I did the best job I could, but that didn’t hurry the finish of it. Mr. Beauchamps inspected the entire grave very thoroughly when we were through. He was pleased with it, and paid me twenty dollars extra—my fair share, he said. So I headed home to start the vigil that would let me know who was going to die.
Mary Sue was waiting for me when I got in. She was the only one there. She sat down and told me that Mama and Papa had been in a serious automobile accident, and that Bobby was with them now over at the Long County Hospital. She said it didn’t look good for either of them.
I went numb. I should have known, I told myself. I should have tried to stop them from going out. I should have warned them. I should have prevented it somehow.
I don’t remember Mary Sue driving me to the hospital. I don’t remember trying to find my parents in the emergency room, I don’t remember Doc Morrison trying to calm me down. I don’t remember being dragged away by the orderlies to the waiting room. Mary Sue told me about it later.
I do remember the waiting room. It was ugly. The furniture was white wrought iron with cushions, and you could see the shiny metal spots where other people had worn away the paint with worry, waiting.
Bobby and Mary Sue and I had cups of coffee from a machine all night, and we hardly said a word to one another. Bobby must have smoked four packs of cigarettes. Mary Sue sat next to him with her arm around him.
It wasn’t fair—knowing that one of them was going to go for sure, and not knowing which. I didn’t want to choose which one I’d rather have live, but I couldn’t stop myself from choosing, over and over again. When morning came, we found out it was Mama that had survived, although she was paralyzed from the waist down. Papa had died in the operating room.
We buried him Monday morning. Bobby made me go to the funeral. I hadn’t wanted to.
We buried a man I realized I never really knew—my father. As we lowered the casket into the grave I had dug, I wondered who he was, how he met my mama, whether he loved her right away when they met or whether it took time to get to know her, whether he was always good at business, whether he had ever sat up all night waiting for someone to die, whether he loved me.
I felt like a stranger to the whole world. I had spent years watching it, waiting for people to fall down like targets in a shooting gallery. And now, here I was, somehow back in it, and all the names and faces I had known were distant, mysterious and cold.
Mary Sue did her best to help. She and Bobby moved back into our house, and we put Mama up in Aunt Fannie’s old room. Mary Sue and I took care of Mama—keeping her company more than anything else. We took her on walks. We went with her to the show. We sat with her in the garden, on the porch, in her room. I think she used to hate being crippled. Most of all, I think she missed Papa.
I dug up stacks of photographs Papa had taken and then hidden away in the attic, and Mama and I would spend evenings pasting them into newly bought albums.
Most of them were family picnics and Fourth of July gatherings, the lot of us scattered across the backyard, eating huge chunks of pink watermelon, lying on the grass or sitting in lawn chairs with various aunts and uncles and grandparents, before they all died.
I found a picture of myself in diapers, sitting on Grandma Larkins’s lap, a blanket draped over my head while I drooled all over myself, white socks barely staying on my feet because they were too big to fit.
And there were pictures of Bobby and me. We had climbed trees together, peered around corners together, taken baths and swum in swimming pools together. There was one where we stood arm in arm, looking doubtfully at two live turkeys Papa had bought for Thanksgiving one year.
But the best pictures were of Mama. She was pretty, in a simple, open-air way. That was how Papa must have seen her. She didn’t smile in most of the photographs, but rather appeared to be thoughtful, moody, elusive, quietly untame. One photograph Papa took of her I remember particularly: she was in the kitchen, and she must have just gotten up, because her hair was mussed and she was wearing her robe that had tiny white flowers embroidered in it near the top; she stood next to an old, scarred butcher-block table with a baby bottle on it, holding her hands together, and behind her I could see an old black telephone and a couple of cartons of empty cola bottles on the floor next to the refrigerator. But she looked so regal, so stately, like she owned the world. Her mouth curled in a little smile.
Mama would tell me stories about every single picture as we put it in an album. The only drawback to this was that Papa had always been the photographer and never the subject. I only heard about him. I never saw what he was like. I could see that it was painful for Mama to talk about him, now that he was gone.
