Handling Sin

by Malone, Michael

  Mingo was not quite so certain; plus he wanted to go home and see Vera, and get some sleep, and get ready to sing in the choir on Easter Sunday, his favorite church day; plus he wanted to get Raleigh home to Aura so that she could persuade him to give his father a decent funeral even if he hadn’t wanted one.

  Bill Jenkins was certain that the gold wasn’t there, that Raleigh Hayes was as mad as a hatter, and that Mingo Sheffield was a garrulous paradigm of the Good Book’s enjoinder to love your neighbor as yourself, even if he were a killer or a lunatic.

  So Mingo and Kaiser Bill sat with the brandy bottle under the shady willow tree, while Mingo recounted to the janitor what he described as his Adventures on the Road (which Jenkins later described to his wife as “A Bunch of Whoppers”): the Battle of Stone Mountain, the Rescue of Weeper Berg, the Barbecue at “Wild Oaks,” the Kidnapping by Hell’s Angels, the Routing of the Ku Klux Klan, the Triumph in The Cave, the duel, the nuns, Diane’s baby, Earley’s death—tale after tale, until Jenkins received word from the Man Upstairs that the fat one beside him was just as off his rocker as the thin one down in the hole, and no wonder they were such good friends.

  Eventually, warmed by the sun and the brandy, the Kaiser dozed off. Mingo took another turn at the shovel, after which Raleigh suggested that he take a break and stroll down to the pond, and maybe look at the old cabin, too, and see what kind of condition it was in. Sheffield decided his friend just wanted to be alone with his thoughts for a while, so off he ambled through the woods alone.

  What a nice spot, Mingo decided, this gentle slope leading to the water’s edge. Then he had a wonderful idea. Wouldn’t this be a perfect place for the outdoor drama Vera had once talked about organizing? The outdoor show that would put Thermopylae on the map, the way “The Lost Colony” had done for Manteo, and “Unto These Hills” had done for Boone. And Vera’s idea was even bigger and better than a history pageant about Sir Walter Raleigh’s poor lost colonists, or a pageant about the rotten way America had treated the poor Cherokee Indians. For Vera’s idea was to do the Greatest Story Ever Told, using the townspeople to play Jesus and the disciples and the Romans and Jerusalemites and all—just the way they did it in that little German town Raleigh had told them about— Obeydamnarung, or something like that. Mingo had always thought it was one of Vera’s very best ideas, and it was really a shame they’d never had the venture capital to get it started. He could see the billboards at the town limits right now: “THERMOPYLAE, NORTH CAROLINA. HOME OF THE GREATEST STORY EVER TOLD.” And they wouldn’t do it in a gloomy way either; they’d concentrate on the happy times—with lots of blind people getting their sight back, and cripples leaping around, and water turned into wine, and then at the end Mary Magdalene (Vera would be wonderful playing that part) rushing to tell Peter that the tomb was empty. Why, this pond would make a perfect Sea of Galilee. They could put in a long ramp just under the surface, so Jesus could walk on the water out to talk to the fishermen in their boat. The Savior could do the Sermon on the Mount from that little hill right over there, and the cabin could be both the stable at Bethlehem and Pilate’s palace, and if they cleared out all that poison ivy…Well, maybe after the lingerie business got on its feet, and put Vera and him back on theirs, he could talk to Raleigh about renting this Knoll Pond property; maybe Raleigh would even like to be partners. It always helped to have a good thinker in your organization, to help iron out the details.

  While Bill Jenkins was napping, and as soon as Mingo Sheffield left to take his stroll, Raleigh Hayes quit digging. He’d come to a decision, having carefully weighed his responsibility to carry out his father’s burial wishes against his responsibility not to involve his companions in an illegality, against his responsibility to the living Hayeses, who (he well knew) would want to share in Earley’s death, would want to see him laid to rest among the family. And having made his decision, Raleigh grabbed the hammer and screwdriver out of the janitor’s tool kit, and raced with them back to the hearse.

  When Sheffield returned from surveying his future amphitheater, he didn’t see his friend under the willows, and horrified that the dark times might have swept over Raleigh and put terrible thoughts in his head, the fat man trotted as fast as he could back up to the hearse. But all Hayes was doing was trying to pull the old black trunk out of the back.

  “Gosh, Raleigh. Why are you taking that out? In case we find the gold?”

