My dad drives east on the blacktop road. The sun edges up before him, a shimmering red half-circle stretching out of its horizon bed. The color peers from behind dark blue cirrus clouds, the remnants of a lazy night. He tries to remember what his mom used to say: Red sky in the morning, sailors take warning; red sky at night, sailors delight. He better dig fast if it’s going to rain. He hates a muddy grave.

For a few moments on the road, he keeps pace with the train rumbling parallel to his right, clickety-clacking over iron tracks. That 40-car train will keep going, making stops in Owatonna, Rochester, Wisconsin, eventually stopping in Chicago to dump coal and grain. It speeds past the cemetery gates, this final destination for so many. And one month later, the final destination for my dad, when he’ll come through the same gates in the back of Walt Kinder’s hearse.

But for now, my father slows the truck and turns left into Woodville Cemetery. Shovels rattle against the sod-cutter in the back and the steel of the truck bed. The backhoe, sitting atop a trailer, sways and lurches with every bump, but the strong chain keeps it firmly anchored. In the truck, the voices of WCCO’s Boone and Erickson grow softer as he turns down the radio knob.

He winds his way past the brick vault. Only a couple of months ago there were 21 caskets in there that had accumulated like snowfall over the cold winter. They lingered in a physical purgatory, dead to the world but not yet put away. By April, spring’s thaw, it was time for the gravedigger to shepherd them to their resting places, and my father buried them all in five days. He worked that week in warp speed; everything seemed to move in fast motion, his arms and legs like hummingbird wings. Now, though, it’s June and his life runs in real-time. He’s back on schedule—mowing, trimming, digging in orderly fashion.

My father rolls down his window, turning the crank with his left hand. He draws into his lungs sweet air—a mixture of peas, dew, nearby petunias, dirt. To him, nothing smells quite this good. Not soap, not Old Spice, not his wood-burning stove in the winter that burps a wispy forest from the chimney and lingers all round the countryside. He waited years to work in fresh air. For fourteen years, right after high school until 1976, he slopped feed into hog troughs and cleaned shit off concrete floors using noxious chemicals that burned his nose. Years of coming home reeking of pig, even though he wasn’t a farmer.

The truck heads straight for the mozzy—the Parthenon-like mausoleum around which lie the Everetts and the Charleses—until he veers left and down the slight hill. Clear Lake is a mirror through the row of evergreens that mark Woodville’s northern edge. If he weren’t so busy, he’d take out the boat and snare some sunnies. But this year isn’t like the drought of ’88, where he fished for days on end. He couldn’t mow that summer because the sun transformed spongy cemetery grass into sharp pricks of brown.

He slows, jiggles the stick shift into first and shuts off the ignition. He climbs down from his seat; his boots meet grass. He reaches a long arm behind the pickup’s seat and palms the smooth cardboard carton. Picking up the package, he tilts it downward and a pack of Kool menthol 100s comes tumbling out. He grabs a matchbook from the dashboard, lights the cigarette, takes that first inhale, and coughs. A crackle of phlegm and debris rises from his lungs, into his windpipe and lands as a gob in his mouth. He turns his head and spits.

He continues puffing as he grabs the shovel and heavy sod-cutter from the pickup bed. His ropy forearms and biceps bulge against the weight as he carries the tools to the Schmidt headstone. He looks at the name: Rose Schmidt, 1910—. Eighty years old. Buried her husband, Jack, just a couple of years before. Easy grave, no trees nearby, loose soil. Not like the rocky clay in other parts of the cemetery. This shouldn’t take long.

He eases the sod-cutter into place. Presses a heavy boot against a bottom ledge and throws his 220 pounds against it. The blade slices through grass and takes three inches of soil with it. It cuts a strip a little more than a foot wide. He does this three more times, the black scar on the ground like a missing tooth. He rolls the strips into neat rounded curls and sets them next to the headstone.

He walks back to the truck and pulls out a piece of plywood. By the time he hauls it to the burgeoning grave, his breath comes in short, hurried gasps. He tries to breathe deeply, but it’s as if his lungs are coated in cement. He sets the plywood on the grass next to the grave. Without it, the backhoe’s weight would sink into the ground, kill the grass, leave ugly tire tracks. He’s not going to mess up his cemetery. He wants to leave no trace of himself. People have a right to come here and not have to look at ugly gashes in the grass. Kinder, the funeral director, likes to say visitors don’t like to be reminded a grave was dug. Dad doesn’t quite understand—how do they think their loved ones get into the ground?—but he plays along. So he sets a goal for himself at each grave: By the time he’s finished, by the time Rose Schmidt or whoever is in her final resting place, he wants it as if he wasn’t even here. He likes to think people imagine the body magically buried itself. That way, he knows he’s done a good job.

