Kay had a shovel, and she dropped the first dirt on the lid of the coffin. It didn’t thud as Hank expected it to; it was dry and loose and fell evenly, like sand. Digging it out was no preparation for hearing it go back in. All the green of spring, the living grass, had been dried out by a month of high-desert sun and wind. Even the summer thunderstorms were gone too quick to bring the green back, or the wetness to the soil.

Kay gave the shovel to Hank and he dropped his portion of dirt on the box. He looked around the crowd, not knowing who should go next.

“I’m going to sing Daddy a song,” Annie’s taped voice said. She started to sing in her little-girl voice, “All in green went my love riding, on a great horse of gold into the silver dawn.”

“I think Duncan must have sung it to her,” Kay said. “I think it’s a poem.”

“Four lean hounds crouched low and smiling, the merry deer ran before,” Annie sang on the tape.

Hank still held the shovel in his hand, and Demeter took it from him. She was coming down off her high, he could see, and she was purposeful in taking the shovel, and in dropping the earth into the grave. Hank stepped back from the hole, feeling he might fall in.

Annie, on the tape, sang, “Four red robots at a white water.”

Four red roebuck, he corrected her in his mind. He’d thought of hunting season when Demeter sang that line in the car, the season that would be coming soon, and all the past seasons with Duncan. The shorter days, the gloves pulled off to fire a rifle in the wind, the look of a buck as it stared you down, unafraid, then crumpled and fell. The rush of a shot fired well, and the sad feeling of the heavy body that had to be dragged bleeding back to the truck. Now he thought about how you can not know the songs a man sings when he’s alone with his little girl, or with your girl.

“Softer be they than slipper-sleep,” Annie’s voice sang, “the lee lie deer.”

Lean lithe deer, Hank thought. He looked around at Duncan’s friends, and wondered what they knew.

Kay knelt next to Annie, who held a fistful of dirt and didn’t want to let it go. “It’s for Daddy,” Kay told her. “It’s to help Daddy make the flowers grow.”

Annie opened her fist and let the dirt spill down the rough wall of the grave. The boxed-up voice stopped, and there was a fuzzy silence. Demeter had sat down on the ground, away from the hole, cross-legged with her elbows on her thighs.

“Maybe you should say something,” Kay said to Hank.