DEAD CONFEDERATES
I never cared for Wesley Davidson when he was alive and seeing him beside me laid out dead didn’t much change that. Knowing a man for years and feeling hardly anything in his passing might make you think poorly of me, but the hard truth is had you known Wesley you’d probably feel the same. You might do what I done—shovel dirt on him with not so much as a mumble of a prayer. Bury him under a tombstone with another man’s name on it, another man’s birth and dying day chipped in the marble, me and an old man all of the living ever to know that was where Wesley Davidson laid in the ground.
“I’ve a notion you’re needing some extra money,” Wesley says two weeks earlier at work, which isn’t a big secret since the whole road crew’s in the DOT parking lot that afternoon when the bank man comes by to chat about my overdrawn account, saying he’s sorry my momma’s in the hospital with no insurance but if I don’t get him some money soon he’ll be taking my truck. Soon as the bank man leaves Wesley saunters up to me.
I act like I haven’t heard him, because like I said I never cared much for Wesley. He’s a big talker but little else, always shucking his work off on the rest of us. A stout man, six foot tall and three hundred easy, a big old sow belly that sways side to side when he takes a notion to work. But that’s a sight you seldom see, because he mainly leans on a shovel or lays in the shade asleep. His uncle’s the road crew boss, and he lets Wesley do about what he wants, including come in late, the rest of us all clocked in and ready to pull out while Wesley’s Ford Ranger is pulling in, a big rebel flag decal covering the back window. Wesley’s always been big into that Confederate stuff, wearing a CSA belt buckle, rebel flag tattoo on his arm. He wears a gray CSA cap too, wears it on the job. There’s no black guys on our crew, only a handful in the whole county, but you’re still not supposed to wear that kind of thing. But with his uncle running the show Wesley gets away with it.
“You want to make some easy money or not?” he says to me later at our lunch break. He grunts and sits down in the shade beside me while I get my sandwich and apple from my lunch box. Wesley’s got three Hardee’s sausage biscuits in a bag and scarfs them down in about thirty seconds, then lights a cigarette. I don’t smoke myself and don’t cotton much to the smelling of it when I’m eating. I could tell him so, could tell him I like eating my lunch alone if he’d not noticed, but getting on Wesley’s bad side would just get me on my boss’s bad side as well. It’s more than just that, though. I’m willing to listen to anyone who could help me get some money.
“What you got in mind?” I say.
He points to his CSA belt buckle.
“You know what one of them’s worth, a real one?”
“No,” I say, though I figure maybe fifty or a hundred dollars.
Wesley pulls out two wadded-up catalog pages from his back pocket.
“Look here,” he says and points at a picture of a belt buckle and the number below it. “Eighteen hundred dollars,” he says and moves his finger down the paper. “Twenty-four hundred. Twelve hundred. Four thousand.” He holds his finger there for a few seconds. “Four thousand,” saying it again. He shoves the other page in my face. It’s filled with buttons that fetch two hundred to a thousand dollars apiece.
“I’d of not thought they’d bring that much,” I say.
“I’ll not even tell you what a sword brings. You’d piss your pants if I did.”
“So what’s that have to do with me getting some money?”
“Cause I know where we can find such things as this,” Wesley says, shaking the paper at me. “Find them where they ain’t been all rusted up so’s they’ll be all the more pricey. You help and you get twenty-five percent.”
And what I figure is some DOT bulldozer has rooted something up. Maybe some place where soldiers camped or done some fighting. I’m figuring it’s some kind of flimflam, like he wants me to help buy a metal detector or something with what little money I got left. He must take me for one dumb hillbilly to go along with such a scheme and I tell him as much.
He just grins at me, the kind of grin that argues I don’t know very much.
“You got a shovel and pickax?” he asks. “Or did the bank repo them as well?”
“I got a shovel and a pickax,” I say. “I know how to do more than lean on them too.”
He knows my meaning but just laughs, tells me what he’s got his mind scheming over. I start to say there’s no way in hell I’m doing such a thing but he puts his hand out like stopping traffic, tells me not to yes or no him until I’ve had time to sift it over good in my mind.
“I ain’t hearing a word till tomorrow,” he says. “Think about how a thousand dollars, maybe more, could put some padding in that wallet. Think about what that money can do for your momma.”
