On the third night after Orin Tackett was buried, Emmett Sohl lay flat behind the low rock wall at the edge of Chalk Hollow cemetery and watched five people open the grave with their own hands. He had dug that grave himself, four feet deep instead of six, because that was the rule the Tackett family had paid him silver to follow for more than twenty years. He watched the men throw the dirt up neat, watched two of them step down into the hole, and heard the soft groan of the pine box lid coming back on its hinges, the same sound he had put into the ground a hundred times. Then the whole family leaned in over the open grave and looked down into it, and something in that box moved that was not one of them.

Emmett is 92 years old now, with an oxygen line running to his nose and nothing left to lose. He dug graves in Marrow County, Arkansas for 51 years. He buried grandmothers and stillborn babies and men crushed under their own tractors, and in all that time he held to one rule: you cover a body once and you leave it covered. But there was one family up in the hollows that never followed that rule.

For almost 30 years, the Tacketts dug their own dead back out of the ground on a schedule they never broke. On the third night after a burial, and again on the ninth, they came down off Sabbath Ridge and opened the grave. Then they closed it, and they never touched that grave again. The last night Emmett saw them do it, he set down his shovel and never picked one up again.

He never told a living soul why, until now. Emmett took the cemetery work in 1956, when he was 22. The old caretaker before him had walked off in the middle of a work day and never came back for his last pay, and nobody in the town of Delsie would say why. Emmett needed the money and did not ask questions.

The yard was called Chalk Hollow, though the church that once stood beside it had burned long before he was born. It sat on a shelf of pale limestone above the Cane Fork, and the ground held so much rock that some graves took a man three full days to open. Emmett dug most of them alone. He heard the Tackett name his first week on the job.

The other men in Delsie lowered their voices when they said it. The Tacketts lived up on Sabbath Ridge, eight miles past the last county road, on land the family had held since before Arkansas was a state. They came down maybe twice a year for salt and shells and coffee. They paid in old coin and did not linger.

People said they married close. People said harder things than that, at the edge of a breath. Emmett did not meet one of them until the winter of 1958, when an old woman named Verna Tackett died on the ridge and four of her people carried her down in a wagon to be laid in Chalk Hollow ground. They came at first light: three men and a young woman, long in the face and quiet, dressed in mended clothes that had gone soft and gray.

The oldest of them gave his name as Ransom Tackett and counted out the burial fee into Emmett’s hand in silver dollars older than Emmett’s father. He asked one thing, plain. He wanted the grave dug shallow, not the six feet the county called for. Four, he said, and no deeper.

Emmett told him that was against the rules. Ransom looked at him for a long moment. “Then bury her shallow and forget you did it,” he said, “and there will be an extra dollar in it. ”

Emmett was young, and he was broke, and four feet of that limestone was a mercy on his back.

He dug it shallow. They buried Verna Tackett that afternoon under a low gray sky. The family did not weep, and they did not pray in any way Emmett recognized. They stood in a ring around the open grave, and the old man said words in a voice too low to carry, and then they filled the hole themselves by hand, taking the shovel from Emmett when he offered it.

Before they left, the young woman knelt on the mounded dirt and pressed her ear flat against the ground, and stayed that way a long while, listening. Then they got in their wagon and drove back up toward the ridge. Three nights later, Emmett came to the yard at dawn and found Verna Tackett’s grave dug open. Not caved in, not dug into by dogs or hogs, which happened now and then in a shallow grave.

Opened. The dirt was piled neat to one side the way a man piles it, and the pine box sat uncovered at the bottom of the hole with its lid laid back on its hinges, and the box was empty. Emmett stood at the edge of that grave and felt something crawl up the back of his neck that he had never felt before in a graveyard, and he had spent two years in graveyards by then. He told himself it was body snatchers.

Medical men paid for corpses in those days. Everybody knew that. He climbed down, closed the empty box, and filled the grave back in himself, and said nothing to Ransom Tackett, because he did not want to be the man who told that family such a thing. Six days later, he came to work and the grave was mounded fresh again.

Somebody had filled it back in during the night. And when Emmett, against every good instinct he had, took a spade and opened one careful corner of it to see, the pine box was down there closed, and heavy, and Verna Tackett was back inside it. He put the dirt back and did not sleep right for a month. That was the first time.

It was not the last. Over the years it stopped being a secret between him and the dark and became a thing he simply did, the way a man learns to live beside a train track and stops hearing the trains. When a Tackett died, they came down off the ridge and paid him in old silver to dig the grave shallow. They buried their own by hand.

And then, on the third night after the burial, and again on the ninth night, the grave would open, and then it would close. Emmett learned to schedule his weeks around it. He learned not to come to the yard on a third night or a ninth night. He learned that if he did come and saw a lantern moving on the far side of Chalk Hollow, he was to turn his truck around and go home.

For years he did not know what they were doing down in those holes. He only knew the pattern, and the pattern never changed. Third night, ninth night, open and then closed. And every Tackett grave, once it had been opened and closed those two times, was never touched again.

