A Fine Dark Line (29 page)

“When is she supposed to come?” Drew asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s just a chance you might see her. She might be in the house now. She might not come at all.”

“I know,” Richard said. “Let’s go down there for a look.”

Drew said, “Why don’t you two go look?”

“I don’t think so,” I said. “Not by ourselves.”

“You chicken?” Drew said.

“Yes,” I said.

Drew laughed. “That’s honest. Oh, hell, let’s all go.”

Drew pulled a flashlight from under the seat. We walked down the hill, past the pool. We pushed open the back door. The only light was the moonlight that came through the windows.

Inside, Drew pulled the door closed, and there was an explosion of sound like dry leaves being run over by a herd of elephants.

“Bats,” Drew said.

I couldn’t see them, but I could hear them, fluttering up near the high ceilings and at the top of the staircase. In the beam of the flashlight, I could see the floor was littered with bat guano. It hadn’t been there at the first of the summer.

Drew played the light on the ceiling. There were large rafters and from the rafters hung bats, but just as many bats were fluttering about the house.

With a burst, the remaining bats on the rafters let loose and joined the others and swirled about. Then with a rush and a flutter, they made a stream of shadow. Drew’s light followed, and they exploded through a place where the roof had rotted and fallen in.

“Oooooh,” Callie said. “Let’s get out of here.”

“What a shame for such a nice house to go to pieces,” Drew said.

“Come on, Drew, let’s go,” Callie said.

“In a moment,” Drew said. He shone the light on the stairs. “Let’s have a quick look up there. How much of the house have you seen, Stanley?”

“About what you see now. I didn’t stay long. I thought I heard and saw someone up there.”

“It could be a bum,” Callie said. “Anyone.”

“I think it was her. Mrs. Stilwind. That’s what Buster thinks.”

“Buster doesn’t know,” Callie said.

“He knows more than you think about most everything.”

“It won’t hurt to look,” Drew said.

“It might,” Callie said.

We went up the stairs, clustered together like grapes, Drew shining the light. The stairs creaked as we went. We came to a hallway. Along it were a number of doors. We opened one and Drew shone the light about. It was an empty room. The wallpaper was peeling in spots, and as we entered, dust rose up from the floor like a mist.

We checked a couple of other rooms. Same situation.

Finally, we entered a room and found a bed inside. There was also a nightstand with a mirror and the mirror was broken, only one piece of glass still in it. It was in the right-hand corner and was a very small piece. The rest of the mirror was on the floor, spread out like pieces of silver.

There was a brush on the nightstand, and there were long gray hairs in it. The bed had wrinkled dirty sheets on it and looked as if someone had been sleeping there. Up close, we saw there were gray hairs on the pillows.

“Wow,” Drew said. “Maybe she does come back here.”

“Come on,” Callie said. “Those bats make me nervous.”

“They’re gone,” Drew said.

“Come on,” Callie said again, and there was no sweetness in her voice.

We left out of there, half expecting to meet Mrs. Stilwind at the door.

Drew drove us home, Callie moving to the passenger position as we came closer to the Dew Drop.

———

U
P IN MY ROOM
, me and Richard went to bed early, preparing for school the next day. I was both excited and worried. At least I had one friend there. Richard. And he’d be going to school with me.

I was thinking about all this, lying wide awake, when Richard raised up on one elbow from his pallet, said, “Stanley?”

“Yes.”

“Your family has been good to me. Thanks.”

“No problem.”

“But I’ve got to go.”

“Do what?”

I sat up in bed. So did Nub. He seemed annoyed. He didn’t like his sleep disturbed.

“What do you mean go?” I asked.

“I have to go home.”

“You can’t go there. Your father doesn’t want you there.”

“Not to see him. Or my mama. I was thinkin’ about that story you told about that old woman wandering back to her house, looking for her daughter’s ghost. My daddy and mama don’t even care about me and I’m alive. I’m not going there to see them, you can bet on that.”

“Then why?”

“I want my bike. That’s the main reason. I’m going to go over there and get it. I don’t get it, Daddy’s gonna sell it or throw it away for spite.”

“Do you have to do it tonight?”

“During the day they’ll see me, and if I wait too long, he’ll get rid of it. May have already.”

“You could get another bike.”

