Never Answer If Someone At The Cemetery Calls You By Your Middle Name.

I was halfway down the west row when I counted forty-two. The wind had been pushing dust across the cemetery all night. It came down from the Chinati foothills and slipped through the chain-link fence in thin red streams. October had taken most of the heat out of the air, but the ground still held enough warmth to make the dust smell dry and old.

Sagrado Reposo covered eighty acres outside Marfa. At night it got quiet enough that I could hear my boots grinding over the caliche road from the west row. The rusted iron arch at the entrance stood behind me with the gate locked beneath it. The office shed was somewhere past the road and the dark line of the mesquite.

I stopped and looked back at the graves. Forty-two. I counted them again. Then once more, slower. The flashlight beam moved from stone to stone.

Most of the markers were low and pale, worn down by weather and time. The rest of the cemetery disappeared outside the circle of light. Nothing moved between the rows. Nothing made a sound except the fence rattling when the wind hit it. Forty-two graves.

Every night, for six years, the count had been forty-one. I had taken the night-gate job in twenty eighteen because it was steady work and kept me close to the house and land I'd inherited from my father. August Quinn had been running the place then. He told me the job needed one reliable man.

That was how he put it. One evening in the office shed, he handed me the keys and a flashlight. The shed smelled like dust, old coffee, and the space heater he kept running even when it wasn't cold enough to need one. He had a metal desk pushed against the wall. Inside the top drawer was an index card taped flat against the metal.

The card had been handled for years. Its corners were soft and gray. The writing on it was dark in some places and faded in others. August gripped my wrist before he let go of the keys.

"The rules on this card are the job," he said.

I looked at the card again. There were six short lines on it, written in his blocky handwriting. Never open the gate between three and four in the morning, even for a hearse. Count the cars if fresh flowers appeared on a grave I hadn't seen visited. Don't investigate sprinklers heard in a section without irrigation.

Count forty-one graves in the west row every night. Never answer anyone who called me by my middle name. The last part took up less room than the rest. The bottom of the card was blank. I reached toward the desk for a pen.

August caught my hand. "Don't add any names to that card."

I looked at him. He didn't explain. August wasn't the kind of man who explained a warning after he'd given it. At first I figured the card was superstition. August had worked at Sagrado Reposo for a long time, and people who spend enough years around cemeteries collect their habits.

I understood locking the gate. I understood walking the west row and counting the markers. Those were ordinary parts of the job. So I did them. Every night I locked the rusted iron gate across the caliche road.

Every night I walked the west row with my flashlight and counted forty-one graves. The card stayed taped inside the desk drawer. I didn't add anything to it. Within a year, August died of a stroke. After that the gate was mine.

The shed was mine. The card stayed where he'd left it, with the softened edges and the blank space at the bottom. I kept following the rules because they were the job, whether I believed in them or not. Most nights the count took less than five minutes. I knew where every marker stood.

I knew which one leaned toward the fence and which one had a corner chipped off. I didn't need to touch them or get close. The beam passed over the row and the number stayed the same. Forty-one. Tonight I reached the last marker and found another grave beyond it.

The extra one was at the end of the row where the ground ran out toward the fence. I had walked past that spot twenty minutes earlier. There had been nothing there except hard dirt, weeds, and a strip of blown dust caught against the wire. Now the flashlight showed a low rise in the ground.

I took a step closer. The mound wasn't large. It was longer than a toolbox and wider than my shoulders. There was no stone at the head. No flowers.

No fresh boards or pile of dirt beside it. Just the dark shape of turned earth sitting where the empty ground had been. I held the flashlight steady and counted the markers behind me. One through forty-one. I turned back toward the mound and started again.

One. Two. Three. The wind pushed dust across my boots. I kept counting.

At forty-one I stopped, then counted the grave at the end. Forty-two. I walked around it once. The light shook a little in my hand, which annoyed me. I was tired.

That was all. Tired people miss things. Tired people count wrong. I went back to the beginning of the row. One.