It was an old man named Dellard Coy, who had cut timber up near Sabbath Ridge as a boy, who first told Emmett what the Tacketts believed. Coy told it to him one night at the feed store when they were the last two men there, and he told it low, watching the door. The Tacketts held, Coy said, that a body does not die all at once. The person goes, but something stays behind in the meat for a while, dim and slow.

And if you bury a Tackett and leave that something alone in the dark, it wakes up down there confused and starts to work its way back. On the third night, Coy said, it comes up to the surface if it is going to come up at all. And on the ninth night, if it did not come up on the third, it tries one more time and then gives out. And only then is the body truly dead and safe to leave.

So the family goes down and meets it. They open the box on the third night and look their dead kin in the face by lantern light. And if the thing in there has come awake, they do a thing to it to put it back down. Then on the ninth night, they check again to be sure.

Coy would not say what the thing was that they did. He said his own daddy had seen it done to a Tackett child once, and had never been right after, and had made Coy promise to stay off that ridge for the rest of his life. Emmett asked him what happened if a family did not do it, if they just left one of their dead in the ground and walked away. Coy looked at him a long while before he answered.

“They did that once,” he said. “In 18 and 91, a Tackett man buried his wife proper and could not bring himself to open her back up on the third night, and he left her lay. ” Within the year, Coy said, six of that man’s kin were dead in ways nobody could explain, and the man himself was found at the foot of the ridge one morning with his hands worn down past the nails, the fingers ground to nothing, like he had spent his last hours digging at something. “That,” Coy said, “is why they do it now, every one of them, every time, on the third night and on the ninth night, no matter how much they might not want to.

”

Emmett kept his part of it for years without ever once looking. “He was not a brave man,” he says, “and he did not pretend to be. But a man cannot live 30 years beside a thing and never look at it. ” In the fall of 1971, his curiosity finally weighed more than his fear.

A Tackett had died that week, a man this time, named Orin Tackett, big through the shoulders, laid out shallow in the far corner of the yard under a black walnut. It was the third night. Emmett parked his truck a quarter mile down the road and walked back up to Chalk Hollow in the dark with no light. He lay down flat behind the rock wall and watched.

They came near midnight, five of them, with two lanterns, moving slow across the graves. He knew the shapes of them by then: the long faces, the mended clothes. They went to Orin Tackett’s fresh grave, set the lanterns down at the head and the foot, and without a word between them, the men took spades and opened the grave, throwing the dirt up neat. It did not take them long, because Emmett had dug it shallow the way he always did.

Then two of them stepped down into the hole, and Emmett heard the lid of the pine box come back on its hinges, and the whole family leaned in over the open grave and looked down into it. For a long moment nothing happened. Emmett almost let himself breathe. Then something in the grave moved that was not one of the family.

He saw it in the lantern light: a slow shifting down in the box, low and wrong, the way a thing moves when it does not remember how to move yet. And he heard a sound come up out of that hole that he has never been able to describe to anyone, a dry working sound like a man trying to talk before he has any breath to do it with. The family did not run. The old woman among them leaned down close to the sound, close enough to feel it on her face, and began to speak to it, low and steady and patient, the way you would talk to a spooked animal or a child waking from a fever.

While she spoke, the young men reached down into the box with something in their hands and went to work. Emmett could not see what they did, and he has thanked God for that every day since. He heard it though. He heard it stop.

Emmett has tried in all the years since to make that sound into something a person could picture, and he has never once managed it. The closest he can come is to say it was the sound of something being finished that did not want to be finished. And then the silence afterward, which was worse than the sound, because in that silence the whole family stood up straight at once, all five of them, and turned their long faces up toward the walnut tree and the sky above it, like they were waiting for something to answer them back. Nothing answered.

After a while they bent again to the work. They closed the box. They filled the grave in by hand, the old woman still murmuring the whole time, and took up their lanterns and walked back off toward the road and were gone. Emmett lay behind that rock wall until the sun came up because his legs would not carry him.

When it did come up, he went home and did not go back to the yard for 11 days. He waited until well past the ninth night, and when he finally did go back, Orin Tackett’s grave was mounded and still, done. A black walnut leaf had fallen on top of it, and it looked like any grave in any yard in Arkansas. He kept digging for the Tacketts 11 more years after that night.

He does not have a good reason why. Maybe he understood that whatever the Tacketts carried, they kept up on that ridge, and he was part of the fence. He buried Ransom Tackett himself in 1979. Old silver, counted out by a younger man with the same long face, and he dug it four feet deep and told no one.

There was one night in those years he came closer than he ever meant to. It was the ninth night, though he had lost track of his own calendar, and he drove up to Chalk Hollow at dusk to fix a leaning fence rail with no thought of Tacketts in his head at all. He was halfway across the yard with the rail on his shoulder when he saw the two lanterns already burning down in the far corner, low to the ground, and heard the old woman’s voice going in that steady, patient way. He set the rail down slow in the wet grass and backed out of that yard without once turning around, keeping his eyes on the lanterns the whole way, because some cold part of him was certain that if he turned his back, one of those lights would be right behind his shoulder when he looked again.

