Free Bone Fire by Mark Spragg Page B

deliberate step at a time, stabbing a shovel into the earth as a staff, with Griff’s high-school backpack slung over his shoulder and a long, iron tamping bar balanced atop that same shoulder, a bulging plastic garbage bag dangling like something an old hobo might invent. A pair of fluorescent dice hung from a carabiner clicked through a webbed loop on the side of the backpack, and underneath it the patch of a frowning yellow bee with the stitched caption
Bee-otch
.
    It took the better part of an hour, but when he topped out under the big cottonwood he felt all right. Not great, but not worn down to the nub. It surprised him. He leaned the shovel and tamping bar against the tree and shrugged off the backpack, setting it by the garbage bag. He eased down onto the single cane chair that stood next to the trunk, tipping his hat off and hanging it on a knee so the wind could work at his hair. When his scalp prickled he dabbed at his head with a bandanna.
    He’d watched the pastures and buildings that lay below him, the prairie stretching eastward toward the curved horizon, the comforting press of the Bighorns at his back, his whole life and didn’t need to see it all now to know what was there.
    He shut his eyes and the memories of summer colors and the sense of expanse brightened in his mind. And as always there were the quick, familiar flashes from the lives of his wife and son and Mitch, and when he opened his eyes the sun caught on the black marble gravestones before him, flaring up like portals to a separate world.
    A leaf brushed his cheek and he pulled the branch down to snap one lengthwise under his nose, enjoying the sweet, clean scent. Then he seated his hat and stood from the chair.
    Just south of Ella’s marker he stepped off a six-by-three-foot plot, dragging the heel of his boot to describe its perimeter. Then he took up the tamping bar.
    Two hours later he’d broken through the hardpan with the beveled end of the bar and shoveled out a foot of the dry, cakedearth. After that he found more rocks, but the soil was looser, just like he knew it would be. He retrieved one of the old quart bottles he’d filled at the tap and packed in the knapsack and drank most of it. He thought if he had to take a leak, he’d piss in the hole and make the digging easier. Though his shirt was damp under his arms and across his back, he still felt fine, thinking he might get out and dig a hole once a week, that it would be a real improvement in his life. Then he wished he could see well enough to drive into town so the tourists could have a look at him. A couple of times in the past year a woman in city clothes had asked to take his picture, and he’d enjoyed the experience. It made him feel he hadn’t faded away altogether, that he was still somehow worthy of notice, even if only as a sort of rural oddity.
    He dug a while longer and then sat in the chair to rest and eat a plum, waking sometime later with his chin on his chest. He wasn’t sure how long he’d slept and squinted at the sky until he found where it brightened, satisfied that he still had most of the afternoon.
    He remembered the two weeks they’d spent trenching out a new leach field for Mitch’s septic tank. Griffin had been a boy then, just nine or ten, and they could have had old Dan Hanson over with his backhoe and finished the job in an afternoon, but Einar wanted to give his son a bone-wearying chore and let him own the satisfaction of having completed it.
    When he was down deep enough that it was just a little bit of a struggle to climb out, he stopped and threw the bar and shovel back toward the tree, then took his hat off and lay down with his heels against one end and his head just short of the other with his arms folded across his chest. His hat was turned up on his stomach. He felt relaxed, comfortable, but got worried that if he died right then and there it might look like a suicide, so he climbed out, pleased with the extravagance of the hole. He