Grave Robbers

By Wolfgang Wright

“Why not trees?” the boy asked his father, who was just about to fire up the excavator.

“What?”

“Why not trees instead of bones?” 

They had just returned from lunch, where they had sat under a tree for shade, which was where the boy had gotten the idea from. The tree was dead—they all were, at least on this side of the earth—but it was still erect and its trunk had cast a shadow wide enough to keep them both out of the burning sun, so long as they were willing to sit cheek to cheek and slide clockwise as the hour wore on.

“You can’t get food from trees.”

“Why not?”

“Because it doesn’t work that way.”

His father wiped his brow and gazed across the cemetery at the other grave robbers, most of whom had already moved their machines on to the next tombstone and were beginning to dig new holes in order to get at the coffins underneath. It was the boy’s job to help his father clean off the last layer of dirt, open the coffins, and remove the bones from the dead bodies they found inside. He would then place the bones into a wheelbarrow and haul them over to the bone pile where someone else would load them onto a truck and take them to the factory where the bones were ground up and converted into food—thick, chunky bars that tasted awful and got stuck between your teeth, forcing you to spend the rest of the day working it out with your tongue, which was what had gotten the boy to thinking about an alternate food source to begin with.

“What about dirt then?”

“Now you want to eat dirt?”

“No, but it can’t be any worse than what we’re eating now. Plus, if we knew a way to get food from dirt then we’d never have to worry about going hungry. There’s dirt everywhere,” and he pointed around for proof. 

His father watched him point and sighed. “I don’t know why we can do one and not the other, okay? Why bones work and not trees or dirt. Maybe it’s because the bones are us and the trees are not us. Maybe the process is simpler that way, less work to convert what’s already us into food for us.”

The boy leaned on his shovel, deep in thought. “What about the scientist?”

“What about him?”

“Would he know?”

“Why don’t you ask him when we’re done for the day. Right now, we need to get back to work.”

The boy laughed. “You’re the one who has to start.”

***

“What is it you want to know?” the scientist asked. He was wearing a white coat and walked around the food supplier like an important man, checking on this and inspecting that, all the while taking notes on a sheet of paper he had strapped to a clipboard. The boy did his best to keep up, but was awed by the machine, which despite its having to crunch bone and repurpose it into food looked slick and clean and made very little noise.

“Why do we use bone instead of something else to make our food from?”

“Because that’s what we know how to do.”

“Did we always know how to do it?”

“It was my grandfather who discovered it,” the scientist said proudly. “And my father, he’s the one who invented the supplier.”

“But if we learned all that, couldn’t we learn how to convert other things into food?”

“Maybe, someday. But right now this is what we have.”

The boy looked on as an old woman loaded a bucket of bones onto the conveyor belt at one end of the supplier, then swung his head around to the other side as another woman, much younger, removed the food bars that were being produced and stacked them neatly into rows.

“So how is it done?” he asked the scientist.

“The supplier does it all.”

“But how does the supplier do it?”

The scientist paused and tapped his clipboard with his pen. “It’s complicated, very high tech. You wouldn’t understand.”

“But I want to understand.”

“Toward what end?”

“Huh?”

“What good will it do you to know this information?”

The boy shrugged; he honestly didn’t know. 

“That’s right, it won’t do you any good,” the scientist went on, checking on another dial and making another note. “There’s no point in having knowledge you’re never going to use.”

“Do you know how to use an excavator?”

“Of course I do. A monkey could run an excavator.”

“But you don’t run them.”

The scientist paused; a faint grin came over his face. “Look, you’re a smart kid, I’ll give you that. But the kind of knowledge you’re asking about, it would take years of study to acquire, and you don’t have time for that.”

“I don’t?”

“Look at it this way. If I were to educate you, get you up to speed on everything there is to know about what I do, who would help your father out? Who would help him clean off the tops of the coffins, and remove the bones from their clothes, and collect them all so that we have something out of which to make our food? You see what I’m saying? We all have parts to do, and if we just up and decided not to do them, we’d starve, and you don’t want that, do you?” The scientist smiled at the boy and patted him on the shoulder. “Now run along and get rested. You’ve got to do it all over again tomorrow.”

