Something Rich and Strange: Selected Stories Read online

  “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.”

  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 is 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 his 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 pillow sheet 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 granddaddy 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. Lot’s 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.”

  “You pay him this time,” 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 that 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 any more. 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 at 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 st
ep 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 any more. 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 in it 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.”