Juke Ash trod beside the mound in the yellowing grass where he had buried his father six months ago, his eyes avoiding the unmarked grave, still set on ignoring the man, even in death, just as the old man had ignored him coming up through the years. Now, it was his duty to watch over the grave of Ira Ash. For what purpose, Juke had no idea; justification he was incapable of fully grasping in this world.

Six months ago, Juke had carried his father’s remains out from St. Shotts to Ira’s old shack in Cutland Junction; the same shack that Juke was now living in. Devoting long days to repairing the place and tending its vegetable garden, he rarely made it back to his home in Bareneed where his wife, Melena, and baby daughter, Jocelyn, lived with no need for him. They had left him to his seclusion, and Juke had moved into his father’s shack, the man buried in the ground where he wanted to be, his last wish passed on by one of his rummy friends in a bar in the city, "Bury me near da woods, in da broken earth, always wha’ I wanted, trees touchin’ roots at least. Roots ‘s important." Juke’s father had been a quiet man who nodded frequently to his own inner conversations and fancied himself a poet, and more and more of a wordsmith with each radiant splash of rum poured into his harassed and somber heart. Words mattered and were deeper than the liquor glass that could never be appropriately drained.

Juke had heard of his father’s death from a neighbour who learned the grim truth from the daily newspaper. When Juke visited the newspaper office in St. Shotts to purchase a copy of the three-day-old edition, he read the details as though he were a stranger idly learning of another stranger’s death, except for the shudder through his bones. The end had come and nothing had changed or could ever change now. His father had perished while leaving his favourite bar and crossing the street. Simple enough. But what had inspired the story in the newspaper was the fact that Ira Ash had continued whispering after his heart had stopped, as though the words were still leaking out. It had been reported that several people heard the words that resembled a verse from poetry. The ambulance attendants confirmed the speculation. And so it was printed as fact. A drunken, dead old man who whispered poetry while lying in the street, long after his heart had stopped beating. And Juke had been obliged to give burial because what was left of Ira Ash was still his father, always his father, and more so fixed as his father now.

Ira Ash had been sixty-seven years old and they had burned him up and all of his stories with him. The only thing that had ever seemed to make Ira real, that had left an impression in Juke’s mind of his father ever existing at all, were his stories. The stories that Ira told detailed outlandish characters and occurrences from long ago as though his life had ended there, in a time that could not be matched by the helpless and hopeless present, and Ira was merely the culmination of those times that required retelling to prevent his diminishment. Sixty-seven years old. The life had ended and been fixed at that age. Dead at sixty-seven. Ira Ash. What Juke had walked away with, after paying the price, was an urn half-filled with ashes. He drove from St. Shotts with the urn in the passenger seat of his pickup, moving out into the dense highway blackness that kept spreading in front of him, gripping his headlight beams and holding them steady, driving for what seemed like days and weeks but would have been an accountable amount of time in the mind of one less occupied. He found Bareneed without even thinking and passed before his house, imagining his wife and his infant daughter in the window watching him with needing, but they were not. He drove beyond the cluster of square houses and the wide-open bay with the towering dark headland, the abandoned church and the graveyard, and then he turned around and headed back toward Cutland Junction. Outside of Bareneed, he travelled along Shearstown Line and saw the highway sign for Cutland Junction, turning off when the time was right and moving through the small community and into the dirt-road woods, deeper into the wilderness, through the branch-scraping closeness until he reached the shack that was so lonely and dim it was barely visible.

Juke dug the hole in the summer darkness, his shovel making a steady sound that brought to mind a voice shushing someone. He dug the grave that he realized was too big, his mind fixed around the shape of a coffin. There was only one size of a grave, no matter what was laid to rest, one size that fit his mind’s configuration. The earthy bowels that made pure waste of what remained of a person.

When he was done, he tossed the urn into the hole, watching it drop and land steadily on its side. It was a hundred times too small for all this vastness he had opened up. Plenty of room for his father to take root. The urn had nudged an imprint in the earth while the top fell off, its silver brushed by moonlight and the fineness of the ash slanted in a neat pile against the dark clay. Juke shovelled dirt to cover the stories inscribed on each flake of powdery ash, concerned that it might blow away, his limbs trembling weakly from work and raw emotions that surged in such a way that he sensed himself growing larger, breathing deeper to engorge the feelings, to face them and have them fortify him with their self-made sadness.

He stood a moment, looking down, then quietly patted the mound of earth all over with the back of the shovel, the filled-in, troublesome hole larger than what it had been gouged from.