Back at the truck, he places a pair of wood planks against the trailer’s back lip and angles them down to the road. His forehead gives birth to tiny drops of perspiration. After taking off the chains that secured the backhoe, he pulls a small set of keys from his front pants pocket, fires the engine, maneuvers the backhoe from its perch and backs down the planks. Reversing direction, he putts over to the grave.

The controls for the smaller digging claw sit high atop the backhoe, so he climbs to the top seat. There, he’s a kid playing an arcade game, moving the claw forward, down, then back up with dirt in its mouth. Another hand movement swings the bucket to the right, where he plops dirt onto a second piece of plywood. He digs down roughly four-and-a-half feet. That will leave enough room between the top of the vault holding the coffin and the top of the grave once everything is in place.

The ground’s gaping hole looks rough, imprecise. The small bucket is no fine sculptor. So he shuts off the ignition and lets nature sink into his ears. Nothing but the constant chirp of robins and sparrows, and lonesome cry of mourning doves. He feels as if he’s breathing in through a damp washcloth, the air is so heavy. No doubt a thunderstorm will sprout later in the day. He draws a white hanky from his right pocket and wipes his brow. The sweat beads come faster and stronger. Each individual bead joins with its neighbor, like small creeks flowing together. Pretty soon he has the Mississippi running off his nose, even though it’s only 7 a.m.

The shovel rests on the Schmidt headstone; he takes it, lays it down on the ground near the grave’s edge. He descends into the hole. His head and shoulders rise above ground level. He likes this part, going down into the grave. There, in the darkness, he finds cool. That cool fans from the side walls, almost in waves, rhythmic like a breath, the earth itself a living being. He wields the shovel into the four corners, carving and smoothing dirt caked with roots and worms.

Here, he stops. Closes his eyes. Thinks. Rests. He quiets all thoughts of what he’s done and what he yet needs to do. He blocks thoughts of his wife, two daughters and a son, erases thoughts of what they need and want. He retreats, times his breath with the breath of the earth. He soaks in cool, lets it spill over his skin.

God filters into his thoughts. My dad thinks how a body will go into this space in a few hours, that it’s just a body, a shell, nothing more. The spirit will not rest here, instead drifting somewhere out there, above. He envisions heaven. He wonders if the spirit stays in one piece and floats up to St. Peter at the pearly gates to look down from above. Then he thinks maybe the spirit dissolves into a million pieces and descends gently upon everything in the world like a fine dust, that all spirits did that, that everything in the world holds an invisible layer of people gone past. Or maybe that spirit breaks into just enough pieces to stick to the places and people it loved most. He likes that thought best. When he goes, he’d like part of him to stick around here, this place, his space. This wouldn’t be a bad spot to linger for eternity.

Time slows, stops here. He’s down there thinking for only a couple of minutes, but his mind moves across a lifetime. He’s heard how people’s entire lives flash before them in the instant before death. How could that be? Did that happen to Rose Schmidt? What will he think about when his time comes?

*  *  *

I grew up in cemeteries. Well, not literally. I lived in the country, my yellow rambler house surrounded by corn fields and soybean fields, and barns and silos of every height and color dotted the landscape of south-central Minnesota’s fertile flatness. But my summers weren’t like the ones other kids lived, my friends who played in Waseca’s parks on playground sets or ball fields or swam off the sand of Clear Lake’s public beach. Instead, I ran around the necropolis, the city of the dead, taking in the fresh air, living and breathing and laughing as those below me no longer could. Spending so much time in a cemetery didn’t bother me; I didn’t imagine the bodies below me. I was in the cemetery simply because that’s where my parents’ jobs brought them.

Dad and Mom made a living on people’s inability to keep on living.

My dad, Paul Hager, worked as the local gravedigger, known to all in and around Waseca as Digger O’Dell. He named himself after the friendly undertaker from the old Life of Riley radio and television show, whose bad puns included, “Well, I best be shoveling off now.” Dad bought pens, business cards, and even playing cards and had them stamped with “Digger O’Dell.” Dad used a cartoonish man with a big nose and smile on top of a backhoe as a logo and Dad’s motto was, “We’ll be the last ones to let you down.” He should have been a salesman, with the ease in which he met new people. Within a few minutes he’d be talking to a stranger like he’d known him for years; Dad got his mother’s genes for non-stop gabbing. The brief encounter always ended with a firm handshake and Dad slipping him a business card, though I never figured out why a gravedigger needed to promote business.

