My Father the Grave-Digger

I grew up in a little shack bordering the Windermere village cemetery. My father was a grave-digger. My father was a silent, tall, stocky man. He had a thick beard that stuck out at odd angles and tiny squinty eyes. He always wore a flat cap, brown and dirty with weather and never washed. He wore great big boots that clunked whenever he walked. The children in the village said that he was the Reaper, and that whenever you heard the tell-tale clunk-clunk-clunk of those boots, you were next on his list. 

When I eavesdropped on other children in the village (because they would not let me near them) I would catch them saying things like, “He’s a monster, and hidden underneath that beard is a black gaping hole of a mouth that he devours his victims with,” or, “Beware of that man! Beware when you hear those boots, because that means he’ll strike you over the head with that shovel of his and drag you down into the earth and bury you alive!” 

Needless to say, he was not well liked. He was an outsider—a man from “somewhere in Scandinavia” that spoke broken English living in a tiny village, far removed from any major town, nestled and isolated in the beating heart of the English countryside. Why he came here, even I cannot say. I wanted to believe that he either waded across the English channel, or perhaps sailed on a Viking ship and was shipwrecked, or else he stole away on a merchant ship and leapt overboard once he saw shore. The stories got wilder the more I thought about them, I wanted to believe them all. Regardless, my father was always a figure of mystery in my life, his persona shrouded much like the mists that rolled over the cemetery at dawn. 

In addition to digging graves, my father ran the whole cemetery. He arranged the funerals, tended the grounds, and ensured that animals never disturbed those at rest. He kept a rifle high on a shelf in the shack to shoot animals and expertly set traps for them. There was also, in the shack, nestled in the corner, a large spear, for killing animals, which he liked to use better than the rifle, and so the rifle collected dust. 

I always thought it looked like a relic from a bygone era. It was tall, taller than me, worn. The grains of the wood were harsh and stood out, gnarled battle scars of weather and the hunt. The tree it was made from was all the way in Scandinavia somewhere, likely cut up and chewed out by storms and spit out by the world that never wanted it, but stubbornly clinging to bare rock with its strong roots, never letting go. Water had not worn away at the wood and it still remained, though ugly and bruised, intact and obstinate. At its tip was a sharp stone, which though not as ugly and gnarled as the wood (for it was newer and had been replaced) was strong and solid. 

I imagined it had been cut from a deep place off the coast somewhere because it had a shining, ethereal quality. I could sense that the stone endeavored to never lose its purity, to remember the place from whence it came—the underbelly of the waves where light dances through the water. 

He dug the graves; he dug up beautiful, fresh earth, and filled it with corpses. And yet, despite what anyone said, the cemetery was still beautiful. 

Most of it was untouched. Half of it was surrounded by a dense cluster of trees, save for a little pathway up to the church in the west, but the other half opened up into rolling hills that were surrounded by heather, dotted sparsely with a few trees that lit up when the sun hit it. 

The village didn’t care about those hills to the north though. Windermere, when it was not concerned with itself, only focused on the south, for it was from the south that was our link to civilization, to goods, to news. But I didn’t care much for the outside world, for ‘civilization.’ 

I always grew up as (what the elderly women in the Windermere called) a “wild girl.” I would spend the day running through the cemetery until my father found me and rebuked me for disturbing the dead. Then I would run into the woods and pick berries. I would run everywhere barefoot, letting my red hair flow behind me in the wind. When I was found by the village-people, however, I was rebuked. They always found something bad to say about me. I was the worst possible mix of obstinance and expression, of purpose and flightiness, and of course, of genetics. 

I don’t really know the full meaning of the word genetics, but from what I’ve been able to make out, part of it has to do with your parents and their ancestry. My father, of course, doesn’t speak English very well and is a larger-than-life figure from Scandinavia that the English in our village have always distrusted. And my mother is Irish—an even more hated figure than my father. 

When I try to remember what my mother looked like, I look at my reflection in a puddle or a pond. My father told me that I remind him of her with my brilliant red hair, freckles, and grey eyes, with my lanky frame, with my gentle hands, with my skin that burns easily, with my happy and free manner. It makes his face crinkle to think of my mother, but it also makes him sad. Because eleven years ago, he had to dig a grave for her, and ever since then, he’s spoken precious few words. 

