The Fossor

The story concerns the least romantic of characters, an elderly gravedigger. He is a Negro cipher working past his time in order to secure a grave of his own in a whites-only cemetery in the Virginia of the 1950s. He has a loose association with a Mennonite neighbor who hates a cruel God, a boy born on the moon who is going to marry Audrey Hepburn, an employer who murdered her husband, a castrated priest who murders himself, and an evil dark presence who murders hope. The old man's final days reveal that life in the garden of the dead does not flower.