I still dug graves for Mr. Beauchamps. But my purpose was different. I waited to know when we would start to dig Mama’s grave.
We never talked about the accident, or Papa’s death. He never brought the subject up, and neither did I. All we ever talked about was the proper digging of graves, and he remained just as cheerful as he had ever been.
* * *
Mama and I were together by ourselves one night. I think she arranged for it to be that way.
“Timothy,” she said “you and I have to have a little talk.”
“About what?”
“I think it’s about time you should be getting to college.”
I looked at her. She seemed a tiny woman now, and so old—even compared to the pictures Papa had taken just before their accident. “There’s plenty of time for that,” I said.
“There isn’t!” she snapped, like she always did when she didn’t want to hear any more about it. She regretted it right away, though. “I think it’s wonderful,” she said, “your staying here to take care of me and all, and it’s meant a lot to me. I can’t say it hasn’t. But you’re nearly a grown man, Timothy. You’ve got to start living your own life, finding out what it is that you want to do, and doing it. Why, it’s not right for you to keep from putting yourself to good use. You’ve got intelligence. You’ve got talents. You’ve got money. With those three things, there’s nothing you can’t do.”
“But—”
“I don’t want to hear any buts!” She glared at me for a few seconds, and then looked down at her hands. “Oh, I thought so careful ’bout what I wanted to say, and it isn’t coming out right.” She started to cry. When I tried to comfort her, she waved me away, and pulled out one of those tiny rose-embroidered old-lady handkerchiefs and dabbed at her eyes with it.
She sniffed. “I’m sorry.”
“That’s all right, Mama.”
She tried to smile at me, which prompted another, shorter crying spell, only this time she let me hold her hand. Neither one of us said anything for a couple of minutes. Then she pulled her hand away and started fidgeting with her handkerchief.
“I had a dream,” she began, not looking at me. “And in that dream, there was an old colored man, dressed in a white tuxedo with a white top hat, who came to me. He said, ‘Hello, Mrs. Evans, I’ve come to take you for a little walk.’ I started to tell him I couldn’t walk, when I found myself walking already, and since there wasn’t much else to say, I didn’t say anything.
“He seemed like such a nice man, and he brought me to the edge of a huge plowed field. ‘I’ll tell you a secret, Mrs. Evans,’ he said. ‘That isn’t a field at all. It’s angels’ wings.’ I wanted to tell him that was a bunch of nonsense, but I looked and saw feathers, growing up out of the ground.
“Oh, Timothy, they were so beautiful! They were all different colors, like they were made out of rainbows, and they grew huge right in front of me, without hardly any time passing at all. So I turned to the man and said, ‘Mister, I do believe I’d like to go out there and lie down in those feathers.’ And he smiled at me—such a nice smile—and said ‘Why, of course you would. That’s why we came here.’
“Then he helped me out into the field, and I found a spot I particularly liked, and sat down, and wrapped myself in feathers. They were soft and co
zy. It was wonderful.”
Mama took my hand and looked at me again. “When I turned around to thank the man, he wasn’t there. Neither was anything else. The whole earth had kind of unfolded like, and I found myself riding on the wings of the biggest angel I ever imagined, tucked in just like a little baby, safe and sound and warm and secure. She smiled when she saw me looking at her.”
Mama let go of my hand and started carefully folding her handkerchief. “That’s all I remember.”
“That was very pretty, Mama.”
“No, it’s not! Least, not in the way you’re thinking. That dream meant something.”
I swallowed because my mouth was dry, and asked her what.
She didn’t answer me at first. She just sat there, folding and unfolding her handkerchief. The sound of crickets chirping came in through the open window. “I’m going to die, Son.”
“No—”
“I am!” She waited for me to say something else, and when I didn’t, she went on. “Maybe tomorrow, maybe years from now. But it’s a fact. It’s going to happen. And it’s not your place to sit beside me while I’m going about it. That’s all I’m saying.”
“Maybe you’re right.”
