“I may just put him over my knee,” Mrs. Woodley said. “Makin’ me think that little Williams boy had come back from the grave. He was still alive when they buried him, you know. I told Mr. Loveland myself, I said that little boy is still alive and tryin’ to push open the lid of his casket, them’s my very words. And he no more listened to me than he would to an old mongrel dog abarking.”
“Sheriff Quarles.”
“Sheriff, there’s something awful at the Municipal Cemetery. I live just across the road — ”
“I’ll just put him across my knee and warm his bottom.”
“ — grave robbers or something — ”
“Wait a minute — no, not you, Mrs. Woodley — what?”
“I’ll go on now, Sheriff. But, you know — ”
“ — right inside the gates, a whole pile of them, a whole pile.”
“You just haven’t been much of a help, Sam Quarles, and I have to say it.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“ — just jumbled up like they was dumped off a truck or some-thin’ — ”
Mrs. Woodley let herself out. “Pile of what, ma’am?” Quarles asked.
“Coffins,” the woman said. “All kinds of coffins.”
6
Their feet whispered on the floors. Ballew Jefferson waited in his nest of light and heat for them to come. It was only midafternoon, sunlight bright outside, but they were no longer stopped by daylight; and there were more of them, five or six anyway, drifting through his house. He had the knife ready.
Now and again he felt them mass outside the nailed-shut door, an eddy of ghosts, of something: but time would pass and they would trickle away again, the sounds rustling up the stairs, overhead on the floors. Jefferson had the sure sense that it was all coming to an end, soon now. Part of him wanted to fling open the side door and flee, to run to the street, away, and keep going. This part of him looked in horror at the ruined kitchen, its whole ceiling black with soot, some of it festooned with softly swaying black stalactites. The walls were blistered, ragged, the cabinets warped and distorted parodies of themselves.
The blue gas hissed. The temperature on the thermometer had not gone below a hundred and fifteen for days. Ballew Jefferson, standing up, could barely gasp in the super-heated air; and yet the slightest suggestion of cold made him shake uncontrollably.
The part of him that wanted to run was weaker than the part that feared the cold outside the kitchen. This part needed the light and the heat; this part was determined to kill the apparition of Mollie Avery when next it appeared.
He almost longed for it now, wanted it to be over. He had not called Miss Wayly this week. His cache of food, diminishing, had not been replenished. Jefferson sensed, somehow, that after this day he would need no more canned food. Either he would be free of Mollie Avery’s hold, or he would be dead. Neither prospect held much appeal.
He waited.
At five o’clock, someone knocked on the side door. “Mr. Jefferson? Police, sir.”
He ignored the sound.
The rap was repeated, louder. “Ballew Jefferson? Open up, sir. It’s the police.”
Jefferson closed his eyes.
“We know about Mollie Avery bein’ after you, sir. We come to help.”
His eyes flew open. “What?” he said, his voice a dry croak.
“I say we know what you been goin’ through, Mr. Jefferson. We got it solved now. It’s done over with, sir. You let me in and I’ll help you.”
Stooping to keep his face out of the hottest layer of air, Jefferson made his way to the door. “I’m going to unlock it,” he said through the wood. “You wait until I get back before you come in.”
“Yes, sir.”
Jefferson turned the knob of the dead bolt. It slipped into its sheath smoothly. He retreated into the heat and glare of the kitchen. “All right.”
A tall, heavyset man in the uniform of a deputy sheriff opened the door, stepped inside, and closed the door behind him. He swept off his hat. “Shoo. You got it hot enough in here.” He grinned at Jefferson.
“It keeps her out.”
The deputy nodded and came into the kitchen. “Smells a mite.”
Tears welled into Jefferson’s eyes. “That’s not my fault! She made me lock myself here, like an animal — ” His shoulders heaved and he sobbed. “Did you, did they-did people see that damned film of us, that vile — ”
“Shoot, Mr. Jefferson.” The other man’s breath was perfumed with the minty scent of chewing gum. “Nobody pays no mind to that. Gettin’ yourself a little piece of poontang, huh? Well, hell, everybody understands that with your wife bein’ dead and all you needed some kinda outlet.”