Two. Three. The number held. I tried it from the other direction. Forty-one markers.

One grave without a marker. There was still only one flashlight in my hand and only one person standing there. Me. I looked toward the office shed. Its window showed a weak square of yellow light through the dark.

The space heater would still be running. The card would still be taped inside the metal drawer. The gate would still be locked behind me. I turned back to the end of the row. The beam settled on the forty-second grave.

Two hours later I was back in the office shed with the logbook open on the desk. The space heater was still running. Dust had gathered along the bottom of the window, and the yellow light made the room feel smaller than it was. I wrote the date at the top of the page and started the entry.

Forty-two markers and mounds in the west row. I wrote it twice because the first line looked wrong. Then I added the time and held the pencil above the paper. There wasn't a place in the book for a grave that hadn't been there when I started the shift. So I put the number in the same column as everything else.

The card was taped inside the desk drawer beside me. I could see its bottom edge where the drawer hadn't closed all the way. Six rules. One blank space beneath them. I pushed the drawer shut and sat there with the pencil in my hand.

A few months after August died, I heard sprinklers running in Section D. It was sometime after midnight. The sound came through the shed wall in short bursts. Hiss. Pause.

Hiss again. I knew there were no sprinklers in that section. The old irrigation map was taped above the desk, and the shutoff valves were marked in red pencil. I checked both from the window without going outside. The gravel stayed dry.

I left the flashlight on the desk and watched the dark section through the glass. The sound kept going for another hour. Maybe longer. I didn't check the clock much. I stayed inside because the card said not to investigate sprinklers heard in a section without irrigation.

The hissing stopped before dawn. Nothing was wet. There were no tracks in the gravel and no reason for the sound to have been there. I didn't write it down that morning. The hearse was different.

That happened during another early shift, back when I was still getting used to the hours. I had been tired enough that I didn't know what time it was until the headlights came through the window. They moved across the wall and stopped at the gate. I went outside with the keys in my hand.

The hearse was dark and unmarked. No funeral home name. No plate I recognized. A man sat behind the windshield wearing a dark suit. He was broad through the shoulders and looked straight ahead while I walked up to the gate.

I stopped on the other side of the bars. The window came down halfway.

"An early burial was scheduled," he said.

"Unlock the gate."

His voice was flat. Not angry. Not friendly either. I looked at the hearse, then at the padlock. I had the key out before I understood what I was doing.

The lock opened in my hand. I lifted it from the chain and reached for the latch. The clock on the shed showed three twenty. August had said never to open the gate between three and four in the morning, even for a hearse. I looked back through the windshield.

The man's eyes stayed fixed straight ahead. His mouth kept moving.

"Unlock the gate."

I didn't answer. I stepped away from the latch and put the padlock back through the chain. My hands were steady by then. That helped. I didn't know what would happen if I opened the gate, but I knew what the card said.

The man watched me without turning his head. "Unlock the gate."

I kept the lock closed. The hearse idled on the caliche road. Its engine made a low steady sound that carried across the empty cemetery. I stood behind the gate with the keys in my hand and waited for the hour to pass. At four, the clock changed.

At four one, the hearse reversed toward Marfa. It didn't turn around. The road was wide enough for it to make the turn, but it backed away in a straight line until the headlights pointed down the road. Then the dust came up around it and covered the rear window. A few seconds later there was nothing left except the dust.

I went back inside and wrote the time down on a scrap of paper. After sunrise I called the funeral homes in Marfa. None of them had scheduled a burial at Sagrado Reposo. None of them knew the hearse. None of them claimed the driver.

I asked about an early burial. I asked about a dark hearse without a name on it. I gave them the time. Three twenty in the morning. The answers were all the same.

No. That was when I started keeping better records. Gate times. West-row counts. Sprinklers that ran where there weren't any.

Anything that didn't fit the rest of the shift went in the book. I turned a few pages now. Most of the entries were ordinary. Gate locked at eleven forty-five. Count forty-one.

