FRIDAY
Friday morning she walks him out to the northeast corner.
It is a quarter mile up from the buildings, along the fence on the County K side, where the ground goes up a little and there is a stand of box elder that his grandfather should have cut out in 1961 and didn't.
Box elder is a junk tree. It grows fast and rots standing and it is not worth the fuel to take down, which is exactly why there is a stand of it in the corner of a farm that has been worked hard for ninety-four years. Everything on this place that got done got done because it paid. That corner did not pay, so that corner is trees.
From there you can see the road and the Vosberg silos and about six miles of Oster County.
You cannot see the house.
"Here," she says.
"That's the far corner of everything."
"I know where it is."
"Ground's good back of the machine shed. It's flat and it's —"
"Emmett." She is looking at the box elder and not at him. "I have to stand at that sink."
He does not say anything.
"I have to stand at that sink every day for the rest of my life," she says. "And I am not going to be able to do it if I can see it from there. That's all it is. That's the whole reason."
It is a reasonable thing to want.
It is, in fact, the most sensible thing anybody has said out loud in three days, and he tells her so in the only way he can, which is by going down to the shed and getting the tape.
The setbacks decide the rest of it.
Two hundred feet from any well, which is nothing out here.
Fifty from the right-of-way.
Twenty-five from the property line.
That is the entire body of law on the subject, and it fits on half a page, and a man can carry it in his head on the walk up.
He pulls the tape from the fence and drives a stake at twenty-five feet, and then walks it out from the road and drives another, and where the two of them agree is a piece of ground about forty feet square with box elder on the north side of it.
That is where it goes.
Not because it is the best ground in that corner. Because it is the only ground inside that corner where it is allowed to go.
A regulation picks the spot. It takes him eleven minutes.
There is something in that he will come back to more than once in the next year, and it is not comfort exactly, but it is close enough to sit next to. Somebody in Madison who has never been here and never will be wrote three numbers down, and those three numbers put his son under the only trees on the place.
It comes to about twenty feet by ten and six deep, and he has to open it up wider than that on the north side because box elder roots go where they want and there is no arguing with them.
He does it himself.
He could call four men and have them here in twenty minutes, and this is understood by everybody involved, including him, and he does not do it, because there is a version of this where a man stands in his own field and points at where to dig his son's grave, and that version is not survivable.
It takes him from about eleven in the morning until nine at night with the bucket.
The first two hours are the only two hours all week that make sense to him, because a loader is a thing with levers and the levers do what you tell them.
Then it is dark, and he puts the work lights on and keeps going, because the sides need squaring and a loader is not a machine for squaring sides. A loader is a machine for moving a great deal of dirt roughly. Everything after that is a man leaning over an edge with a spade in the dark.
At ten-thirty there are headlights coming up the field road.
Alvin Prahl gets out of his truck and walks to the edge of the hole and looks into it with his hands in his jacket pockets.
He does not say anything. He is there for perhaps ninety seconds.
Then he walks back to his truck and drives out, and Emmett keeps digging, and twenty minutes later Alvin comes back up the field road on his tractor with the backhoe on it.
He does not ask.
He backs it down to the south side and puts the stabilizers down and starts squaring the corner Emmett cannot reach.
They work until about four in the morning without saying one word to each other. Two engines and two sets of work lights and a hole between them, and a man on either side of it who has known the other one for forty-one years and does not have anything to say that would improve the situation.
When it is done Alvin shuts the tractor off and gets out and sits on the tailgate of his truck, and Emmett shuts the loader off and sits on the step of it, and they stay that way, forty feet apart in the dark on either side of a hole, until there is enough light to see the box elder.
Then Alvin says, "I'll be here at seven."
Then he goes home.