Cape Cod by William Martin

Priscilla Mullins, who had already buried her brother and would soon bury her father, stared at the body of her mother. Simeon Bigelow stood with his arm around Christopher. Master Jones folded his hands and bowed his head. And Jack Hilyard, stock-still and wordless, leaned on his shovel at the foot of his wife’s grave.
    “ ‘Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever.’ ”
    Ezra glanced across the open grave mouth and told Jack to turn the first shovel. But Jack neither looked up nor moved.
    Ezra whispered, “Jack, the first shovel.”
    Jack still stood motionless.
    “The Indians may spy, and the dead must be buried,” Ezra said more urgently.
    Jack simply looked at Ezra, and his breathing grew harder, so that steam came in long freezing plumes from his nose.
    Ezra then asked Master Jones if he would do the burying. Without a word, Jones took the shovel that young Christopher held and dug it into the sand.
    None by that frigid grave mouth would ever forget the sound Jack Hilyard then made.
    “It was as if,” wrote Jones in his log, “the shovel struck Jack’s belly rather than the earth.”
    Christopher, hearing the sound again decades later, would remember the hopelessness he felt on that dark and grieving hill. Priscilla Mullins cried out in sympathy with Jack. Simeon Bigelow heard the cry of Job, so utterly human that it made him wonder that he had not cried out himself at his own wife’s death. And Ezra Bigelow heard the sound of Satan bursting forth, not simply a cry of grief but an utter denial of the psalm’s power and God’s plan.
    Jack jumped at Jones and grabbed the shovel. “I be the gravedigger! I know death better than any of you.” And he sent the sand splattering onto his wife’s legs.
    “Jack,” said Simeon, “let me do it for thee.” He reached for the shovel, and Jack pulled it back with such force that Simeon nearly fell into the hole.
    “I be the gravedigger. Me and me boy.” Jack thrust the shovel upon his son, then picked up his own. “Come on, lad, help me bury thy mother and them other poor dumb souls what come here thinkin’ God was watchin’ over ’em.”
    At that, Priscilla Mullins began to sob.
    “Shovel, boy.” Jack Hilyard whacked his shovel against his son’s.
    Christopher looked down at the shovel, then into the hole. “I can’t, Pa. I can’t bury her.”
    “Shovel the sand, damn thee!”
    “Jack!” cried Simeon.
    “Have respect for the dead,” said Ezra Bigelow.
    “I respect ’em. I respect ’em more ’n thee. I do somethin’ for ’em. I bury ’em.” Then sand and ice crystals flew in the moonlight. Faster and faster Jack’s arms went, as if he had been seized by madness. Had this colony the time to worry over witchcraft, he might have been burned on the spot as the warlock priest of some black coven, doing his evil ceremony in the moonlight.
    Jones tried to grab him, but Jack pushed away and held up the shovel like a club.
    “I be the gravedigger,” he cried. “I bury the dead, so’s them what prayed the dead would live don’t waste their energy as well as their breath.”
    “ ’Twas God’s will,” said Ezra. “All is God’s will.”
    “Why do you talk like this over my mother and your own good wife?” Priscilla Mullins wiped her tears from her eyes. “I’ve lost two dear ones, but my prayers were not wasted.”
    “Mayhap not. But mine were,” answered Jack.
    “Damn you, Jack.” Simeon Bigelow ripped the shovel from Jack’s hands. “Take your boy home and grieve this venom out of you.”
    But before Simeon’s words could calm him, Ezra Bigelow put himself between Jack and the grave mouth. “Aye. Go home. Stay longer, you coast too close to blasphemy.”
    “Blasphemy?” cried Jack. The word was a quick match striking powder in his brainpan. “Blasphemy? God treats me prayers like dung and I fear blasphemy?”
    Ezra Bigelow looked at his brother