Jefferson sank into a chair. “It’s been so hard.”
“It was hard on the screen, sure enough,” the deputy said crudely.
Jefferson scowled up at him. “That was uncalled for.”
The deputy leaned over. “You want to see somethin’ uncalled for?” He did not wait for an answer, but suddenly, shockingly, tore open his uniform shirt. Jefferson gaped. A hole the size of a quarter opened in the man’s chest just left of the sternum, and through it he could see pink, pulsing things —
Jefferson kicked away from the table, falling over, rolling from the chair. He scuttled into the corner, knife held out in front of him. The deputy grinned at him, pulling his shirt to. The buttons had all popped off, but somehow they were there again, neatly fastened. “That Marine Quarles done it,” he said. “I hadn’t even got started good when he done it to me. But that’s all right. Hey, I can start all over now and he can’t kill me. There’s so many I want to see.”
“Get out,” Jefferson said.
“Used to call me Elvis, some of them. Now, you never done that, Mr. Jefferson, I ain’t talkin’ about you. But some of them lint-heads used to call me Elvis just to make me mad. Well, now we gonna see how they like it when I come around to visit them, huh?”
“Get out of my house!”
The deputy smiled and shook his head. “I ain’t got nothin’ against you, Mr. Jefferson, but somebody had to come in and make everything ready, don’t you see. He needs you. See, there’s a lot of stuff he has to do, and he gets weak, like, so he has to feed now and then. He’s gotta have you. But it ain’t bad, Mr. Jefferson, and you’ll like it. Then later it won’t matter none. But I had to come to turn off the heat.” The deputy walked to the stove and switched off the burners. For the first time in a month the stove died with a soft flup! of extinguished gas.
The deputy turned back. “The lights don’t matter so much. Do you know I get to go out tonight? It’s been a long time, seems like. You know what I can’t figure? Where in hell has Eula gone? Her and me married all these years, and now she ain’t with the rest of us. Some of ’em disappears, like. I don’t know why. The rest of us, we’re still around.”
Jefferson had tremblingly straightened. He picked up a can of O’Kelley creamed corn and threw it as hard as he could at the interloper. The can passed right through him, and the deputy vanished from sight, simply dissolved to nothing.
The rustling had started again, hitching like whispered laughter. Another sound, a groan, came into the air, agonizing, slow, high-pitched. For a second Jefferson thought it came from him, but his hand placed flat on his chest felt no vibration. It was a wrenching, squealing sound, like —
Like a nail being pulled from wood.
His gaze went to the door. It was one of the nails holding the chairs against the door and wall: it protruded already an inch, and as he watched, it came out more, an inch and a half, two —
The nail jingled to the floor, rolled in a quarter-circle, and was still.
Another began to groan and move, pulling itself out.
And behind the door, somehow he knew, the dead were massing.
7
They found Ludie Estes in a rocking chair, beneath a hanging lightbulb shaded by a pinned-on cone of colorful Sunday comics. “Come in,” she said. “’Scuse me
not gettin’ up. My arthritis bad today.”
Ann Lewis came in, followed by Odum Tate, then by Michael. “Sit down,” Michael said, nodding toward a sofa against one wall. It had lost its original upholstery and was covered by a handmade quilt. Tate and Ann sat there. Michael took the room’s only other available chair, a straight ladder-back kitchen chair. Ann looked around: the room was poor but neat, with a battered coffee table and a dresser with a mirror the only other furniture beside the chairs. A radio was on the bureau, its cord looped up to the ceiling through a hook and finally plugged into a socket at the base of the ceiling bulb. The walls held pictures of Jesus and of black babies, mottoes of hope and a calendar from Detterley’s Funeral Home.
Ludie was an immense woman, heavy without really being obese. Her features were small in that broad face, the eyes direct and penetrating. “You come to ast me about Jim Bascom,” she said.
“Yes, Miz Estes,” Odum Tate replied.
Ludie sighed. “Lord, Lord. It a world of sorrow he been through in his time. And now it come back again, worse than it was before.” She shook her head, and then that shrewd gaze came back to Tate. “You a preacher man, my grand-baby tell me.”
