The Dead Don't Dance

by Charles Martin

  Nanny grew sick my junior year of college. When we knew it was serious, I broke every posted speed limit on the drive home. I bounded up the back steps just in time to hear Papa hit his knees and say, “Lord, I’m begging You. Please give me one more day with this woman.”

  After sixty-two years, the music stopped, the lights dimmed, and their dance atop the magnolia planks ended. The loneliness broke Papa, and he followed three weeks later. The doctor said his heart simply quit working, but there’s no medical terminology for a broken heart. Papa just died. That’s all.

  Growing up, I had always wanted to travel out west. When Nanny and Papa died, I found my excuse, so I dropped out of school and drove toward the setting sun. I had grown up watching Westerns with Papa, so all that wide-open space held some attraction. Besides, that’s where the Rockies were. I spent weeks driving through mountain after mountain. Saw the Grand Canyon; even sank my toes in the Pacific Ocean. I’m pretty low maintenance, so I ate a lot of peanut butter and slept in the back of the truck with Blue. We kept each other warm.

  When I got to New Mexico, I came pretty close to running out of money, so we loaded up and came home. When I finally made it back to Digger, almost a year after Papa’s death, the vines and weeds had almost covered the house, a few shutters had blown off, the paint had flaked, and a fence post or two had fallen, pulling the barbed wire with it. But the well water still tasted sweet, the house was dry, and Nanny’s breeze blew cool even on stagnant August afternoons. Papa knew what he was doing when he built the place.

  I spent six weeks cleaning, painting, sanding floors, repairing the plumbing, oiling doorknobs and hinges, and fixing fence posts and barbed wire. I also spent a lot of time on the tractor, just trying to get it working again. The sound reminded me of Papa, but it had sat up too long and a few of the hoses had rotted. I drained the fluids and changed the plugs, distributor, and hoses. After some careful cussing and a few phone calls to Amos, she cranked right up.

  On a trip to the hardware store, I bumped into Maggie. We had known each other in high school but never dated. In hindsight, that was really dumb. But I was too busy hunting, fishing, or playing football. At any rate, I wasn’t dating, or studying, for that matter. That came later.

  Papa once told me that before he met Nanny, his heart always felt funny. Like a jigsaw puzzle with about two-thirds of the pieces missing. When I met Maggie, I realized what he was talking about. Most guys talk about their wives’ figures, and yes, mine has one, but it was her Audrey Hepburn hair and Bette Davis eyes that stopped me.

  After two or three more “accidental” hardware meetings, I got my nerve up and asked her out, and it didn’t take long. If I had had any guts, I would have proposed after two weeks, but I needed six months to work up the courage. I bought a golden band, we married, and somewhere on the beach at Jekyll Island beneath the stars, she persuaded me to finish my degree.

  I enrolled and started night school at the South Carolina satellite campus in Walterboro. If Nanny and Papa’s deaths had taken the wind out of my sails, then Maggie helped me hoist anchor, raise the sails, and steady the rudder.

  For most of my life, and thanks in large part to Nanny’s prodding, the only thing I was any good at was writing. When I enrolled as a freshman at the University of South Carolina, I registered in the English program and started down the track toward a creative writing degree. It’s what I was good at, or so I thought.

  During my first three years of college, I wrote some stories and sent them off to all the magazines you’re supposed to send stuff to if you’re a writer. The Saturday Evening Post. The New Yorker. I’ve still got a folder of all my rejections. Once my folder got pretty full, I quit sending my stories.

  But Maggie continued to believe in me. One day while I was finishing my senior year at the satellite, she printed a few of my pieces and sent them to Virginia along with an application for graduate school. For some reason, they accepted me into their master’s program and even said they’d pay for my classes and books. I don’t know if that’s because I wrote well or because I couldn’t afford it, but either way, they paid for it.

  So Maggie and I charted a new course, and I returned to school. It was not long after, though, that my grand illusions of plumbing the deeper meanings in storytelling, fired by Nanny’s love of reading, were shattered. Graduate school was no lighthouse. If it weren’t for Victor Graves, a gnarly old professor who laughed like a rum-drunk sailor, I’d have never made it. Vic took me under his wing and helped me navigate.

