Rotters (14 page)

The clasp, of course. I reined it in, and with each inch of progress the strand plowed deeper into the ulcerous neck. Finally I had it but felt faint and realized that I was still holding my breath. I drew a heaving, ragged gasp and contaminated air slid down my throat. It was inside me now, death was inside me. Somehow the necklace came free and I fumbled it over to my father. My knees pistoned; one foot dipped into coffin liquor. Then I was wriggling like a worm over the hole’s edge, gasping upon the tarpaulin, translated to the stars.

Somehow the casket lid was put back in some semblance of order. I didn’t watch. I rolled off the tarp to allow my father to refill the grave. He was still talking, but it was hard to hear him over the sickly rattle of my lungs. Decay was claiming
my entrails. Over the snowy thump of dirt, I detected my father speaking of something called the Satipatthana Sutta, a passage called the Nine Cemetery Contemplations. It was one of the books in the cabin, I knew it, and I wondered if he would later assign the reading. The passage, he said as he tamped down the earth, details a process wherein apprentice monks meditate upon bodies in various states of decay until they overcome disgust and embrace the serenity of the body’s ephemeral nature. I knew this was meant to comfort. But there was fetid mortality swelling inside me, I was certain of it—I could feel its long claws thread my organs.

We were up and moving. A heavy sack skipped across my vertebrae. Still my father spoke, and still I tried to listen, but my ears buzzed with the low hum of disease. He told me, and I tried to understand, that what we had done was something ancient and possibly noble, but also vilified and to be undertaken with the utmost solemnity; and that, most importantly, it was a craft passed down for generations, teacher to student, and as of tonight this group included not just my father, not just a clandestine group of men spread all across the country, but also, horrifyingly, me.

“We’re called the Diggers,” he said.

M
ONDAY, SCHOOL—THERE WAS
no way I was going, they would smell my sin all over me. I prayed to the placid and forgiving Two-Fingered Jesus:
Save me
. Even though I didn’t deserve it, my prayers were answered. Five minutes later, I
pushed to my feet to vomit into the sink. I would not suffer school today. I was sick for real.

Consciousness was sporadic. My eyes ached, so I closed them and fixated on the sweat that slopped my shirt and boxers to my skin. I had read about fevers so severe that people’s brains were literally cooked, and I remembered the dark liquid pooling from the dead woman’s mouth and ears. I coughed and spat until everything came up, corpse-tissue mush, coffin liquor, all dredged up from my guts and sent back through sewer pipes and returned to the earth. I glimpsed myself in the bathroom mirror and saw a corpse.

Harnett’s hands were icy. I realized he was lifting me from the toilet. Then I was moving through the air and set back upon my bed, feeling moments later a rag draped over my forehead. There was ice wrapped inside, but a few minutes later it was water. My head pounded and I took advantage of the noise and hid inside. No cemetery, no woman, no maggots, just a fire in which I alone burned.

After a time my eyes fell upon my father standing at the stove within a cloud of steam, and I became riveted by the normalcy of the apparition—Ken Harnett, not grappling with graves and the enormity of death, but clanging a metal spoon against a metal pot, stirring broth. He served soup and I drank it. Later there were crackers and water. By now it had to be at least Tuesday, and wretchedly I began to fret about the classes I was missing and what it meant for the future my mother had plotted. Was I in danger of flunking out? Suspension? This was worse than risking the wrath of Woody and Gottschalk. Then my father returned from an absence and set a stack of papers on my cardboard-box desk. “Your assignments,” he said.

Just sifting through the papers strengthened me. Though
sweaty, my fingers itched for my textbooks. I would show them. I would continue to ace every exam. I would turn in work so strong they would accuse me of cheating and I would welcome the challenge. I drifted off imagining their thwarted effort. Let them try.

A cool hand against my face rose me from slumber. I blinked my eyes open and saw an elderly man kneeling above me. He had sparse gray hair and a slotted, wizened face of the darkest chestnut. He wore a white clergyman’s collar. My first thought was one of vanity: my smell, the stink of the grave, this man of God would recoil.

“Hello, Joseph,” he said. “I’m Reverend Knox.” The sonorous buzz of his voice was deep and true.

My throat burned. “Hello.”

