by Ronald Kelly
The panic passed. Boyd felt stone cold inside. “What kind of problems?”
“Well, you’ve been late to work three mornings in a row this week…”
“You know I have a far piece to drive, Ed,” said Boyd.
“I know,” allowed Grant. “But it’s throwing off everyone’s schedule. The truth of the matter is, I’ve got four men who are ready to come to work at the snap of my fingers—Kentucky men—and they all live no more than ten miles away.”
“I’ll just get up an hour earlier every morning,” Boyd said, trying to salvage what he was on the verge of losing.
“And how early do you get up now? Three A.M.? Face it, Boyd, you couldn’t handle it. You’d be dead on your feet in two weeks’ time.”
Boyd knew he was right. The eighty-mile drive to work and back was already running him ragged as it was, and he was only getting a few hours’ sleep at night.
“I’m sorry, Boyd,” said Ed. “I really am. But I’ve gotta have someone who can be here when the whistle blows.” He took a company checkbook out of his desk drawer and opened it. He scribbled out a check and handed it to Boyd. “Here’s your severance pay. I put a little extra in there, ’cause I know you’re going through some hard times.”
“Thanks,” said Boyd, folding the check and sticking it in his shirt pocket.
As he stood up, so did Ed Grant, who extended his hand. “No hard feelings, huh?”
The carpenter stared at the man’s hand for a moment. Then he sighed and took it. They shook firmly. “That’s just the breaks,” said Boyd. “God knows I’ve had my share of ’em lately.”
“Take care, Boyd. And good luck.”
Boyd nodded and left the trailer. He walked to his red Ford half-ton pickup, the cold knot in his stomach loosening, warming into anger. By the time he was sitting in the front seat, his jaw was clenched so tightly it hurt. “Damn!” he yelled, striking the dashboard so hard he left a split in the upholstery. He started up the truck and goosed the gas pedal. The tires spun, kicking up dust, sending him shooting out of the dirt lot like a rocket.
A few minutes later, Boyd was on the main highway, heading for the long stretch of Interstate 75. A couple miles farther on, the anger died and despair took its place. He glanced over at the plastic sack that lay on the seat. It was Paul’s birthday present; a Nintendo Game Boy he had bought at Toys “R” Us the night before. It and the game to go with it had cost him over eighty bucks.
The uncertainty of unemployment reared its ugly head, bringing back that old, familiar fear. Boyd thought about how much food eighty dollars would buy, how much gas it would put in his truck. Then he felt ashamed. He’d be damned if he let a little thing like losing a job set him back. Paul was going to get his birthday present and that was all there was to it. Boyd had roughed it through money troubles before, and he would do it again. He had no choice.
As he approached the interstate, Boyd spotted a liquor store. Something tugged at him and he licked his lips. He could sure go for a drink. A good, stiff swig of Jim Beam would be just what the doctor ordered. But Boyd was no longer a patient of that particular doctor. He’d been dry for three months now. The last time he’d had a drink was that December night when he’d come home falling-down drunk and Joan had tossed him and his toothbrush out the front door.
He had made himself a promise when he had awakened the next morning, puking his guts out and unable to hold his head up straight, it hurt so badly. And so far he had kept it.
Boyd fought down the urge until finally it faded. He sped past the liquor store without a second glance and kept going. He had a birthday party to go to.
Chapter Two
The mountain was quiet. A few birds sang in the longleaf pines—robins and starlings, as well as a mockingbird mimicking them song for song. From the ground came the gritty noise of plowshares biting deep into clay, along with the snort of a mule blowing through his nose and a man breathing heavily, keeping pace.
Then the blade struck something hard, causing it to ring along the mountainside like a bell. The mule grunted as his harness grew taut, stopping him in his tracks. The farmer cussed. The plow handles slid through his hands, filling his palms with splinters.
“Damn it to hell!” growled Dudley Craven. The big man stepped away from the plow, picking the slivers of wood away with his tobacco-stained teeth. He got most of them out; the others would require tweezers and a sharp eye.
