The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Fourth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  I was fascinated. He worked all morning without a stop, carefully placing shovelfuls of the carmel brown earth on top of the canvas, making sure that as he dug, the sides of the hole were straight, swinging the pickax in big arcs over his head, or chiseling at the sides with it in tiny hammerlike strokes, slow and steady. He hummed to himself, sang songs I’d never heard before, grunted a lot, talked to himself whenever he thought there was a problem keeping the sides straight up and down, chuckling more and more as he got deeper.

  He stopped when the sun was overhead and he had dug up to his thighs. I could tell he was hot.

  He crawled out, put the pickax and shovel in the wheelbarrow, and then spent a couple of minutes inspecting his work. After that, he walked straight toward the oaks, pulling the wheelbarrow behind him.

  I had been pleased with my spying. I had hardly moved all morning, even when I got bored watching him, and watched the cars on Route 85 instead, or the lazy crows circle overhead. I hadn’t made a sound.

  But he walked right to the tree I was hiding in, parked the wheelbarrow, looked up through the leaves like he knew I was there the whole time, cupped his hands over his mouth, and called out: “Timothy Evans, you come down from there right now!”

  I was so scared I dropped Robinson Crusoe. I watched it fall, sickeningly, right into his wheelbarrow. It took a long time to get there.

  I didn’t move, hoping he’d go away. He didn’t.

  “Timothy!”

  “What makes you think Timothy Evans is up here?” I yelled back, trying to disguise my voice.

  “Well, now, I know who’s up there and who ain’t, so you get your rear down here, Timothy Evans. No games!”

  I slithered down a couple of levels, where we could see each other better, and changed tactics. “Why?”

  “It’s lunchtime.”

  “I have mine,” I countered, showing him my brown bag.

  “Mine’s better,” he said, pulling a tan wicker basket out from under his wheelbarrow. “Besides, I do believe I’ll go home with your book if you don’t come and get it.”

  “How’d you do that?”

  “Do what?”

  “Where’d the basket come from?”

  He smiled. It was a pleasant smile, and I felt I liked him right away. He set the basket on the grass, took his hat off, and mopped his forehead with his sleeve. “If you don’t come down, you’ll never find out—will you?” With that, he bent over, produced a big red and white checkered tablecloth from the basket, spread it out in the shade under the next tree, sat down, and began to unpack the food.

  I could smell the chicken from where I sat. He had potato salad, iced lemonade, and baking powder biscuits with butter and honey. “Promise you won’t hurt me if I come down?”

  “I ain’t promising anything,” he said, eating a drumstick, “’cept I’m going to eat all of this if you don’t come down here and help me with it.”

  My stomach growled. Mama had made a peanut butter sandwich for me, with a couple of oranges for snacks. Fried chicken was a lot better. He looked old; I figured I could outrun him if I had to.

  I came down in as expert and dignified a manner as possible, not slipping even once. From the bottom branch I dropped my lunch off to the side, swung by my hands briefly, and made a perfect landing by the wheelbarrow. Squatting next to it, I examined its underside, hoping to find the hook or shelf where the picnic basket had been hidden. There was nothing but pieces of rust caught in old cobwebs.

  “Lunch is over here, boy,” he yelled at me. I peered back at him over the top of the wheelbarrow. “You’re not going to find anything to eat by looking over there.” He laughed and went back to work on his drumstick.

  I wiped my hands on my jeans, picked up my sack lunch, and retrieved Robinson Crusoe before I walked over to the tablecloth. I stood, book tucked under my arm, and watched him eat for a couple of seconds. “What’s your name?” I asked.

  He pulled a white paper napkin out of the basket, wiped his lips, chin, and fingers with it, and then looked up at me. “I am Mr. Beauchamps,” he said, pronouncing it bow-shomps, like a foreigner, “and I am very pleased to meet you, Timothy.” He took my hand shook it, as if he were one of Papa’s business partners. His hand was huge around mine, and felt warm and dry and crusty with calluses.