“I made that one out of old bikes I got down at the dump. He didn’t give it to me. They ain’t never give me much of anything besides a beatin’ and hard work. I’ve had more clothes give me since I been here than I got all them years from them. I didn’t even have no underwear till your mama gave me some.”

He stood up, took off the pajamas Mom had given him, started pulling on his clothes.

“You’re just going to go over there and get your bike?”

“Yeah. At least that.”

“What does that mean?”

“I’ll be back.”

I don’t know what I feared he might do, why I thought he might need a backup, but I said, “Wait up, and I’ll go with you. Just wait until it’s later and we’re sure everyone’s asleep, then we’ll both go. You’ll have to hide the bike nearby. Out behind the house in the woods. We’ll get it tomorrow, say we went over and got it after school. They see it tomorrow, they’ll know we went out tonight.”

“Ain’t no need in you going,” Richard said.

“I know. But I’m going.”

———

I
GOT MY
H
OPALONG
C
ASSIDY
flashlight and snuck silently out the back way. In fact, any noise we might have made was covered by Rosy’s snoring.

With only one bike, we walked. Nub went with us, trotting along, sniffing the ground. There was a cool, late August wind, and it gently shook the trees on either side of us and made the shadows of their boughs cut back and forth across the road as if they were sawing the earth in half.

When we could see the old sawmill, we stopped. Nub sat down in the road and let his tongue hang out, dripping drool onto the ground.

Richard said, “I feel like that little colored boy under all that sawdust and nobody giving a damn. ’Cept I ain’t dead. If’n I was dead, maybe it would be easier. Maybe he’s got it lots better now.”

“Don’t talk like that,” I said.

“I don’t know any other way to talk. Come on, we’ll go behind the sawmill, slip over to the house, out to the barn. There ain’t no dog to bark, so we can get up there pretty easy. I can get a shovel there.”

“A shovel?”

“Yeah. I want to dig Butch up.”

“Say what?”

W
HAT IN THE WORLD
are you talking about? You came here to get your bike.”

“That too,” he said.

“Why would you dig up a dead dog . . . Your daddy’s dead dog?”

“That’s the one. I’m gonna dig it up because it meant so much to him. He cried over that dog. I ain’t never seen him cry over nothin’. He sure ain’t cried over me. I ain’t never seen him like nothin’ enough to even say so ’cept that dog. You know I oncet pulled cotton all day, and I filled bags good as a grown man, and I was only nine, and he didn’t even say good boy, but he always told that dog how damn good it was. He never said nothin’ to me. Not a thing.”

We walked on toward the sawmill. Nub deserted us, ran off into the woods to pursue dog business.

“Sometimes people don’t know how to say those things,” I said.

“He knew how to say it to his dog.”

“What good will digging up the dog do?”

We passed the sawmill, turned in the direction of the Chapman home.

“I want to put that dog on the back porch. Want to dig it up ’cause he cried over it and he ain’t never cried over me. He went to all that trouble to bury it, and I’m going to unbury it.”

“Richard, this is weird.”

“It ain’t weird to me. Now be quiet.”

We were near his house. We stopped for a moment and looked at it, bathed in shadow from the trees that surrounded it.

“Daddy sleeps light. Used to claim he could hear a dog run across the yard, and I reckon he can.”

“That doesn’t sound promising,” I said.

“We’re gonna go out to the barn. There’s a shovel there.”

“I don’t know, Richard.”

“Listen here, Stanley. I didn’t ask you to come. I appreciate you did. But I didn’t ask you.”

“You said we were going to get your bike.”

“I am.”

“You didn’t say anything about this dog business.”

“I didn’t know I was gonna do it till I was standing out there in front of the old sawmill. It just come to me. You want to go home. Go. Ain’t gonna hold it against you. But I’m gonna dig that dog up, and I’m gonna drag it on that screen porch. He’ll know I done it, and that’s enough.”

“How will he know?”

“Because I’ll leave him somethin’ that lets him know.”

“What?”

“Well, I ain’t figured that yet. But I will. And even if he don’t know, I’ll know I done it.”

I sighed. “All right. Let’s do it.”

———

T
HE BACKYARD WAS BRIGHT
with moonlight, so bright you could even see where chickens had been scratching in the dirt. Out by the barn, the hog snorted once at us, then lay down in its wallow and went silent.

