The Best American Mystery Stories 2002

I toss the first shovelful of crumbling dirt into the grave. They say it’s an honor to be the first, like throwing out the first baseball of the new season.

Snow twirls and twists its way into the dark rectangle as if sucked into the earth’s gaping void. No one says a word. John Bouchard, the soul-bankrupt banker, Lucille Emerson, the widowed neighbor with fifteen hundred acres of slumbering wheat land, Orville Mansfield with his cheap toupee, and the two to three others stand with their hands clasped neatly in front, heads bowed. I’m the only family present.

I count the shovelfuls: twenty-eight, twenty-nine, thirty. I can’t quit. The shovel keeps digging. I keep counting. I swore I wouldn’t cry. A man should have learned not to cry by the age of twenty-four.

A couple of pats on the shoulder, several muttered “So sorry, Amp,” and I set the spade aside. I’ve lost count now. Even in the cold, sweat stings my eyes. The folding chair creaks beneath my weight as I sit. I pull the wool collar of my coat up against my neck, shove my tingling hands between my thighs, and stare directly into the pit. The silent snow swirls like pure white confetti.

He died alone.

When he was alive, my Uncle Keven stood yardstick straight, measuring just under five and half feet short. His round, flat face barely tolerated the tangle of hair wrestling across his head. He explained it away as “cowlicks gone awry, about as combable as a pack of pigs’ tails.” His blue-green eyes surveyed people, as a farmer judges distances. His thick upper body sat atop stubby, bowed legs. He was strong — stronger than any man I ever knew. He moved as if he were constantly under water. Slow. Deliberate.

He lived for baseball, but World War II killed his chances when it snatched him away from an imminent semipro career with Seattle’s newest team, the Rainiers. “Heck,” he’d say, “I was so short I could have caught behind the plate standing up.” But by the time he came back from the Philippines, he’d lost everything youth had ever loaned him. “You can lose it all,” he’d mutter, “but you’ll always have family.”

I grew up on a five-thousand-acre, third-generation wheat farm in eastern Washington, just outside of Endicott. The town boasted a population of more than seven hundred living on hills facing north across the Palouse, as if looking for a future that would never come its way.

My well-mannered mother and back-busting father raised me and my sister Sarah with the typical wheat farmers’ attitudes: trust no one but family; never depend on the weather to do anything except knock the stuffin’ out of you. My father ate, drank, and choked on that Palouse dirt. Home to him was standing knee-deep in a sea of waving, thick, green wheat. Dream wheat. Uncle Keven and I shared our own dreams. The Brooklyn Dodgers.

Uncle Keven lived three miles, as the crow flies, west of us on a wheat farm handed down to him by my grandfather. Most people found Uncle Keven stingy with conversation. I never did. We had talked baseball ever since I could catch one. “It’ll be your ticket out of Endicott, Amp,” he told me. “Maybe so,” I answered, “but the old man’ll tear up the ticket before I can ever get my hands on it.”

Sarah, on the other hand, flashed her ticket around with style and grace. Bouncing blond hair, batting eyelashes. Bobby socks. Soft words and sweet smiles. Endicott High’s Rodeo Queen and voted “Most Marry-able, Class of ’55” her senior year. She adored the title, as did mother and father. And I adored her, thinking the five years between us somehow afforded her the wisdom of kings. But even royalty suffers.