Wind from the west. Nothing unusual. The handwriting got smaller near the bottom of each page. I didn't remember doing that, but the lines crowded together whenever I was trying to get everything down before sunrise. I looked at the new entry again.

Forty-two markers and mounds. The words sat there in pencil beside the older counts. The mound at the end of the row was still outside in the dark. I could see it from the shed window if I angled the flashlight away from the glass. I didn't do that.

I had already counted it enough times. I wrote another line beneath the first. Unmarked grave appeared at end of row. Then I stopped. The pencil point rested against the paper.

I could hear the heater clicking as it cycled on and off. Somewhere beyond the shed the fence rattled once in the wind. I wrote the time. I wrote the first unexplained hearse entry beneath it, then closed the logbook and left it beside August's card.

By the time I left the shed, the sky was turning gray behind the mesquite. I slept for a few hours at the house, then drove to Marfa on my day off with the logbook on the passenger seat. I wasn't looking for a reason to believe the extra grave. I wanted the reason August had made me count the west row so precisely.

Forty-one markers. Every night. He'd kept that rule on the card for six years, and probably longer before that. The county records office opened at eight. I got there a little after and spent the morning looking through burial records that smelled like dust and old glue.

The pages were kept in flat boxes. Most of the writing had faded to brown, but the names were still readable. The forty-one marked graves belonged to the Casillas and Fisher ranch families. They'd died during the influenza winter of nineteen eighteen. Some pages listed whole households on the same day.

Others had one name followed by three more in a different hand. The deaths came close together that week. I counted the names twice. Forty-one. That matched the stones in the west row.

It also matched the number August had written on the card. So far there wasn't anything strange about it. Just a cemetery with old records and a bad winter behind it. The parish ledger was in a different archive across town. It took another hour to find the right book because the burial entries weren't filed under the cemetery name.

They were filed by week and parish district. The ledger had a cracked black cover and pages swollen from years of damp air. I turned through the week in October until the ink started getting darker. Forty-two people had been interred there. I counted the entries once.

Then I counted them again, slower. The extra entry was near the bottom of the page. Ellie Fisher. Child. The priest had written a note beside it in smaller letters.

Not to be marked. Not to be counted. I read it several times. The words were plain enough. They weren't a mistake in the record.

They were an instruction. The forty-one count had been from the start. Someone had left Ellie out of the stones and out of the number, and the rule had stayed in place for more than a century. August had inherited it the same way I had inherited the gate and the shed. I copied the name into the logbook first.

Then I copied the note beneath it. Ellie Fisher. Not to be marked. Not to be counted. The pencil point broke when I finished.

I sharpened it with the little metal sharpener I kept in the truck and closed the book. Nothing in the records explained the mound that had appeared at the end of the west row. Nothing explained why a child had been buried there and then erased from the count. But it gave the forty-second grave a place in the world, which was more than I'd had that morning.

I drove back to Sagrado Reposo before noon. The gate was still locked. The west row looked the same in daylight. Forty-one markers. Hard ground at the end of the row.

No mound. No fresh dirt. Nothing disturbed. I walked the row anyway. The count held at forty-one.

I checked it from both directions and came up with the same number. Then I went back to the shed and put the logbook beside the card. That was the first time I noticed how often flowers appeared in the older entries. They were never listed as visitors. There wasn't a name attached to them.

Just a short line about fresh flowers on a grave that had been bare during the previous round. After that came a second line about a car. At first I thought the entries were unrelated. Flowers got left at graves. Cars came and went.

People forgot to sign in or didn't want to be seen. None of that was unusual by itself. The problem was that the grave was always bare before the flowers appeared, and the car was always one more than it should've been. The pattern continued for three years. White flowers on a grave I had passed twenty minutes earlier.

A car parked near the rows that hadn't been in the lot on my first round. Sometimes the flowers were wilted by morning. Sometimes they looked fresh enough to have been cut minutes before. The cars were different, but none of them left a plate number I could use. There were no visitors among the markers when I went out to look.

