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in a few minutes the rumble of the engine returned, and after another moment the tractor appeared again over the berm, this time carrying the sod. It crossed the grounds and stopped within a few yards of the man’s back. But he didn’t even look up. I could tell that the grave diggers didn’t know what to do. The driver turned off the engine. You could hear a boom box then, playing some kind of angry talk radio—it’s going to be the death of newspapers like mine—until he reached down and shut that off, too. Then he sat there in the seat while his helper climbed out of the scoop and stood looking the other way. I suppose they were happy to have another minute to smoke.
    Presently, the driver climbed down and the two of them went to work restoring the grass. They filled in down the length of the plot with squares of sod, carefully again, using buck knives to cut the last pieces to size. But it was only after they’d finished and set off across the lawn again in the tractor that the man finally looked up; and when I stepped out from behind the tree he finally looked over at me, too, but just for a moment. We must have been fifty feet from each other, but I’m sure he didn’t know who I was. I had a decent look at his face, though, and then at the duck’s head handle of his cane. I took a couple of steps closer and saw then that his wife was there, too, standing behind a tree. She looked wrecked, I have to say, and when she noticed me watching she gestured me away with her arm.
    That’s when I turned back and found that her husband had lowered himself onto one knee, and even from where I stood, I knew he was weeping.
    That was it. The quiet end of all of it.
    There was no one else alive now who knew.
    II
    1971
    I WAS RAISED ten miles from that cemetery, in a town that was almost entirely built and owned by a single family, the Metareys. The town is called Saline, which if you’re an old-timer rhymes with
malign
, and if you’re a newcomer, with
machine
. We’re an hour south of Buffalo in western New York State, in what used to be the territory of the Erie and Seneca Indians. In 1881, a young boy named Eoghan Metarey arrived penniless with his father in Fort Clinton, New York, having endured half a year’s voyage from their farming hamlet in the east of Scotland, and the two of them made their way west together to our low hills and hardwood forests. They shoed horses and shoveled barns for their meals and passage, but by 1890 they’d saved enough money to open a hardware store, and from there Eoghan Metarey launched his empire. Within five years he’d bought his first large tract of land, and within another five he needed a post to house all the woodsmen and mill hands and quarriers he employed on it. He became the first great capitalist in this part of the world and one of the first to found a settlement for his workers; but unlike the other tycoons of his day, he actually lived in the town he founded. When he first set to building Saline, a group of renegade Seneca was still roaming the woods; he wasted no time in dispatching them. A few were hired as guides and the rest paid to move south, so that by the turn of the century a visitor could take an Otis elevator to the top of Eoghan Metarey’s six-story, granite-faced New World Bank of Saline, sit for a cup of Chinese tea, and enjoy a small, slate-colored view through glass at Lake Erie, twenty miles to the west, where those Seneca once fished.
    Until the end of the Second World War, both Saline and the Metarey family prospered. The town’s stately central square started at the wide marble steps of a Greek-columned library bearing Eoghan Metarey’s name, and its walks were lit by cast-bronze gaslights bearing the name of his foundry. Across the street the public park was divided in two by the brook he had dug, its pumped water tumbling all spring and summer over a set of falls that had been carved from his granite. The downtown was six blocks long and by