There wasn’t anything else I could say, or any way Mama could answer, so I tucked her in again, and went to bed. I dreamed about her green eyes staring, and about the cold all night.
In the morning I woke to find Mr. Beauchamps’s pickax and shovel in my room, propped against the wall next to my bed. They were wet with dew. I wiped them off with my bed sheets, so they wouldn’t rust, and put them away in the garage.
* * *
Long County Hospital did what it could for Mama, reluctantly. For the two months she was there, I visited her during the days, sometimes with Bobby, sometimes with Mary Sue, most often by myself.
I would read to her—newspapers, poetry I knew she liked, Bible passages. We’d prop her up so she could see what I was reading, and follow along with me. She wouldn’t, though. On good days, her green eyes would watch me wherever I went in the room; on bad days, she would just stare at nothing.
It was the same routine after we brought her home, once Doc Morrison and the hospital made it clear there was nothing that could be done for Mama, even if they had wanted to. We put her back in Aunt Fannie’s room, hired a live-in nurse, bought a whirlpool bath, rented all sorts of fancy monitoring equipment—anything the experts asked for. Christmas came and went.
And the dance with Mr. Beauchamps’s digging tools began to be an odd diversion, a game that wouldn’t stop.
I was frightened of them at first, not sure if something worse was waiting to happen. No matter where I hid them, they would show up in my room mornings, always in the same spot, damp, but no dirt, no rust.
The novelty of it took over after the fear wore off. It was like having my own rabbit in a hat. I would hide them further and further away, or make it harder, to see if the trick would still work. I started in the garage at first; locked, chained, bolted, encased in cement out back. From there I went to the graveyards. And the Robinson house. The marsh. Long City, when I had the excuse to go.
I nearly got in trouble when I left them at the store—Bo Potter bought the pickax, and it vanished from his shed during the night. Bobby replaced it without saying anything, and I couldn’t figure why. I couldn’t ask, either. That was another game: discovery, hoping and fearing Mary Sue, Bobby, or Althea—Mama’s nurse, Mammy Walker’s girl who trained for medicine instead of midwifing, like Mammy—would find out. I tried to imagine what they would do if they knew.
Once the specialists started coming to our house to see Mama, after the first of the year, I let the pickax and shovel stay in my room on hooks. The playing got weary, tedious, losing its edge with each new prospect for Mama’s recovery.
They all seemed cut from the same mold, the specialists—gray-suited, bald, bespectacled; embarrassed smiles on all their faces. They came to us from New York, Washington, Chicago, Los Angeles, more out of curiosity to see Mama like she was some kind of freak than because they thought she could be helped. They examined her, consulted, and we waited. She didn’t get any better.
I kept reading to her anyway. I didn’t feel like it was as much a matter of hope as it was a matter of time.
* * *
Bobby and Mary Sue adjusted rather quickly to Mama being home. They would help me with the reading, and Mary Sue and Althea worked as a team to take care of Mama—giving her baths, preparing her food, keeping records. Bobby took me with him to the store to teach me the business, which was fine as far as I was concerned; I was through with gravedigging, and willing to help out running things.
The situation lasted until February, when Bobby said he was tired of all the gloom and doom hanging over our heads, and he and Mary Sue started going out on the weekends. I stayed home with Mama.
Which was why Mary Sue asked me to help with a surprise birthday party for Bobby—she said she thought it would do us all some good to have regular people over at the house. I was hesitant at first, but she kept at it until I agreed to help.
My part in the plan was to take Bobby over to the county seat—to file some tax papers, ostensibly—and stall him while we were there. We weren’t supposed to get home until eight o’clock. I called over to Jameson’s Garage in Long City ahead of time and let them know what was going on, so when the car wouldn’t start from the distributor cap being jimmied, they wouldn’t give me away. They timed it just right, holding back from fixing the car until seven-thirty. None of them could tell me how the shovel and the pickax got in the back seat; they acted like it was somebody else’s joke.