Richard and I removed the bar from the barn doors and heaved them open. Inside, the light from the moon was full in the doorway, but the back of the barn was as black as the devil’s thoughts.

I pulled the small flashlight out of my pants pocket, and flashed it around. On the far wall of the barn hung a large cross. It looked to be splashed with dark paint. On either side of the cross were pages torn from the Bible and pinned to the wall. I remembered now what Richard had told me about the barn being a kind of church and Mr. Stilwind thinking he was a preacher.

I pointed my light at the pages on the wall.

“What is that about?” I asked.

“Daddy sticks them on the wall, underlines them, makes me and Mama learn ’em. I had to stand in front of them and memorize them.”

“You never told me that.”

“Would you tell that on purpose? I wouldn’t tell it now, but there it is.”

“Tell me that’s paint on the cross.”

“It’s mostly animal blood.”

“Why? . . . Mostly?”

“He butchered a chicken, hog, anything, he smeared the blood on there, let it dry. Didn’t never clean it.”

“Why?”

“Thought of it as a sacrifice to the Lord. You know, thanks
for this here fryin’ hen. This here batch of pork chops. One time, when he whipped me across the back with his belt, he wiped the blood off and rubbed it on that cross, and he didn’t even say thanks. I wasn’t even as good as a fryin’ hen. He said, ‘And here’s the blood of a sinner.’ So it ain’t all animal blood.”

“Tell me what religion he is so I can stay away from it.”

“He says there ain’t none of the religions doin’ what they’re supposed to do. What they’re supposed to do is what he does.”

“I don’t think they’d keep too many in church.”

“Havin’ to hear his preachin’ might run ’em off too,” Richard said. “It’s mostly about dyin’ and goin’ to hell and burnin’ up and stuff. And how we have to serve penance all the time.”

“What’s penance?”

“Kind of sufferin’ and hurtin’ for what you believe, to show how much you believe it.”

I waved the light around. On one side, in a stall, was the mule. Its eyes in the glow of the flashlight looked like huge black buttons. On the other side, on wooden racks, shiny and clean with filing and oiling, hung all manner of tools. Scythe. Axe. Hoe. Posthole diggers. A shovel.

Richard stroked the old mule’s nose. “Hello, boy. How are you? He worked this mule hard as anyone. I ought to let it out, but it wouldn’t have nowhere to go. It’d just come back, or die somewhere.”

“I’m afraid your parents will see us,” I said.

“Yeah,” Richard said. He gave the mule a last pat, took the shovel from the rack on the other side.

We pulled the doors back, slid the bolt across them as silently as possible, headed for the woods where the dog was buried.

———

L
EAVES SNAPPED
under our feet, and in the woods it was dark. The flashlight batteries became faint, and I had to shake the flashlight to make it work. Finally it quit altogether.

“Hopalong might ride a horse good,” Richard said, “but he makes a shitty flashlight.”

Due to lack of a flashlight, the grave was hard to find. But finally the trail, which was little more than a single footpath, widened and the trees broke, and there in the moonlight, under the sky, was the mound of dirt where Butch lay.

“I’ll do the diggin’,” Richard said.

“Suits me.”

“Figured it would.”

“I feel like someone in one of those monster movies,” I said. “Ones with Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff. The one where they were grave robbers or ghouls.”

“You be Boris, and I’ll be Bela,” Richard said, and he started to dig.

“I wonder what Nub is doing?” I said.

“Chasin’ coons and night birds would be my guess. Or squattin’ behind a bush.”

The dirt was not too hard, but it seemed to me Richard had to dig deeper than before. I suppose that feeling had to do with standing in the middle of the woods while you watched your friend dig up a dead dog in the moonlight.

Before Richard reached the dog, the smell reached us. It was so strong I thought I was going to lose my dinner, but after a moment I became accustomed enough to it to stand it, long as I held one hand over my mouth and nose and didn’t breathe too deeply.

“There he is,” Richard said, scraping the shovel along the length of the grave.

Sure enough. There in the moonlight was the head. No eye visible, because it was gone. Richard cleared the length of the body and you could see it all now, from tip of nose to tip of tail. Head and body had shrunk, as if it were a package from which items had been removed. The dog’s snout had shrunk up so much, the teeth it contained seemed bared.