by Ron Rash
“You need to leave,” Jim Coleman said.
“Please,” Boyd said. “I know what I’m talking about.”
“Leave. Leave now,” Jim Coleman said.
Boyd walked back into his own yard. For a few minutes he stood there. The owl did not call but he knew it roosted in the scarlet oak, waiting.
“Janice just called and she’s royally pissed off.” Laura told him when he entered the house. “I told you not to go over there. They think you’re mentally disturbed, maybe even dangerous.”
Laura sat on the couch, and she motioned for Boyd to sit down also.
“Where’s Allison?” Boyd asked.
“I put her to bed,” Laura said. “You know, you’re upsetting Allison as well as the Colemans. You’re upsetting me too. Tell me what this is about, Boyd.”
For half an hour he tried to explain. When Boyd finished his wife placed one of her hands over his.
“I know where you grew up that people, uneducated people, believed such things,” Laura said. “But you don’t live in Madison County anymore, and you are educated. Maybe there is an owl out back. I haven’t heard it, but I’ll concede it could be out there. But even so it’s an owl, nothing more.”
Laura squeezed his hand.
“I’m getting you an appointment with Doctor Harmon. He’ll prescribe some Ambien so you can get some rest, maybe something else for the anxiety.”
Later that night Boyd lay in bed, waiting for the owl to call. An hour passed on the red digits of the alarm clock and he tried to muster hope that the bird had left. He finally fell asleep for a few minutes, long enough to dream about his grandfather. They were in Madison County, in the farmhouse. Boyd was in the front room by himself, waiting though he didn’t know what for. Finally, the old man came out of his bedroom, dressed in his brogans and overalls, a sweat rag in his back pocket.
The corpse bird’s call roused him from the dream. Boyd put on pants and shoes and a sweatshirt. He took a flashlight from the kitchen drawer and went into the basement to get the chain saw. The machine was almost forty years old, a relic, heavy and cumbersome, its teeth dulled by decades of use. But it still ran well enough to keep them in firewood.
Boyd filled the gas tank and checked the spark plug and chain lube. The chain saw had belonged to his grandfather, had been used by the old man to cull trees from his farm for firewood. Boyd had often gone into the woods with him, helped load the logs and kindling into his grandfather’s battered pickup. After the old man’s health had not allowed him to use it anymore, he’d given it to Boyd. Two decades had passed before he found a use for it. A coworker owned some thirty acres near Cary and offered Boyd all the free wood he wanted as long as the trees were dead and Boyd cut them himself.
Outside, the air was sharp and clear. The stars seemed more defined, closer. A bright-orange harvest moon rose in the west. He clicked on the flashlight and let its beam trace the upper limbs until he saw it. Despite being bathed in light, the corpse bird did not stir. Rigid as a gravestone, Boyd thought. The unblinking yellow eyes stared toward the Colemans’ house, and Boyd knew these were the same eyes that had fixed themselves on his grandfather.
Boyd laid the flashlight on the grass, its beam aimed at the scarlet oak’s trunk. He pulled the cord and the machine trembled to life. Its vibration shook his whole upper body. Boyd stepped close to the tree, extending his arms, the machine’s weight tensing his biceps and forearms.
The scrub trees on his co-worker’s land had come down quickly and easily. But he’d never cut a tree the size of the scarlet oak. A few bark shards flew out as the blade hit the tree, then the blade skittered down the trunk until Boyd pulled it away and tried again.
It took eight attempts before he made the beginnings of a wedge in the tree. He was breathing hard, the weight of the saw straining his arms, back, and even his legs as he steadied not only himself but the machine. He angled the blade as best he could to widen the wedge. By the time he finished the first side, sawdust and sweat stung his eyes. His heart banged against his ribs as if caged.
Boyd thought about resting a minute but when he looked back at his house and the Colemans’, he saw lights on. He carried the saw to the other side of the trunk. Three times the blade hit the bark before finally making a cut. Boyd glanced behind him again and saw Jim Coleman coming across the yard, his mouth open and arms gesturing.