  “Have a seat,” he told me, nodding, while he lifted the hinged basket lid and fished around briefly. “You can’t eat standing up.” He produced a second blue and white china plate, dumped a second drumstick and three biscuits on it, and slid it over to me.

  The chicken was good. So was the lemonade. I broke open one of the biscuits, which was hot, smeared butter all over it with a plastic knife, and dribbled honey on top of that. “How come you call yourself mister?” I asked. “None of the colored men I know call themselves mister. Only whites.”

  He leaned toward me on one elbow and plopped a pile of potato salad on my plate. “Three reasons,” he said, sticking a plastic spoon in the mound and then sitting up. “First, ’cause I am eighty-three years old, and there are only two people in the whole city of Evans that are older than I am. Second, ’cause no one knows my first name, and I’m not telling what it is, so there’s nothing I can be called called but Mr. Beauchamps. Third,” he said, leaning forward again, “’cause I am the gravedigger here. I buried 657 people in my time—white and colored, rich and poor, all of them the same. Ain’t no boy does anybody’s gravedigging.”

  “Oh.”

  He smiled and took a final bite out of his drumstick. “You weren’t expected to know that, of course.”

  “Mr. Beauchamps.” I smiled back at him. He was as remarkable up close as he was from a distance. His skin was the blackest I’d ever seen, like baker’s chocolate or chicory coffee. His face was leathery and full of wrinkles, and his hands looked like they might have been tree roots. He had white hair, white eyebrows, even one or two white whiskers that curled out on his face from where he missed them shaving, I guess. They were easy to see because his skin was so dark.

  I think the thing I remember most about him was his smile. His teeth weren’t yellow, like most black folk I knew. They were bright white, and when he smiled, his whole face lit up, and all his wrinkles would mesh together and smile too.

  “Isn’t it kind of scary being a gravedigger?”

  “Nope.” He looked all around him. “Don’t know what could make a day like today scary. The sun’s out, shining bright; the grass is green, just like always; and if you’re quiet enough, you can hear the birds singing away, two counties over. No boss to stand around and give me a hard time, lots of long lunches—if you take my meaning—my own shovel and pick and wheelbarrow, and new kinds of flowers blooming practically every time I come out here. Can’t think of any place I’d rather work.”

  “But all those dead people—”

  “Nonsense, Timothy. We’re all going to be dead one day. I’m going to die, you’re going to die, your mama and papa are going to die. It’s part of life, part of living. The Lord says we can’t enter the Kingdom of Heaven ’less we’re born again. That’s what dying is—being born again in God’s Kingdom. We just can’t see it so clear from this side.”

  I looked past him, back to where he’d been working. The old stone angel was standing guard over the spot. “Whose grave you digging now?”

  “I ain’t saying.”

  “How come?”

  “I just ain’t. ’Sides,” he said, leaning back and stretching out on the grass, “it’s your turn to do the talking now.”

  “My turn?”

  “Sure. Read to me from your book.”

  So I read to him. I read the part where Robinson Crusoe found Friday—first in a dream, and then when he saved him from being eaten by other cannibals. Friday was the first human companion Robinson Crusoe had after living on the island by himself for years.

  … never was a more faithful, loving, sincere servant than Friday was to me; without passions, sullenness, or designs; his very
affections were tied to me, like those of a child to its father, and, I dare say, he would have sacrificed his life for my own, upon any occasion whatever.

  I was greatly delighted with him, and made it my business to teach him everything that was proper and useful, and especially to make him speak, and understand me when I spoke. And he was a very apt scholar, and he was so merry, so diligent, and so pleased when he could understand me, or make me understand him, that it was very pleasant for me to talk to him. And now my life began to be very easy and happy.

  Mr. Beauchamps chuckled when I finished reading, scratched his cheek, and said, “Now ain’t that something.”

  “I like it. It’s a good book.”

  “You would think Mr. Crusoe wanted a friend, after being lonely all the time.”

  “I think it would be fun to be alone like that.”