  Hayes, red-faced and sweaty, sat down on top of the steamer trunk. “Listen to me, Mingo. I thought about everything you said on the plane, and I’ve decided you were right. Even if it was Daddy’s last wish to be buried out here at Knoll Pond, I’ve decided you’re absolutely right.”

  “I am?”

  “Yes. So I’ve changed my mind. We’ll take the casket back to Thermopylae. It’s not fair to the family. Daddy ought to have a proper funeral, and he ought to be in the cemetery with the people he loved, just like you said.”

  Mingo, pleased and honored, squeezed his friend’s shoulder. “Gosh, I know it wasn’t easy, but I think you’re doing the right thing, Raleigh, I really do. And I bet Earley would understand too.”

  “I’m sure he would. And I appreciate your advice.…Now, listen, Mingo. Daddy also wanted me to bury this old trunk out here.”

  “He did? Why?”

  “Ah, Mingo, it has a sentimental aspect that he associated with Knoll Pond, and, ah, he felt, well, maybe it’s hard to explain, and maybe he wasn’t all that rational, but what difference does it make, and let’s just do this one little thing for him, okay?”

  “Well, sure.…But aren’t we going to keep digging for the gold since we started?”

  “Of course we are. Here, grab that handle, will you? That’s right. Be careful. Stay on the path.”

  “Hey, Raleigh, maybe we could bury the trunk in the gold hole, and not, you know, have to dig another one.”

  Hayes called back over his shoulder as they struggled down the hill with the heavy trunk. “Mingo, that’s a great idea.”

  “Well, it just sort of occurred to me.”

  “Good thinking.”

  At nine o’clock, Kaiser Bill awakened, took a few contemplative sips of brandy, gave his mustache a few meditative strokes, and started to wonder if he shouldn’t sneak away and telephone Mrs. Hayes to come collect her husband. She seemed like a nice woman, with a good head on her shoulders, and always with a friendly hello whenever they passed each other in the Forbes Building, even though she was always in a bustle. Maybe she’d been too busy to notice how her man had pretty well lost his mind. Maybe the Kaiser ought to drive her out here to take a look at him, bare-chested and bare-footed, up to his shoulders now in the hole.

  “It’s too bad Gates isn’t here, isn’t it, Raleigh?” said Mingo, leaning over the side of the deep pit, and keeping out of the way of the flying dirt. “He was so interested in the Civil War. It’s hard to believe he just left without even saying good-bye, but I guess he was too shy. I sure hope he’ll come back for Christmas, and bring Weeper, so I can give him back his bass fiddle. Gosh, we could start our own band here in Thermopylae. You’ve got these trumpets, and I’ve still got that clarinet…Boy, I sure hope they come back someday.”

  “Me too,” Raleigh panted, and at that moment the handle of Jenkins’s shovel quivered in his hand as the blade struck something harder than clay. Holding his breath, Raleigh stabbed all around the area. “Mingo? Mingo? Mingo!”

  Sheffield jumped down beside him, and together on their hands and knees, they flung away earth from what was undeniably, indisputably, and soon enough, absolutely visibly, the rotted, caved-in lid of a long wood chest. Raleigh spit on his hands and rubbed hard at the oak boards. He could see a black A, then in front of that a black S, then in front of that a black C.

  “C.S.A.,” he whispered. “I’ll be goddamned.”

  “Dear Jesus,” Mingo whispered. “C.S.A. Confederate States of America. Raleigh, Raleigh, it’s true!”

  And peering down on them,
Kaiser Bill received still another interpretation from Above. This man Raleigh Hayes was the special kind of crazy. He had the Power. Like that mean old spinster woman he kept asking about, Flonnie Rogers, who used to come around and charge you a dollar to scare off ghosts, or tell you where to dig your well. When Hayes had started beating through the weeds with that stick earlier on, he’d been divining for the treasure, and he’d felt his way right to it. Right to it!

  After pulling and digging and scraping for ten minutes, the Thermopyleans gave up trying to raise the rotted box out of the hole. Instead, they pried the planks off the lid, one by one, shoving away the falling dirt.

  They knelt back so the sun could shine in on all the gold.

  It didn’t.

  “Oh, Raleigh, Raleigh, it’s empty!”

  No one spoke for a full minute, then, “Ha ha,” said Raleigh Hayes, and knelt there, hearing very distinctly the gloat of a blue jay behind him in the willow tree.