I raced home. After the first five minutes at eighty miles an hour, Bobby stopped asking me why. He just buckled the seat belts and wedged himself in the corner against the door and the seat, one arm over the top of the front seat, the other braced against the dash.
We first heard the sirens when we passed the Evans city limits. I screeched the car to a stop outside the circle of fire trucks, and it was plain to see the firemen were fighting a losing battle against the burning house. Our burning house.
Bobby tried to run inside, but that wasn’t what held my attention. Rather, it was the bank of ambulances parked along the drive, one or two of them pulling away as we pulled up. There were burnt and charred bodies being loaded up and down the line, and moans filling the air above the roar of the fire and spitting of the hoses. I began opening the back doors of the ambulances nearest me, reeling in the sweet stench of cooked flesh that boiled out every time. They were all alive.
I found her in the fifth car. Mama had been burned beyond recognition, except for a single, lidless green eye that turned toward me.
I slammed the door shut, screaming, stumbling away. A pair of attendants carrying a squirming body on a litter ran past me. The world began to spin, and I could feel the heat from the fire reach for me, even as I heard the sound of the explosion.
I knew what I had to do. I grabbed the pickax and the shovel and ran for Evans Cemetery, as fast as I could, the moon lighting my way as I rushed across the open fields, trying to leave behind me the sounds of the fire, the smell of burning people.
I found the wheelbarrow where I left it, rolled it to the first spot, measured out a rectangle with my two-by-fours, and started digging. I wept until I couldn’t see through my swollen eyelids, cursed and screamed until I was hoarse, swung the pickax at the defenseless earth with a vengeance until I was barely able to lift it, and the moon glared down at me like Mama’s eye, lighting everything I did. When I finished the grave, I sat for a minute at the bottom, panting.
It was still night.
I picked up my boards and laid out the dimensions of the next grave. It went so much slower than the first, and now I began to regret killing Mr. Beauchamps, not out of guilt, but because I could have used his help.
The digging became painful; even in the moonlight I could see the bruises and cuts on my hands. My feet hurt. My back ached from the strain. I thought of Mr. Beauchamps digging graves even after he reached ninety, going slow and steady, and that gave me hope to go on.
I finally finished the second grave. I was barely able to crawl out. As I lay there, exhausted, I suddenly realized I had been listening to music.
It took me a minute to recognize the tune: Chopin’s Nocturne, played on the silvery, tinkling tones of Aunt Fannie’s music box.
And then I realized it was still night, and I was still looking at a scene illuminated by moonlight. I rolled over.
He was sitting on the shoulder of the old stone angel, dressed in a white tuxedo instead of his blue and white striped overalls, and his engineer’s hat was replaced by a white silk top hat. “Hello, Timothy,” he said. The music box sat in his lap, its lid open.
“Hello, Mr. Beauchamps,” I croaked back.
“Save your strength,” he said, pushing off from his perch and slowly floating to the ground. “You’ve got a lot of work ahead of you tonight.”
“The moon—”
“Never you mind about the moon! I’m doing my part, and you do yours—there are lots of graves to dig before morning gets here. You can rest a little before you get
started on the next one, though.”
So I rested to Chopin. And dug to Mozart, Beethoven, and Brahms. Grave after grave, until the pain, the remorse, the revulsion drained away; and there was nothing left but the sound of the shovel, the shadows dancing with the moonlight that poured down from the sky, the crisp, brittle notes of the music box, and the gentle encouragement of Mr. Beauchamps. The sun came up as I finished digging the twenty-seventh grave.
* * *
There is no one left to get close to anymore. Except for Mr. Beauchamps. In addition to bringing me lunch when I’m working, he always comes by on special occasions—the anniversary of our meeting, my birthday, his birthday, the day I passed his gravedigging total of 743—and that was well over a decade ago.
