just enough light

Raymond “Digger” Cummings had seen this coming for several years. Digger was the grounds keeper and record keeper for Hillside Cemetery, and had been so for more than 20 years. Digger was slim, some might call him scrawny, with a large adam’s apple for a man his size, and receding hairline always covered with a dirty baseball cap. Digger’s nickname did not come from his job at the cemetery. He’d had the nickname for so long, no one in town associated it with his work with the cemetery backhoe. Only the rare newcomer to town recognized the irony of his name. He had been “Digger” since high school when he played shortstop. He was a talented and scrappy player, and Coach Baggett had said Raymond could dig a grounder out of a gopher hole and still throw out the runner. Teammates started calling him “Digger” and it stuck.

Taking care of the cemetery did not require much of Digger’s time, and it paid almost nothing, so he busied himself as the town’s handyman. He could fix almost anything mechanical or electrical, he could build anything you wanted, often without drawing up any plans. He did construction, plumbing, electrical work, or painting for anyone who called. If someone could pay his full fee, that’s what he charged. If he knew they couldn’t, he adjusted downward. It was just understood.

As the keeper of Hillside Cemetery, Digger gave a report every year to the City Board. He had warned them several years back that the number of cemetery plots still available was diminishing quickly, but the matter was not taken seriously by the Board. A quick comment of, “That’s a lot of land with a lot of empty spaces,” and the matter was dismissed. When he brought it up again two years later, the mayor at the time, A. J. Barnett himself, had dismissed it with a joke about “people just dyin’ to git in there” and then a casual “We’ll look into it,” which he did not.

Digger’s warning was now a reality. The town of Bynum had run out of cemetery space. When A. J. contacted the Board about this “new” development, they finally took it seriously. They spent a fair amount of time in their next meeting asking useless questions of each other, just as A. J. had asked Digger. “How can this be?” “How did this happen?” “What about those spaces without stones?” It was only after about 45 minutes of useless blaming in the form of rhetorical questions that Herb Beasley asked the right question. “So what are we going to do about this?”

Everyone suddenly got as quiet as a prayer meeting. Board members began glancing around the room, looking at the ceiling, inspecting their fingernails, and clearing their throats. Finally, Harriet Goodman, a teller at the bank, a soprano in the Baptist Church choir, and a regular attender of the board meetings, raised her hand and said, “The town owns the land to the west of the cemetery. Can’t we just extend it that direction?”

With that simple question, all the Board members were suddenly smarter than they were the moment before.  “Well, of course we could.” “I think we should extend the cemetery to the west.” “The town owns that land, you know.” And with that, the Board appointed two of its members to look into the matter and bring a solid recommendation to the next month’s meeting. All adjourned feeling pretty good about themselves.

The oak trees around the cemetery had survived more than a hundred frigid winters and blazing summers. They had survived drought, floods, insects and fungus, and more than a few nearby tornados. All but one. As fate would have it, the one oak that had not survived was at the far west end of the cemetery, exactly at the end of the road that cut through the center. A lightning strike took it out more than a decade before. It was cut down after a contentious City Board meeting, and since then a gap in the trees stood out like a giant smile with a front tooth missing. No replacement was planted because a sapling would have looked more out of place than the gap. At least the gap, given its location in the middle of the row, didn’t detract from the symmetry. When it became clear that the road could be extended directly through the gap in the trees, some suddenly concluded that the lightning strike had been providential, and cutting it down, despite the earlier disagreements, was now seen as a divine sign that this was what needed to be done. Everyone involved breathed a sigh of relief that order would soon be restored.

At the next meeting, board members were more enthused than anyone could remember. Sybil Townsend leaned over to her neighbor, Gladys Whitney, and whispered, “I haven’t seen all of them smile at the same time since the town got cable.” The board discussed a plan to take out a 20-foot section of the fence, extend the road between the trees and through that gap, and erect a new fence to enclose the Hillside Cemetery annex, thus increasing the acreage by 40%. These plans were approved with rousing unanimity. Reed Zeigler, Bynum’s welder and machinist, agreed to cut the section of the fence and begin work on the new fence for his standard hourly fee. Larry Belvin would bulldoze the road and level the land where the fence would be erected. All seemed happy with the plans that had begun to take shape. The Board decided to have the drawings, the contracts, and the expenditures all in place for approval at the next meeting. Until Digger spoke up.

“We have a snag.  Somebody owns the four plots where the road is going to be dug.”