  But Mingo was prying off another plank. Then another. “No, wait,” he cried, “What’s that?”

  Light flickered over a dull gleam at the very bottom of the deep chest. Reaching his arm in through the ripped wood, Hayes pulled out a small, square, dented metal container that appeared to have once been covered with canvas or leather. Clots of decayed fabric fell off in his hands when he held it up to the light.

  They had to chisel the top off the little box. Inside there were two relicts of the War between the States. One was a personal letter written on the back of an official military document regarding the transport of forty-eight bars of Confederate bullion from the Dahlonega mint to the Richmond treasury.

  The other relict was a very real and still very yellow and still brightly glowing small rectangle of solid gold.

  The personal letter was written in smudged lead. It was not easy to read, not easy to comprehend, and not easy to accept.

  This is what it said:

  I wisht i could see yor Face you G.D. son of a bitch Hays when you no yor goal is misen and I taken it. i gess this puts you in the shithouse, dont it? wen they dont beleave you aint got it.

  i’m writing caus i waunt you to no. Whoo follered you closter than Flees all the way form Attlanta? Whoo wawtched and wated untell you buryed it? And whoo come back and TOK IT?

  CAVIN BUNCOMB

  You had no call to Speake slack about me and call me wurthless afore my friends and Put a brand on a white man like he wus a Mule, and drum me out ans sutch.

  Now yore paed. it’ll Bee a coal day in Hell when sumboddy throws a stigmey on Cavin Buncomb and i don’t take cear of him Good. I hope the hole G.D. Yankey armey tromples you bludy.

  You ken ceep 1 bar so as evryday you dont never for get CAVIN BUNCOMB who were as good a rebbil and jest as white as you, Hays.

  Yrs, Serg. Cavin BUNCOMB

  Unseen in the sun sparkle of the willow tree, the blue jay laughed on and on. And before long, Raleigh Hayes joined him, and the insurance man laughed and laughed until tears rolled plinking down his cheeks onto the metal box. He said, “Cavin Buncomb?” and laughed. He pointed at the “HO HO HO” on Bill Jenkins’s tie, and laughed some more. He danced bare-chested up and down in his bare feet on the shoveled mound of clay, and laughed some more. He laughed until Kaiser Bill, tapping his temple with his pipe stem, whispered to the speechless Sheffield, “Poor soul. He’s gone now. Bill told him not to mess with trouble the way he kept on doing, and now it’s took him off for certain.”

  Mingo Sheffield hated to concur, but he was shaken. Even Mingo had to wonder if his friend hadn’t been felled by this latest blow from Fortune—who’d cruelly tantalized him with a genuine buried treasure, after she’d already let some spiteful rotten bastard, like whoever that Cavin Buncomb was, rob it all (or practically all) a hundred years before Raleigh even got there—even Mingo had to wonder if Raleigh hadn’t right in front of his eyes suffered a permanent nervous breakdown. Because laughing and dancing when you’d just lost a fortune (and your father) was strange enough. And burying a steamer trunk was strange enough (even if your father had begged you to do it). But asking people to bow their heads while you read Psalm 98 over a buried steamer trunk—that just wasn’t like the old Raleigh at all.

  Praise the Lord upon the harp; sing to the harp with a psalm of thanksgiving. With trumpets also and cornets.

  Let the sea make a noise, and all that therein is; the round world, and they that dwell therein.

  Let the floods clap their hands, and let the hills be joyful together.

  “Amen,” said Raleigh, closed his father’s Prayer Book, and shoveled the first dirt clattering down onto the metal lid.

  “Amen,” said Mingo, for company’s sake.

  “Amen,” said Bill Jenkins, who didn’t for a moment believe that the fat man knew what he was talking about when he said the trunk was full of old souvenirs. No doubt that’s what Hayes had told his friend. But the Kaiser was certain that the trunk contained some poor soul’s body.

  “I’m really sorry somebody stole all your gold, Raleigh,” sighed Mingo as they drove around the curve of the beltway at noon on Holy Saturday, and saw again the Forbes Building looking down on the little skyline of Thermopylae. “Gollee, just think, if that nasty guy hadn’t hated your ancestor so much, you would have been a rich man!”

  Raleigh Hayes patted the shiny rosewood casket that was stuffed with old clothes, old pictures, old trinkets, and a few large stones for ballast. He started laughing again. “Mingo, I am a rich man. And when I say that, I’m not just yanking your wank.”