I didn't touch the flowers. I counted the cars. That was the rule on the card. Count the cars if fresh flowers appeared on a grave I hadn't seen visited. It didn't say to remove anything.

It didn't say to search the cemetery. I was learning that the rules usually left out the part I wanted most. One night I found white oleander on the Barlow grave. I'd passed the plot twenty minutes earlier. It had been bare then.

The Barlows had moved to El Paso years ago, and I hadn't seen anyone visit that grave since I took the job. The flowers lay across the dirt in a loose bundle, pale in the flashlight beam. My truck was parked beside the office. There was another car near the west row. A sedan covered in dried mud.

I counted mine first. Then the sedan. Two cars. I left the flowers where they were and walked toward the sedan. Its engine was still warm.

I could hear the metal ticking as it cooled. The doors were closed. The windows were dark. I looked through the windshield and the side glass. Nobody inside.

I checked the rows from the edge of the light. No driver. No passenger. No one standing near the Barlow grave or anywhere else among the markers. The cemetery was empty except for me and the car.

I stayed beside the office until dawn. The sedan was gone when the light came up. There were no tire tracks in the dirt and no registration left behind. The oleander had turned brown. The petals looked as if they'd been dead for weeks instead of a few hours.

I checked the funeral records after the office opened. Nothing matched the car. Nothing matched the flowers. I put the logbook on the desk and turned to the page where I'd copied the parish entry. Then I added the unidentified sedan beneath Ellie Fisher's name.

The sedan was gone when the light came up. There were no tire tracks in the dirt and no registration left behind. The oleander had turned brown. I checked the funeral records after the office opened, then added the sedan beneath Ellie Fisher's name. That was the first entry like that.

It wasn't the last. Over the next three years, flowers kept appearing on graves I'd already checked. I would walk past a bare plot, make my first round, and find fresh flowers there when I came back. White flowers mostly. Sometimes yellow.

Once a bundle of red ones tied with twine. I never saw anyone leave them. The cars came after. There would be mine beside the office and another one near the rows. A sedan.

A pickup. Once an old station wagon with mud up the doors. None of them had come through the gate. I kept counting them because that was what the card said. Then I waited for daylight.

Every time, the flowers were dead by morning or the car was gone. Sometimes both. Nothing followed me back to the shed. Nothing came to the door. The rule held.

That was enough for me. Four years after August died, I found the sedan at the west fence again. I knew it before I got close. Dried mud covered the sides and the windshield was dark with dust. It sat outside the chain-link fence with its nose pointed toward the cemetery, like the driver had pulled over and stopped without bothering to turn off the road.

My truck was by the office. Two cars. I said it out loud because the number felt wrong.

"Two."

The wind had dropped sometime after midnight. The cemetery was quiet except for the fence tapping against one of its loose posts. I took the flashlight and walked west between the rows. The beam moved over the markers and the hard ground. Forty-one stones.

The count stayed where it belonged. At the fence, someone was standing beside the sedan. I stopped. August wore the work shirt he used to wear at Sagrado Reposo. Faded blue.

Sleeves rolled to his elbows. The shirt hung loose on him, and the wind moved through it without moving the rest of him. His boots were planted in the dirt. His hands were empty. I hadn't seen him since the week before his stroke.

He'd been in the shed that afternoon, looking over the logbook and telling me to keep the west row clear. He didn't say anything else. August never wasted words when an instruction would do. Now he faced the cemetery with his head bent slightly forward. His lips were moving.

I raised the flashlight. The beam caught the side of his face, then the shirt, then the ground around his boots. There was no shadow behind him. The sedan had one. The fence had one.

August didn't. He started counting the markers. His mouth formed each number. I could see the motion clearly, but I couldn't hear him. The wind wasn't loud enough to cover a voice.

There wasn't any other sound near us. Still, the numbers stopped at his lips. I watched him pass from one stone to the next. He didn't touch them. He didn't need to.