The mule strained at the leads again, then began to grow skittish. Dud stepped up quickly, rubbing her lathered back, calming her down. “Cool on down, girl,” he said soothingly. “We just hit an ol’ rock, that’s all.”
The animal stopped her prancing and stood still. When Dud was certain she would stay put, he walked to the front of the plow and crouched down. He swept away a mound of earth with his aching hands, expecting to find a good-sized boulder.
But that wasn’t what was there. It was the corner of a box. A heavy wooden box.
“What in tarnation is this?” he mumbled beneath his breath. True, he hadn’t plowed that particular stretch of ground before, but he didn’t expect to find such an object there, scarcely beneath the surface. Dud had been given the land shortly before his father’s death twelve years ago, but he had chosen to plow and plant only the acreage closest to the house he had built. That year he had decided to put in more corn and tobacco, and it had been a job just preparing for it. He’d had to cut down some trees and blast up the stumps with dynamite before he could clear the meadow down to bare earth and get it ready for cultivating.
He had been plowing since sunrise that day, with nothing much to contend with but fist-sized rocks and stray roots. That was, until now. He took a bandanna from the side pocket of his Duckhead overalls and scrubbed the dirt away. The box was made of oak and he could make out the rusty end of a square-headed nail in one corner. He knew it was old then. They had stopped making nails like that some sixty or seventy years ago.
Dud tried to move the box, but it wouldn’t budge. It was in deep. The mountain farmer lifted his CAT baseball cap and scratched his balding head. He studied on the matter for a moment, then stood up. He took hold of the leads and pulled. The mule backed up enough to ease the blade from the wood. Then Dud wrestled with the plow until it was a few feet to the side. The corner of the box jutted from the bare earth, nothing obscuring it now.
Dud looked up at the sky. The afternoon was gone. The sun was already setting to the west. He fished a tarnished pocket watch from the bib of his overalls. The ornate hands showed that it was half past five. He unhitched the mule, leaving the plow where it rested. Then he led the swayback across the sloping field, toward the barn. The discovery of the box had thrown that day’s work off track. Besides, Dud was sort of anxious to find out exactly what it was. He had been like that since childhood; never able to leave anything alone once it piqued his interest.
“Come on, girl,” he said, pulling the mule along the crest of Craven’s Mountain. “I’ll rub you down and feed you your oats. Then I’ve got some work to do.”
Dud returned to the spot in the field an hour later. The sun was gone and twilight was darkening the sky. He even had to turn on the headlights of his ’69 Dodge pickup to find his way. The old truck jounced on busted springs, despite the fact that he was barely driving ten miles an hour. Part of it was due to the steepness of the mountainside, which caused the vehicle to list precariously.
Finally, he made out the plow up ahead and, a second later, the edge of the box, still jutting out of the earth. He braked to a halt, cutting the engine but leaving the lights on. They cast a dull glow across the raw earth, sending long shadows toward the southernmost edge of the field.
Dud climbed out of the cab, chewing on a wad of Redman. He wore a denim jacket. The warmth of the day had given way to a sharp chill. He reached around to the bed of the truck and brought out a shovel. Then he took a pair of cowhide work gloves from his pocket and pulled them over his hands. He wasn’t about to draw splinte
rs twice in one day.
He took the shovel in his hands and approached the edge of the box, studying it like it was some great mystery. It wasn’t until he had gotten ol’ Alice back to the barn that an idea came to him: he recalled his papa telling him once about how folks used to bury their valuables during the War Between the States. They would take their gold money out in the middle of a pasture or the thick of the woods and bury it in boxes or Dutch ovens of cast iron. Dud rubbed his stubbled jaw, his eyes as shiny as a greedy coon’s. Maybe this was some poor soul’s forgotten fortune, long ago buried and lost track of.
“Let’s just see what we got here,” he said to no one in particular. He stuck the spade into the ground and began to scoop it away. The earth had already been stripped and disked before plowing, so most of the hardness was gone from it. The work was tedious, but not as hard as he had suspected it would be.
