The Gravedigger

Stella Jorgensen

In the cold light of dawn, the gravedigger of Innish Shoan slammed his shovel into the ground. His stooped back rippled under the sleet, and long sinewy arms connected to hands so calloused it was the handle of the shovel that was whittled away over many, many years. There was rhythm to his work. The gravedigger cherished frozen earth.

He had dug nearly every grave in this small town and if he had not, his father had before him and his father before that. Grave digging is not something one falls into, you see. The gravedigger, his father, and his grandfather before him took pride in their work. It was their hands, in Innish Shoan, that sculpted the afterlife, after all. In death and life and profession, these men fastened what the townspeople may have seen as a generational burden to their backs with dignity. 

The gravedigger lived a simple life in his forgotten corner of time and space. He had no children, but a wife whom he loved deeply. His house had two rooms, one for cooking and eating, one for sleeping and lovemaking, and on occasion, when he and his wife were young, the purposes of the two were fluid. They both missed those days, when winter meant whiskey and wine, whistling out the door, woodsmoke to wrap them on cold evenings in coils of hickory. 

Back then, she would accompany him to the graves in summer. She would sit on a blanket in the grass, tossing daisies into his piles of fresh earth, watching the muscles in his back gleam and move like oceans tossing underneath his skin. “When you dig my grave,” she teased, “I want it to be perfect. I want the corners to be square, not an inch under six feet. I want the bottom to be level, no rocks to disturb me in my rest.” 

“I won’t dig your grave,” he’d respond. “For as we’re united in life, so will we be in death. I cannot dig your grave, for I will be lying in it with you.” 

She’d laugh at this. “You cannot master death, just like you cannot master me, my love. Death and I are wild, you cannot pin us down.” He would then proceed to do exactly that. On the blanket, in the summer sun, flirting and loving next to the rows of open graves. 

The gravedigger and his wife missed those days. The twilight of their middle age brought arthritis to the man’s hands, left a perpetual curve in his back, and more and more his posture resembled a scythe rather than the straight pine of his youth. Yet the two were happy. He had his work, his noble pursuit of digging, and she, her health, her noble pursuit of living. 

Each day, he would kiss her head under the blankets before slipping out the door into the dim of a northern morning. When she rose later, if he had forgotten his bread and cheese (as happened more and more often these days), she would wrap them up under her scarves and walk slowly to the graveyard to find him. “Don’t be digging my grave just yet,” she’d chide. “Who will bring you your sandwiches if I am buried in the ground?” 

“I won’t need my sandwiches, love,” he’d reply. “I’ll be in the ground with you.” Their little joke. You see, to be a gravedigger and a gravedigger’s wife, one must accept the importance of laughter in the graveyard, for what else is there? 

Innish Shoan was not a bright place in winter. The sun rose too late and set too early, and the thermometer hovered just between very cold and even colder, so cold that cows on occasion had to be woken in the night and moved lest they freeze. Everyone in Innish Shoan remembers the winter when little Beck licked the pole of the streetlamp outside the schoolhouse and, by the time his father arrived, he could only pull the boy's head back firmly, ripping off the top layer of skin because his tongue had frozen so solidly to the metal. The gravedigger dug Beck’s father’s grave the next winter, and little Beck is remembered more for his incident with the lamp pole than for his orphanage.

Except by the gravedigger, who remembered every grave he’d ever dug. He struggled with that these days and carried the guilt of one who has misplaced something valuable, like a wedding ring or the coins for the passage of a stranger on the river Styx. 

The gravedigger's wife was right, of course, and it came to pass that one winter she fell ill. The gravedigger had many graves to dig that winter, for it was particularly cold. Small graves, long graves, graves of no notable size or shape, remarkable only in their number. The ground took and took and froze and froze, and the people of Innish Shoan wondered in the taverns and at the church how the poor digger, who was an old man, might continue his labor and who might continue it when he was gone. 

This concern bothered the gravedigger little in his distracted state. He tended to his wife at her bedside with great care, hastening from his work each day to swaddle her in blankets and kiss her sweating forehead. The old man sang as he bathed her, and for moments at a time she would return to him, humming along to the love songs of their youth. 

Mostly, in those final days, while her physical body turned beneath the sheets in their little cottage, she seemed to be elsewhere. Her mind floated freely beyond the confines of their bed as Death crept from the corners, lifting the blankets and claiming first her pinky toes and then the rest of her body one inch at a time. The poor gravedigger could only hold her, and when the last of her spirit finally answered Death’s beckoning call, there was just one thing left to do: dig her a perfect grave. 

This was his final task, he thought to himself. What does one do in life when life itself seems to have moved on from the world? 

He did not know how to make the soup she had made each winter night for fifty years. He made the bed, and the corners fell from their places no matter how carefully he tucked them in. The fire in the stove went out, he had diligently chopped the wood each day for the entirety of their marriage but had somehow failed to master the secret of nurturing a newborn flame into grown fire, no matter how much kindling he added to the pile. 

More than these things, her absence manifested in his stomach as a fear of the world around him, growing in his heart from a profound loneliness. He decided when her grave was perfect, he would lay down beside her. The thought of dirt filling his mouth seemed peaceful. He did not know what else to do, so three mornings after her death while his wife’s body lay resting in the church, he began to dig. 

The shovel and the frozen ground felt comfortingly familiar to the gravedigger. Despite his grief, he kept a rhythm to his work. The handle of his tool grew warm rubbing against the calluses of his palms, and while the digging was slow, it was steady. There was nobody to bring him bread and cheese at noon, and without her reminding him, he kept digging right through lunch. The repetitive labor felt good in his body; his muscles loosened, steam seeped from his shirt into the January air. 