  And the insurance agent kept on laughing so wholeheartedly that, despite themselves, Bill Jenkins and Mingo Sheffield finally started laughing, too.

  Chapter 36

  Wherein the Story of Raleigh W. Hayes Draws to a Close BRIGHTNESS OF THE MORNING gleamed through the rosestained window glass. Flowers garlanded every pew rail. In baskets before the altar, lilies lifted their white-petaled horns. New dresses rustled and new hats tilted up when all together the congregation of Thermopylae’s Baptist church stood to welcome Easter. In the back row of the choir stall, Mingo Sheffield, his robe yards and yards of robin’s egg blue, sang out beaming as if he’d just heard the news, “Jesus Christ is risen today! Alleluia!” Beside him, Pierce Jimson’s pious baritone boomed its moral certainty. “Sinners to redeem and save. Alleluia!” Two rows down, next to Mrs. Ned Ware, and the only soprano with a green streak painted across her blond hair and a pink feather hanging from her creamy ear, Caroline Victoria Hayes sang, “Where the angels ever sing. Alleluia!”

  And next to the organist, at his own request, by special arrangement with the choir, to the delight of his family (some of whom cried as they sang), to the astonishment of his neighbors (some of whom lost their places in their hymnals), stiffly stood Raleigh W. Hayes, deacon, Civitan, and Mutual Life insurance agent. Wearing a threepiece suit and frowning behind his glasses, Mr. Hayes was accompanying the organ and choir on a trumpet so highly polished that it glistened like gold.

  “The strife is o’er, the battle done. The victory of life is won. The song of triumph has begun. Alleluia!”

  From where he stood playing, Raleigh could see the congregation, books in hand, sing back to him. He saw, in the first pew, Nemours Kettell beside his only faithful daughter, Agnes. He saw, behind them, the old halfback banker Ned Ware, juggling to turn the page of his hymnal, because for some reason Ned’s arm was in a cast, held out from his side by a metal brace. He saw, across the aisle, a large group (mostly women) all wearing on their jackets or hats distinctive round green-and-white buttons. Mr. and Mrs. Wayne Sparks wore them; Holly Hayes and Chief Hood’s daughter wore them; Barbara Kettell wore one; Vera Sheffield wore three; all the Millers (the first black family to move to Starry Haven) wore them; most of the Thermopylae PTA and the Thermopylae Friends of the Library wore them. Some of these buttons said, “WHERE THERE’S HAYES, THERE’S HOPE,” some said, “NO MORE NUKES, NO MORE LUKES,” the one pinned to Wayne Sparks’s tie said,
“PEACE POWER,” and the rest said simply, “HAYES FOR MAYOR.”

  In the midst of these people, singing on as she wiped her eyes with the tissues Vera kept handing her, was the woman Raleigh knew best in the world; the back of whose neck, the shape of whose ear, the bone of whose wrist he could have chosen from a thousand indifferent pictures, and said, “This is Aura.” He caught her eye and bobbed hello with the trumpet, and she waved up at him, the jade bracelet sliding on her arm, while, alone, their daughter’s high sweet soprano sang, “Now the queen of seasons, bright with the day of splendor, With the royal feast of feasts, comes its joy to render.”

  “Alleluia!” shouted Mingo, out on the church steps after the service ended. He had one huge arm around his wife, Vera, who squeezed his hand in both of hers, and one arm around Raleigh Hayes, who resigned himself to the embrace with an embarrassed smile.

  Everyone paused under the portal to wish each other a Happy Easter, to swap greetings and gossip until next Sunday. It surprised Raleigh that very few of his fellow Thermopyleans appeared to have even noticed his two-week absence, so almost no one welcomed him back. Some, however, had heard rumors of his father’s death, and, accepting their condolences, he explained that the funeral would be tomorrow at St. Thomas Church and that the casket would be closed. Some of his fellow Civitans asked him when he’d suddenly decided to run for mayor, and some poked him in the ribs or arms and asked him why he was allowing his wife to run for mayor. “Boy, Raleigh,” said Tommy Whitefield, “How does it feel? Don’t ask me to open a paper or turn on the tube and there’s my wife. What are you going to do if she really goes ahead and runs?”

  “Vote for her,” said Raleigh.

  “Oh gollee, what a happy morning!” Mingo threw his arm back around Raleigh. “Look at everybody’s new clothes! Look at those daffodils!”