First published in Extra Teeth Issue 3, 2021

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David stretched his arms above his head and yawned. Sweat darkened his shirt, pulling it tight against the contours of his back and stomach. He glanced around, over the grey headstones and the heather-pink hill beyond, then turned back to the other men. His mouth twitched towards a smile.

‘Have we no dug deep enough aaready?’ he said. ‘So lang as the coffin’s covered, naebody’ll complain.’

Andrew, his father, stopped what he was doing and looked up. He was waist deep in the grave, white sleeves rolled neatly to his elbows. There was not a hint of amusement on his face.

‘If du worked more and yattered less, boy, we’d be six feet doon in nae time.’

Andrew shook his head, leaned his shovel to one side, then nodded—just the slightest tilt —towards his son. David understood the gesture. He sighed and straightened, wishing he’d kept quiet.

As carefully as he could manage, the older man pulled himself out of the earth. He brushed dirt from his black trousers, checking each leg in turn, then sat a few yards away, beside the cemetery wall. He leaned back, adjusted his shoulders, and closed his eyes against the sun. He seemed no less alert in that state than he had done with them open.

David took his place in the hole.

The four men were taking turns: one digging while the others waited. Each shovelful was thrown up and out, onto the black tarpaulin above. And as the grave got deeper, and the excavated pile grew taller, their work below ground became ever more strenuous.

The morning was uncommonly hot for Shetland, and all of them looked overdressed. Had they been elsewhere, at work on their crofts, they might have pulled their shirts wide to stay cool. But there in the kirkyard that wouldn’t be right. Four jackets hung on a granite cross nearby, like a family of roosting bats, but their shirts—each white, or near enough—stayed buttoned to the throat.

David was the youngest of the men by some distance. That summer, of 1970, he had not long turned seventeen.

His father, Andrew, was next. He was the quietest of the group, the most focused too. He didn’t talk while he was digging, and he didn’t talk much the rest of the time either. His attention was a sharp, almost solid thing, on which all of them relied. If someone was in charge that morning, it was Andrew.

Next in line was Walter: Maggie of Gardie’s man. He was short, and thick around the waist, and he wheezed between drags on his pipe. His shoulders were narrow, as though his body were clenched at the top, but he had the force of someone fitter. Every thrust of his shovel struck deep. Every lift of his arms brought a cascade of black earth flying.

The oldest of the four was Willie, in his mid-seventies and looking no younger. He’d been strong in his day, like the rest of them, but the muscle had gone out of him—abandoned him, he’d said. A bachelor gets auld afore his time, that’s how David’s mother explained it. And in Willie’s case it was true. He’d been an old man now for years. He missed most of his turns in the hole that morning, and he never stayed down there for long.

The four of them had worked together many times, on one or other of their crofts. Working together was almost indivisible, for them, from working. Since David was a boy he’d been part of this group—only acting the role at first, doing just what he was told. He had learned early on to keep the others entertained. They were less likely to tire of him that way, or to send him home. So he gathered stories to share, embellished and repeated them. It was a habit he had not left behind, though his strength, these days, was as valuable to the others as his company.

This was the first time, though, that David had dug a grave. When his grandfather died, six years before, he was too young, too short, to be of use; and the last burial he’d attended—the oldest of his aunts—had been in town, where the family’s shovels weren’t required. The County had a gravedigger here in Treswick too, who was meant to do this job, no matter whose bones needed buried. But Willie was old-fashioned. He saw this as a matter of propriety. Anyone who belonged to this place, he’d said, should be laid to rest by neighbours and kin. And though she hadn’t lived there for more than fifty years, Elizabeth Hughson had asked, in her final days, to be buried in this kirkyard. So Willie had given the gravedigger a half-bottle, and told him he wouldn’t be needed.

‘Ah’m done,’ said David, when the sting in his arms grew urgent. ‘Een o’ you auld fellows can take ower.’ He wiped his forehead with the back of his hand, then hoisted himself to the surface, like a seal mounting a rock. He looked at each of the men in turn. Walter stood, grumbling, and came forward.

To his knowledge, David had never actually met Elizabeth Hughson. She was brought up in the old house at the top of the valley, but had moved to Lerwick when she married, before even his father was born. And though Andrew himself had gone to see her in town sometimes—every couple of years, at most—he had never extended this obligation to his children. She was his cousin once-removed: the closest blood tie to her among these men. So it was hardly a notable bereavement on that count. David did not, therefore, consider this an occasion for excessive solemnity.

‘What wye did she want tae end up here?’ he asked. ‘Her man’s buried in Lerwick, is he no?’

‘Yeh, well, some folk get hamesick as dey get aulder, I suppose,’ said Willie. ‘She must o’ missed da place, and wanted to come back.’

‘She’ll no see much o’ it fae doon there,’ David said, then chuckled. Willie didn’t reply to that.