  After I wrote my thesis, Vic encouraged me to apply to the doctoral program. With little hope but no other direction, I did. Three weeks later I received my acceptance letter, which Maggie framed and hung above my desk. I couldn’t believe it. Me? A doctoral student? You’ve got to be kidding. I’m the guy who didn’t study in high school. But the letter said they wanted me, and once again they said they’d pay for it—which was nice, because without the financial backing, I wasn’t going. They gave me a fellowship, and I got to work.

  Thanks to Vic, light bulbs began clicking on like a Fourth of July celebration, and it was there that I really discovered just how smart Nanny really was.

  It wasn’t easy, but we made it. We lived in an upstairs, one-room apartment, and while Maggie waited tables, I worked the morning preload at UPS. I woke early and she worked late, so for about two years, we didn’t see each other much.

  Despite Vic’s best encouragement, I quickly found that my grandmother had forgotten more stories than most experts would read in a lifetime. And not only did she understand them better, but she had a knack at helping others do the same. Just because you know something, or think you do, doesn’t mean you can teach it.

  Beneath the sly, academic façade, and hidden behind their glossy degrees, most of my teachers were just frustrated hacks who couldn’t write a great story if their lives depended on it. Out of the void of their own missing talent, they found a sick joy in tearing others’ apart. Maybe I could do better, I hoped. Maybe I could teach Nanny’s wonder through Papa’s pocketknife practicality and shield the students from the poisonous cynicism around me.

  I accepted an adjunct position at my university, teaching freshman and sophomore English. I enjoyed the classroom and the interaction with the students and even helped click on a few lightbulbs myself. All I wanted to do was introduce other people to the power and wonder of language. But all the covert backstabbing and infighting along the tortuous path to tenure drove me to the brink of drinking. If the pen is mightier than the sword, it’s also a good bit bloodier. Instead of finding Nanny’s fireside wonder shared amid my colleagues, I found ivory-tower experts ripe with stoic discontent and bent on tearing down castles they could never rebuild, simply for the sake of saying something.

  While I struggled to help kids look for universal truths and themes that great stories revealed in unforgettable ways—themes like love, humor, hope, and forgiveness—and maybe encourage them to transpose those through their fingers and onto paper, my colleagues stood on soapboxes with raised brows and asked, “Maybe, but what is hidden?” They reminded me of pharmacists who crushed their pills into powder and studied the contents under a microscope while never bothering to swallow the medicine.

  Caught in a postmodern pinball machine, I became pretty well disillusioned. I never voiced it to Maggie, but she could read me. She knew. After graduation, she gave me a good talking to. So I swallowed my disgust and filled out twenty applications for schools scattered about the South. I licked the stamps, dropped them in the box, and hoped the grass grew greener in some other pasture. When the last “we’re-sorry- to-inform-you-letter” arrived from my own hometown junior college, we quit our jobs, packed up my books, and came back here.

  Virginia is pretty, but it can’t hold a candle to South Carolina. We hadn’t even walked in the front door when I realized that my love for farming had much deeper roots than the shallow shoots I’d put down in academia. As I looked out over those fields where
I had passed many a happy day, I knew I’d miss the students, the lively exchange of ideas, and the sight of lightbulbs turning on, but little else. I was glad to be home.

  The well water smelled like eggs, the faucets dripped like Chinese water torture, and both toilets ran constantly, but Maggie never complained. She loved the narrow, coal-burning fireplace, the front and back porches, and the two swinging screen doors that slammed too loudly and squeaked in spite of oil. But her two favorite pleasures were the tin roof beneath a gentle rain and Nanny’s breeze.

  I had never measured it, but including the porches, the house probably covered twelve hundred square feet. But it was ours, and for sixty-two years, love had lived here.

  Like riding a bicycle after the training wheels had been removed, I hopped on the tractor, sniffed the air for any hint of rain, and cried like a baby all the way to the river. Papa had taught me well, and once away from the classroom cobwebs and textbook chains, I remembered how to farm. In our first year, I sold the pine straw from beneath our fifteen hundred acres of planted pines, leased two five-hundred-acre blocks to part-time farmers who lived in Walterboro, and drilled soybean seed into the remaining five hundred acres of our thirty-five-hundred- acre tract. By the end of that year, we had made money.