He says the words about Momma last for he knows that notion will hang heavy on me if nothing else does.
I go by the hospital on the way home. They let me see her for a few minutes, and afterward the nurse says she’ll be able to go home in three days.
“She’s got a lot of life in her yet,” the nurse tells me in the hallway.
That’s good news, better than I expected. I go down to the billing office and the news there isn’t so good. Though I’ve already paid three thousand I’ll be owing another four by the time she gets out. I go back to my trailer and there’s no way I can’t help pondering about that money Wesley’s big-talking about. I think about how Daddy worked himself to death before he was sixty and Momma hanging on long enough to be taught that fifty years of working first light to bedtime can’t get you enough ahead to afford an operation and a two-week stay in a hospital. I’m pondering where’s the fair in that when there’s men who do no more than hit a ball good or throw one through a hoop and they live in mansions and could buy themselves a hospital if they was to need one. I think of the big houses built up at Wolf Laurel by doctors and bankers from Charlotte and Raleigh. Second homes, they call them, though some cost a million dollars. You could argue they worked hard for those homes, but no harder than Momma and Daddy worked.
By dawn I know certain I’m going to do it. When I say as much to Wesley at our morning break he smiles.
“Figured you would,” he says.
“When?” I ask.
“Night, of course,” he says, “a clear night when the moon is waxed up full. That way we’ll not give ourselves away with a flashlight.”
And him thinking it out enough to use moonlight gives me some confidence in him, makes me think it could work. Because that’s the other thing bothering me besides the right and the wrong of it. If we get caught we’d be for sure doing some jailhouse time.
“I done thought this thing out from ever which angle,” Wesley says. “I been scouting the cemeteries here to Flag Pond, looking for the right sort of graves, them that belongs to officers. I’m figuring the higher the rank the likelier to be booty there, maybe even a sword. Finally found me a couple of lieutenants. Never reckoned to find a general. From what I read most all them that did the generaling was Virginians. Found Yankee soldiers in them graveyards as well, including a captain.”
“A captain outranks a lieutenant, don’t he?” I ask.
“Yeah, but them that buys this stuff pay double if it’s Confederate.”
“And you can sell it easy?” I say. “I mean you don’t have to fence it or anything like that?”
“Hell, no. They got these big sellings and swappings all over the place. Got one in Asheville next month. You show them what you got and they’ll open their billfolds and fling that money at you.”
He shuts up for a moment then, because he’s starting to realize how easy it all sounds, and how much money I might start figuring to be my share. He lays his big yellow front teeth out on his lower lip, worrying his mind to figure a way to take back some of what he just said.
“Course they ain’t going to pay near the price I showed you on them sheets. We’ll be lucky to get half that.”
I know that for a lie before it’s left Wesley’s lips, but I don’t say anything, just know that I’ll damn well be there with him when he sells what we find.
“What do we do next?” I say.
“Just wait for a clear night and a big old harvest moon,” Wesley says, looking up at the sky like he might be expecting one to show up any minute. “That and keep your mouth shut about it. I’ve not told another person about this and I want it to stay that way.”
Wait is what we do for two weeks, because that first night I look up from my yard the moon’s all skinny and looks to be no more than something you might hang a coat on. Every night I watch the moon filling itself up like a big bowl, scooting the shadows out in the field back closer to the trees. Momma’s back home and doing good, back to where she’s looking more to be her ownself again. The folks at the hospital say she’ll be eligible for the Medicaid come January and that’s all for the good. That means I can go with Wesley just this one time, pay off that hospital bill, and be done with it.
Finally the right night comes, the moon full and leaning down close to the world. A hunter’s moon, my daddy used to call it, and easy enough to see why, for such a moon makes tramping through woods a lot easier.
Tramping through a graveyard as well, for come ten o’clock that’s what we’re doing. We’ve hid his truck down past the entrance, a few yards back in a turnaround where, at least at night, no one would likely see it. We don’t walk through the gate because that’s where the caretaker’s shack is. Instead we follow the fence up a hill through some trees, a pickax and shovel in my hands and nothing in Wesley’s but a plastic garbage bag. It’s late October and the air has that rinsed-clean feel. There’s leaves that have fallen and acorns and they crackle under my feet, each one sounding loud as a .22 to me. I catch a whiff of a woodstove and find the glow of the porch light.
