The casket inside the vault of Thad was whole. I knew it before the sheriff lifted the lid, because I could see the dust on the brass handles, the unbroken seal of the seam, the tiny scratch near the lock where I had once dropped my wedding ring and bent to pick it up. A detective in a hard hat stood beside me, holding my elbow. When the lid rose, I did not look away. Inside, in the gray satin that I had chosen with my own hands, my husband lay in his dress uniform.
His hands were folded on his chest. On the left hand, a plain gold wedding band. On the right, the heavy silver ring of the Army, with the little eagle worn smooth by sixty years of mail routes and mowing and holding my hand. They had not touched him. I put my palm against my mouth and wept, standing in the cold wind of a Monday morning, with half the office of the sheriff looking politely at their boots. The detective whispered, “Mrs. Upchurch, I am so sorry for the trouble.” I said that I was only grateful.
But next to me, I felt Renee Bostic go stiff. She had asked the sheriff for permission to wait at the far edge of the cemetery, by the oak, and she had not been able to stay there. Now she stood at the side of the grave, a thin woman in a gray sweatshirt, staring at my husband in his casket. Then she looked at me, and I saw her face change. “They opened the casket of my mother yesterday,” she said, in a voice like a thread. “It was empty. Nothing in it but the satin.”
The grief a family carries for a grave is no less real when the grave turns out to be empty, and may sometimes be even heavier.
The detective told us the rest in the cemetery office, over coffee that no one drank. For nine years, the groundskeeper of Resthaven, a quiet man named Dewey Pruitt, had been digging into the oldest and most poorly kept section of the grounds. He chose graves with no regular visitors, graves of the widowed and the childless and the far away. He took the rings. He took the watches. He took the gold teeth. And in a few cases, he removed the remains entirely and buried them again in a pit behind the maintenance shed.
Renee made a sound I will never forget. I held her in the little office with its brown paneling and its calendar from a funeral supply company, and I let her cry on my shoulder as though she were my own daughter. The detective said that her mother had been found, and that every one of the families would have a chance to bring their loved ones back to the proper place. He said there was a county ordinance, and a state law, and more than that, a decent way to do it.
They caught Dewey Pruitt on Tuesday night, after a trail camera that the sheriff had hidden in a hollow tree photographed him at two in the morning. He was carrying a shovel and a flashlight. He did not run. He sat down on the grass beside the open grave of a veteran from Korea and put his head in his hands. The detective said he told them everything, in a flat voice. He said he had needed money, and then he had needed more, and then he had forgotten what the dead were.
I went to the arraignment alone. It was a small gray room in the county building, and he came in wearing an orange jumpsuit, an old man with stooped shoulders. He did not look up. The judge read the charges, which took eleven minutes. When she finished, she asked him if he understood. He nodded. Then he lifted his eyes, found me and Renee in the second row, and said, in a cracked voice, “I am sorry.” I did not answer. Some words are too small for the thing they carry.
Renee and I attended the reburial together on a warm Saturday in May, in Section C, where her mother lay beneath the same patchy grass. A pastor from her church read the twenty third Psalm. The funeral home brought a new casket, white and plain, paid for by the cemetery company. Renee threw a handful of red clay into the grave and stood silently with her hand over her heart. Then she turned to me and said, “Would you stand with me? I have no one else here.”
I have been standing with her since. We have lunch every Tuesday at the diner on Wilma Rudolph Boulevard, and she calls me Miss Frances, and I call her honey. On Sundays, after church, we drive out to Resthaven in my car and visit both graves, hers and mine. We bring flowers from my garden. She tells her mother about the grandchildren. I tell Thad what happened that week at the post office, which is his old route, and I swear I hear him laugh.
The last time we went, I was kneeling by the stone of Thad, pulling weeds from the edge of the bronze plaque, when Renee said, “Miss Frances, that ring I found in the Walmart lot. You gave it back to me. But the ring was supposed to be in the casket.” I nodded. She said she wanted me to know that she had placed it back on the hand of her mother, at the reburial, where it belonged. The diamond caught the light. It looked, to me, like the smallest star.