Chapter 22: The Grave
Ernesto Reyes was born on the eleventh of March, 1941, in a house with a dirt floor, and he died on a Tuesday eighty-one years later in a bed we had to argue him into. Every year on his birthday I drive Midnight out to St. Brigid's cemetery on the hill road, and this year, the first year after everything, I had more to report than usual.
Midnight does not care for the cemetery road. It is gravel, and she was built for the decades when gravel was a promise and not a condition. I take it slow. The brass plate my father polished with his own hands catches the light on the dash, and the glovebox holds his registration card from 1983, the paper soft as a dollar bill that's been through the wash. I do not let the car sit and cool at the grave. Pop always said an engine, like a man, should be spoken to while it's warm.
He picked this hill himself, years before he needed it, the way he picked out the Mustang โ standing in a field of other men's second choices, saying, "That one. That one's got years in it." He bought the plot and the car in the same decade and maintained them with the same philosophy: pay a little all along, and neither one will surprise you. The car he could tend weekly. The plot he tended by living so that the eventual tenant would be presentable.
"Well," I said to the granite, which is a listener of the first rank, never interrupting, never checking a phone. "You'd have liked some of it and you'd have handled the rest better."
I told him about the picnic at the lake, and the boy โ nineteen, all appetite and no map โ setting his heart on the car the way young men do, as if wanting were a form of title. I told him about the mother, and the telephone, and the officers standing in my yard asking a retired chief of police whether his own car was stolen, out of his own garage, where it had sat since before some of them were born. I told him about the court, which is a place where the truth goes to get its hair combed. I told him about the fine, and the hours, and the hairnet, because Pop appreciated a detail that did the work of a paragraph.
Then I told him about the boy with the bucket.
"Saturdays now, Pop. His own car. He washes it like it's going to be inspected by God. He's learning the two-bucket method and the patience that goes with it, and he asked me last week โ asked me, you'll note, in the form of a question โ whether a clay bar would help the Camry's hood. I said it would help the car. I'm still deciding what it does for the boy."
I told him about the rebuilding years, too, because a grave is the one place a man can admit he misses work. The winter we pulled the engine and set it on the stand in his garage, and he made me name every part I touched before I was allowed to touch it. "A thing you can't name, you don't respect yet, Samuel." I was thirty years old and a sergeant of police, and I stood in that cold garage reciting "intake manifold" like a schoolboy, and I have never once, in all the years since, resented the lesson. The car out front was the diploma. I told the granite that, too.
The wind did what it does on that hill. A groundskeeper's cart rattled past below, and neither of us hurried. Somewhere below, the town went on being the town: the grain elevator, the water tower with his name half the letters it once had, the lake showing through the trees like a kept secret.
"You'd have handled her with coffee first," I told him. "Sat her on the porch, poured her a cup, let her hear herself talk until the meanness ran out of the story. I handled her with paper. Affidavits. Statements. The whole cold toolbox. We both got there, old man. It just took me longer and cost the county more."
I stood a while. Grief, at my age, is not a storm anymore. It is a speed limit. You can drive inside it, most days, and get where you're going, and some days you notice every sign. March in Tennessee is built for it: everything about to bloom, nothing bloomed yet, the whole world holding at thirty-five in a forty zone.
I patted the granite the way he used to pat Midnight's fender, checking nothing, confirming everything, and I drove home at thirty-five in a forty zone with the windows down, one hand on the wheel he taught me to hold at nine and three, and the engine saying its low rosary all the way down the hill.