I nudged the horse and cart as far as I could down the track, now no more than a footpath, until we reach what I reckoned to be the last flattish place wide enough for all four wheels. Then I grabbed the tarps, and Walter and I descended the rest of the slope.
The air got colder as we went lower, until it felt like two in the morning when we reached the edge of the water. The bottom of the Wallow was a swamp, with slimy branches and yellowed grass reaching out of black pools. All the air had that sweet, metallic tang that stagnant fresh water gets. A white frog’s head stuck out of a pool a dozen feet away, watching us as we tried to find a way across. Another frog was beyond that. There may have been more, but it was hard to tell them from the clumps of white mushrooms at water level.
The old bastard had built or rebuilt a ford of fallen logs just above the water level, and we tottered our way across the slick old wood onto the black rock.
It wasn’t just a rock. It was a mass of black stone, maybe a hundred feet at its widest. There were no cracks in its surface, although it was rough like sandpaper and seemed like it should have had cracked and weathered with ages and ages of frost expansion. Because there were no breaks or crevices, nothing could grow on it except blotches of lichen, and moss clinging to the sides. And right in the middle of it was the cabin.
The oldest wood in the cabin—the greyest, most weathered wood—was milled lumber, brought up to the Wallow probably more than a hundred years before when great-something-grandfather Ostler first built the cabin. Since then, other wood had become attached to it, not to expand it except for a small lean-to, but just to maintain it: fresher but still old unpainted lumber, and untrimmed logs from the hills around supporting each of the four corners, with split logs laid at the bottom of the wall all around it, and against them all around were animal skulls—deer and bear, with smaller ones thrown in, all facing outward. I first thought that the dull red barn door was the door of the cabin. Only after I couldn’t find a knob or pull on either side did I realize that it was part of the exterior wall, scavenged and nailed on. The actual door, slumping on rope hinges, was on the far side of the cabin. It stood a foot open, probably just as Jude had left it.
I set down the tarps, pulled my leather gloves out of my back pocket and put them on. Then I took in a breath and held it, grabbed hold of the edge of the door, and pulled it wide, standing as far back as I could. The daylight in the Wallow had no direction and didn’t push very far into the cabin, and there was only one small, high window in a wall on the opposite side. I waited, squinting, Walter beside me, until the dark blur inside began to divide into lighter and darker parts. Then I finally saw him.
The floor of the cabin was mostly just the surface of the black rock, with a rag rug and a large cowhide thrown on spots. The old bastard was stretched face-down across the cowhide, arms toward the door where we stood, feet just barely off the bed built on split logs against the far wall. He was less naked than the first time I had seen him here, at least; his lower half faded away into the shadows, dressed in something like canvas trousers. His upper half was bare, and even with shadows on top of shadows we could see the light-and-dark splotches where rot had set in. The air rolling out of the cabin probably wasn’t much worse than it had been while he was alive—every smell that a man can make, folded in on itself and stewed together for decades, along with woodsmoke and old meat, all on top of that wet, stagnant tang. It was only when I leaned in to grab the edge of the cowhide and pull it toward the door that the rot-smell hit me: rich and roiling, fertile as old manure, thick as a cloud of gnats riled up as the body was moved.
Walter backed up and covered his mouth and nose as I dragged the corpse out into the valley’s light. The old bastard had been skinny to begin with, and now he was little more than leathery skin on bones. His greasy white hair, long enough to tuck into his belt, was tied back into a matted tail, with small bones woven through—bird bones, maybe. The blackened skin on his shoulders was speckled with huge moles and spots, running into and over each other. The fingers of each hand had become claws of callus and scar tissue with months’ and years’ worth of dirt ground into each wrinkle and pock.
“Turn him over,” Walter said behind his hand.
I lifted the edge of the cowhide and tried to roll him, but in the days—weeks?—since he had died, his rotting skin had molded into and around the bristly hairs on the hide. After a couple of tries, I made sure my gloves were on tight, grasped his shoulder, and peeled him back from the cowhide. It felt like stripping the hide from a buck.