Forty minutes later he was done. The denim jacket had been pitched over the hood of the Dodge, and despite the coolness of the evening, sweat stained the pits of Dud’s long-handle underwear. He wiped at his forehead with the bandanna and stared at what his diligence had uncovered. A shiver ran down his spine, and suddenly, the night around him seemed much darker than before. It was a coffin, six-and-a-half feet long and two-and-a-half feet deep. The oaken boards of the casket were covered with clumps of earth and tiny roots, and the wood that was visible looked warped and speckled with wormholes. Several of the square-head nails had backed out of their holes, jutting like rusty pins in the light of the truck’s low beams.
It had been something of a shock for Dudley Craven, finding a thing like that buried in his field. In fact, it was the last thing in the world he had expected to find. Dud wasn’t a religious man, but he was superstitious. The thought of digging up someone’s earthly remains didn’t set well with him. It was like those professors from the University of Tennessee who had excavated the Indian mounds down near Green Hollow a few years before, desecrating the memory of someone who had died long ago.
Dud stood there and stared at the coffin for a long time, debating on what to do. His best bet would be just to cover the thing back up and leave it alone, forget about his extra acreage, and be happy with what he already had.
But he found that he couldn’t bring himself to do it. Curiosity pulled at his brain, whispering like a woman in the night. Open it up, it said. Just pry up the lid and take a peek inside. It won’t hurt none just to look.
Dud took a step forward. He reached out and pulled one of the nails from the lid. It came free with no trouble at all. He tried another. It came out easier than the first.
He took hold of the lid on both sides, snaking his fingers in between. There was a creak of tortured wood as he pulled backward. The remaining nails held firm and all he got for his trouble was a fragment of rotten wood in one hand. He tossed the splintery shard aside and studied the problem again.
Finally, he decided to try something else. He went to the truck and fetched the jack handle from under the seat. He put the flat end of it between lid and box, then gently pried. One by one, the remaining nails popped free until, eventually, the lid was completely loose.
Open it up, suggested that voice in his head again. Just lift it up and look inside. Don’t be scared.
Dud took a deep breath, his hands shaking as he reached for the lid. He thought of the quart jar of moonshine he had back at the house and how good a swallow of it would be right about now. Nothing was better than a kick of white mule to put a little steel into a man’s backbone. God knew he could certainly do with some.
“Aw, quit your fidgeting and just do it!” he told himself gruffly. Then he lifted the lid from the box and laid it aside on the ground.
Of course, he found exactly what he expected to find. It was the skeleton of a man—a tall man—the bones bare and bleached a dull yellowish white. The body was clad in a dusty black suit and vest and a brittle white shirt yellow with age. From the looks of it, the remains had lain beneath that field for a very long time. Maybe close to a hundred years.
Dud then turned his eyes to the one thing about the body he didn’t expect to find. There, jutting from the center of the ribcage, was a length of wood. Kind of like a broken piece of bean pole or a tent stake.
The farmer couldn’t figure it out. Why would someone do that to a person? Shove a stob between their ribs and into their heart? And why would their family allow them to be buried with it sticking out of them? Dud had a hard time even imagining the reason.
He stood there and stared at the skeleton for a while. He could only do what his heart told him to: bury it in its rightful place and forget about it. But then, maybe that wasn’t what he should do, after all. Maybe this fellow had been murdered long years ago and his family didn’t even know where he was. Maybe whoever had killed him had built the casket and buried him up there on the mountain, thinking no one would ever find him in such a godforsaken place.
Dud knew then what he had to do. He placed the lid back on the coffin and then carefully dragged the box from its hole. The casket creaked and rattled as if it was on the verge of falling apart. He jumped into the truck and backed it around the other way. Climbing out, he dropped the tailgate and began to load the coffin into the bed. The crimson glow of the taillights threw an eerie cast on the box, making it look blood red. The illusion ran a cold finger down Dud’s spine again. Something nagged at him in the far reaches of his brain, almost like a premonition of some sort.
