Should this Disappear

The hole was no deeper than the head of a spade when Mrs. Crowl leaned against the marble headstone marking the nascent plot. 

She looked around the graveyard. He was nowhere to be found. Mr. Huntz, the groundskeeper, had a habit of disappearing on hot days, and it was a hot day indeed. 

This usually didn’t annoy her. He had been with the family for nearly fifty years. They were the same age, Mr. Huntz and Mrs. Crowl, which, she remembered, had always made her a little uncomfortable. A shabby boy of fifteen came to her father’s office one May morning looking for work. He had not left since. He was, she liked to think, inherited along with the graveyard. She liked to think she inherited her father’s patience, too. 

But today she needed Mr. Huntz. The sun broke through the willow branches, each ray a needle of summery heat. Even the marble had lost its natural coolness. 

He was not a lazy man, but he had grown slow and tired in his age. He had a sixth sense, her father used to say, that told him when someone was looking for him. That was what he had liked best about him: he knew when — and how — to work. ‘Graveyards are about appearances,’ her father had said. ‘Mr. Huntz understands appearances.’ 

She looked around impatiently, squinting into the afternoon light. 

The graveyard was pocked with holes. Mr. Huntz’s method was to make the same progress on everything he had to do, giving equal attention to every grave. It was hardly efficient, and his age had slowed his moving from the bottom of one grave to another. But perhaps he enjoyed the slower, labored pace, felt that it was something to which he could appeal if — and she nor her father never had — a complaint were registered against him. 

Mrs. Crowl shifted her weight to her feet. Her skirt clung to the tiny crags and valleys of the marble. Her toes were at the lip of the hole. 

She looked around the yard again. Mr Huntz’s truck, blue and textured the same as the unpolished marble, was parked on the dirt road.