Lying back, with his hands behind his head, David looked up. A skylark was singing somewhere above them, and the whole expanse of the air was held within that song. Tucked into an elbow of the hill, the graveyard lay between heather and green fields, half a mile outside Treswick, and a little farther from the valley where the four of them lived. The sounds of the village—a dog barking, a voice or two, a car—seemed distant, and almost unreal. If he closed his eyes, then, David might just be able to sleep.

‘Oh!’ shouted Walter from his place in the grave. ‘See dis!’

The others all stood—not wanting to rush, exactly, or to seem like they were rushing—and gathered around the hole. Walter was bent towards one corner of the grave, his shirt almost transparent over his pale, freckled back. He was scraping in the mud as they watched, his fingers prying something loose, then he turned and looked up. ‘Seems like she’ll hae company in here,’ he said, and lifted his hands, a skull gripped between his fingers.

The lower jaw was missing, and there was damage above one of the eyes: a narrow crack that forked upward to the brow. The dome itself was discoloured—blotchy and mud-smeared—but otherwise intact. The three of them looked down as Walter turned it over, one way then the other.

‘I dunna recognise him,’ said David, straight-faced.

On this occasion, his father laughed. ‘Afore dy time,’ said Andrew. ‘Mine too, I reckon.’

There was no headstone within two metres of the spot, so no indication of whose skull it might be. The owner could easily have been kin to any of the men. All of them had been born within ten miles of this place. All of them, most likely, would end up here.

‘We’ll bury it beneath,’ said Willie. ‘A grave wi’in a grave.’

‘Yes’, said Andrew. ‘And we’re aamost there, I’d say. Walter’ll never get oot again if he digs much deeper.’

Walter looked around him then, as though only just noticing that his head was below ground. ‘Du’s right,’ he said. ‘Ah’ll be needin a ladder at dis rate.’

‘Du can come up noo,’ said Willie. ‘Ah’ll finish it.’

‘Dunna be daft,’ replied Walter. ‘Ah’m here, so I might as well stay. Nae point us swappin at da last minute.’

‘No,’ said Willie, with a firmness that refused debate. ‘Ah’ll finish it.’

Walter shrugged, turned, and set the skull down in one corner. He rubbed his hands together to wipe away the mud, then lifted them to where Andrew and David were standing. Together, they hauled him up.

‘Dunna go jumpin,’ said Andrew to Willie, then. ‘We’ll lower dee.’

The old man nodded, and sat at the edge of the hole, legs dangling. He put his arms up, like a child, doing just what he was told. Andrew and David held one hand each and took the strain. He was lighter than they’d expected—lighter, certainly, than Walter. They lowered him gently into the grave.

Willie didn’t pause when he landed. He set to with the spade, scratching at the edges and the corners of the hole, tidying, making it square. He threw a few shovels of dirt out, then turned his attention to the ground.

Near one end, he dug a small cavity, leaving the soil to one side. Cradling the skull, as if the bone might break, he placed it inside the hole, then covered it again with his hands. Once the earth was flattened, he stood, stopped, and leaned forward on his shovel.

The grave was now several inches deeper than Willie was tall, and from where David stood, a few metres back, he could see only the top of the old man’s head: his white hair, cropped close to the scalp. Willie seemed to be bowing, back into the earth, until he was almost invisible. He cleared his throat, then began to speak.

‘We coorted,’ he said, loud enough for all of them to hear. ‘Me and Lizzie Hughson—Elizabeth—afore da war. Da first one.’ His words seemed to carry with them a silence, like a cloud carrying a shadow.

‘I thought we’d marry when I cam hame,’ he went on. ‘I telt her that when I signed up. And she said she would wait. ‘As lang as it takes,’ she said. ‘As lang as it takes.’ But . . .’ He paused, his voice beginning to break. ‘Four years. Four years. It wis too lang. I dunna blame her for changin her mind.’

Each of the men above ground was poised, not looking at each other but staring straight ahead, as though waiting for some unknown thing to enter the kirkyard and end this moment, to close whatever chasm had been opened around them.

Willie, in the grave, said nothing more. He stood there, inclined and unmoving. He may have been crying, but they couldn’t tell. They waited—five minutes, maybe ten—until he sighed, straightened and threw the shovel out of the hole. Only then did they come forward.

Everything was tidy: scraped and smoothed. The space where the coffin would lie was as neat as it could be.
Andrew bent down and grabbed Willie’s hand. David held tight to the other. The two of them leaned back as they pulled, expecting their strength to be needed. But the old man seemed even lighter than he had done going in, and he came up quickly, like a half-empty sack. They lifted him out onto the grass beside them.

Willie fell to his knees. There was mud the full length of his right sleeve, and he began to rub it, to sweep the mess back down into the hole. But the earth had clung to him, and wouldn’t let go. It smeared and spread, thick and dark over his shirt. He stopped, looked up at the three men beside him.
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‘It’ll wash,’ he said, as though only to himself. ‘It’ll wash.’