Knox smiled so widely the hairs in his mustache pulled away from one another. Bones whined audibly as he twisted his neck to look over his shoulder.

“This boy’s got the boneyard blues.”

Behind Knox I could see my father standing with his fists in his pockets, shuffling his feet like a scolded schoolboy. “His first time. What do you expect?”

“That’s no excuse for laying him on this cold floor,” Knox snapped. “Man, you ought to have your head examined.”

“Stop coddling him,” Harnett said. “It’ll work itself out.”

“Work itself out, my missing foot,” muttered Knox. I gazed at the swaying fabric of his black pants and ascertained that, indeed, the lower half of his right leg was gone. I searched for his face and he waved a hand as if erasing the last few moments. “I got just the cure, Joseph. We gonna put your dad to work, amen?” Knox winked, then called over his shoulder. “Shake a leg to your garden, old man, and get me one of all you got. And not just an armload of nasty onions. We’re
also going to need whiskey. Don’t even try telling me you got none. And two lemons, and if that means you need to drive into town, well, I don’t know what to tell you besides you’re running the Lord’s errands now. God is good?”

To my surprise, Harnett moved right away. He lifted his jacket from the rocking chair and fished his keys from the pocket. “Don’t be polluting the kid with this Lord’s errand shit, all right?”

Knox took on a philosophical tone. “ ‘It is enough for the student to be like his teacher, and the servant like his master. If the head of the house has been called Beelzebub, how much more the members of his household?’ ”

My father raised his hands in surrender and exited. Knox placed a hand on his knee and with a pained grunt lifted himself into the air. He wedged a single crutch into his armpit.

“Are you one of the Diggers?” I asked.

“Just one of Jesus’s foot soldiers. God is good? No, child, I don’t approve of hardly a thing your dad’s ever done. It’s wrong. I don’t need to tell you, you know it in your heart. But that’s Jesus’s miracle, Joseph.” Knox smiled. “Two men such as your father and myself, breaking bread? God
is
good! Ken Harnett’s soul is on fire, yes. But you know what that means? It means my soul is on fire, too. And the two of us, amen, we douse each other’s flames.” He patted his sleeves by means of illustration.

“You know? What he does?”

“ ‘Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter.’ ”

I tried to bring myself to one elbow. Knox winked.

“We gonna fix you up, amen?”

It just came out of my mouth: “God is good.”

When Harnett returned, Knox shoved a wooden spoon into his hand, and now my father stood before the stove, poking sullenly at vegetables. Knox clattered a number of bottles across the counter, eventually handing me a glass half filled with a golden liquid. He limped to my father’s rocking chair, sat down, and set his crutch horizontally across the armrests.

Knox sighed, kneading his stump. “Forty years I been trying to knock sense into your fool head and forty years you been telling me to save my breath. Now I don’t have a whole lot more breath left to give, so you best let me say my piece. Amen?”

For a moment my father stood motionless. “Don’t say that.”

“When God calls my name, I plan to come a-hopping, to a land where there’s no crutches or dentures or medicine bottles no one can open. You, you’d kick and scream all the way to glory. Don’t believe a single thing put in front of your two eyes. Don’t even believe in the Incorruptibles.”

“I’ll give you a hundred dollars not to start this again,” Harnett said. “Two hundred.”

“Saint Teresa Margaret.” Knox elongated each word with exquisite pleasure. “Fifteen days after death with cheeks still as pink as posies, praise Jesus. Smelled like posies, too—every witness swore it.”

“I know tricks that could pull off the same thing,” Harnett muttered from the stove. “Give me the right chemicals and five minutes with the body.”

“Thirteen years later! They move the blessed body and upon exhumation find Saint Teresa Margaret uncorrupted still! A miracle, given unto Saint Teresa Margaret for the healing miracles she bestowed as His servant. Oh, God is good.”

“This was what, the eighteen hundreds? The seventeen hundreds? I tell you what’s a miracle, that you believe any of this.” Harnett pushed sizzling vegetables around the pan.

Knox slapped his knee and guffawed. One of his teeth was capped in gold. “ ‘I am the resurrection and the life!’ ” He laughed and slapped his knee again. “ ‘I am the resurrection and the life! Whoever believes in me, streams of living water will flow from within him.’ Visit the monastery chapel of Santa Teresa dei Bruni. See for yourself. Then come back and you explain it to me.”