“You ain’t worried none about that caretaker?” I say.
“Hell no. He’s near eighty years old. He’s probably been asleep since seven o’clock.”
“He’d not have a fire going if he was asleep.”
“That old man ain’t going to bother us none,” Wesley says, saying it like just his saying so makes it final.
We’re soon moving amongst the stones, the moon brighter now that we’re in the open. Its light lays down all silvery on the granite and marble, on the ground itself. It’s quieter here, no more acorns and leaves, just cushiony grass like on a golf course. But it’s too quiet, in a spooky kind of way. Because you know folks are here, hundreds of them, and not a one will say ever a word more on this earth. The only sound is Wesley’s breathing and grunting. We’ve walked no more than a half mile and he’s already laboring. A car comes up the road, headlights sweeping over a few tombstones as it takes the curve. It doesn’t slow down but heads on toward Marshall.
“I got to catch my breath,” Wesley says, and we stop a minute. We’re on a ridge now, and I can see a whole passel of stars spilled out over the sky. As clear a night as you can get, and I reckon it’s easy enough for God to see me from up there. That thought bothers me some, but it’s a lot easier to have a conscience about something if you figure it all the way right or all the way wrong. Doing what we’re doing is a sin for sure, but not taking care of the woman who birthed and raised you is a worse one. That’s what I tell myself anyway.
“It’s not much farther,” Wesley says, saying it more for his own benefit than for me. He shakes his shoulders like a plow horse getting the trace chains more comfortable and walks down the yonder side of the hill until he comes to where a little Confederate flag is planted by a marble tombstone.
“Kind of them Daughters of the Confederacy biddies to sight-map the spot for us,” Wesley says.
He pulls up the flag and throws it behind the stone like it was no more than a weed. He flicks his cigarette lighter and says the words out loud like I can’t read them for myself.
“Lieutenant Gerald Ross Witherspoon. North Carolina Twenty-fifth. Born November 12, 1820. Died January 20, 1890.”
“Dug up October 23, 2007,” Wesley adds, and gives a good snort. He lights a cigarette and sets himself down by the grave. “You best get to it. We got all night but not an hour more.”
“What about you?” I say. “I ain’t doing all this digging alone.”
“We’d just get in the other’s way doing it as a team,” Wesley says, then takes a big suck on his cigarette. “Don’t fret, son. I’ll spell you directly.”
I lift my pickax and go to it. Yesterday’s rain had left some sog and squish in the ground so the first dirt breaks easy as wet sawdust. I get the shovel and scoop what I’ve loosed on the grass.
“People will know it’s been dug,” I say, pausing to gain back my breath.
And that’s a new thought for me, because somehow up to now I’d had it figured if they didn’t catch us in the graveyard we’d be home free. But two big holes are bound to have the law looking for those that dug them.
“And we’ll be long gone when they do,” Wesley says.
“You’re not worried about it?” I say, because all of a sudden I am. Somebody could see the truck coming or going. We could drop something and in the dark not even know we’d left it behind.
“No,” Wesley says. “The law will figure it for some of them voodoo devil worshippers. They’ll not think to trouble upstanding citizens like us about it.”
Wesley flares his lighter and lights another cigarette.
“We best get back to it,” he says, nodding at the pickax in my hand.
“Don’t seem to be no we to it,” I say.
“Like I said, I’ll spell you directly.”
But directly turns out to be a long time. When I’m up to my chest I know I’m a good four feet down and he still hasn’t got off his ass. I’m pouring sweat and raising crop rows of blisters on my palms. I’m about to tell Wesley that I’ve dug four feet and he can at least dig two when the pickax strikes wood. A big splinter of it comes up, and it’s cedar, which I always heard was the least likely wood to rot. I ponder a few moments why that grave’s not a full six foot deep and then remember the date on the stone. Late January the ground would have been hard as iron. It would have been easy to figure four foot would do the job well enough.
“Hit it,” I say.
Wesley gets up then.
“Dig some around it so we got room to get it open.”
I do what he tells me, clearing a good foot to one side.
