The Gravedigger

I was walking by the graveyard, on my way home from work, when I first met him.

"Hey man, you wanna buy a watch?" the Gravedigger called out to me.

I looked over. He was wearing a one piece blue monkey suit, speckled in dirt, looking like a mechanic who had a fuel line leak soil. Beside him was a freshly dug grave. The sun was setting over his shoulder, and he was grinning devilishly, a gold watch dangling from his fingers.

I walked over to him. "Is that yours?" I asked.

"Nah, man," he replied. "But the thing about these dead guys is that they don't need to know what time is it. Neither do the maggots or worms for that matter."

It was morbid, to be sure, but there was a dark truth to what he was saying.

Now, I'm not one to usually buy stolen merchandise, especially when the item is supposed to be six feet under the ground. But something about this man made it feel all right. There was a calming wisdom in his old pale blue eyes. And after a small moral debate, I bought the watch from him. It was a real gold Rolex and it only set me back twenty bucks.

"Congratulations, man. We just saved that thing from an eternity under the ground. It's a shame though," he mused, gazing across the rows upon rows of graves, "all the other watches that are trapped down there."

I nodded, looking as well. After a polite moment I was back to admiring the watch on my wrist.

The dead don't need to know the time, but the living sure do.

I saw the Gravedigger again three weeks later.

"Hey man," he called.

I walked over, pulling the cuff of my shirt down over the Rolex on my wrist, as if the dead would judge me for taking part in stealing from them.

"How's business?" I asked.

"Well man, every day just about 146,000 people kick the bucket," he said, and then added: "It's a great thing for my line of work that folks can't help but die." He gestured behind him at a heap of clothes under an old rotting elm tree. "Say, you wanna buy a suit? It's real nice, man. It's Perry Ellis or Nautica or something." He was grinning, that devilish grin of his, like he knew something I didn't. And maybe he did; graveyards are full of buried secrets.

"Oh I don't know," I said. "Wearing a dead man's suit? It's a bit...you know...a bit morbid."

"Hell man, it's just gonna go to waste down there with them. Think about it like this. Being buried in your best garbs, that don't make no sense, now does it? It's sorta selfish if you ask me. Here, just take a look at it." He picked up the suit, shook it out, and handed it to me.

The suit was beautiful, he hadn't lied. But of course it was; who gets buried in their Sunday worst?

"It's a great suit, it really is," I said. "But I can't. I mean, a watch is one thing. A suit is a different story altogether. This was actually worn by somebody. They walked around in it. They didn't know they'd be buried in it."

The Gravedigger pressed. "I'll give it to you for fifty bucks, man. How 'bout that?"

"I really can't," I said, although I must admit I was very tempted. "It's just weird." I paused. "Isn't it?"

"Look man, I'm just trying to do these guys a favour."

"Oh yeah?" I said skeptically. "What's the favour?"