He knew where they were. Forty-one. His mouth kept moving. I understood then that he wasn't counting the stones anymore. I stepped closer to the fence.

Gravel shifted under my boot. "August."

His lips stopped. He turned his head toward me. His eyes were open, but they didn't settle on my face. He looked through me toward the west row, like I was something behind the fence or maybe something farther off. The flashlight beam shook in my hand.

"August," I said again.

He looked back at the graves. His mouth formed a number I couldn't hear. Then he was gone. I reached the fence a second later. My hand hit the wire hard enough to make it rattle.

The sedan was gone too. There was no engine sound fading down the road. No dust hanging in the air. Just empty ground beyond the fence and the dark road running west. I stayed there with the flashlight pointed through the wire.

The rules had kept the visitors away. The hearse hadn't entered. The cars hadn't crossed the gate. The flowers had gone bad before morning. I had treated all of it like the same job August gave me.

See it. Count it. Don't follow it. But August hadn't been a visitor. He had worked the cemetery before me.

He'd walked the west row and counted forty-one stones every night. After he died, something had kept doing it. Maybe not something. Former groundskeepers. Men who took the gate and the card and the count, then kept working after there wasn't a body left to do the work.

The thought made me feel sick. I lowered the flashlight and stood at the west fence where August had disappeared.

I stayed at the fence until the wind started coming back up from the foothills. August was gone. The sedan was gone. The cemetery was still there, with the west row behind the wire and forty-one stones standing where they belonged. I went back to the shed and finished the shift.

A little before four, the first dust came down from the Chinati foothills. It moved low across the road at first. Then the whole storm followed it. Red dust hit the window hard enough to make the glass shake. The fence disappeared.

The lights along the road flickered once and went out. The radio died with them. I picked up the flashlight and watched the dark outside. The storm covered Sagrado Reposo in a few minutes. Dust pressed against the window in thick sheets.

The cemetery lights were gone. The road was gone. Everything beyond the glass turned the same red-black color. I could still hear the wind. Under it came a different sound.

Hiss. Pause. Hiss again. The sprinklers were running somewhere in the west row. I looked at the irrigation map above the desk.

The west row wasn't connected to the system. There weren't any sprinkler heads there. Section D had the only line on that side of the cemetery, and the card said not to investigate sprinklers heard in a section without irrigation. I stayed inside. The sound kept going.

Short bursts from different places. One near the fence. Another farther down the row. Then one close to the shed, just beyond the window. Hiss.

Pause. Hiss. I kept the flashlight in my hand. The beam pointed at the floor because there wasn't much use shining it through all that dust. The radio sat beside the logbook with its red indicator light dark.

I checked it twice anyway. Nothing. Then the dust shifted outside the window. A child stood among the markers. She was small enough that the tops of the stones reached near her shoulders.

A pale dress hung around her legs. Her dark hair moved across her face in the wind, but she didn't lift a hand to push it away. The dust ran around her in red streams. It covered the ground and struck the markers. It flattened everything else.

She didn't move. I moved the flashlight toward the window. The beam caught her dress for half a second. The fabric looked old and dirty at the bottom. Her face stayed turned toward the shed.

I didn't open the door. The radio crackled. The child disappeared from the window. A voice came through the dead speaker.

"Patrick."

It was a child's voice. High and thin. Close enough that I felt it in the room instead of hearing it from the radio. The speaker went silent. I stood there with the flashlight pointed at it.

The storm kept hitting the shed. Dust scraped over the roof. The sprinklers hissed from the west row, one after another, and I stayed where I was until daylight started showing through the window. The storm cleared before sunrise. Not slowly.

One minute the glass was red and blind. The next I could see the fence again. Dust covered the road and lay in ridges against the shed. The cemetery looked smaller than it had the night before. I went outside with the flashlight.

