The sun is shining and the gravedigger sits in the seat of his tractor with his head tilted back and the warmth makes the skin on his face tingle. He wears jeans and work boots and the only marker of the solemnity of his occupation is the black of his hooded sweatshirt. Its afternoon on a Friday and he only has an hour before his week ends. He breathes in the sweet smelling air of spring and smiles. Beside his tractor lies an open hole. He waits.
The radio on his belt crackles and startles him. He opens his eyes and sits forward.
“Yah down there?” a voice calls through the radio.
The gravedigger leans to one side and retrieves it from his waist. He presses the button, “Yea, I’m here waitin’.”
“Alright they’re comin’ down now.”
He spots two cars approaching across the graveyard and watches them idly. He leans forward and rests his elbows on the steering wheel. His arms cross at the wrist.
The cars stop near the gravedigger and one of them, the hearse, backs up to the open hole. It beeps  as it approaches.
  Men from the hearse pull a coffin from the back and position it beside the grave. A priest steps from the other car. The gravedigger has seen it all before and watches a bumblebee flit across the grass, bobbing from dandelion to dandelion.
  The coffin is in position and the priest begins the ceremony. No one else arrives.
  “Samuel Gordon Clark graduated from Freemont High School in 1974 and went to work in his father’s moving company, where he worked for most of his life,” the priest reads aloud to no one in particular. The cemetery employees stare at their feet or away.
“He attended Saint Paul’s on Sundays and lived alone. Sam Clark leaves behind his brother, David Clark, of Westborough.”
The gravedigger’s attention snaps back. Sam Clark He mouths to himself. They sat together in elementary school. When the gravedigger was a boy he dropped his lunch in the school cafeteria - spaghetti splattered on the linoleum tiles and milk spreading in a puddle. Ms. Diandria wouldn’t give him more, teaching him to be more careful, she had said, but there was mercy in Sam's eyes. He had shared his lunch. They were not ever close except for that moment, but the gravedigger had always known Sam to be a man of kindness.
  “Why is no one here?” the gravedigger exclaims, interrupting the priest’s continuing monologue.
  The coffin carriers and priest stare at the gravedigger, now climbing down from his tractor.
  “Sam was a good man, I didn’ know he died. Why is no one here?”
“You knew this guy, Jim?” asks one of the other employees.
There is silence for a moment.
“I’m sorry for your loss,” says the priest, and the gravedigger grazes the surface of the coffin with his fingertips. His eyes are glazed.
  “You want us to wait before we let him down?” asks the other employee.
The gravedigger, as if from far away, steps back from the box and says, “No, go ahead.”
The priest watches the gravedigger for a moment, then the other two men as they lower the coffin into the hole, and then he becomes distracted. He realizes that its the anniversary of his brother’s wedding, and he glances at his car. He ought to say something to him. Or maybe send them flowers. He makes a mental note to do so when he arrives home and fumbles with the keys in his pocket.
  The coffin carriers and the priest get back into their cars and the gravedigger and his tractor and the open hole and the pile of dirt grow small in their mirrors. And the sun is shining and the priest considers what to write in the card to his brother and his sister-in-law and what he will make for dinner and the priest goes home and leaves his work behind him.