  “I see.” He sat up and pawed through the picnic basket once again, but couldn’t find anything for dessert, so each of us had an orange from my lunch. They were extra juicy, and we had a contest to see which one of us could spit the pits farther. Mr. Beauchamps won.

  “Well,” he said, sitting up and patting his stomach, “time for me to get back to work. Seeing as I found you, though, you’re going to have to work with me, just like I was Mr. Crusoe.”

  “You found me!”

  “’Course I did. Spying on me from the trees, just like some kind of savage. I could call you Saturday.”

  “I’m not a savage! My name is Timothy—”

  “All children are savages! You take my word for it. That’s what growing up consists of—civilizing you. You can be Saturday Evans.”

  “No!”

  He chuckled again. “Very well,” he said, hooking his thumbs in his suspenders, “I’ll be more civilized than Mr. Crusoe was and let you keep your own name. Just so long as you keep me company, if you catch my drift.”

  “I don’t mind that,” I said, getting to my feet. “Do I get to watch you dig up close?”

  “Of course you do. But we have to clean up here first.”

  Everything got packed, including my peanut butter sandwich. Then Mr. Beauchamps made the basket disappear by hiding it behind his back. He laughed when I asked him where it went, and told me he didn’t know himself, but it hardly mattered until he was hungry again.

  I watched him dig the rest of the grave that afternoon. I sat with my feet dangling in it sometimes, or lay on my stomach near the edge of it. The earth smelled rich and damp and somehow clean.

  He talked about gravedigging, how it was a craft, how you had to know the earth, whether it was going to be wet enough to stay packed, or if it was going to be mud four feet down, or sand, or tree roots. He said early summer was the best time to dig, and told me how hard it was to dig graves in winter, or in the middle of a storm. But he said he couldn’t stop digging graves just on account of the weather.

  We sang together, sometimes songs I knew, sometimes songs he taught me. The breeze would brush by us every once in a while, and when we weren’t talking or singing, I would just listen to the quiet, or to the sound of Mr. Beauchamps’s shovel slicing through the earth.

  It was late in the afternoon. Just as Great-Great-Grandpa Evans’s angel started to touch the feet of the oaks with her shadow, we finished. The grave was deep—deeper than Mr. Beauchamps was tall.

  He handed me the shovel, leaned the pickax in one corner of the grave, and climbed up on it like a stepladder. He hauled himself out from there. Then he took the shovel back, neatly hooked the head of the pickax with the back of the shovel’s metal blade, and pulled it up.

  “I have to go home now, sir.”

  He tipped his hat and bowed slightly. “Have a good evening then, Saturday.”

  “That’s Timothy.”

  “Timothy.”

  “You have a good evening, too, Mr. Beauchamps.”

  When I got home, I found my empty lunch bag folded up and stuck between the pages of Robinson Crusoe. I was sure I had put it in the picnic basket when we were cleaning up.

  * * *

  Aunt Fannie died Sunday afternoon.

  At least that’s when we found her. When we left for church that morning, she was alive.

  Aunt Fannie lived with us in one of the upstairs bedrooms, and Mama looked after her, day and night. She was too sick to take care of herself, and had been that way for years.

  I was helping Mama carry the dinner tray upstairs. Aunt Fannie always ate before the rest of us did on Sunday, and if I helped, Mama usually let her give me a cookie or a piece of cake from the tray.

  I noticed something different right away when we walked into the room, but Mama didn’t. She went straight to the windows and opened them, just like she always did, and the wind billowed the white lace curtains like sails.

  Aunt Fannie was all propped up on her pillows, and tucked in with a white quilt that had pink roses embroidered on it in every square. Her face was powdered—she always did that; she said she could go through the whole week just plain, but the least she could do was look pretty on the Lord’s day—and there was just a little touch of pink on her cheeks.

  She held a Bible in one hand loosely. The wind came in the room and lifted the filmy wisp of gray hair that had fallen on her cheek, pushing it back on her head and making it tremble, just for a moment.

  She looked like she was asleep. I knew she wasn’t. I knew because I couldn’t hear her breathing.