“I’m right.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
We sat together and listened to the sounds the night was making. After an hour, a chill began to creep into the house, and I bade her good night and went to bed.
* * *
Mr. Beauchamps was waiting for me in his red rocker when I got to the Robinson house the next day. “Morning, Timothy,” he said. “I’m going to need you tomorrow.”
“I know.” I pulled the music box out of its hiding place in the window seat and let it play. Mr. Beauchamps started to play along with it on his harmonica.
“It’s Mama’s grave—isn’t it?”
“I never tell who I’m digging for,” he said, picking up the melody again when he finished talking.
I let the tune run out. “What if we don’t dig it?”
“We have to dig it,” he said.
“Well, what if we don’t?”
He stopped rocking. “Timothy Evans, I swear to you, I won’t never pass up a grave that needs digging.”
“Oh.”
“You going to be there?”
I looked at him. “Yeah, I’ll be there.”
“I thought you would.” He started rocking again, and played a new song on his harmonica. The notes lingered in the air long after he disappeared.
* * *
I met him in the morning, just like always. It was a cold day, and the oaks waved their fire-colored autumn leaves at us, mocking. We still had no problem working up a sweat as we dug, though.
Mr. Beauchamps was more given to humming than to conversation. He hardly said a word to me all day, or I to him. For lunch, we sat huddled over his picnic basket like a couple of scavengers; the wind was too brisk to lay out the tablecloth and take our time.
Still, even with a short meal, it was a long day of hard work that sank into tones of gray as the afternoon wore on. The sky was bleak, colorless and unrelieved. The dirt stuck to itself, almost like clay, and it was hard to break up.
We finished. I climbed out first, and Mr. Beauchamps went on his usual inspection tour. Then he walked over to the pickax, stood on it, and started to pull himself out.
I swung the shovel for all I was worth. It sliced into his skull as if it were slicing into a piece of clay, sounding much the same, and then stuck there. I tugged on it—once, twice, and a third time before it came loose, and Mr. Beauchamps tumbled back into the grave. As he lay there, blood pooling around his head in a red halo, he slowly smiled.
I shivered. The chill of the day penetrated me all at once, turning my insides to ice, squeezing all the breath out of me, choking me. I dropped to my knees, then to my hands, and let the shovel slip from my grasp into the open grave.
Slowly, quietly, tiny clods of dirt, on their own, began rolling down the graveside pile of earth. They trickled over the edge of the grave in twos and threes at first, sounding like summer hail as they hit bottom, or bounced off Mr. Beauchamps’s body. They gathered numbers and strength and speed rapidly, forming a brown waterfall that covered him, and filled the air with growing thunder, until the heavens roared with it, and the ground shook with it, and I thought I would burst. I pressed my hands to my head and rocked back on my heels, dizzy.
Then there was quiet. Abruptly. I opened my eyes to see the pieces of sod slowly crawl off the canvas, like big green caterpillars, moving back to the spots where they belonged, settling in and weaving their edges together where we had cut them. A cold wind came up, whipping through the trees behind me and cutting through the wings of Great-Great-Grandpa Evans’s stone angel, who stood a little ways off, aloof and praying.
I folded up the canvas, collected the two-by-fours, threw them into the wheelbarrow, hid them all in among the oak trees, and left.
* * *
Doc Morrison’s car was parked outside our house when I got home, a silhouette in the gray shades of evening against our whitewashed front porch. I waited for him to come out and drive away before I went in.
I found Bobby and Mary Sue at the kitchen table, drinking coffee, Bobby’s cigarette in the ashtray in front of him sending a long plume of smoke straight up until it curled away two feet over their heads. The fluorescent light made their faces pale, and Mary Sue looked like she’d been crying. They both stood up when I walked in, helplessly rooted in place for a moment. Then Mary Sue darted to the stove and poured me a cup of coffee.
“What happened?” I asked, cradling the coffee’s warmth in my hands, trying to rid myself of the chill that had followed me inside. I left my jacket on.
