Jamie introduces the novel's opening scene: “Henry and I dug a hole seven feet deep. Any shallower and the corpse was liable to come rising up during the next big flood” (3). They hurry because storm clouds are coming. Jamie is 29 and Henry is almost 50. Jamie says his body aches from kicks and blows, but he does not want Henry to know that. Henry trades places with him and digs, hitting a human skull four feet down. Then he finds a leg bone with a manacle on the ankle bone: “We can’t bury our father in a nigger’s grave” (5). Jamie knows he’s right—there’s nothing their father would have hated more than being buried in a slave’s grave.

A woman named Laura brings them food and water. She sees the bones and tells them to move them so that the children can’t see. When the grave is a foot over Jamie’s head, it starts to rain. He’s afraid that mud will spill in and bury him: “It wasn’t the confinement; I’d spent hundreds of hours in cockpits with no problem at all. It was the water” (8). He says that during the war he avoided the ocean whenever he could.