“I’ll take over for you,” he says, and crawls into the hole with me. “Probably be easier if you was to get out,” he adds, picking up the shovel, but I ain’t about to because I wouldn’t put it past him to slip whatever he finds into his pocket.
“I wouldn’t be one to try and hide something from you,” Wesley says, which only tells me that’s exactly what he was pondering.
We wedge ourselves sideways like we’re on a cliff edge to get off the coffin. Then Wesley takes the shovel and pries open the lid.
The moon can’t settle its light into the hole as easy as on level ground so it’s hard to see clear at first. There’s a silk shirt you can tell even now was white and a belt and its buckle and some moldy old shoes, but what once filled the shoes and shirt looks to be little more than the wind that blusters a shirt on a clothesline. Wesley lifts the garment with his shovel tip and some dust and bones the color of dried bamboo spill out. He throws his shovel out of the hole and flicks his lighter. Wesley holds the lighter close to the belt buckle. There’s rust on it, but you can make out C S stamped on the metal, not CSA. Wesley lifts the buckle and pulls off what little is left of the belt.
“It’s a good one,” he says, “but not near the best.”
“How much you reckon it’s worth?”
“A thousand at most,” Wesley says after giving it a good eyeballing.
I figure the real price to be double that, but I’ll be there when the bartering gets done so there’s no need to argue now. Wesley grunts and gets on his knees to sift through the shirt, even checking inside what’s left of the shoes.
“Ain’t nothing else,” he says, and stands up.
I lift myself from the hole but it’s not as easy for Wesley. Though the hole’s only four foot he’s not able to haul himself out. He gets halfway then slides back, panting like a hound.
“I’ll need your hand,” he says. “I ain’t no string bean like you.”
I give him a tug and Wesley wallows out, dirt crumbs all over his shirt and pants. He puts the buckle in the pillow sheet and knots it.
“The other one’s down that way,” Wesley says, and nods toward the caretaker’s shack. He slides up his sleeve and checks his watch. “One fifteen. We making good time,” he says.
We start down the hill, weaving our way through the stones laid out like a maze. Then a cloud smudges the moon and there’s not enough light from the stars to see our own feet. We stop and I have a worrisome thought of something holding that cloud there the rest of the night, me and Wesley bumping into stones and losing all direction, trapped in that graveyard till the dawn when anyone on the road could see us and the truck too.
But the moon soon enough wipes clear the cloud and we walk on, not more than fifty yards from the caretaker’s place when we stop. We’re close enough to see the light that’s been glowing is his back-porch light. Wesley flares his lighter at the grave to check it’s the right one and I see the stone is for both Lieutenant Hutchinson and his wife. His name is on the left so it’s easy enough to figure that’s the side he’s laying on.
“Eighteen and sixty-four,” says Wesley, moving the lighter closer to the stone. “I figure a officer killed during the war would for sure be buried in his uniform.”
I get the shovel and pickax in my right hand and lean them toward Wesley.
“Your turn,” I say.
“I was thinking you could get it started good and then I’d take over,” he says.
“I’ll do most of it,” I say, “but I ain’t doing it all.”
Wesley sees I aim not to budge and reaches for the pickax. He does it in a careless kind of way and the pickax’s spike end clangs against the shovel blade. A dog starts barking down at the caretaker’s place and I’m ready to make a run for the truck but Wesley shushes me.
“Give it a minute,” he says.
We stand there still as the stones around us. No light inside the shack comes on, and the dog shuts up directly.
“We’re okay,” Wesley says, and he starts breaking ground with the pickax. He’s working in fourth gear and I know he’s wanting this done quick as I do.
“I’ll loosen the dirt and you shovel it away,” Wesley gasps, veins sticking out on his neck like there’s a noose around it. “We can get it out faster that way.”
Funny you didn’t think of that till it was your turn to dig, I’m thinking, but that dog has set loose the fear in me more than any time since we drove up. I take the shovel and we’re making the dirt fly, Wesley doing more work in fifteen minutes than he’s done in twelve years on the road crew. And me staying right with him, both of us going so hard it’s not till we hear a growl that we turn around and see we’re not alone.