Dad commanded a gravedigging monopoly in and around Waseca. He carved holes out of the earth in about 20 different cemeteries, burying bodies and dreams from Janesville to Medford, from Waldorf to Blooming Prairie, burying farmers and accountants, teachers and mechanics, teen-agers and parents, babies and grandparents.

Dad and Mom, along with my sister Renee and brother Andy, kept the grass trimmed in eight cemeteries. When Dad began cemetery work in 1976, I hadn’t yet celebrated my second birthday. Renee was eleven and Andy nine, so Dad put those two and Mom on the lawnmowers while he trimmed around each stone and tree with a weed-eater. As I got older, with Mom, Renee, and Andy plugging away, there still was no use for me on the lawnmower. Instead, Dad assigned me the little, often dirty, jobs. I picked up sticks after storms, keeping the lawnmower’s path free of obstacles that could result in the costly replacement of a blade or gear.

I also kept the perpetual-care flowers watered at Woodville, our biggest cemetery, on Waseca’s eastern city limits. Some families paid the cemetery association a few dollars a year to keep the pinks and purples of the geraniums and petunias at graves tended and bright instead of doing it themselves. Mom taught me to pinch off the dead blooms and each spring Dad walked me around the cemetery, helping me that first time to find each flower pot and the nearest spigot that would fill my two Schwan’s one-gallon ice cream pails. My skinny girl arms strained under the weight of the full buckets, and water sloshed around me. The summer of the box elder bug invasion, I nearly refused to do my job because the annoying insects buzzed around my ears and got tangled in my hair. Dad and Mom helped me that year.

Each year, two weeks after Memorial Day, I also picked up artificial flowers left behind at gravestones throughout the cemetery. Some were quite beautiful. I couldn’t bear to throw the colorful silk flowers on the pickup bed with the rest of the dingy, smelly arrangements. Instead I took them home where they served well as bridal bouquets when I played wedding.

I had no use for the majority of the flowers, the ugly and cheap ones bought for just a buck or two in the aisles of the local discount store. To this day I can smell the dusty plastic even before I happen upon the arrangements sitting in store displays. I cringe and resist the urge to buy them all so they won’t end up in cemeteries. There, the hot sun and wind and rain cracked the thick plastic leaves and flowers. And some arrangements sat in green, plastic, cone-shaped containers stuck into the ground. These were the worst; they always filled with rainwater that became dirty and rank after a couple of weeks. Inevitably that water spilled over my shins, socks and shoes, leaving me with a sour smell mixed with my sweat.

Dad told me to pick up all arrangements, no matter how expensive they seemed or how well they were wired to a gravestone. But there was one exception, which Dad told me gently but firmly: Do not take anything from the baby graves. So I left the pinwheels and plastic lambs, the balloons and flowers. Here, I lingered. These babies were not anonymous; Waseca was a small town where names quickly became familiar. One baby was a boy stillborn to my first-grade teacher at Hartley Elementary and his wife. I could picture them placing the toys and trinkets upon the grave where they buried not only a baby, but also the dream of what this child would grow up to be.

* * *

At age 46, Dad got sick and died within three days—possibly the world’s fastest case of cancer. He wasn’t the first Hager to die suddenly. For some reason, the Hager boys weren’t meant to linger. Brothers dead at 44, 53, 58, 65, and a dad dead at 71, walking to the bathroom or to the barn, one moment thinking about urinating or picking up eggs, and in the next moment hearts refusing to pump any longer. Did their lives flash before them? Or did they die too quickly?

All three days are mixed up to me, fragmented pieces of a jigsaw puzzle still in the box. Mom and I followed the ambulance to Rochester. Arrived at St. Marys. Dad writhing in pain, crying—“It hurts so much.” When I no longer could watch, I turned and buried my head in mom’s shoulder like a little girl instead of the 15-year-old I was. One night Mom and I stayed overnight at a dumpy tenement-like hotel across from the hospital. The second night we came home, got a call from the doctors while we watched sitcom reruns. You better come back; he’s not going to make it. Andy called Renee, choking on his words.