Before long, the world outside grew quieter. The toll of the church bell was only a very distant music, and the chickens and cows and children and men and women of the village were muted as he lost himself entirely in the task at hand. A perfect grave. Not an inch less than six feet. No rocks to disturb her in her rest.

Eventually, the gravedigger began to grow very warm. He removed his shirt, which was odd for such a cold day. Dusk came sooner than he expected, and in what felt like very little time at all, he was having difficulty seeing the rocks that clanked against the edge of his shovel. He paused to listen to the church bell that usually marked the end of each day’s work, and in doing so, found surprisingly he could not hear the town at all. 

He stopped digging and spun around, looked up and down, and realized quite suddenly that he had dug himself very deep into the ground. The sky glimmered in a small square above him, and he was struck by the realization that while his wife remained out there, in the fresh, cool air, it was he who found himself swallowed by the warm embrace of the earth, entirely unable to climb out. 

The gravedigger pondered his situation for a few moments and concluded that there was very little he could do to get back up. The only way he decided was to continue digging. He would dig to the center of the earth, and though he was fairly certain it had never been done before, he would perhaps dig himself out the other side. 

A strange calm settled over his spirit as he once again grasped his shovel in his hands. “Here stands the gravedigger of Innish Shoan,” he said aloud to no one in particular. “He is about to embark upon the strangest of journeys.” 

As he commenced his digging, the gravedigger noted the warmth that had earlier prompted the loss of his shirt, and the walls of his hole began to glow a soft red. In the heat and exertion, he felt faint, and he noticed his head spinning ever so slightly. As he continued on, he longed for his bread and cheese, the embrace of his wife, and even the clucking of the hens in the  town above. Each face he passed on the walk to and from the graveyard each day seemed suddenly important, the people of the town he’d never cared for much circled through his head as he contemplated his quest toward the center of the planet and what he left behind and above. No matter how much he thought, he arrived time and time again at the same simple conclusion: his quest may be senseless, but to stop now would be equally so. He dug on.

Deep in the center of the earth, there exists a great reckoning. Some call it God, some call it Fate, some simply accept that it is the nature of the universe. But in the center of the earth, this force burns red hot. In underground chambers, molten rock smolders and pulses, and sometimes there are cracks in the surface of the planet from which fragments of this force might escape in steam or in the fiery lava that long ago formed the mountains and the stones and the beginnings of life itself. 

And there are beings there too, in the center of the earth, who stoke that eternal hearth. To  the mortal eye they are but shadows floating from wall to wall, but far from the goings-on of the  mortal world, they sweat and sing, toiling in perpetuity to feed those fires that make up the  lifeblood of the world. They take the bodies of the dead and the prayers of the living alike,  recycling what is tired and broken through hot, pulsating pools, and push them once again to the  crust where they emerge, renewed, to face the trials and turmoil of the human world. These beings guard their secrets well against the Pirates and the Greeks and the Capitalists who yearn for fountains of eternal youth and power, and it is not once in a blue moon but only once every few eternities that a human man enters that sacred realm. The gravedigger was one such man.

As he neared the center of the world, the gravedigger, who, like all mortal men, knew nothing of the immortal universe (which was only very slightly less than his wife who, like all mortal women, knew something innate about eternity), grew very, very hot. The hole he had dug grew narrower, winding away above his head, and he was reminded of a tale his wife had once told long ago… Something about a young girl falling into a rabbit hole. 

All alone under the ground, the gravedigger began to feel afraid. He kept on. As he  neared the center of the earth, he felt a tug on his psyche, almost like comfort, calling to him  until, one shovelful at a time, he noticed the space around him grow wider. The tunnel above his head disappeared behind him, and to his great surprise, his path forward began crossing with other tunnels, as if great worms had perhaps come before him to similarly sculpt the inside of the world. With one final push from his shovel, the wall of dirt in front of him fell away, and he found himself at the edge of a cavernous space. Stepping forward, he discovered the source of the heat, and peering downward, stared right into a belching, burping, gaseous pool of life. 

The gravedigger felt a rapture come over him, dousing his tired body in a lightness he hadn’t felt in years. He could feel the presence of his wife, and the presence of his mother and father and grandfather, and little Beck’s father, too, and that of the occupant of every grave he’d ever dug in the town of Innish Shoan. For the first time that week, he felt a great desire to breathe. 

He looked behind him and upward, at the grave he had dug himself, and imagined the frozen air and the church bells and the sleeping cows and the streetlamps and churches and taverns he’d never considered remarkable. Mostly he thought of his unmade bed and two-room cottage, one room for eating and cooking, the other for sleeping and lovemaking, and he considered the other side of the globe somewhere far below and somehow above as well. The pool below gurgled and shifted and he could feel the steam from its depths wrapping itself into his nostrils and over his bare chest. It was not uncomfortable, but rather a sensuous embrace of his aching body. He could sense Death lay within that pool, but Death was an old friend to the gravedigger, and he was not entirely afraid. He could sense Life below the waters as well, and came quietly to understand Life and Death not as enemies, but lovers, intertwined and inseparable in the womb of the earth. 

Considering the journey ahead, he wrapped himself tightly in his fear and in his uncertainty. He held his loneliness closest, nestled inside his ribcage where it rubbed against the walls of his beating heart, where he also held his joy. His journey was senseless, to dig through the entire world, but would it not be equally senseless to give up here? He inhaled deeply, and grasped his shovel tightly in his ancient, calloused hands. He took one look at the path he had traveled, and just before he dove into the pool, he thought he could make out the tiniest pinpoint of sky.