“What are you boys up to?” the old man asks, waggling his shotgun at us. The dog is haunched up beside him, big and bristly and looking like it’s just waiting for the word to pour its teeth into us.
“I said, what are you boys up to?” the old man asks us again.
What kind of answer to give that question is as far beyond me as the moon up above. For a few moments it’s beyond Wesley as well but soon enough he opens his mouth, working up some words like you’d work up a good spit of tobacco.
“We didn’t know there to be a law against it,” Wesley says, which is about the stupidest thing he could have come up with.
The old man chuckles.
“They’s several, and you’re going to be learning all of them soon as I get the sheriff up here.”
I’m thinking to make a run for it before that, take my chances with the dog and the old man’s aim if he decides to shoot, because to my way of thinking time in the jailhouse would be worse than anything that dog or old man could do to me.
“You ain’t needing to call the sheriff,” Wesley says.
Wesley steps out of the two-foot hole we’ve dug, gets up closer to the old man. The dog growls deep down in its throat, a sound that says don’t wander no closer unless you want to limp out of this graveyard. Wesley pays the dog some mind and doesn’t go any nearer.
“Why is that?” the old man says. “What you offering to make me think I don’t need to call the law?”
“I got a ten-dollar bill in my wallet that has your name on it,” Wesley says, and I almost laugh at the sass of him. We have a shotgun leveled at us and Wesley’s trying to lowball the fellow.
“You got to do better than that,” the old man says.
“Twenty then,” Wesley says. “God’s truth that’s all the money I got on me.”
The old man ponders the offer a moment.
“Give me the money,” he says.
Wesley gets his billfold out, tilts it so the old man can’t see nothing but the twenty he pulls out. He reaches the bill to the old man.
“You can’t tell nobody about this,” Wesley says. “None but us three knows a thing of it.”
“Who am I going to spread it to?” the old man says. “In case you’d not noticed, my neighbors ain’t much for conversing.”
The old man looks the twenty over careful, like he’s figuring it to be counterfeit. Then he folds the bill and puts it in his front pocket.
“Course you could double that easy enough,” Wesley says, “not do a thing more than let us dig here a while longer.”
The old man takes in Wesley’s offer but doesn’t commit either way.
“What are you all grubbing for anyways,” he says, “buried treasure?”
“Just Civil War things, buckles and such,” Wesley says. “No money in it, just kind of a sentimental thing. My great-great-granddaddy fought Confederate. I’ve always been one to honor them that come before me.”
“By robbing their graves,” the old man says. “That’s some real honoring you’re doing.”
“I’m wearing what they can’t no longer wear, bringing it out of the ground to the here and now. Look here,” Wesley says. He unknots the bedsheet and hands the buckle to the old man. “I’ll polish it up real good and wear it proud, wear it not just for my great-great-grand-daddy but all them that fought for a noble cause.”
I’ve never even seen a politician lie better, because Wesley lays all of that out there slick, figuring the old man has no knowing of the buckle’s worth. And that seemed a likely enough thing since I hadn’t the least notion myself till Wesley showed me the prices.
The old man fetches a flashlight from his coveralls. He lays its light out on the stone. “North Carolina Sixty-fourth,” he reads off the stone. “My folks sided Union,” the old man says, “in this very county. Lots of people don’t bother to know that anymore, but there was as many in these mountains fought Union as Confederate. The Sixty-fourth done a lot of meanness in this county back then. They’d shoot a unarmed man and wasn’t above whipping women. My grandma told me all about it. One of them women they whipped was her own momma. I read up on it some later. That’s how come me to know it was the Sixty-fourth.”
The old man clicks off his flashlight and stuffs it in his pocket and pulls out an old-timey watch, the kind with a chain on it. He pops it open and reads the hands by moonlight.
“Two-thirty,” he says. “You fellows go ahead and dig him up. The way I figure it, his soul’s a lot deeper, all the way down in hell.”
“Give him his twenty dollars,” Wesley says to me.
I only have sixteen and am about to say so when the old man tells me he don’t want my money.
“I’ll take enough pleasure just in watching you dig this Hutchinson fellow up. He might have been the one what stropped my great-grandma.”
The old man steps back a few feet and perches his backside on a flat-topped stone next to where we’re digging. The shotgun’s settled in the crook of his arm.