Surgeons at St. Marys had sliced a knife through Dad’s soft belly skin, thinking they’d find a colon obstruction. Instead, when they dug in, they saw ugly growths all over his insides, riddled throughout the organ linings. The cancer had sprouted a complex root system impossible to cut. Even these doctors at St. Marys—part of the famous Mayo family of hospitals—couldn’t fix this, couldn’t deftly carve out the cancer. They had no way to make this body neat. The cancer suffocated all function and smothered his life as easily as a pillow over a mouth. The doctors closed him up and waited for him die. He never woke up.

The doctors said we could see him. Mom asked for a priest. Dad’s post-op room contained nothing. No colors, just grays. No flowers, no TV. Just Dad on his movable hospital bed, ready for easy transport to the morgue. A gentle light glowing over a nearby sink softly illuminated the room.

Dad’s organs were failing and toxins overwhelmed his system, leaving his body massively swollen and purple, one giant bruise. The poisons bloated his face, rendered him nearly unrecognizable. Death hovered heavy, like thunderstorm air. Mom, Renee, Andy and I surrounded Dad, along with the priest, to give Last Rites. We performed a laying-on-of-hands upon Dad’s body as the priest directed.

I didn’t want to go near Dad, didn’t want to touch him. What if I hurt him? What if I placed too much pressure on his tender skin pulled tight like a sausage, and it split? I chose to stay away far from his face, to stay away from the purple, swollen visage that was my dad, yet didn’t look anything like him. I placed my fingertips on him, gently, at an ankle, and repeated the ritual words after the priest. We all mumbled in a daze. We left the room. Dad waited a few more minutes, then died.

* * *

Dad never ventured far. He grew up north of Waseca on a farm in Blooming Grove Township, then moved south of Waseca to raise his family. He got on a plane twice, once to Memphis for an Amway convention, and once to see the Twins play spring training games in Florida. He preferred to travel by car, taking Mom and me to Missouri, Wisconsin, the Black Hills of South Dakota. He was always happy to return home, never quite comfortable in the hotel room, nervous and jumpy, waking at dawn, wondering who died and how Andy was handling the job of digging graves. Was Andy doing good work? Did he remember to place the plywood on the grass? What if he had two graves to dig, or even three? Dad didn’t fully relax until we returned home. He didn’t become himself again until he put on his dark blue work clothes and boots, more comfortable behind the wheel of his truck than in his car, more at ease in the cemetery than on the road.

At Woodville, on July 9, 1990, Dad wasn’t shoveling dirt into a hole. He was going in. He would no longer be invisible. No hiding in the recesses of the ground, no pretending he was not there, no erasing traces of himself.

I would no longer be invisible, either. All the wakes I went to with Dad and Mom, I was part of the anonymous procession that filtered up to the casket, reflexively genuflected, uttered a quiet word of sympathy, and left. At funerals, I watched from the balcony as Mom pressed minor chords on organ keys. At the cemetery, I hid with Dad in the pickup as we waited for mourners to leave.

You’d think I’d be comfortable in this space, these quiet spaces we devote to our dead. This was where I glided over blacktop and gravel roads on the three-speed bike Dad hoisted into the back of the pickup alongside his sod-cutter and shovels. I rode endlessly among the gravestones, wind drifting through dishwater blond hair, skinny legs pumping hard, blood coursing through my veins.

This was where I worked, where I ate brown-bag lunches with Mom and Dad, where we rested on sun-warmed granite like salamanders and felt it burn underneath our legs. This was the place where I learned to read, recognizing letters on gravestones and stringing the letters into words. This was the place where we were all together. Sitting at the edge of Dad’s grave, his brothers and sisters and their kids at my back, it didn’t feel right being here without him.

At the graveside, Dad’s casket was front and center for all to see. A pretty, classic oak, just as he had always requested, with some roses on top and a ribbon woven around them that said, “Dad.”

That day, it was another gravedigger’s turn to be invisible. Paul Swenson hid among the trees in the back of the cemetery by the tool shed. Swenson, the son of Swedish immigrants, dug graves south of Waseca and was one of Dad’s best friends, coming into Waseca a few nights a week to drink coffee and smoke cigarettes at the back corner table in Happy Chef restaurant.

Swenson had to have known that we would see him, that we would know his hiding place. I could see the blue of his pickup and him inside the cab, waiting quietly for all of us to leave. And he would follow protocol, not starting his job until we left for the church basement with its ham sandwiches and dessert bars. He’d bury Dad in the quiet, the birds singing their songs on this bright and hot day. He’d breathe in and out, timing his breath with the breath of the earth, mopping the sweat of his brow with a hanky. He wouldn’t leave any tracks, no sign that he was there. Quickly, the grass seams of Dad’s grave would blend with the rest of the lawn.