He sat in his truck out on the road until the lanterns went dark on their own, near three in the morning, and then he drove home. He did not fix that fence for a month. The last grave he ever dug was in the spring of 1982, and it is the reason he stopped. A girl had died up on the ridge.

She could not have been more than nine or ten years old. Emmett never learned her name. The family that brought her down was smaller than it used to be, only three of them now, and older. The young woman who had once pressed her ear to Verna Tackett’s grave was gray at the temples and moved like her hips hurt her.

They paid him, and they asked for the grave shallow, the same as always. But this time, when Emmett had it dug, the oldest man among them, older than Ransom had ever gotten, took Emmett by the arm with a grip like a root and looked into his face and said: “This one, you come and watch. On the third night, you come and you watch what we do, and you learn it, because we are the last of us that knows how. And when we are gone, somebody has to come up the ridge and do it right, or she does not stay down.

”

Emmett did not go up the ridge. He is not proud of it. He was 48 years old, and his hands shook when he thought about that dry working sound coming up out of a child’s grave, and he could not make himself do it. So he did the only thing he could think to do.

On the third night, he went to Chalk Hollow alone before the family could come, and he found the little grave, and he did not open it. He hauled stone. All night, by lantern, he hauled the biggest slabs of Chalk Hollow limestone he could lift, the pale flat rock that shelf was made of, and laid them over the child’s grave three deep, packing the seams with clay, until there was a cairn on top of her that a team of mules could not have shifted. The stone tore his hands raw.

He worked without a lantern because he was afraid of what a light might call up out of the ground while he stood over it. More than once, as he set a slab into place, he felt the dirt beneath the cairn settle, just slightly, the way ground settles when something under it shifts its weight. Each time he made himself believe it was only the clay giving under the load. By the time the sky went gray, he could barely close his fingers.

Better than 40 slabs of pale limestone, stacked three deep, over a child who could not have weighed 60 pounds. He told himself he was keeping her in. He has never been sure in 43 years whether he was keeping her in or keeping the family out or whether it made any difference at all. The Tacketts came that night and found the grave sealed.

Emmett watched them from the road in his truck with the engine running. They stood around that cairn of stone for a long time in the lantern light, and they did not try to move it. Then the old woman with the gray temples turned and looked straight down the road at Emmett’s truck, at the two lights of it in the dark, though there was no way she could have seen him behind them. She stood facing him for a long, long while.

Then the family gathered up their lanterns and walked back up toward Sabbath Ridge. Emmett never saw a single one of them again. No Tackett ever came down off that ridge after that spring. Not for salt, not for coffee, not for anything.

In the years since, hunters and timber men have gone up looking, and they come back and say the cabins are still there, sunk in and roofless now, and the little family plot behind them is full of low, unmarked stones. More stones than there ought to be for a family that stopped coming to town. Nobody stays up there past dark. A man out of Delsie named Whit Ferris went up the ridge alone in 1994 on a dare, meaning to spend one night in the old Tackett cabins and come home with a story for the feed store.

He came back the next morning two hours before anyone looked for him, and he would not tell the story, not then and not ever. He sold his place and moved his family clear to Oklahoma inside of a month. He never went back up onto that ridge again, and he never once spoke that name out loud after that. The one thing he ever said about that night he said to Emmett, and only because Emmett was the one man in the county who would not laugh at him.

He said that around three in the morning he had heard somebody out behind the cabins in the little family plot working. Digging, he said, and then filling back in. And when he made himself get up and go to the window and look, there was nobody out there at all, only the dirt on one of the low graves moving. What he could never shake, he told Emmett, was that when he pressed his ear to the cold window glass to be sure of what he heard, the digging out in that plot did not stop or slow the way it should have if an animal were at the dirt.

It kept its own steady time, that slow rhythm any man keeps with a shovel. Spade in, lift, throw. Spade in. It did not once care that he was awake and listening.

There is one thing the ones who go up all say the same, and it is the reason Emmett is telling this at last. With the oxygen line in his nose and his own grave paid for and dug six feet deep, he made sure of that, six feet and lined with stone. They all say that up in the Tackett plot, on certain nights, the fresh turned dirt shows on graves that have no business being fresh, on the third night after no death at all, and again on the ninth. Emmett sealed one child in the ground with limestone 43 years ago because he was too afraid to learn how to do it the right way.

And every spring since, he says, when the third night comes around, he lies awake in the dark and listens the way that young woman once listened with her ear pressed to the ground, and waits to hear whether he kept something in or shut something out. He is 92. He does not think he will have to wait much longer to find out. And when they put him in the ground in Chalk Hollow, six feet down and lined with stone, he has left instructions with the one man he trusts.

On the third night, come and check the dirt. And on the ninth night, come again. And if the ground is ever turned, do not open it. Do not talk to it.

Cover it back over and haul stone, and do not stop hauling until no team of mules could shift it. Then leave that yard and never come back, and never tell a living soul why.