else was a young gravedigger to do?
One day, I was advised by our boss (cryptically named 'Ship') that were going to have an "Elenor Rigby" at 2:00 pm. I didn't dare ask what an "Elenor Rigby" was so I set about moodily preparing the gravesite. The backhoe showed up around 9:00 and Ron and I hastily plotted the site. It was a cheap one, and the tombstone, though vertical, was small and plain. Ron began plunging a long steel rod into the earth to find out who (or what) was next to the gravesite so the backhoe could dig without disturbing a neighboring coffin.
I set about digging a hole for the tombstone. I went down about two feet and filled the hole with rocks from the crypt on "Boot Hill" and filled it with quick-drying cement. I mashed it all down as hard as I could and smoothed it over, checking the evenness with a level. Ron plunged deep several times till we heard a clink! noise. It was the tell-tale clink of a burial vault. It was a neighbor; presumably the spouse. Ron shifted over a few inches and plunged deep, this time finding nothing but soil. The burial vault ended *right there*.
Eureka!
He plotted the site along the edge of the neighbor's burial vault. The backhoe moved in and Ron and I smoked some weed while the John Deere did all the work. The vault company arrived and we scraped the edges of the new grave with flat shovels while the vault guy, Gregg, set up the lowering equipment and astroturf. This was our first all-in-one-day job, and I was proud. It was noon. Time for lunch. We got some pizza and Ship gave us a six-pack of Budweiser. We drank greedily in the hot New Jersey sun. But from atop Boot Hill, coming in around Raritan Bay, were ominous, black clouds. In the Jersey summer, this means *thunderstrorm*. We were pissed. We hated burying stiffs in the rain. It was wet, muddy and...depressing. Boss Ship waved his arms around the clouds, yammering some meterological weirdness while Ron casually popped a fourth beer. That fucker!
"Well, it ain't all bad," Ron said, "at least it's an Elenor."
Ship stared skyward. I pensively peeled the label from my beer.
By 1:30, the sky was a wall of black and steel grey. The clouds hung low and had puffy, whitish underbellies. Not a good sign...We went back to the site on the tractor, Ron riding in back with some dirt and faded flowers. Gregg had the place ready and my tombstone was standing proudly against the breeze. Ron unloaded the tractor and started placing shovels and tamping blocks against a tree at the site.
"What the fuck are you doing?" I yelled to him. (It's really bad form to leave gravedigging equipment at a funeral site. It totally freaks out the Bereaved. I learned this important lesson at my first dig...)
Ron cast a "you idiot!" stare and me and said: "It's an Elenor, man! Ain't nobody gonna show!"
Wow! It had never occured to me that anyone would be buried alone. After witnessing parade after parade of grieving Survivors, stoic tearful Polish families and baying, arm-waving Italians I never thought anyone died alone nowadays. As was usual at the graveyard, I had to do some job before ruminating long about the situation. A hearse and a limo pulled in past the spiked iron gates and rolled slowly down the winding dirt road around the Hill. Thunder peeled across the Bay. Rain had begun to fall.
Showtime!
The Rev and funeral director (some fat guy I never liked) came out, bracing against the rain.
"Let's do it!" Ron yelled to Ship, whom by now was looking greedily toward his warm, dry office. The rain began to pour. We unloaded grandma from the hearse (it seems I can't recall her name; I often imagine I should have, but it still escapes me. I've remembered others, but not hers. Rather strange...) and placed her coffin (unfinished pine) onto the straps, suspended above her Last Resting place.
The rain began to pound down onto our heads. The skies had opened up on our hard-earned site, and my reserve dirt was becoming a muddy swamp. Lightning flashed and lit the vault company the area like a strobe, causing the funeral director to utter something to the Rev like: "Cough out the words and let's blow this popsicle stand!" The Rev immediately did his thing.
"And so, on this day, as we gather at so solemn a place on so solemn a day, blah-blah-blah."
Gregg the Vault Guy sat in his truck, smoking a Lucky Strike. Ship was backing off toward his office. The director held his collar against the rain, arms in close to his enormous sides. Ron glowered into empty space. He hated God, especially when God was making him stand in the rain while the dirt pile got soaked. I looked at the director, and knew he would be pushing us to dig real fast. It's common practice for funeral directors to remain with the deceased up until they are interred, and none of them liked doing it. I alone thought about Elenor, and strangely, I smiled. She was really old (ninety-something) and her scumbag relatives didn't bother to show. Those fuckers! At least she was free now, free to sew doilies in heaven with Vishnu and Ghandi, free to sip wine with Moses and Christ, free to play hearts with Mark Twain, Albert Einstein and Sharon Tate. Then again, maybe she was a bitch and was twittering down into a fiery hell. . .
As an atheist, I didn't care which scenario held sway, but one can't deny the occasional tug to ruminate about the afterlife. Yet here on Earth grandma was still a fucking corpse. Nothing more, nothing less.
"And yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of Death, I shall fear no evil..."
Those words were music to my ears. Our small funeral party was utterly drenched, and Ron and I would be the last ones to leave and find shelter. The Rev finished his little sermon and dashed off to the limo. The director barely had time to yell at us to finish the job when Gregg the Vault Guy appeared and quickly lowered the casket into its burial vault (these vaults are thick-walled sarcophoguses that serve the ridiculous purpose of retaining the integrity of the coffin for an extra 50 years or so. I liked them only because it was easier to probe for "neighbors". Unprotected coffins rot in about sixty years). Her coffin fit beautifully into the vault, and we quickly lowered the heavy vault lid over the top. Though not tightly sealed, it would serve to protect the coffin from moisture and bugs. For a while, anyway...Then Ron and I began to dig furiously into our dirt pile, covering the vault with goopy piles of muddy earth. We saved some of the muddier stuff for the top. Then we tamped it all down with heavy iron stamps (tampers) to mash down the dirt. We then overfilled the grave with more dirt and tamped down again. Finally, we tossed the director's feeble pile of flowers onto the grave. The whole operation took about ten minutes. We were both sweaty, wet and filthy. The director tipped us the usual $5 apiece and ran into the hearse. Off they went, a tiny entourage, back to their well-appointed offices. Ron and I picked up our tools and rode the tractor back to Ship's office. Thunder still rolled across the Bay, but the rain had let up. Ship gave us the day off, and Ron snuck my underage ass into his favorite watering hole, where we spent the balance of the afternooon drinking beer and playing pool. Our friend Quaalude showed up. He used to be a gravedigger but got fired for some hush-hush offense.
"So you guys had an Elenor today, huh?" Quaalude asked.
"Yeah," Ron replied, "it rained like crazy. I usually like Elenors. But this one sucked, man."
He was right. It did suck. But it sucked even more for Elenor.
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