Bobby realized he was staring at me; he sat down, reached for his cigarette with one hand, and rested his forehead in the other.
“Your mother had a stroke,” Mary Sue said, sitting down again and putting her arm around Bobby’s shoulder.
I wanted to shiver—out of hope, out of fear, hardly daring to give into one, lest the other should overcome me. Still holding the cup, I pulled a chair out with my foot and sat down, not bothering to scoot up to the table. “Is she going to be all right?”
Bobby took a final drag on his cigarette, sucked the smoke in deep, and then blew it out in a cloud of frustration. “She’s paralyzed,” he said. “Doc Morrison says by all rights she should have died.”
Nobody spoke for a moment. We didn’t look at each other either. “Then she’s alive,” I said, trying to hide my smile.
“She can’t move,” Bobby said. “She can’t feed herself, she can’t sit up, she can’t move her arms or her hands, she can’t talk. She’s alive, all right, if you can call it that.” He left the room. Mary Sue and I watched him go, watched the kitchen door swing slowly shut, listened to his footsteps pad down the hall and up the stairs to their bedroom. Mary Sue crushed out his still-burning cigarette.
“The doctor says it’s still too early to tell the extent of the damage,” she said. “Your mother could get better. She might recover the use of her arms, at least partially. He said she might learn to talk again. He wasn’t sure her condition would be permanent. He’ll call for a specialist Monday morning. We’re supposed to bring her to the hospital then—”
“If she survives, you mean. He’s waiting for her to die.”
Mary Sue stared at the palms of her hands. “Yes,” she said. “That seems to be just about the size of it.” She looked up at me. “I’m sorry, Timothy. If you’d been here when the doctor came and heard what he’d said, maybe you’d think differently. As it is, just right now, she might as well stay home. There’s nothing they can do for her at the hospital.”
“Until Monday?”
“Until Monday.”
“Well, she’s not going to die,” I said, the sweat trickling down under my arms, beading on my forehead.
“You don’t know that, Timothy—”
“I do.”
&
nbsp; “But you can’t—”
“I know,” I said, staring her full in the face. Her eyes were brown, like Bobby’s. It was something I had never noticed before. “She won’t die.” I dropped my gaze and sipped at my coffee. The table seemed miles away.
Mary Sue sighed, sat back, and ran her fingers through her hair. “All right then. You know. More than me, more than your brother, more than the doctor. More than anybody. She won’t die.” She stood up, and her chair scraped across the floor the way Bobby’s did. “I wish I wanted you to be right.” With that she left.
I was so excited I could hardly contain myself. Mama was alive! She had made it! She would get better. We would bring her doctors, nurses, medicine—whatever she needed. It was only a matter of time before she got better. That was all. I drained my coffee cup and headed upstairs.
Mama’s room was warm, and filled with a pale rosy glow from the nightlight—a frosted white hurricane lamp with pink flowers painted on it. Mama was asleep, so I contented myself with standing next to her bed, jacket draped over one shoulder, and watching her breathe. I had to stand still and observe carefully to do it. But the faint indications were there.
As I moved to leave and close the door behind me, I thought I noticed movement in the shadows on the far side of her bed. I froze. “No,” I whispered at the darkness, “I won’t do it.” I flipped on the light switch, half expecting to see Mr. Beauchamps. But there was nothing. Only Mama’s thin, wasted form, captured by the bedsheets and the quilt. Her eyes came open, staring at the ceiling first, then turning her head, slowly, searching for me, finding me. I turned out the light and knelt by her bed, my head close to hers.
“I will not dig your grave, Mama,” I told her. “I won’t do it.”
But she stared at me, her green eyes pleading, unmoving. I took her limp hand in mine. “I won’t. We don’t know what can happen, Mama. We’ll take you to the hospital Monday, and there’ll be doctors, and special equipment, and medicine. We’ll fix you, Mama. We’ll make you better, and you’ll talk and write and maybe even walk again. Who knows? But you’re not going to die Mama—we’ve got that on our side.”
The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Fourth Annual Collection Page 40