*

I was born fifteen years ago, on January 31st. My father has only told me a few scarce details between the time I was born and the time my mother died, and from those details, I’ve filled the gaps. The story (his combined with a little bit of mine) goes like this: My mother was in labor for nearly two days, and when she finally gave birth to me, she fell very ill. No one in the village would help her, on account of her being Irish, and her husband being Scandinavian, and she was bedridden for quite a few months after. Eventually, however, she began to feel better. I can hardly picture my father as one to sit by one’s bed all night and spoon-feed them, but from the way he talks about my mother, I imagine that’s exactly what he did. Soon, she was able to go outside and later, able to walk and be “normal” again. It seemed like she was on the mend for the better, until March 18th of my fourth year of life. 

It was early morning, just after sunrise. We were all apparently early risers—me, the wailing toddler, my father, the Grave-Digger, and my mother, the caretaker. My father rose early to dig a new grave for an elderly man who had just died in the village while my mother took me out into the heather fields to play. 

Now, here is where my father’s account and mine differ—parts of this day were some of my earliest memories, which I have never told my father and never forgotten. I remember fragments and flashes—just simply running through the heather fields, my mother chasing after me, both of us laughing—Her shouting, “You can’t run forever!”—Sliding down a steep slope towards a rushing stream—My mother calling out for me to stop, running after me on gravely, slick, steep earth—Her crying out and a thud!  behind me as she tumbled past—Me not even caring, not even turning around—A sharp crack—Turning to see my mother’s body, head twisted at an unnatural angle, lying on a rock beside the stream one instant, and in the next, swept away—

—There’s red on the rock and on the water.—

—Turning to begin to run back to the shack, thinking about hurling myself into bed, trying to pretend to my father that I wasn’t there by the stream, that I didn’t see that red in water, that the words “You can’t run forever” didn’t replay over and over again in my mind. 

My father told me that he found her at the little pond below the village that afternoon, after he had gone looking for her—neck broken, face blue from suffocation, cold to the touch. He cried over her dead body. He said later that she probably went to collect water from the stream, but the water took her and she hit her head on a rock in the water. If only I had kept my eye on you and wasn’t so busy digging those damn graves, he told me. 

But grave-digging was his profession, his art, his craft. The cemetery was his home, and there was no other place to bury her than the Windermere village cemetery. So, with a heavy heart, and a heavy burden upon his back, my father the grave-digger trudged through the hills, carrying his dead wife. He didn’t sleep that night. But a piece of his soul did—it never awoke again. When I picture my father in my mind, I see how he looked that night—a lone silhouette on a misty hill where the moon dances around headstones, illuminating a place of ghosts and of a man half-alive himself. 

That morning, my father buried my mother in a grave that sat atop the northern hill of the cemetery. It looked over undisturbed fields of heather. My mother would’ve liked it there. 

To this day, I haven’t visited my mother’s grave on my own. On the anniversary of her death, my father will grab me by the shoulder and we will trudge up the hill—him leading, me begrudgingly following. And when we reach the grave, he whispers things that I can’t hear—prayers. And I stand, looking away from my mother’s grave, whose death I caused, whose death I didn’t say anything about. I can’t look at the grave because when I do, the headstone is bathed in red, my mother is slumped against the side, and her neck languishes over top of the headstone. And of course, the corpse mumbles the words—“You can’t run forever.”

My imagination is my best and worst friend in that way. Best, in that it helps me to bend the sad reality I live in, the various titles tied to my identity—daughter of a grave-digger, shunned, careless murderer— by giving me a path to avoidance. Worst, in that my imagination makes me see her in everything, when I least expect it or least want it. I see her in my reflection, I see her in the heather dancing in the wind. (I swear I can see her dancing too.) It’s the worst at night, when I’m walking among graves that seemed so pleasant and still during the day, that grow during the night, creating long shadows that stretch across the cemetery. Some nights, I feel inspired, an imaginative story on my lips looking across the cemetery  where beauty and loss collide. But others, I feel oppressed. I was convinced my mother’s face was hiding behind headstones and her lanky shadow was creeping up behind me, and that worst of all—my father would come up behind me and know what I had done. 