“Yes, ma’am. I try to be.”
“You tries to be.” She shook her head again. “Sometime it don’t seem they can be no good on the earth. Sometime it seem like the bad done got into everybody. But them that got some good in them, they has to try. And you the schoolteacher, miss?”
Ann nodded. “I teach at Gaither Elementary.”
“My grand-baby Michael tell me the president say it all right for him to go to that school. So why he didn’t get to go, when he was little?”
Ann looked at Michael, who averted his eyes. “I — the community — ”
“Community? What that community?”
“The people — ”
“White folks? Or like me?”
“Mrs. Estes — ”
“Hush, child. I just devlin’ you. I know it ain’t your fault. Ain’t nobody’s fault, seem like, but it the way things are. He graduate from the colored high school last June. He made a speech. What do you call it, Michael?”
Michael, not looking up, whispered, “Valedictorian, Granny-Ma.”
Ludie nodded. “That it. And he goin’ away off yonder next year to college, after he work and save money for it. Michael, he a good boy.”
“I’m sure he is,” Ann said, but when Michael Estes glared at her through his black-rimmed spectacles, she blushed in confusion.
“Be better for him to go right now, without hardly no money. Evil time has come.”
Tate leaned forward, making the sofa springs creak. “We want to talk to you about that, Mrs. Estes. It seems like a man named Jim Bascom might have something to do with all this.”
Ludie Estes rocked back and forth. The floor, covered with a worn gray and blue linoleum rug, creaked under the rockers. “He a misled man. I remember his wife, cryin’ so pitiful that night, sayin’, ‘Please don’t, don’t kill my man.’ But they took him up the hill, away past the railroad tracks, and they hung him. Then they brung him back dead and throwed him on the fire, but he got up and walked away.”
Tate and Ann exchanged a glance. Tate said, “Can you tell us about how he died?”
Rocking in the circle of light beneath the hanging bulb, Ludie told them the whole story: Jim Bascom, a local boy, was at first a farmer. He and his family made a decent enough living for a while, during the hard times of the first war, but after, when prices dropped, he lost his land and went from job to short-lived job. His second oldest daughter married Timothy Avery and moved out, and that helped some, but at last Jim had to work for old Mr. Morgan Simmons.
“The meanest white man,” Ludie said, “that ever drawed breath, that was Mr. Simmons.” She told of the dispute over wages, of Jim Bascom’s night visit with kerosene and matches — “I reckon the devil get into him, and he want to get back at Mr. Simmons for his babies goin’ hungry.”
She told of the next night, when she was awakened from sleep by the sounds of screaming. She went to the porch, looked across at the next house, and saw four white men dragging Jim Bascom toward a car. “And old Mr. Simmons, he waitin’ by the car and cussin’. And Jim’s poor wife, she cryin’ and prayin’ and beggin’, but it no use.”
She told of going across to comfort Seelia Bascom and the wailing children, of waiting through the night until the news came that they already knew, that Jim was dead. She told of the black undertaker coming for the body, actually having to come and pick it up himself out of the puddle where it had fallen from the pyre. “No white man want to touch it, some way.”
And then the funeral, and Seelia’s move, to somewhere away off, far from Gaither, far from memory. At last Ludie fell silent, with the floor still creaking in rhythm as she rocked.
Tate, leaning forward, his hands clasped between his knees, said, “Mrs. Estes, did you know any of the white men?”
“All of them,” she said.
“Who was it?”
Ludie held up a hand and began to count off the men on her fingers. “Old Morgan Simmons, first. He by the car. Then Henry Cox. He work for Simmons, too. He holdin’ on to Jim’s legs. Then Mack Williams. He the daddy of the man who hung hisself while back. He holdin’ on to Jim’s arms. Then Mr. Dover, he had the dry-goods store back then. And finally there Mr. Pollion. He new in town.”
“Are they still alive?” Ann asked.
“Mr. Simmons, he die not long after the big storm. Horse throw him. Mr. Williams die two or three years back. Mr. Dover, he move off and die somewheres. Henry Cox still alive. You see him settin’ down on the Square some days. He old now, like me.”
“What about the other man?”