“She’s been embalmed, Knox.” Harnett sighed. “And I’m not going to Italy.”

“What’s an Incorruptible?” My voice surprised even me. Knox looked pleased that I had spoken. Harnett’s reaction was less enthusiastic.

“Tell the child,” Knox said. “He asks a sensible question.”

My father chewed his lip for a moment. When he spoke, he kept his eyes on the vegetables. “There’s two kinds of preservation,” he said begrudgingly. “There’s embalming, and then there’s sort of natural embalming.”

“Like the Iceman,” I said.

“But some people,” he said, pausing long enough to indict Knox, “say there’s a third kind, whose bodies don’t decay because of their … I don’t even know. Their virtue.”

“And we call ’em the Incorruptibles,” purred Knox.

“Some of us call ’em bullshit,” said Harnett.

“Saint Francis Xavier—oh, let me tell you about Saint Francis Xavier!” Knox’s hands were raised at the level of his head in private elation. “Saint Francis Xavier, passed in 1552. You know what they said in 1974 when they examined his remains? They said, ‘Why, it looks as though Saint Francis is only sleeping.’ Or Saint Andrew Bobola, tortured and burned
alive, or Saint Josaphat, who they drug up from a river! Incorrupt, each of them. Tell me now that God is good!”

There was a snapping noise as my father turned off the stove. He lifted the pan and dumped the contents onto a plate. “All of which is very interesting and none of which means a goddamn thing.”

“It means that the grave is a holding pen.” The gaiety of Knox’s drawl hardened into something magisterial. “It is a waiting room. It is temporary housing, amen. It means that we bury our bodies at the
pleasure
of our Lord and He is
aware
of those bodies and even, amen,
possessive
of them. He be using the Incorruptibles to deliver a message, Ken Harnett, that you isn’t to be down there messing around with his property. Now, put some salt and pepper on that before you give it to the child. Mary and Joseph.”

A few irritated banging noises later, my drink was joined by a plate of food: roasted slices of red and green pepper, tomato, and plenty of browned onion, plopped unceremoniously onto a bed of sticky rice. I went for it with my fingers before my father pushed a fork into my palm. After stuffing some in my mouth I washed it back with a big gulp of the liquid concoction. Instantly my throat stung and my eyes screwed shut. So
this
was whiskey. It hit my belly and radiated heat, and only moments later did I taste the undertones of honey and lemon. My first thought was that it was like sucking gasoline vapors. My second thought was that I wanted more, and down the hatch it went.

Knox was chuckling. “Those blues will be gone in no time,” he said. His eyes twinkled and his hands clasped at his heart. “A son. God is good. God is
real
good. ‘Sons are a heritage from the Lord,’ Psalm One Twenty-seven. This is a gift, Harnett. Don’t you throw it away.”

Harnett looked at the old man in a way that was almost affectionate, and in that moment I recognized two men with much history between them, two men on opposite sides of a battle who kept fighting despite an abiding respect.

“It’s a warm October,” Harnett said. “Good news for your arthritis.”

There was silence for a while as I ate and drank. The sun was sinking. Unexpectedly it caught the bathroom mirror and temporarily blinded me; my eyes filled with white light and my ears momentarily rang with a sound like ravens. When I again opened them, Knox was kneeling before me, gently taking the empty tumbler from my hand and replacing it with a glass of water. I blinked; I must have blacked out. Over Knox’s shoulder I could see my father outside, raising an axe at the woodpile. I could also see Knox’s car, a small, battered junker that had to be at least twenty years old. The reverend’s large hand patted mine, and I marveled at the pure whiteness of his palms.

“Your father,” he sighed. “I save what souls that I can, but only the Almighty knows which path your father will take.” He squeezed my wrist and I could feel a sinewy strength alive in the old man’s bones. “Remember your Proverbs. ‘Listen, my son, to your father’s instruction and do not forsake your mother’s teaching.’ Understand? I want the Lord to have an easier time with you than He does your old man. Amen?”

I felt myself nodding limply.

“And whatever you do,” he said, widening his yellow eyes and leaning forward until I could smell his musk of coffee and peanuts and minty cologne. “You stand clear of Mr. Boggs. You do not go near Antiochus Boggs.”