Lyle Undermound has buried eight hundred and forty-four people in the clay ground of St Crispin's churchyard. He knows their names. He knows the weather on their days. He prays and swears, sometimes in the same breath, and if God has objections to the vocabulary He hasn't mentioned them.

Today is number eight hundred and forty-four. Clifford Bream. Gardener. Loved apples. The clay is behaving badly, the priest is finding threads and following them too long, and the apprentice ? Kevin Holes, twenty-three, perpetually one beat behind events ? is beginning to suspect that digging graves is not like working at McDonald's.

The Matter of Kevin Holes takes place over a single day. One burial. The digging before, the service during, the filling-in after. Everything else ? theology, philosophy, the precise calibration of a man who has spent his working life at the place where things stop ? arrives as interruption.

This is a dry, unsentimental novelette about work and mortality and the gap between what we mean and what we manage to say. Lyle is not a wise man performing wisdom. He is a tradesman with opinions about clay, a cataloguer of misread mourners, a man who argues with a four-hundred-year-old bell that can't count and a God who hasn't answered in twenty-six years. He keeps the argument open on both fronts. This seems reasonable to him.

Kevin is not a comic foil. He is a young man thinking properly in a place that rewards it, arriving at conclusions one beat after the moment but not wrong. By the end of the day he has decided to stay. He doesn't know why exactly. That turns out to be the right reason.

The ground gets the last word. It always does.

For readers who want their philosophy delivered by a man in clay-covered boots who makes tea with three bags and means it.