“You ain’t needing for that shotgun to be nosed in our direction,” Wesley says. “Them things can go off by accident sometimes.”
The old man keeps the gun barrel where it is.
“I don’t think I’ve heard the truth walk your lips yet,” he tells Wesley. “I’ll trust you better with it pointed your way.”
We start digging again, getting more crowded up to each other as the hole deepens, but leastways we don’t have to worry about noise anymore. We’re a good four foot in when Wesley stops and leans his back against the side of the hole.
“Can’t do no more,” he says, and it takes him three breaths to get just the four words out. “Done something to my arm.”
Sure you did, I’m thinking, but when I look at him I can see he’s hurting. He’s heaving hard and shedding sweat like it’s a July noon.
The old man gets off his perch to check out Wesley as well.
“You look to have had the starch took out of you,” the old man says, but Wesley makes no bother to answer him, just closes his eyes and leans harder against the grave’s side.
“You want to get out,” I say to him. “It might help to breathe some fresher air.”
“No,” he says, opening his eyes some, and I know the why of that answer. He’s not getting out until he’s looked inside the coffin we’re rooting up.
Maybe it’s because Lieutenant Hutchinson was buried in May instead of January, but for whatever reason he looks to have got the full six feet. The hole’s up to my neck and I still haven’t touched wood.
The old man’s still there above me, craning his own wrinkly face over the hole like he’s peering down a well.
“You ain’t much of a talker, are you?” he says to me. “Or is it just your buddy don’t give you a word edgewise.”
“No,” I say, throwing a shovelful of dirt out of the hole.
It’s getting harder now after five hours of digging and shucking it out. My back’s hurting and my arms feel made of syrup.
“Which no you siding with?” the old man says.
“No, I don’t talk much.”
“You wanting one of them buckles to wear or you just along for the pleasure of flinging dirt all night?”
“Just here to dig,” I answer, glad when he don’t say nothing more. I got little enough get-go left to spend it gabbing.
I lift the pickax again and I hit something so solid it almost jars the handle from my hands. That jarring goes up my arms and back down my spine bones like I touched an electric fence. I’m figuring it to be a big rock I’ll have to dig out before I can get to the coffin. The thought of tussling with a rock makes me so tired I just want to lay down and quit.
“What is it?” the old man says, and Wesley opens his eyes, watches me take the shovel and scrape dirt to get a better look.
But it’s no rock. It’s a coffin, a coffin made of cast iron. Wesley crunches up nearer the wall so I can get more dirt out, and what I’m thinking is whoever had to tote that coffin had a time of it, because Momma’s cast-iron cooking stove wouldn’t lift lighter, and it took four grown men to move that stove from one side of the kitchen to the other.
“I’d always heard they was a few of them planted in this cemetery,” the old man says, “but I never figured to see one.”
The coffin spries Wesley up some. I dig enough room to the side to set my feet so they’re not on the lid. Rust has sealed it, so I take the flat end of the pickax and crack the lid open like you’d crowbar a stuck window. I about break my pickax handle but it finally gives. I get down low but I can’t lift the lid off by myself.
“You got to help me,” I tell Wesley and he gets down beside me.
It’s no easy thing to do and we both have to step lively in hardly no room to keep the lid from sliding off and landing on our feet. Soon as we get it off, Wesley puts his left hand on his right shoulder, and I’m thinking it’s some kind of salute or something, but then he starts rubbing his arm and shoulder like it’s gone numb on him.
“The Lord Almighty,” the old man says, and Wesley and me step some to the side to get where we can see good too.
Unlike the other one, you can tell this was a man. The bones are most together and there’s even a hank of red hair on his skull. You can tell he’s in a uniform too, raggedy but what’s left of the pants and coat is butternut. I look over at Wesley and he’s seeing nothing but what’s made of metal.