His face was blotched from the blood inside him that had settled downward and started to rot. His eyes had leaked and dried, and now each eye socket was filled with dried tar that had hairs from the deer skin stuck to them. His belly was probably bigger than it had ever been in his life, jiggly from all the gases still trapped inside. Around his neck, under his grimy beard, was a string of small skulls—frog skulls, which is probably also where the bones in his hair were from. Maggots had burrowed underneath where the moisture had collected between him and the hide, and now his chest and belly writhed sluggishly like bubbling oats.
Walter took his handkerchief out of his pocket and laid it across the old bastard’s ruined face, making sure not to touch him. “That’s him, sure enough,” he said.
I nodded and let the corpse fall back onto the hide, squashing maggots and making the smell puff out. I flipped the edges of the hide up over him, then picked up a tarp and shook it out. Walter grabbed one end, and we draped it on the surface of the rock beside him. Then I nudged him with my foot over onto the tarp, and between the two of us we rolled him up tight. All sorts of flies buzzed around us, knocked away from the corpse and anxious to get back.
I made to pick up one end of the rolled-up tarp, but Walter said, “Hold on—let me get some fresh air first.” He walked away from the bundle and the cabin, and I did the same, meandering around the edges of the rock that the old bastard had called home for something over forty years.
I glanced over the edge of the rock where, decades before, I had seen him taking a crap. It was still his outhouse, and his trash pile; dried, crusty shit striped the rock down to the water’s edge, and below were odd bones from his meals, along with a rusted, curled shovel head and what few other things hadn’t been worth fixing or burning, all coated in a fly-covered mound of shit. I saw tiny bones mixed in with larger ones from raccoons and deer, and wondered how many of the albino frogs he had eaten over his lifetime.
I took the rest of the turn around the stump-like rock, back to where Walter had steeled himself and returned to the tarp bundle. He gathered up the head end, I gathered up the foot end, and together we hoisted it and hauled it back the way we had come.
In between watching my footing over the swampy area around the rock, I saw maybe a dozen white frogs watching us with their deep black eyes just above the surface of the water. I wondered if they were going to have a population explosion without the old bastard around to keep their numbers down.
We got his old bones back up to the cart and hauled him into the back. The horse shook her head and blinked like she couldn’t believe the smell. I looked at the satchel of food that Beth had made for us, caught Walter’s eye, and motioned toward it with my head. He shook his head rapidly.
“I’m not eating nothing anywhere near this smell,” he said.
“I thought not,” I said. I stretched out my back after dropping my load, stripped off my gloves, and fished two cigars out of my shirt pocket. “These might fit the bill better,” I said as I handed one to Walter, who took it easily. I bit the end off mine, then pulled out my matches and lit first Walter’s and then mine. They were old, stale cigars—I don’t smoke much — and they hadn’t been that great when I first got them at Sadley’s for cheap, but they were a damned sight better than the air we had been trying not to breathe too deep as we came back from the cabin.
“So,” Walter said after two or three good cleansing puffs, “should we come back up l
ater today, or leave it until tomorrow?”
“Why’d we want to come back?”
“Clean out the cabin, of course.”
“I was thinking just burn it down,” I said. “I got the matches.”
“I’d not just Ephraim Ostler’s cabin,” he said. “His own grandfather built it, and came up here to hunt plenty, I heard. Ostlers are the only family that doesn’t have a cabin to use, since Grandpap came up here to live.”
“Ostlers been doing fine without one,” I said, looking at the grey, wooden husk sitting alone on the black rock.
“Well, I’d like to be able to come up here with my family,” Walter said. “Take a vacation week for some camping sometime.”
“Fine,” I said. “We can come back to clean it out.” I looked up, where a bright spot in the cloud cover showed where the sun was hanging at midday. “But probably not today, once we get him planted. You’re welcome to stay over, of course.”
“Thank you. That’ll work out fine.”
