Game of honor [antikvár]

ONE The cemetery was quiet, but it was not a peaceful place for him, and he was glad to leave. He had paid his annual visit to the graves of his wife and daughter, and now he could go. He hated the place. The slopes of short green grass were cared for like a golf course. The trees were ten-foot whips held upright by ugly wires and stakes, and they were planted at precise, regular intervals. The stones were in perfect order, each in one of the four approved colors and styles—a boneyard of gray or black granite, or pink or white marble, heavy in design, carved by machine. Under the smooth grass were tons of mahogany and brass caskets encased in hermetically sealed crypts of lead and concrete. There was none of the consr iation of a graveyard in this place, only the glare of painful iremories: The stones he had chosen for Mary and Ellen were the best he could do: gray granite with their names and dates of birth and death. A few lines of poetry from Donne and Yeats were engraved on the stones—he had pondered the choices for days. He wished he could have buried them in a rural cemetery in New England or his own Wisconsin, where their graves would have been surrounded by eroded limestone and hand-carved 3