There’s plenty to fill up his eyeballs that way. A belt buckle is there with no more than a skiffing of rust on it. Buttons too, looking to be a half dozen. But that’s not the best thing. What’s best is laying there next to the skeleton, a big old sword and scabbard. Wesley reaches for it. The sword’s rusted in but after a couple of tugs it starts to give. Wesley finally grunts it out. He holds the sword out before him and I can see he’s figuring what it’ll fetch and the grin on his face and the way his eyes light up argue a high price indeed. Then all of a sudden he’s seeing something else, and whatever it is he sees isn’t giving him the notion to smile anymore. He lets the sword slide out his hand and leans back against the wall, his feet still in the coffin. He slides down then, his back against the wall but his bottom half in the coffin, just sitting there like a man in a jon boat. His eyes are still open but there’s no more light in them than the bottom of a coal shaft.
“See if they’s a pulse on him,” the old man says.
I step closer to Wesley, footlogging the coffin so I won’t step on the skeleton. I lay hold of Wesley’s wrist but there’s no more alive there than in his eyes.
I just stand there a minute. All the bad fixes I’ve been in are like being in high cotton compared to where I am now. I can’t even begin to figure what to do. I’m about to tell the old man to level that shotgun on me and pull the trigger for my brain’s not bringing up a better solution.
“I don’t reckon he’ll be strutting around and playing Johnny Reb with his sword and belt buckle,” the old man says. He looks at me and it’s easy enough for him to guess what I’m feeling. “You shouldn’t get the fantods over this,” he says. “His dying on you could be all for the better.”
“How do you reckon that?” I ask, because I sure can’t figure it that way.
“What if he was speaking the truth when he said we’re the only three that knows about this?” the old man says.
“I never said a word.”
“I got no doubting about that,” the old man says. “Far as I can tell you don’t say nothing unless it’s yanked out of you like a tooth.”
“I don’t think he’d have spoke about this,” I say. “There’s not many that would think good of him if he did, and some might even tell the law. I don’t figure him to risk that.”
“Then I’d say he’s helped dig his own grave,” the old man says. “Stout as he is, I don’t notion you could get him out of there alone and I’m way too old to help you.”
“We might could use a rope,” I say. “Pull him out that way.”
“And what if you did,” the old man says. “You think you can drag that hunk of lard behind you like a little red wagon. Even if you can, where you headed with him?”
That’s a pretty good question, because here to the truck is a good half mile. I’d have a better chance of toting a tombstone that far.
“It doesn’t seem the right sort of thing to do,” I say. “I mean for his kin and such not to never know where he’s buried.”
“Those that wears the badges ain’t always the brightest bulbs,” the old man says, “but they won’t need the brains of a stump to figure what he and you was up to if they find him here.” The old man pauses. “Is that truck his or yours?”
“His.”
“You leave that truck by the river and the worst gossip on your buddy there is he was fool enough to get drunk and fall in. You bring the law here they’ll know him for a grave robber. Which way you notion his kin would rather recollect him?”
The old man’s whittling it down to but one path to follow. I try to find a good argument against him, but I’m too wore down to come up with anything. The old man takes out his watch.
“It’s nigh on four o’clock. You get to filling in and you could get that grave leveled by the shank of morning.”
“It’s two graves to fill,” I say. “We dug another one up the hill a ways.”
“Well, get as much dirt in them as you can. Even full up they’ll be queer looking with all that fresh dirt on them. I’ll have to figure some kind of tall tale for folks that might take notice, but I been listening to your buddy all night so I’ve picked up some good pointers on how to lie.”
I look at the sword and think how the blade maybe killed somebody during the Civil War and in its way killed another tonight, at least the wanting of it did.
“He was lying about this stuff not being worth much,” I say. “I need the money so I’m going to sell it, but I’ll go halves with you.”
“You keep it,” the old man says. “But I’ll take what’s in your partner’s wallet. He’ll need it no more than the lieutenant there needs that sword.”
I pull the wallet from Wesley’s back pocket, give it to the old man. He pulls out a ten and two twenties.
“I knew that son of a bitch was lying about having no more money,” he says, then throws the wallet back in the hole.
I reach the sword and scabbard up to the old man and then the buckle and buttons. I think how easy it would be for him to rooster that trigger and shotgun me. He leans closer to the hole and I see he’s still got that shotgun in his hand and I wonder if he’s figuring the same thing, because it’d be easy as shooting a rat in a washtub. He gets down on his creaky old knees, and I guess my fearing is clear to him for he lays down the shotgun and gives me a smile.