***

That night, after everyone else had gone to sleep, the boy dug from his pocket a bone that he had swiped earlier in the day when his father wasn’t looking. It was the bone that was at the very tip of a woman’s pointer finger, a woman who had worn a fine blue dress and several pieces of jewelry none of which were valuable anymore, because no one knew how to turn them into food. He held the bone up to his eyes and examined it carefully, wondering if the bone had its own name, and if the scientist knew what it was. After placing the bone in his mouth he moved it around with his tongue, then took it between his teeth and bit down as hard as he could. Though the food supplier had only one entry point he had noticed that it had two exit points, one where the food came out and another where the “waste” came out. This waste was something that was extracted from the bone, the part of the bone that wasn’t worth eating because there was no sustenance in it, and one of the things extracted from the bone must have been its hardness, because even though the food was tough to chew, chewing the bone was impossible. But what else did the supplier remove? And what all went into the removal process? Were there chemicals involved? What kind? And who else knew about how the food supplier worked? Did the women who were working with the scientist know? Did the village leader know? Were there people in other villages who might know the process, and would they tell him about it if he were to go to them and ask? Or would he be forever trapped in this state of not knowing but wanting to know, a state that did not seem fair to him and with each passing moment became more and more intolerable?

***

The boy wasn’t paying as much attention as he should have been. He was thinking about how he and his father technically weren’t grave robbers, because in order to rob something there has to be someone who doesn’t want you to rob it, and whoever cared about graves as graves had died almost as long ago as the corpses they found in the coffins. But by taking the bone of that woman, he had actually made himself into a grave robber, because his entire village wanted that bone in order to make food with it. And it was while he was thinking about this that his father, who perhaps wasn’t paying as much attention as he should have been either, brought the bucket of the excavator down and tore off his arm. 

The boy didn’t know this at first. At first all he knew was that he was suddenly inside the grave lying on his back and staring up at a clear blue sky. But then his father appeared above him and looked panicked; he began calling to the other grave robbers for help. That’s when the boy began to feel pain in his shoulder and looked over and saw that he did not have a shoulder to feel pain in. He thought it was funny that he could feel pain in a part of his body that was no longer attached to his body, and he wondered if anyone else knew about this. 

“Son, listen to me. Everything’s going to be okay. The doctor’ll be here soon.”

“I stole a bone,” the boy confessed.

“What?”

“I wanted to look at it some more, to see what I could learn.”

“That’s okay,” his father said. He was in the grave with him now, kneeling next to him, holding the hand of the arm that was still attached to his body. “We’ve all done that at some point.”

“You have?”

His father nodded. “Yes, of course. We’ve all wondered what we’re doing here, and why we have to live the way we do.”

The boy laughed.

“What’s so funny?”

“I just wanted to learn more about bones.”

***

The doctor was able to save the boy’s life, but not the arm. He managed to patch up the wound and stop the bleeding, but the knowledge that was required to reattach a limb had long since been forgotten.

The other grave diggers brought the arm to him anyway, once he was feeling good enough for company. By then they had stripped it of all its flesh, consumed it in secret like a pack of hungry wolves, one of the many extinct species the boy had only heard about in stories. But they had left the bones alone, if only because the bones had to be converted into food first before they could be eaten. The boy thanked the grave robbers for bringing the bones to him, and when they were gone he removed them from the bag that the grave robbers had brought them in and arranged them next to him on his bed in the order that they were supposed to go. By now he’d seen hundreds of arm bones while digging up graves, but it still felt different to see them when they were his own. 

“What are you going to do with them?” his father asked, looking on from a chair beside the bed. “Afterward, I mean. When you’ve had your fun.”

The boy shrugged, wondering what it must look like with only one shoulder shrugging.

“If it were me,” his father went on, “I would give them to the scientist. No one will say anything, but tomorrow, when we eat our supper, everyone will be thinking of you. They’ll be thinking to themselves, ‘Now here’s a boy who really cares about his community, who cares that we survive.’”

The boy nodded, giving his consent, but when his father came forward to collect the bones, he rolled over and placed his other arm, the one that was still attached to his body, over the top of the bones in order to prevent his father from taking them away.

“I’ll do it,” the boy said.

***

“You again,” the scientist said. He had barely taken his eyes off his clipboard, and so the boy waited, waited until the scientist looked at him again, until he saw in the scientist’s face a change that reflected how much he himself had changed. “Oh, so that was you. That’s too bad. Looks like you made it through though.”

The boy held up the bag. 

“What do you got there?”

The boy gave the bag to the scientist, who glanced at its contents.

“Are you sure about this?”

The boy nodded.

“All right then, I’ll add them to the pile.”

The scientist turned and began to walk away, but the boy said to him, “I can’t dig graves anymore.”

“What’s that?”

“With one arm. I can’t dig graves with only one arm.”

The scientist paused and looked him up and down with the same intense scrutiny that he gave to the food supplier. “No, I don’t suppose you can. That would be rather cruel to make you have to do that.” He grinned and gestured with the bag. “Well then, I guess we’ll have to find something else for you to do.”

Wolfgang Wright is the author of the comic novel Me and Gepe and various short works scattered across the ether. He doesn’t tolerate gluten so well, quite enjoys watching British panel shows, and devotes a little time each day to contemplating the Tao. He lives in North Dakota.