On Such a Day as This

Creeks swollen to the lip of their banks with a slate-gray sky fat with more rain, and I can think of nothing but the day Earl and I lowered her into the earth. It was steady rain, then, like today, but it made no difference to Mrs. Baxter, sealed as she was in her gleaming brown casket.

The ground was thick with water, down to three or four feet, and the continuing showers met with no accommodation, forcing small rivulets to gather into larger ones in searching for a watercourse. At a safe distance, half-hidden in copse of trees, we watched the mourners gathered at the grave, the preacher's murmurs adding little to the steady patter of rain on the carpet of dead oak leaves.

"Raining like a cow pissing on a flat rock," said Earl, who then turned his head and spat a brown stream toward the base of the nearest tree.

His exact meaning was lost on me, as was much of the rural wisdom he imparted. I originally thought him to be little more than a simpleton. Earl - a man with an exact understanding of what was important in his life - confined his interests to simple pleasures, like the coon dogs he kept boxed in the back of his pickup, ready at a moment's notice to seek and tree a passing animal. He might never have crossed the county line but for our work, and yet he was infinitely more worldly than was I, a white-bread sixteen year old, dangerously naive.

Slanting rain slipped under the apiaceous canopy of floating black umbrellas, but even in such conditions there exists a time standard as to denote proper and fitting respect, and we had the good fortune to be in the hands of an experienced preacher man who knew that limit. He talked not a minute longer, briskly closing up the well-thumbed bible he had kept so near to his thin necktie, then moved toward the next-of-kin, a stalk of a man who was likely Mr. Baxter. The gathering of people drifted along in a slow wake until the waiting undertaker folded the little man into the back of the black Cadillac, and at that point the crowd set off like a shot to the dry interiors of the various parked cars.

It was time.

Dangling hammers at our thighs, Earl and I crossed to the plastic grass we had spread to soften the look of the raw cut in the ground, a corner of which I folded back to reveal the top of the pine box. I dragged furiously at the lid. It would have been practical to wait for Earl, but I believed it was only through these spontaneous acts that I could disprove his impression that I was but a soft city-boy. When he did not take hold of his end, I finally looked up to see what Earl had already discovered.

"Water's come up," he said, and looking down I comprehended his meaning completely.

The hole in which the departed would be lain was freshly dug, else it might have been as full as Earl's Sunday bath. As it was, the pine box into which we intended to lower the casket was floating in quickly-rising water. The several streams that had been coursing along the ground had discovered a destination, and ran cascading in torrents over the edge and into the collecting basin of Mrs. Baxter's grave.

It was apparent by their expressions that the two county gravediggers were appalled by the development, and they stood with their muddied boots at the edge of the hole, angled back, defying gravity, leaning stiff-backed and wide-eyed, as though Mrs. Baxter herself might rise up and shout at them in her disapproval. Earl - ever steadfast - coughed a suggestion and the county men steadied the boat of the box while I turned the cranking mechanism that slowly lowered the coffin. I looked up and saw Earl, his arms bulging as he maneuvered the pine top, ready to apply it at once to the box, now no longer floating. He held the lid at an angle, like a medieval shield, guarding the county men against what they could not see, which was the water pouring over the sides of the pine box, lapping up against the lacquered casket.

Earl's eyes were bright beneath furrowed brows, the look of a captain in battle, assessing and assaying, directing his charges. We were compliant at once, and even I - the dubious city boy - recognized his command of the situation.

Without looking in my direction, Earl growled at me to remove the canvas straps, "Quick," he said, and there was no other way but to lay down in the slick mud. I dangled myself into Mrs. Baxter's grave and jerked the straps from beneath her casket, tossing them up onto the ground. Earl flung the lid into position and we nailed it closed as quick as we had ever done it. I immediately set about the folding of the fake grass sections, loading them into the truck, taking down the square green tent we had positioned over the grave.

When my work was done I retired to the truck, where I sat dripping in the cab, blinking away water from the hair plastered against my scalp, shivering a little and waiting for Earl. Just as I turned to look for him, he motioned to me from across the way, and I opened the door again and climbed back out into the rain.

I could hear his soft argument with the county men as I approached, and it took only a glance to understand the basis for his position: Mrs. Baxter was not going without protest.

He instructed me to take a position opposite him, and we rode her floating pine box like a surfboard, pushing it into place while the county men struggled with spades full of wet earth, as Earl dictated a solution to our mutual difficulty. When the dirt covered my shoes, Earl ordered me out of the grave, and I climbed out directly. He marched along the peak of mud and dirt, stomping down a little as he moved along, securing the box against further motion with an almost religious rhythm.

Part of her grave we brought back with us, on Earl's boots and my city-shoes, mud in the fake green grass, smeared through the interior of the truck's cab, on the floor, the seats, and the door handles. Back at the warehouse, Earl uncoiled the garden hose and turned it on me, the stream not jetting from the faucet, but at a slower rate, much like that which was still pouring in on Mrs. Baxter when we pulled out of the cemetery. I heard the backhoe roar to life as Earl had turned the truck from the gravel onto the pavement, leaving the county men behind to complete the filling and tidy up the scene.

The rain has let up for the moment, and a brief stab of sunlight has broken through the cloud cover, indicating a false passage. I'll not go just yet.

When I do, I trust it will be with the reluctance of Mrs. Baxter, and if it should be on such as day as this, may someone of Earl's vision and eloquent focus be there to direct me.