  Maggie looked at Papa’s picture on the mantel, stroked the skin around my eyes, and said, “You two have the same wrinkles.” And that was okay with me. I liked watching things grow.

  It was shortly thereafter that Maggie tapped me on the shoulder and said, “Let’s go swimming.” I remember lying on the riverbank, with my wife’s head resting on my chest, looking at the water droplets fall down her pale skin and thinking that God must be pleased. At least I thought He was.

  Then came the delivery.

  THE FUNERAL PARLOR HAD PREPARED MY SON’S BODY. Amos and I drove by in my truck and picked up the cold metal coffin. I walked through the double swinging doors, bent down, picked it up, and walked back to the truck, where Amos lowered the tailgate. I gently slid it into the back. While Amos thanked the mortician for preparing things and giving us a few extra days, I climbed into the back and braced the coffin between my knees so it wouldn’t slide around.

  Shutting the tailgate, Amos climbed into the cab and drove us the twenty minutes back to the farm. Underneath a sprawling oak tree on the sloping riverside, next to my grandparents, I had dug a hole with the backhoe for the larger cement casket. Amos parked. I picked up the box that held my son, and we walked over to the hole.

  After we stood there for some time, Amos cleared his throat, and I set my son down next to the hole. Then Amos handed me his Bible. It had been a while. Maybe last Christmas. Maggie always liked to read about the Nativity scene.

  “What should I read?”

  “Psalm 139.”

  I split the big book down the middle with my index finger. The thin pages crinkled and blew in the breeze, and I had a hard time finding the right page. When I found the psalm, I read what I could.

  O LORD, You have searched me and known me.

  You know my sitting down and my rising up;

  You understand my thought afar off.

  . . . Where can I go from Your Spirit?

  Or where can I flee from Your presence? . . .

  If I make my bed in hell, behold, You are there.

  About midway through, I fell silent and Amos took over from memory.

  . . . For you formed my inward parts,

  You covered me in my mother’s womb.

  . . . My frame was not hidden from You,

  When I was made in secret . . .

  And in Your book they were all written,

  The days fashioned for me.

  When he finished, he stood with his head bowed and hands folded in front of him. The breeze picked up and blew against our backs. Then in a deep, low voice he began singing “Amazing Grace.”

  I did not.

  While Amos sang, I knelt down next to my son and put my head on his casket. I thought about the things that were not going to happen. Baseball. The tractor. Finger painting. “Dad, can I have the keys?” Buying his first pair of boots. Girls. The first step. Fishing. A runny nose. Tag. Swimming. Building a sandbox. Vacation. Big brother. All the stuff we had talked about. I faded out somewhere into a blank and empty space.

  Amos’s singing brought me back. With each of the six verses, he sang louder. When the song was over, Amos wasn’t finished. “D.S., you mind if I sing one more?”

  I shook my head, and Amos, looking out over the river, started up again.

  When peace, like a river, attendeth my way,

  when sorrows like sea billows roll . . .

  Since college, Amos had spent two days a week singing in the church choir. He was a church history buff and especially liked the stories surrounding the writing of hymns. Years ago, floating on our raft down the river, he’d told me the story behind “It Is Well with My Soul,” and I’d never forgotten it. I sat there, resting my head on the cold metal coffin of my baby son, a child I never knew, a child I never held, and thought about Horatio G. Spafford.

  Spafford was a Chicago lawyer, traveling to Europe with his family for the summer. There he is, boarding a steamer with his family for an Atlantic cruise, but he gets called away for business. He sends his family ahead and plans to meet them in England. A storm comes up, sinks the ship, and all four of Spafford’s children drown while holding hands on the bow. A strong swimmer, his wife reaches land and sends him a telegram, saying simply, “Survived alone.”

  Broken, Spafford catches the next steamer. When the ship gets to the place where his children drowned, the captain brings him up to the bow.

  “Here. This is where.” He leaves Spafford to stand alone on the bow.