I am ninety-six years old now, and have buried 915 people—my brother, my sister-in-law, my cousin, my nieces and nephews, the sheriff, the doctor, the black folk who lived down in the Quarters, the white folk who used to work for the Evans family business; people I never knew, or met, or even heard of. As I dug every one of their graves, I wondered who they all were, where they came from, and I was glad to give them their deaths, to help them step into the next Kingdom. But I am tired. I have been tired since the night I dug twenty-seven graves.
When there’s a nice day and I don’t have to go digging, I put flowers on Mama’s grave, or on Mr. Beauchamps’s. He was the first black man ever to be buried in Evans Cemetery, even if no one else knows about it.
And I keep hoping the next grave I dig will be my own.
GREG BEAR
Tangents
Born in San Diego, California, Greg Bear made his first sale at the age of fifteen to Robert Lowndes’s Famous Science Fiction. In the years since then, he has established himself as one of the top young professionals in the genre. His short fiction has appeared in Analog, Galaxy, Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, Omni, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Universe, and elsewhere. His story “Blood Music,” which was in our First Annual Collection, won both the Hugo and the Nebula Award, and his story “Hardfought,” also in our First Annual Collection, won the Hugo Award. His books include the novels Hegira, Psychlone, Beyond Heaven’s River, Strength of Stones, The Infinity Concerto, and Blood Music, and a collection, The Wind from a Burning Woman. His most recent books are the novels Eon and The Serpent Mage. Upcoming are The Forge of God, from Tor, and Eternity and Queen of Angels, from Warner Books. Bear lives in Santee, California, with his wife Astrid and their new baby Erik.
In the story that follows, Bear suggests that the way you look at things may be every bit as important as what you’re looking at.…
TANGENTS
Greg Bear
The nut-brown boy stood in the California field, his Asian face shadowed by a hard hat, his short, stocky frame clothed in a T-shirt and a pair of brown shorts. He squinted across the hip-high grass at the spraddled old two-story ranch house, and then he whistled a few bars from a Haydn piano sonata. Out of the upper floor of the house came a man’s high, frustrated “bloody hell!” and the sound of a fist slamming on a solid surface. Silence for a minute. Then, more softly, a woman’s question: “Not going well?”
“No. I’m swimming in it, but I don’t see it.”
“The encryption?” the woman asked timidly.
“The tesseract. If it doesn’t gel, it isn’t aspic.”
The boy squatted in the grass and listened.
“And?” the woman encouraged.
“Ah, Lauren, it’s still cold broth.”
The conversation stopped. The boy lay back in the grass, aware he was on private land. He had crept over the split-rail and brick-pylon fence from the new housing project across the road. School was out, and his mother—adoptive mother—did not like him around the house all day. Or at all.
He closed his eyes and imagined a huge piano keyboard and himself dancing on the keys, tapping out the Oriental-sounding D minor scale, which suited his origins, he thought. He loved music.
He opened his eyes and saw the thin, graying lady in a tweed suit leaning over him, staring down with her brows knit.
“You’re on private land,” she said.
He scrambled up and brushed grass from his pants. “Sorry.”
“I thought I saw someone out here. What’s your name?”
“Pal,” he replied.
“Is that a name?” she asked querulously.
“Pal Tremont. It’s not my real name. I’m Korean.”
“Then what’s your real name?”
“My folks told me not to use it anymore. I’m adopted. Who are you?”
The gray woman looked him up and down. “My name is Lauren Davies,” she said. “You live near here?”
He pointed across the fields at the close-packed tract homes.
“I sold the land for those homes ten years ago,” she said. “I don’t normally enjoy children trespassing.”
“Sorry,” Pal said.
“Have you had lunch?”
“No.”
“Will a grilled cheese sandwich do?”
He squinted at her and nodded.
In the broad, red-brick and tile kitchen, sitting at an oak table with his shoulders barely rising above the top, he ate the mildly charred sandwich and watched Lauren Davies watching him.
“I’m trying to write about a child,” she said. “It’s difficult. I’m a spinster and I don’t know children well.”