Boyd eased the throttle and let the chain saw idle.
“What in God’s name are you doing?” Jim shouted.
“What’s got to be done,” Boyd said.
“I’ve got a sick daughter.”
“I know that,” Boyd said.
Jim Coleman reached a hand out as though to wrest the chain saw from Boyd’s hand. Boyd shoved the throttle and waved the blade between him and Jim Coleman.
“I’m calling the police,” Jim Coleman shouted.
Laura was outside now as well. She and Jim Coleman spoke to one another a few moments before Jim went into his house. When Laura approached Boyd screamed at her to stay away. Boyd made a final thrust deep into the tree’s heart. He dropped the saw and stepped back. The oak wavered a moment, then came crashing down. As it fell, something beaked and winged passed near Boyd’s face. He picked up the flashlight and shone it on the bird as it flew away. The corpse bird crossed over the vacant lot and disappeared into the darkness it had been summoned from. Boyd sat down on the scarlet oak’s stump, clicked off the flashlight.
His wife and neighbor stood beside each other in the Colemans’ backyard. They spoke softly, as though Boyd were a wild animal they didn’t want to reveal their presence to.
Soon blue lights splashed against the sides of the two houses. Other neighbors joined Jim Coleman and Laura in the backyard. The policeman talked to Laura a few moments. She nodded once and turned in Boyd’s direction, her face wet with tears. The policeman spoke into a walky-talky and then started walking toward Boyd, handcuffs clinking in the policeman’s hands. Boyd stood up and held his arms out before him, both palms upturned, like a man who’s just set something free.
DEAD CONFEDERATES
I never cared for Wesley Davidson when he was alive and seeing him beside me laid out dead didn’t much change that. Knowing a man for years and feeling hardly anything in his passing might make you think poorly of me, but the hard truth of it is had you known Wesley you’d probably feel the same. You might do what I done—shovel dirt on him with not so much as a mumble of a prayer. Bury him under a tombstone with another man’s name on it, another man’s birth and dying day chipped in the marble, me and an old man all of the living ever to know that was where Wesley Davidson laid in the ground.
“I’ve a notion you’re needing some extra money,” Wesley says two weeks earlier at work, which isn’t a big secret since the whole road crew’s in the DOT parking lot that afternoon when the bank man comes by to chat about my overdrawn account, saying he’s sorry my momma’s in the hospital with no insurance but if I don’t get him some money soon he’ll be taking my truck. Soon as the bank man leaves Wesley saunters up to me.
I act like I haven’t heard him, because like I said I never cared much for Wesley. He’s a big talker but little else, always shucking his work off on the rest of us. A stout man, six foot tall and three hundred easy, a big old sow belly that sways side to side when he takes a notion to work. But that’s a sight you seldom see, because he mainly leans on a shovel or lays in the shade asleep. His uncle’s the road crew boss, and he lets Wesley do about what he wants, including come in late, the rest of us all clocked in and ready to pull out while Wesley’s Ford Ranger is pulling in, a big rebel flag decal covering the back window. Wesley’s always been big into that Confederate stuff, wearing a CSA belt buckle, rebel flag tattoo on his arm. He wears a gray CSA cap too, wears it on the job. There’s no black guys on our crew, only a handful in the whole county, but you’re still not supposed to wear that kind of thing. But with his uncle running the show Wesley gets away with it.
“You want to make some
easy money or not?” he says to me later at our lunch break.
He grunts and sits down in the shade beside me while I get my sandwich and apple from my lunch box. Wesley’s got three Hardee’s sausage biscuits in a bag and scarfs them down in about thirty seconds, then lights a cigarette. I don’t smoke myself and don’t cotton much to the smelling of it when I’m eating. I could tell him so, could tell him I like eating my lunch alone if he’d not noticed, but getting on Wesley’s bad side would just get me on my boss’s bad side as well. It’s more than just that, though. I’m willing to listen to anyone who could help me get some money.
“What you got in mind?” I say.
He points to his CSA belt buckle.
“You know what one of them’s worth, a real one?”