The west row had forty-one stone markers. The count was easy in the morning light. I didn't need the beam, but I carried it anyway. At the end of the row, beyond the last stone, the ground had changed. There was a fresh mound where the hard dirt had been.

It was child-sized. Narrow through the middle and shorter than the other graves. The earth was dark and loose. No marker stood at the head. Something white caught the light.

I crouched beside it. A single milk tooth had been pressed into the dirt at the top of the mound. It was small and clean, with a thin brown line near the root. I didn't touch it. I counted the stones again.

Forty-one. Then I counted the mounds. Forty-two. The number stayed the same from either direction. Forty-one markers.

Forty-two burial mounds. I went back to the shed and opened the logbook. The old entry with Ellie Fisher's name was still beneath the parish note. I put the pencil to the page and wrote beneath it. Ellie Fisher surfaced without a marker.

I stopped there, then added another line. The cemetery now holds the grave the priest ordered omitted. The sentence looked too formal for the logbook. I left it anyway. The pencil shook when I put it down, which made me angry.

I didn't want the cemetery deciding what my hands did. That night I made the first round before midnight. The mound was still at the end of the west row. The tooth was still pressed into the dirt. I counted forty-one stones and forty-two mounds, then went back to the shed.

Nothing happened until after three. The voice called from near the fence.

"Patrick."

I was standing beside the desk with the flashlight in my hand. I didn't answer. A few minutes later it came from the middle of the row.

"Patrick."

I checked the clock. Three twelve. The voice moved again. Sometimes it came from behind the shed. Sometimes from beyond the west fence.

Once it sounded like it was standing right outside the door. I kept the door shut and said nothing. I didn't answer my first name. That was the easy part. The rule had always been about my middle name, but I wasn't going to give her any name at all.

Not after the radio. Not after the mound. Not after seeing August standing beside the car with no shadow behind him. The calls continued for three nights.

"Patrick."

Then silence. On the fourth night, the voice came from the far end of the west row. It sounded tired, though I couldn't tell if that was in the voice or in me. The air was still. No dust moved across the ground.

The flashlight showed the stones and the mound and nothing else. "Patrick."

I stood at the last marker and waited. The voice didn't say it again. For a while there was only the fence ticking in the dark. Then the child spoke from directly behind me.

"Elias."

I didn't turn around. The name had only been written in one place, in the baptismal record at the parish office. August had never asked for it. I had never told anyone. I held the flashlight at my side and waited beside the forty-second mound.

I stayed beside the mound until the sky started to pale, then went back to the shed and locked the west gate behind me. I slept through most of the day. When I woke up the light was already going down, and the name was still there in my head. Elias. I had never told August.

I hadn't told anybody living. The baptismal record was in the Presidio parish ledger beside Ellie's burial entry, which meant she had either heard me say it somewhere I didn't remember or she'd found the same book I had. Neither answer helped. I ate something at the house and drove back to Sagrado Reposo before midnight.

The gate work was the same as it had been every night for six years. Check the chain. Check the padlock. Walk the road. Keep the flashlight charged.

The difference was that I knew what waited at the west end now. The wind had dropped. There wasn't any moon. Dust lay across the caliche road in thin pale strips, but nothing moved over it. I took the flashlight from the truck and started toward the west row.

The stones were where they belonged. The mounds were there too. I counted as I walked. One through forty-two. The last mound sat beyond the final marker with its dirt still dark from the storm.

The milk tooth was gone. I didn't know when it had disappeared, and I wasn't going to search for it. I stood beside the mound and kept the flashlight pointed at the ground. The voice came from directly behind me.

"Elias."

I closed my mouth. It would've been easy to turn around. That was the problem. The voice was close enough that I could hear the thin breath behind the name. I could picture her standing there in the pale dress with the dark hair hanging around her face.

If I turned, I'd be looking at the child whose grave had been left out of the record on purpose. I didn't turn. The forty-second person wasn't supposed to be counted. That was what the priest had written. Not to be marked.