The night after the eleventh anniversary of my mother’s death, I steeled up the courage to walk up to her grave. The sky was a deathly, suffocating blue; the moon dim and clouds passing in front of what little light emanated from it. Each step was a mile, each moment eons. When I made my way up to the top of the hill, I could barely see my mother’s grave, but I felt like she could still see me. She was still watching me, still disapproving of me. She was choking me, and I slammed down onto the hard dirt to gasp for air. I can’t run forever. I thought. Tears streamed down my face and I was seized with a conviction that I couldn’t stay in this place any longer. 

Four months later, I ran away. 

*

My father, the grave-digger, was always a distant man. I always thought he was more a father out of duty and obligation than love and that, out of all the many days that he wasn’t digging graves, he was the beating heart of the cemetery, not a presence in his daughter’s life. He chose to identify with that part of his identity—the Grave-Digger—rather than Father. 

My Father the Grave-Digger just became Grave-Digger. (At least, that’s what I told myself when I ran away.)

I went from town to town looking for work, often pretending I was a boy, doing odd jobs, farm work. Eventually, I made my way down to Bath and there I met a young man called William. Many were loath to employ the young Irish woman except for menial jobs, but William hired me as a cleaner in his family’s library, and, when he learned I didn’t know how to read, took it upon himself to teach me. Eventually, I was promoted to librarian. 

I don’t remember when I realized I was in love with him, only that, when he proposed to me after three years, I knew this was what made the world spin. And I became more assured of my love for him when we welcomed our children Emily and Richard into the world, and more so assured of my love when he died of a sudden flu after Richard’s eighth birthday. For on the day of his death, I had never felt a heartbreak so rich or so painful that my soul threatened to tear itself apart.

For the burial, the family had hired a grave-digger, and he came with a shovel slung over his shoulder to the cemetery at the nearest church two nights before the funeral. But I was there—I had gone to wait for him ever since I had heard about him because the restlessness within me was so excruciating that I felt I had to do something, the one thing I had seen all my childhood. 

I gave the grave-digger money for his shovel, and for his confidence. He obliged, and, relieved, went on his way. After all those years of watching my father, breaking the first bit of dirt up with my shovel was something I felt I was always meant to do. It was cathartic, relaxing, shoving my older, more tired arms down and up, down and up, down and up. I found myself digging up those old memories, those flashes of red on my mother’s headstone and on the rock by the stream. 

But in this moment, in this much pain, it didn’t bother me anymore. The red washes down the stream and I’m carried with it, down into swirling depths, but not suffocating. Rather, from the underbelly of the waves, light dances through the swirling water, kissing my eyes and cutting me deep like a spear tip.

Before I knew it, the sun had risen and I became aware of my arms. They burned and shook. Sweat dripped off my brow and made gripping the handle of the shovel difficult. Splinters dotted the pads of my fingertips and  fingers and blood crept across my fingernails, dirt embedded beneath them. And still I kept digging.

I kept digging, imagining I was hearing the clunk-clunk-clunk of my father’s boots as he walked around the edge of the grave. In some ways, I thought he was judging me but in others, I thought he was watching over me. Suddenly, sleep washed over me, and, after climbing out of the grave, I crawled into the shade of some nearby trees and fell asleep. 

*

Though I never remarried, I always thought that perhaps I could. After digging that grave for my husband, it was like a great burden had been lifted off my soldiers—I had given him a place to rest, and with that, I felt like I could—not move on, but also not dwell on the grave and find time to spend with my children. 

When my children were in their early adolescence, I took them to the village I was born in. The heathered hills, the woods around the cemetery, the petty villagers—they were all the same. Except for one thing—my father had recently died. The town was void of a grave-digger. 

The town would have asked me, but now I was a respectable widow, married into a great family—not at all the “wild girl” I had been as the grave-digger’s daughter. 

I wondered, after I came back, if when I left, I tormented my father greatly, not only because of my absence, but because there was no grave to dig, no place to bury his feelings about his daughter. Or perhaps he dug a grave for my memory, not content to let me wash away like my mother’s body into the stream. 

Though I never knew, coming back to this place, where the sunlight caught the headstones and lit up the heather fields, and where the woods called, I realized that I could dig another grave for my father before I left. I wouldn’t run forever. 

The whole village came out to watch me, silently. They didn’t whisper or gossip as usual, but just watched as I rolled up my sleeves and shoved my shovel into the earth. The villagers watched as the father’s legacy was passed down to his Daughter, the Grave-Digger.