  I want to know if he broke down. Fell to his knees. How strong was the urge to Peter Pan off the bow? Had it not been for his wife waiting on the other shore, would he have jumped? I think I would have. That dark water would have reached up and swallowed me whole—frozen man. But not Spafford. He stands up, wipes the tears, scans the water, and returns to his cabin, where he writes a poem.

  What kind of a guy writes a poem at the place where his four kids went down? What kind of a guy writes anything when his children die? Well, the poem got off the boat in Spafford’s pocket in Europe, somebody tied some notes to it, and there it was, coming out Amos’s mouth.

  The doctors say Maggie “probably” won’t be alive long. Tell me yes or no, but don’t tell me probably. Yet had it not been for probably, and the picture in my mind of Maggs lying there, limp and bleeding, I’d have lowered my son down on top of me and let Amos sing for both of us.

  He finished his song, his face a mixture of sweat and tears, and I laid my son in the hole. Amos grabbed a shovel.

  “Hold it,” I said.

  I walked back to the truck, picked Huckleberry off the front seat, and tucked him under my arm. I brushed him off, straightened the red bow tie around his neck, and then knelt next to the hole and laid the bear on top of the casket.

  The cement made a grinding sound as we slid the casket into place. I let the first shovelful spill slowly. Gently. Quietly.

  The riverbank sloped to the water. The river was quiet and dark. Minutes passed. Amos wiped his face, put on his glasses, and walked to the truck. Sweat and cold trickled down my back in the ninety-eight-degree heat.

  I looked at my hands. My eyes followed the intersections of wrinkle and callus and the veins that traveled out of my palm, over my wrist and up my forearm where, for the first time, I saw flecks of blood caked around the hair follicles. It was dark, had dried hard, and had blended with the sun freckles. Maggie’s blood. I picked up a handful of dirt and gripped it tight, squeezing the edges out of my palm like an hourglass. It was damp, coarse, and smelled of earth.

  I needed to tell Maggie about the funeral.

  The tops of the cornstalks gently brushed my arms and legs, almost like mourners, as I walked back to the house. On the way, I rubbed the dirt
from my son’s grave into my arm, grinding it like a cleanser, until my forearm was raw and clean. The old blood gone and new blood come.

  chapter five

  THE DIGGER AMPHITHEATRE, BUILT ABOUT SIX YEARS ago, is one of South Carolina’s best-kept secrets. It’s ten miles from my house and a long way from nowhere. It rises up like a bugle out of pine trees and hardwoods, covering about three acres, most of which is parking lot. Whoever built it was far more interested in quality acoustics than quantity seating. During the construction, throughout the public hoopla surrounding the opening, and ever since, the donor has remained anonymous.

  The amphitheatre is used about three times a year; the rest of the time it just sits there. It’s hosted Garth Brooks, George Strait, Randy Travis. Vince Gill, James Taylor. Mostly country and bluegrass folks. The unplugged types. But we’ve had other names. Even George Winston. Bruce Springsteen came through once. Brought only his guitar. Maggie and I got to that one.

  There are all kinds of myths about who built it. Some bigwig in Charleston with more money than sense. A divorcee from New York who was angry at her husband. An eccentric from California whose family homesteaded this area. Who built it depends on whom you talk to. One night a few years back, I learned the truth.

  I was driving home at about two in the morning, and I swore I heard bagpipes. I stopped my truck and crept through the woods to the top of the hill. Sure enough. A broad-shouldered man stood center stage in the amphitheatre, wearing a kilt and playing the pipes. I sat and listened for about half an hour. Curiosity eventually got the best of me, and I found myself standing on the stage with a half-naked man. Once his eyes focused on me, he adjusted his skirt and shook my hand. We struck up a conversation, and somewhere in there the guy decided that he liked me. His full name, I learned, was Bryce Kai MacGregor, and when he plays the bagpipes, he wears a kilt. But after six or eight beers, the plaid skirt is optional. He has fiery red hair and freckles, and looks like a cross between a coal miner and a troll—just one big flexed muscle. Bryce is not ugly, although he could take better care of himself, and he has penetrating green eyes.