The old man’s pipe had gone out. He rocked in his chair, back and forth, back and forth, silently.

‘But,’ said the young man, ‘what did you do?’

‘Nothing,’ said the old man.

‘Nothing?’

Nothing I could do. That ground was solid. Six men couldn’t have dug that grave. No hot water near. And she might’ve been screaming hours before I heard, so..’

‘You did. nothing?’

‘Something. Put the shovel back in the toolshed, locked it, and went back to the house and built a fire and drank some hot chocolate, shivering and shivering. Would you have done different?’

‘I. ’

‘Would you have dug for eight hours in hard ice rock so’s to reach her when she was truly dead of exhaustion, cold, smothered, and have to bury her all over again? Then call her folks and tell them?’

The young man was silent. On the porch, the mosquitoes hummed about the naked light bulb.

‘I see,’ said the young man.

The old man sucked his pipe. ‘I think I cried all night because there was nothing I could do.’ He opened his eyes and stared about, surprised, as if he had been listening to someone else.

‘That’s quite a story,’ said the young man.

‘No,’ said the old man. ‘God’s truth. Want to hear more? See that big stone with the ugly angel? That was Adam Crispin’s. Relatives fought, got a writ from a judge, dug him up hoping for poison. Found nothing. Put him back, but by that time, the dirt from his grave mixed with other dirts. We shovelled in stuff from all around. Next plot, the angel with broken wings? Mary Lou Phipps. Dug her up to lug her off to Elgin, Illinois. More relatives. Where she’d been, the pit stayed open, oh, three weeks. No funerals. Meanwhile, her dirt got cross-shovelled with others. Six stones over, one stone north, that was Henry Douglas Jones. Became famous sixty years after no one paid attention. Now he’s planted under the Civil War monument. His grave lay wide two months, nobody wanted to utilize the hole of a Southerner, all of us leaning North with Grant. So his dirt got scattered. That give you some notion of what that “Free Dirt” sign means?’