“Then let’s get along,” I said, still puffing as I climbed up into the front of the wagon.
Today I changed thinkin abowt how long this will take. I no someon will haf to chip away for ten thowsand thowsand years and that oways galled me, but today I unerstood that the Years is part of the blesing. You love what you searve. And mabe wat you searve cant help but love you back. Even if your the ant. How could it not love the Ant wat searved it for ten thowsand thowsand years?
Not for a minute did I think of burying the old bastard behind the family home, where my mother and father and my murdered grandmother lay. Even if I’d thought to dishonor them all by planting him between them, I have to half-believe that they would have risen up together and kicked his skinny carcass out of their fellowship.
If I had still wanted to give the old bastard a full, proper burial—with a headstone and flowers and crying people dressed in black—we could have taken him down to the Lutheran church in Timoree, bought a fancy box, and paid to lay him in the churchyard where they keep the grass cut short and the trees neat.
But mostly what I wanted was to bury him deep where we could forget about him, and waste not too much time and absolutely no money doing it. So instead we took him to the old graveyard just down not too far from Sadley’s, where the old log church used to be a while back. The church isn’t there any longer—church-going folks decided they could ride a ways further to sit on varnished pews in a sanctuary with electric lights—but nobody was going to move the dead people already in the churchyard, so it’s still there. I don’t know as anybody new had been buried there for ten years or more, but there wasn’t no law against it, and it was free. So that’s where we went.
Walter took off his tie and rolled up his sleeves while I picked a spot for the old bastard, and the two of us dug until we had gotten about four feet down. The turfy was soft from the roots of the grass clumps, but creepers from elm trees wove through it like old baling twine, and half the time it felt like we were cutting a grave instead of digging one. I hadn’t chosen a spot close to the old graves, which were still marked with leaning headstones or simple granite rocks with names etched in and lichen patterned over, spreading out from the old log church that now looked like a deadfall. A lot of those graves had dips in front of the stones, where the old boxes the dead had been buried in had rotted or been eaten by worms and the earth fell in, so I didn’t feel too bad about burying the old bastard in nothing but an old tarp. I didn’t feel bad at all, to tell the truth.
Once we had laid him in the hole we dug, Walter insisted on stopping and saying a few words. The old farts from up at Sadley’s had seen us at work and were now at the edge of the graveyard, far enough away to respect any privacy we wanted but close enough that they could tell their wives what went on. I leaned on my shovel while Walter wiped the sweat from his forehead with his sleeve and calmed his breathing.
“Dear Lord,” he said, his chin tilted up into the low-hanging clouds, “we commit to the earth the mortal remains of Ephraim Joel Ostler. May his soul receive whatever justice and mercy Thou hast chosen for him, and may his children and children’s children redeem the wrongs that were done in his name. In Jesus’ name, amen.”
“Amen,” I said, my first shovelful of dirt hitting the body before I was done with the word.
By the time we had all the earth packed back over the body, a light rain was coating us, keeping our sweat from drying and leaving us stickier than flypaper. Walter patted the last few shovelfuls down with the flat of his shovel and said, “We going to put up some sort of marker?”
I shrugged. “No hurry, I expect. I’ll get to putting a slab here with his name before the grass grows back and people forget he’s planted here.” Even in the wet air, dust from our digging had gotten in my mouth and mixed with the dried-out spit that was all I had left. I gathered what I could on my tongue and spit it out to land on the grave.
I alwaz thot someone of my Blood wood carry on. Thats why I done it, to git her out from bitween us and let me raze him right for the Work. I thot that was wear my own Pap done it wrong, just leting me find out on my own after he was gon. Mabe his pap fore him did the same, I guess. But how much time has bin wasted that way? Hole tens of Yeers when I coud have been workin here. Evry year wasted is a year some one is gon haf to work.