“You’re a writer?” he asked, taking a swallow of milk.
She sniffed. “Not that anyone would know.”
“Is that your brother, upstairs?”
“No,” she said. “That’s Peter. We’ve been living together for twenty years.”
“But you said you’re a spinster—isn’t that someone who’s never married or never loved?” Pal asked.
“Never married. And never you mind. Peter’s relationship to me is none of your concern.” She put together a tray with a bowl of soup and a tuna-salad sandwich. “His lunch,” she said. Without being asked, Pal trailed up the stairs after her.
“This is where Peter works,” Lauren explained. Pal stood in the doorway, eyes wide. The room was filled with electronics gear, computer terminals and industrial-gray shelving with odd cardboard sculptures sharing each level, along with books and circuit boards. She put the lunch tray on top of a cart, resting precariously on a box of floppy disks.
“Still having trouble?” she asked a thin man with his back turned toward them.
The man turned around on his swivel chair, glanced briefly at Pal, then at the lunch, and shook his head. The hair on top of his head was a rich, glossy black; on the close-cut sides, the color changed abruptly to a bright, fake-looking white. He had a small, thin nose and large green eyes. On the desk before him was a computer monitor. “We haven’t been introduced,” he said, pointing to Pal.
“This is Pal Tremont, a neighborhood visitor. Pal, this is Peter Tuthy. Pal’s going to help me with that character we discussed.”
Pal looked at the monitor curiously. Red and green lines went through some incomprehensible transformation on the screen, then repeated.
“What’s a tesseract?” Pal asked, remembering the words he had heard through the window as he stood in the field.
“It’s a four-dimensional analog of a cube. I’m trying to find a way to teach myself to see it in my mind’s eye.” Tuthy said. “Have you ever tried that?”
“No,” Pal admitted.
“Here,” Tuthy said, handing him the spectacles. “As in the movies.”
Pal donned the spectacles and stared at the screen. “So?” he said. “It folds and unfolds. It’s pretty—it sticks out at you, and then it goes away.” He looked around the workshop. “Oh, wow!” In the east corner of the room a framework of aluminum pipes—rather like a plumber’s dream of an easel—supported a long, disembodied piano keyboard mounted in a slim, black case. The boy ran to the keyboard. “A Tronclavier! With all the switches! My mother had me take piano lessons, bu
t I’d rather learn on this. Can you play it?”
“I toy with it,” Tuthy said, exasperated. “I toy with all sorts of electronic things. But what did you see on the screen?” He glanced up at Lauren, blinking. “I’ll eat the food, I’ll eat it. Now please don’t bother us.”
“He’s supposed to be helping me,” Lauren complained.
Peter smiled at her. “Yes, of course. I’ll send him downstairs in a little while.”
When Pal descended an hour later, he came into the kitchen to thank Lauren for lunch. “Peter’s a real flake. He’s trying to see certain directions.”
“I know,” Lauren said, sighing.
“I’m going home now,” Pal said. “I’ll be back, though … if it’s all right with you. Peter invited me.”
“I’m sure that it will be fine,” Lauren replied dubiously.
“He’s going to let me learn the Tronclavier.” With that, Pal smiled radiantly and exited through the kitchen door.
When she retrieved the tray, she found Peter leaning back in his chair, eyes closed. The figures on the screen patiently folded and unfolded, cubes continuously passing through one another.
“What about Hockrum’s work?” she asked.
“I’m on it,” Peter replied, eyes still closed.
Lauren called Pal’s foster mother on the second day to apprise them of their son’s location, and the woman assured her it was quite all right. “Sometimes he’s a little pest. Send him home if he causes trouble—but not right away! Give me a rest,” she said, then laughed nervously.
Lauren drew her lips together tightly, thanked her, and hung up.
Peter and the boy had come downstairs to sit in the kitchen, filling up paper with line drawings. “Peter’s teaching me how to use his program,” Pal said.
The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Fourth Annual Collection Page 41