Not to be counted. If I answered, Ellie would have the name she'd been trying to get from every keeper who came after her. She could take my place in the count, and I'd take hers everywhere else.

"Elias."

My jaw hurt from holding it shut. I walked toward the caliche road. The voice followed me. It came from the end of the row first, then from between the stones, then from somewhere beyond the fence. I kept walking.

The flashlight beam crossed the markers one at a time. Forty-one stones. One unmarked mound. I didn't count them aloud. I didn't give the voice anything to use.

At the shed I locked the door and checked the clock. Three thirteen. The radio was off. The irrigation map hung above the desk. The logbook sat beside the metal drawer where August's card was taped.

I put the flashlight on the desk and stood there listening. "Elias."

It came from outside the window. I didn't answer. The name came again from behind the shed. Then from the west fence. Each time it sounded the same.

Patient. Not angry. Like she could keep calling longer than I could keep silent. I checked the clock at three twenty-eight. Then three forty-six.

I didn't look at it again until the heater clicked off. Four one. The voice stopped. I stayed in the shed for another few minutes because being alive didn't mean the rule had ended safely. Nothing moved outside.

The fence was still. The window showed the first gray line of morning over the cemetery. I went out and looked toward the west row. The mound was still there. So were the forty-one markers.

Nothing had changed except the hour. That was when I understood what August had been doing beside the sedan. He hadn't been haunting the cemetery because he missed the work. He'd been continuing it. He'd counted the stones after death because the job didn't end when the keeper did.

Ellie had been trying for a century to make someone answer. Every keeper had inherited the omission. The forty-one-marker count held her outside it. If one of us gave her the name she wanted, she'd be released from the count and the keeper would be trapped in her place. August hadn't quit because he couldn't.

Neither could I. I considered driving home and leaving the keys in the shed. I considered calling the county and telling them the cemetery needed somebody else. Both ideas lasted about a minute. The count needed a living keeper.

If I left, it would fail. I didn't know what that would do to the cemetery or to anyone who came through the gate, and I wasn't willing to find out. So I changed the procedure. The next night I counted the mounds aloud through forty-one. I stopped before the last one and kept the final number in my head.

The gate stayed locked from three until four. When flowers appeared, I left them alone and counted the cars. When sprinklers ran over dry ground, I stayed in the shed. I didn't answer any voice that called from the rows. The old card was still taped inside the desk drawer.

I took it down and wrote Elias in the blank space at the bottom. My handwriting looked worse than August's. The letters leaned together, and the pencil broke halfway through the last one. I sharpened it and finished. Then I took a fresh card from the box beneath the desk.

I wrote six rules on it. Never open the gate between three and four in the morning, even for a hearse. Count the cars if fresh flowers appear on a grave you haven't seen visited. Don't investigate sprinklers heard in a section without irrigation. Count the west-row mounds aloud through forty-one.

Don't say the final number. Never answer anyone who calls you Elias. Don't add any names to this card. I added Elias at the bottom anyway. After that I taped the new card inside the drawer and left the old one beneath it.

The fresh card covered most of the metal, but I could still see August's handwriting at the edge. The two cards stayed together. One had carried the job to me. The other would explain enough for whoever took it next. There was no reason to think about who that would be.

I wasn't planning to leave. I kept doing the night gate, one shift after another, and the count stayed at forty-one stones and forty-two mounds. On the last round I made before dawn, I walked the west row with the flashlight in my hand. The cemetery was quiet. No sprinklers.

No flowers. No cars waiting outside the fence. I counted the markers aloud. One. Two.

Three. The number reached forty-one. I stopped there. The unmarked mound sat at the end of the row in the dark. I didn't say what came after it.

I turned away and walked back along the caliche road. At the entrance I pulled the chain through the gate and set the padlock. The metal clicked shut. I checked it once, then once more. The office shed window showed a weak square of yellow behind me.

Inside, the replacement card waited in the metal desk drawer for whoever took the keys after me. I left it there and walked away from the locked gate.