“He just go. He here one time and gone the next.”
“What was his name?” Ann asked.
“It somethin’ like Pollion.”
“Napoleon?” Ann guessed.
Ludie shook her head. “No. Some way it seem to me his name start with a A.”
“Oh, my God,” said Odum Tate.
8
Richard Crawford shook his head at Sam Quarles. Quarles, standing just inside the gate of the Municipal Cemetery, was arguing jurisdiction with Robert Goss of the city police. “It ain’t in the county,” Quarles, with a note of rising anger in his voice, insisted.
Goss, a taller man than Quarles, and maybe ten years older, looked away, scratching his silver hair. “It sure as hell ain’t in the city. City limits end right at the gates there. Looks to me like you gotta take it, Sam.”
“Bob, you try to shove off every little pissant thing you don’t want to bother with — ”
“It ain’t in the city.”
“ — but that’s one thing. This here is a big crime, Bob. Some crazy man’s diggin’ up dead bodies, for God’s sake.”
“The Municipal Cemetery is on county property,” Goss said, as if that one fact weighed more in his mind than the improbable stack of coffins, jumbled like jackstraws, that Quarles’s deputy stood beside. “The back of the cemetery opens out onto the river, and you know the river’s county. Now, I got a map that shows the city limits, and they end right at them gates.”
“Shit.”
“I’ll be glad to cooperate with you — ”
“Look at these coffins!” Quarles threw his arm toward the stack. “Goddamn it, somebody dug up Harmon Presley, and the whole Williams family, and — don’t you want to find out who took them bodies?”
“If you need any help — ”
“Shit!”
For many seconds Quarles stood with his hands on his hips, looking off into the low forest of marble tombstones. Almost gently, Goss said at last, “You’re gonna take it?”
Quarles nodded but did not speak.
“Well, good luck to you.” Goss walked out of the cemetery. A moment later the sound of his car engine came to them.
Richard Crawford came over shaking his head. “Goss is a pussy,” he
said.
“Shut up,” Quarles told him. Then, contradicting himself: “What does it look like?”
Crawford cast a despairing glance behind him. “Looks like twelve coffins, Sheriff. None of them very old. All of them open and empty.”
“Let’s see the graves.”
The graves were the final insult to reason. None had been disturbed, seemingly, by shovel or pick; and yet all were sunken. Quarles squatted beside the Williams family plot. The three graves, each neatly covered in gravel that had until last week been piled in teardrop-shaped mounds, were sagging. “Look to you like somebody moved that gravel, dug up the graves, then put the gravel back?”
“And kept it that clean?” Crawford asked.
“What does the caretaker say?”
“He didn’t know about it until you called him. He swears everything was okay last night when he made his rounds and locked up, and then again this morning when he opened the gates.”
“When was that?”
“He locked up at about eight. It’s supposed to be sunset, but — ”
“Yeah, he was late. This morning?”
“Around eight again. And he walked right down this path here. He couldn’t hardly have missed the coffins.”
“No.”
“Anyhow, there’s no funeral scheduled here the next couple of days. He worked some on the back lots, over the hill there, he says, cuttin’ the weeds along the borders, tossin’ the dead flowers. He was back in his house — ”
“Over on Toombs Street.”
“Yeah, east of the cemetery on Toombs, when you called him. He came down and looked and went back and called you, and that’s it.”
“You know where the toolshed is?”
“Sure.”
“Go and bring back a couple of shovels.”
“What if it’s locked?”
“Then walk over to Toombs Street and get the caretaker to open it for you. But it won’t be locked.”
“Two shovels.”
“Right.”
“Don’t you need a court order or somethin’ — ”
“I don’t need anything, Dick. I’m the goddamned sheriff.”
Crawford was gone for a quarter of an hour. Quarles paced around the graves, squinted up into the sky: a deep blue sky, the true sky of fall. Evening was coming on, the wind fingering the red and yellow leaves of the maples. The cemetery had them spaced at even intervals, trees of an age, all about twenty-five feet tall; between them stood poplars and firs. The maples were always the first trees to turn, but it seemed to Quarles they were turning early this year, the leaves looking more hectic and feverish than bright.
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