Page 7

7

THE FIRST GRAVE

In the late afternoon, when Vida returns from the placer mine, the breeze is coming from the east, and on it she can smell a faint trace of marijuana smoke. The sun is balanced on the highest peaks of the western mountains, its light slanting across the meadow at the ideal angle to paint the lenses of the binoculars orange, but she doesn’t bother surveying the eastern tree line for the sentinel.

He will not watch forever. When he’s done watching, he will pay her a visit for whatever purpose. Only then will she disrupt her day to take the time needed to deal with him.

She doesn’t go directly to the house, but first follows the memorial path.

Although she has a riding lawn mower, she never cuts all of this expansive grassland. As needed, she crops it in a radius of thirty feet around the house, shears a pathway to the center of the meadow, and mows an eight-foot-wide clearing around the headstone that bears her uncle’s name.

This is a county that still allows burial on private property under certain circumstances and for a consideration. She had dug the grave with her uncle’s backhoe, which he had used to excavate a new septic tank two years before Vida came to live here and which he had taught her to operate when she was sixteen, so she might be able to prepare his resting place when the time came. The funeral home transported the casket to the site and lowered it into the grave.

In addition to the name, the only other thing incised in the gray granite is a line of verse that he chose: I SAID TO MY SOUL , BE STILL , AND LET THE DARK COME UPON YOU .

From a pocket of her jacket, she produces a small drawstring bag of the softest cotton, which contains what she panned from the placer mine today. “It was a nice haul, Uncle. When I was done, I raked the dig, filled it in, and smoothed it over so it isn’t a wound in the earth. Just as you taught me. A doe came to visit with her fawn. The little one was all legs and curiosity, but the mother kept it at a distance. I was surprised to see a buck, its growing antlers velvety. I hope it was the father of the fawn. It’s nice to think it might’ve bonded with the doe for the long haul rather than for one season. Anyway, I’ll work the stones to your standards. I haven’t lost a customer in the past ten years. Some of them swear you must still be alive and on the job. Well, in a way, you are.”

On this Monday in May, as the sun slips from sight, the western mountains are crowned with carnelian red. The darkling eastern sky is sapphire blue and diamonded.