  Mama tried to wake her up several times. I didn’t say anything. Then she told me to get Papa.

  We buried her Tuesday morning, in the grave I had watched Mr. Beauchamps dig. The site was littered with wreaths and sprays of bright-petaled flowers, with weeping, long-faced adults dressed in black, most of them carrying Bibles; and with frightened children—Bobby and his friends included—who either clung to their parents singly, or stood together in groups of three or four, trying to understand what had happened.

  I knew they were all seeing an illusion I couldn’t see. The flowers, somber clothes, the prayers couldn’t hide the clumps of uncut grass, the color and smell of the earth in the grave, the impressions left on the gravesides from the pickax or shovel, the black stone Mr. Beauchamps had tossed up on the canvas after digging around it and cursing for half an hour, the way the wind danced through the oak trees, inviting me to climb them. Or the way Aunt Fannie smiled when she died.

  But more than all these things, I wondered how Mr. Beauchamps had known to dig her grave. I tried to spot him all the way through the funeral, even up to the point where it was my turn to throw a handful of dirt on Aunt Fannie’s casket. He was nowhere to be seen. The granite angel was the only witness of the weekend’s events; she stood silent, reigning over the proceedings, her eyes fixed on a point off on the horizon.

  I stopped at the Evans Cemetery every day for two weeks after that, but I still couldn’t find him. Where could he be, I wondered. How did he know?

  I knew he had to have been there while I was gone: when I went to look for him Wednesday, after the funeral, the flowers were gone, and the canvas; the grave was filled up and the sod put back in place. There was a brand spanking new granite headstone to mark her grave, half as tall as I was. The front of it was polished shiny, and I could see my own faint image in it.

  * * *

  Mama had green eyes, and when she would watch me, I was sure she could see what I was thinking. I wasn’t afraid of being watched, exactly—sometimes she would keep at it for weeks at a time, though it never would bring enough trouble to warrant Papa spanking me—but when she got that look and I knew she was watching, I knew I had to be good, or at least be careful.

  And she watched me after the funeral.

  Now, Mama would never say much to me while she was watching. Nothing out of the ordinary, that is; she would still say things like, “Timothy, sit up straight,” or, “Timothy, pick your things up when you’re through with them.” Sometimes I would get a clue why she was watching me from what she didn’t say.

 
But I never knew all the reasons for all the times she would watch. There would be times, after a bout of watching, when she would make up her mind about what she was thinking, and then tell me about it. But just as often, she would stop as quietly as she started, and never say what I did to bring it on, or why she stopped, or what she saw.

  After Aunt Fannie’s funeral was one of the times she decided to talk. I was in the kitchen at breakfast one morning, when Papa had left for the store but before Bobby was gone.

  I knew something was up when I saw her making only one sack lunch instead of two for Bobby and me. I felt all queasy inside when she came over and put it on the table next to Bobby; I hunched over my cereal and pretended I hadn’t seen, and that nothing out of the ordinary was happening.

  “Timothy,” she said, and I had to look up at her, “stay put for a while after you finish. I want to talk to you.” She smiled at me—a quick, toothless twitch almost, which was supposed to let me know that everything was all right—but it didn’t help.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  She walked back to the counter and began cleaning up, washing the knives, screwing the top on the peanut butter jar, packing up the bread, brushing the crumbs toward the sink. Her window was open, and from where I sat I could see the tops of the sweet peas in her garden out back; but no wind came blowing in the kitchen to flap the yellow checkered curtains, or stir the leaves on the two tiny plants she had growing in the pots on the sill.

  Bobby stared at me over his cereal bowl, the spoon briefly frozen in his mouth—he had black curly hair and freckles, and people said he looked just like Papa when Papa was small; I was blond, and Mama had light brown hair, straight as rain when she didn’t have it pinned up, so I guess I must have looked like her by default, though people didn’t say that—and he applied himself to finishing quickly, not looking at me again until he stuck out his tongue at me as he grabbed his lunch and ran out back. The spring on the screen twanged as the door slammed shut behind him.