“I was just allowing I’d give you some help out of there,” he says and offers his hand. “Just don’t jerk me in there with you.”
I take his hand, a strong grip for all his years, and reach my other hand over the lip. It’s one good heave and I’m out.
I fetch the shovel and set to the covering up, dead tired but making good time because I’m figuring if it doesn’t get done I’ll have some serious jailhouse time to wish I had. Plus it’s always easier to fling dirt down than up. I get the hole filled and walk up to the other grave, the shovel and pickax in one hand and the sword and bedsheet in the other. The old man and his dog follow me. I get it half full before the pink of morning skims Bluff Mountain.
“I got to go now,” I say. “It’s getting near dawn.”
“Leave the shovel then,” the old man says. “I can fill in the rest. Then I’m going to plant chrysanthemums on the graves, let that be the why of the dirt being rooted up.”
I have no plans to find out if that’s what he does do. My plan is not to be back here again unless someone’s hauling me in a box. I walk on down the hill. It’s Sunday so I don’t see another soul on the road. I park the truck down by the river, no more than a mile from Marshall. I get my handkerchief out and wipe the steering wheel good and the door handle. Then I high-step it, staying in the woods till I’m to the edge of town. I hunker down there till full light, figuring it’s all worked good as I could have hoped. They’ll soon find the truck, but no one spotted me near it. Wesley and me never were buddies, never went out to bars together or anything, so there’s none likely to figure me in his truck last night. I hide the sword and bedsheet under some leaves to get later. When I cross the road in front of Jackson’s Café, I figure I’m home free.
But I’m still careful. I don’t go inside, just wait by some trees until I see Timmy Shackleford come out. He doesn’t live far from me and I step into the parking lot and ask if he’d mind giving me a ride to my trailer.
“You look like the night rode you hard,” Timmy says.
I look in the side mirror and I do look rough.
“Got knee-walking drunk,” I say. “Last thing I remember I was with a bunch of fellows in a car and said I needed to piss. They set me by the side of the road and took off laughing. Next thing I know, I’m waking up in a ditch.”
That’s a better lie than I’d have reckoned to spin and I figure I have picked up some pointers from Wesley. Timmy grins but doesn’t say anything else. He lets me out at my trailer and goes on his way. I’m starved and have got enough dirt on me to plant a garden, but I just fall in the bed and don’t open my eyes till it’s full dark outside. When I come awake it’s with the deepest kind of fearing, and for a few moments I’m more scared than any time before in my life. Then my mind settles and I see I’m in the trailer, not still in that graveyard.
Come Monday at work I hear how they found Wesley’s truck by the river, and most figure him down there fishing or drinking or both and he fell in and drowned. They drag the river for days but of course nothing comes up.
I wait a month before I try to sell the Civil War stuff, driving all the way to Montgomery, Alabama, to a big CSA convention where a whole auditorium is full of buyers and sellers. Some want certificates of authenticity and such, but I finally find a buyer I can do some business with. A lady at the library has pulled up some prices on the Internet and I’ve got a good figuring of what my stash is worth. The buyer’s only offering half what the value is but he’s also not asking for certificates or even my name. I tell him I’ll take what he’s offering but only if it’s cash money. He grumbles a bit about that, then finally says, “Stay here,” and goes off and comes back with fifty-two hundred-dollar bills, new bills so crisp and smooth they look starched and ironed.
It’s more money than the hospital bill and I give what’s left to Momma. That makes what I’ve done feel less worrisome. I think about something else too, how both them graves had big fancy tombstones of cut marble, meaning those dead Confederates hadn’t known much wanting of money in their lives. Now that they was dead there was some fairness in letting Momma have something of what they’d left behind.
The only bad thing is I keep having a dream where that old man has shot me and I’m buried in the hole with Wesley. I’m shot bad but still alive and dirt’s piled on me and somewhere up above I hear that old man laughing like he was the devil himself. Every time I dream it, I rear up in bed and don’t stop gasping for nearly a whole minute. I’ve dreamed that same exact dream at least once a month for a year now, and I guess it’s likely I’ll keep doing so for the rest of my life. There’s always a price to be paid for anything you get. I wish it weren’t so, for it’s a fearsome dream, but if it’s the worst to come of all that happened I can live with it.