“No,” I say, though I figure maybe fifty or a hundred dollars.
Wesley pulls out two wadded-up catalog pages from his back pocket.
“Look here,” he says and points at a picture of a belt buckle and the number below it. “Eighteen hundred dollars,” he says and moves his finger down the paper. “Twenty-four hundred. Twelve hundred. Four thousand.” He holds his finger there for a few seconds. “Four thousand,” saying it again. He shoves the other page in my face. It’s filled with buttons that fetch two hundred to a thousand dollars apiece.
“I’d of not thought they’d bring that much,” I say.
“I’ll not even tell you what a sword brings. You’d piss your pants if I did.”
“So what’s that have to do with me getting some money?”
“Cause I know where we can find such things as this,” Wesley says, shaking the paper at me. “Find them where they ain’t been all rusted up so’s they’ll be all the more pricey. You help and you get twenty-five percent.”
And what I figure is some DOT bulldozer has rooted something up. Maybe some place where soldiers camped or done some fighting. I’m figuring it’s some kind of flim-flam, like he wants me to help buy a metal detector or something with what little money I got left. He must take me for one dumb hillbilly to go along with such a scheme and I tell him as much.
He just grins at me, the kind of grin that argues I don’t know very much.
“You got a shovel and pickax?” he asks. “Or did the bank repo them as well?”
“I got a shovel and a pickax,” I say. “I know how to do more than lean on them too.”
He knows my meaning but just laughs, tells me what he’s got his mind scheming over. I start to say there’s no way in hell I’m doing such a thing but he puts his hand out like stopping traffic, tells me not to yes or no him until I’ve had time to sift it over good in my mind.
“I ain’t hearing a word till tomorrow,” he says. “Think about how a thousand dollars, maybe more, could put some padding in that wallet. Think about what that money can do for your momma.”
He says the words about Momma last for he knows that notion will hang heavy on me if nothing else does.
I go by the hospital on the way home. They let me see her for a few minutes, and afterward the nurse says she’ll be able to go home in three days.
“She’s got a lot of life in her yet,” the nurse tells me in the hallway.
That’s good news, better than I expected. I go down to the billing office and the news there isn’t so good. Though I’ve already paid three thousand I’ll be owing another four by the time she gets out. I go back to my trailer and there’s no way I can’t help pondering about that money Wesley’s big-talking about. I think about how Daddy worked himself to death before he was sixty and Momma hanging on long enough to be taught that fifty years of working first light to bedtime can’t get you enough ahead to afford an operation and a two-week stay in a hospital. I’m pondering where’s the fair in that when there’s men who do no more than hit a ball good or throw one through a hoop and they live in mansions and could buy themselves a hospital if they was to need one. I think of the big houses built up at Wolf Laurel by doctors and bankers from Charlotte and Raleigh. Second homes, they call them, though some cost a million dollars. You could argue they worked hard for those homes, but no harder than Momma and Daddy worked.
By dawn I know certain I’m going to do it. When I say as much to Wesley at our morning break he smiles.
“Figured you would,” he says.
“When?” I ask.
“Night, of course,” he says, “a clear night when the moon is waxed up full. That way we’ll not give ourselves away with a flashlight.”
Him thinking it out enough to use moonlight gives me some confidence in him, makes me think it could work. Because that’s the other thing bothering me besides the right and the wrong of it. If we get caught we’d be for sure doing some jailhouse time.
“I done thought this thing out from ever which angle,” Wesley says. “I been scouting the cemeteries here to Flag Pond, looking for the right sort of graves, them that belongs to officers. I’m figuring the higher the rank the likelier to be booty there, maybe even a sword. Finally found me a couple of lieutenants. Never reckoned to find a general. From what I read most all them that did the generaling was Virginians. Found Yankee soldiers in them graveyards as well, including a captain.”
“A captain outranks a lieutenant, don’t he?” I ask.
“Yeah, but them that buys this stuff pay double if it’s Confederate.”
“And you can sell it easy?” I say. “I mean you don’t have to fence it or anything like that?”