When he had finished loading the casket, he closed the gate, threw the shovel in the back, and climbed into the truck. Then he headed across the mountainside to his farm. He figured he would have himself a bite to eat, maybe a drink of that moonshine in the pantry. After that, maybe he would drive down the mountain to Green Hollow and let the law take a look at the skeleton in the box. He was tired of trying to figure out what it was doing there on Craven’s Mountain and why. Maybe the police would figure it out for him and take the godawful thing off his hands.
Chapter Three
It was a quarter ’til seven when Boyd pulled his truck into the driveway of the place he had once considered his home. He cut the engine and sat there for a long moment simply staring at the house. It was a common ranch-style plan, 1,300 square feet with a two-car garage and a redwood deck running along the back. Boyd knew every inch of that house: every stud, every nail, and every sheet of drywall. He should have… he had built it with his own hands over a period of a year and a half. The plumbing and electrical work had been done by someone else, but the rest had come about by his sweat and hard work alone.
And now he wasn’t even allowed to live there. Just the thought of it hurt Boyd. Oh, sure, he could have made a fuss and proclaimed his right to live under his own roof. But then Joan would have moved out and undoubtedly taken the kids with her. After that, he’d have ended up in an empty house that had once been filled to the rafters with laughter and the sounds of children. And Boyd couldn’t have stood that, not even for a few hours.
At least for now, the house at 411 Stantonview Road was still a home. Just not his own.
Boyd sighed. Taking the Toys “R” Us bag, he climbed out of his truck and stood in the gravel drive for a moment. He looked around, feeling a little uneasy. Something wasn’t right. The floodlights at the corner of the house showed only his truck, Joan’s beige Tempo, and his mother-in-law Blanche’s Toyota Camry parked in the driveway. If Paul’s party had been scheduled for seven, there should have been at least six or seven more cars parked there. As he walked around the side of the house to the back door, Boyd listened. He should have heard the noise of excited ten-year-olds echoing from the dining room, cutting up and laughing. But he didn’t. He didn’t hear anything at all. That heightened his sense of unease even more.
When he reached the back door, Boyd reached for the doorknob and then thought better of it. Instead, he knocked.
“Come in,” came Joan’s voice from the other side.
Boyd opened the door and s
tepped into the kitchen. It looked the same as the day he and Joan had finished painting and papering it. There was an almond-colored refrigerator and stove, and a dishwasher set below the counter just to the left of the double stainless-steel sink. The woodwork of the kitchen cabinets was white oak, hand-rubbed with brass fittings. Boyd remembered the work he’d put into them, how he had sanded and oiled the wood with the love and patience that only a carpenter could provide.
As he stepped past the threshold and closed the door behind him, Boyd looked toward the two women who sat at the kitchen table. They held coffee cups in their hands and expressions of tense expectancy in their eyes. At first, Boyd couldn’t understand the look of accusation being directed his way. Then he looked past them into the adjoining dining room. The decorations were still on the walls, but the long oak table was completely bare. He glanced over at the kitchen sink and was surprised to find a pile of dirty dishes there, covered with cake crumbs and traces of chocolate icing.
“Where is everybody?” he asked.
Joan sat and stared at him for a moment, her eyes sharp. She was a beautiful woman with dark brown hair and the Craven blue-gray eyes, but when she was angry, that loveliness grew a hard edge Boyd could do without. “That’s exactly what I asked about you, oh, around four o’clock.”
Boyd frowned. “I don’t understand.”
“Well, neither did Paul,” said his estranged wife. “He was looking forward to his father being at his birthday party, and you didn’t show up. Didn’t call or anything.”
“But I called the other day and Blanche here told me the party was going to be at seven,” Boyd said.
“I did no such thing,” Blanche Craven said from the far end of the table.
“Yes, you did, Blanche,” said Boyd, starting to grow a little angry.
“No, I didn’t, Boyd. I told you four o’clock on the nose and you know it.”