The second time I saw the old bastard was when I got married. It was down at the Lutheran church, with me in a borrowed suit and Beth in her mother’s dress. When we came out of the church with family and friends all lining the steps and throwing rice, I saw an old skinny man with a beard that hid half his face, standing just outside the black iron fence, wearing a feed-sack shirt that came to his knees. When I leaned over to kiss Beth I asked if if was someone I didn’t know from her family, but she said it wasn’t. I was planning to ask my mother—Pap was already dead from coughing up blood by that point—but before I got there, Roy Sadley said, while shaking my hand, “Don’t that beat all? There’s your own grandfather standing yonder.”
He didn’t look like he was planning on coming in, so I just kept watch out of the corner of my eye while being kissed and handshook and congratulated. Before we ran out of people wishing us well, he had shrugged, turned, and walked off with stiff steps.
This week I bin dreamin throu the Rock to whats bineeth. My lord. Its not alive, not like anything I ever new was alive, but its not Dead nither. Its keeps from dyin by dreamin. I dont unerstand it but its still the Truth. It dreams to itself to keep itself not dead, and it dreams to me and I dream back. It thinks long, long thouts in Dreams that last so long it was dreamin long befor the lizzerd-pigs worshipt it. It can stay in its dreams for the ten thowsand thowsand year itll take me and mine to reach it.
Beth and Kezzie loved having Walter over for dinner. Beth had Walter say grace, and it was a simple, beautiful, not-too-long prayer that asked blessings on our house. Over mutton and potatoes, he told Kezzie all about her cousins Velma and Walter Junior—Kezzie had never been down out of the mountains as far as St. Stephen yet, so she’d never met them—and promised her that, once we had cleaned out the cabin, their whole family would come for a vacation visit sometime soon. He also told her that her name, “Keziah,” was from the Bible, where it was the name of one of Job’s three daughters, the other two being Jemimah and Keren-Happuch. Kezzie was only two and didn’t understand a lot about vacations and namesakes, but she got a kick out of his talk because she knew a girl named Jemimah just a few miles away.
Once Kezzie was in bed and Beth was washing up, Walter and I sat by the banked fire.
“It’ll be good to reclaim that cabin,” Walter said. “It’ll sort of be like reclaiming the family name from what he did. I know I’m not technically an Ostler, but still—what he did hangs over all of us of his blood, no matter if we get it from our father or our mother.”
“I’ll trust you on that, I guess,” I said. “Me, I just want to bury everything he done along with him.”
“Problem is that noth
ing stays buried forever,” he said, and chuckled like he had amused himself. Then he slapped his knee. “Well, no offense, but I need to turn in. I may have been raised a mountain boy, but I’ve got lily-white hands these days—” he turned his palms toward me, as if to prove it “—and I put more back into today than I normally do in a month. I’m just hoping I can roll out of bed in the morning.”
Turned out for him that that wouldn’t be a problem as such; the only other real bed we had in the house was the one we were holding for when Kezzie outgrew her pallet and it wasn’t long enough for him, so we fixed him up with some blankets on the couch.
I guess I do regret killin my Wife. I thot I was doin somthin that would get fences out of the way and let Eliazar and me do the Work up here together. I thot I was smarter then my Pap had bin, and his Pap, and his Pap afore him. But Eliazar turnd aginst me, and now its just me here in the Wallow doing the work, and when I go, there wont be no one. And whats bineeth the Rock will stay bineeth the rock.
The one time I actually met my grandfather was only about a year before he died. Ma was gone by that point, too, from something that kept her from caring to eat or sleep or, eventually, breathe. I was down at Sadley’s picking up some new bolts for the wagon’s axle. As I walked in from bright sun to dusty shade and stood still waiting for my eyes to adjust, a skinny shadow stepped up toward me, a shadow that smelled like it had been sleeping in old ashes and deer guts.
I blinked, as much at the smell as to clear my eyes, and could finally focus on the old man in front of me. He was wearing a rabbit-skin vest over a bare chest and canvas trousers, and his eyes were small and watery—eyes that were searching me up and down. In his arms were a bag of salt and a shiny red pickax. Everything about him was lean, spare, and tough.
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