“Hell, no. They got these big sellings and swappings all over the place. Got one in Asheville next month. You show them what you got and they’ll open their billfolds and fling that money at you.”
He shuts up for a moment then, because he’s starting to realize how easy it all sounds, and how much money I might start figuring to be my share. He lays his big yellow front teeth out on his lower lip, worrying his mind to figure a way to take back some of what he just said.
“Course they ain’t going to pay near the price I showed you on them sheets. We’ll be lucky to get half that.”
I know that for a lie before it’s left Wesley’s lips, but I don’t say anything, just know that I’ll damn well be there with him when he sells what we find.
“What do we do next?” I say.
“Just wait for a clear night and a big old moon,” Wesley says, looking up at the sky like he might be expecting one to show up any minute. “That and keep your mouth shut about it. I’ve not told another person about this and I want it to stay that way.”
Wait is what we do for two weeks, because that first night I look up from my yard the moon’s all skinny and looks to be no more than something you might hang a coat on. Every night I watch the moon filling itself up like a big bowl, scooting the shadows out in the field back closer to the trees. Momma’s back home and doing good, back to where she’s looking more to be her ownself again. The folks at the hospital say she’ll be eligible for the Medicaid come January and that’s all for the good. That means I can go with Wesley just this one time, pay off that hospital bill, and be done with it.
Finally the right night comes, the moon full and leaning down close to the world. A hunter’s moon, my Daddy used to call it, and easy enough to see why, for such a moon makes tramping through woods a lot easier.
Tramping through a graveyard as well, for come ten o’clock that’s what we’re doing. We’ve hid his truck down past the entrance, a few yards back in a turnaround where, at least at night, no one would likely see it. We don’t walk through the gate because that’s where the caretaker’s shack is. Instead we follow the fence up a hill through some trees, a pickax and shovel in my hands and nothing in Wesley’s but a pillow sheet. It’s late October and the air has that rinsed-clean feel. There’s leaves that have fallen and acorns and they crackle under my feet, each one sounding loud as a .22 to me. I catch a whiff of a wood stove and find the glow of the porch light.
“You ain’t worried none about that caretaker?” I say.
“Hell no. He’s near eigh
ty years old. He’s probably been asleep since seven o’clock.”
“He’d not have a fire going if he was asleep.”
“That old man ain’t going to bother us none,” Wesley says, saying it like just his saying so makes it final.
We’re soon moving among the stones, the moon brighter now that we’re in the open. Its light lays down all silvery on the granite and marble, on the ground itself. It’s quieter here, no more acorns and leaves, just cushiony grass like on a golf course. But it’s too quiet, in a spooky kind of way. Because you know folks are here, hundreds of them, and not a one will say ever a word more on this earth. The only sound is Wesley’s breathing and grunting. We’ve walked no more than a half mile and he’s already laboring. A car comes up the road, headlights sweeping over a few tombstones as it takes the curve. It doesn’t slow down but heads on toward Marshall.
“I got to catch my breath,” Wesley says, and we stop a minute.
We’re on a ridge now, and I can see a whole passel of stars spilled out over the sky. As clear a night as you can get, and I reckon it’s easy enough for God to see me from up there. That thought bothers me some, but it’s a lot easier to have a conscience about something if you figure it all the way right or all the way wrong. Doing what we’re doing is a sin for sure, but not taking care of the woman who birthed and raised you is a worse one. That’s what I tell myself anyway.
“It’s not much farther,” Wesley says, saying it more for his own benefit than for me.
He shakes his shoulders like a plow horse getting the trace chains more comfortable and walks down the yonder side of the hill until he comes to where a little Confederate flag is planted by a marble tombstone.
“Kind of them Daughters of the Confederacy biddies to sight-map the spot for us,” Wesley says.
He pulls up the flag and throws it behind the stone like it was no more than a weed. He flicks his cigarette lighter and says the words out loud like I can’t read them for myself.
“Lieutenant Gerald Ross Witherspoon. North Carolina Twenty-Fifth. Born November 12, 1820. Died January 20, 1890.”
