Handling Sin

by Malone, Michael

  to him, I never did anything that wasn’t easy. So, listen to me,

  Raleigh, don’t call me brave. It makes me want to spit.” She turned

  her head to look out the thick beveled window as the airplane tilted

  its wings to circle back to earth. Bright lines of rose-red light now

  streamed through the darkness like the pennants of an army marching across the sky.

  “The sun’s coming up,” Victoria said. “I’ve traveled far and wide

  for fifty years, and it always surprises me.”

  Chapter 35

  In Which Raleigh Inherits a Fortune “MORNING, MR. HAYES. You okay? Kaiser Bill’s right here, just like he told you on the phone. Don’t fret your mind.” The large black man stood, just inside the flight arrivals gate, puffing on the pipe that hung below his white Teutonic mustache. Dressed in a blue work shirt with a red tie that must have been a Christmas present—for it had “HO HO HO” in small letters all over it—the Forbes Building janitor towered above the bleary passengers who filed past him into the overlit echoing corridor.

  Raleigh let his aunt and Mingo walk ahead. Then he took Mr. Jenkins’s arm in order to speak to him; the arm was a heavy, helpless weight, and, embarrassed, he couldn’t make himself let go of it. So arm in arm, the two walked into the airport lobby.

  “Thank you, Bill, I really appreciate this. And I appreciate your brother-in-law’s letting us hire his hearse. I hadn’t remembered you had relatives in the funeral business. I was simply planning to ask if I could rent your station wagon. But this will work out much better, because frankly I’ve been a little worried about the airline officials.”

  “Un hunh.…So how are you, you doing all right? I tried passing the word to you, how you could of come on home sooner. Those old troubles we had? ’Spect you know, it all got fixed. She’s back, good as new.”

  Once again, Raleigh had no idea what Kaiser Bill Jenkins was talking about. This time he said so. “Bill, what are you talking about? Who’s back?”

  “Your secretary.”

  “Betty Hemans?”

  “Naw, she’s gone. Least, she’s going, soon’s you show up, is what

  she says. Looks like you messed up bad with that lady. She took a hate to you. Naw, I’m talking ’bout the other one. She’s back. The one you thought you’d, you know….” Jenkins suddenly went limp, flopping his head to the side and sticking his tongue out.

  “Ah, Bill, excuse me. Let me just put my aunt in a cab, then we’ll go to the baggage room.”

  Mingo didn’t really see why they couldn’t have let Vera and Aura know when their plane was arriving, instead of Raleigh’s hiring Kaiser Bill Jenkins to pick them up. And although Vicky Anna had claimed that if she hadn’t minded riding around the world alone in oxcarts, rickshaws, junks, mail planes, and donkey wagons, she certainly wouldn’t mind taking a cab alone to Thermopylae—still, Mingo hated to see an elderly single woman go off by herself with a strange taxi driver at 5:30 in the morning.

  However, Raleigh said he had his reasons. And even if his friend hadn’t had his reasons, Mingo’s philosophy was, as he reminded himself, “If you’re going to stick with a person, then stick with a person,” and if that person didn’t want his father taken to Baggett Mortuary, where all the other dead white Thermopyleans went; if that person preferred the services of the Negro funeral parlor, Thomason & Jenkins, well, that person undoubtedly had his reasons for that too, and ought to be stuck by. Of course, probably Ernie Baggett would have sent more people than one single, handicapped, elderly relative to collect the remains, so that the mourners would not have been obliged to load the casket into the hearse themselves. On the other hand, Ernie Baggett might not have wanted his hearse packed with suitcases, a steamer trunk, and a bass fiddle, on top of the coffin. Further on the other hand, Thomason & Jenkins did have a very handsome white Cadillac hearse, lined with white tufted satin (much grander than the Baggett model), and its stereo radio speakers were of a very high quality, which Earley Hayes certainly would have appreciated, loving music as he did. Further still on the other hand, Ernie Baggett had always been sort of fussbudgety about his funerals, always handing you special pens with his name on them, and making you sign forms he took one by one out of vinyl folders with his name on them; always rearranging the flowers in their sponge bases; even measuring the distance between the folding chairs with a snap-out yardstick. So maybe Ernie would have come up with some finicky objections to Raleigh’s burial plans. Maybe he wouldn’t have wanted to drive his hearse off Hillston Road up onto a dirt lane that wasn’t as wide as the tires, causing shrub branches to whack the sides like those brushes at an automatic car wash; causing the casket to bounce around as if Earley Hayes had changed his mind and was trying to get out. Ernie Baggett might have simply declined to associate his mortuary with what apparently (despite Mingo’s advice) was going to be a funeral in the woods, with no guests to speak of, and therefore nobody to appreciate what Ernie was always calling “that little something extra, the Baggett touch.”

  While Mingo, wedged in the back, between the old trunk and the gleaming new coffin, was mentally sticking by Raleigh, in the front of the hearse, Kaiser Bill was analyzing the risks of doing the same. It was not the hundred dollars the insurance agent had offered him by phone from New Orleans that had brought the Kaiser to Triangle airport at five in the morning on Holy Saturday, a vacation day when he might have been sleeping late. It was rather his continuing conviction that the Man Upstairs had assigned him Raleigh Hayes to watch over; just as He’d assigned Gabriel to help out Joshua, and other angels to help out Daniel. The Kaiser therefore needed to know precisely how hot a fiery furnace Hayes had walked into this time—after God had already saved him once by bringing his young secretary back to life.

  Holding tight to the steering wheel with his one good hand, as the long white car lurched over ruts and around trees up the hill, to Knoll Pond, Bill pushed his chewing gum to the side of his teeth, and said to Raleigh, “You catch up with Jubal Rogers?”

  “Yes. Yes, I did.”

  “He in the coffin?”

  “Good God, no! I told you, Bill, my father passed away.”

  “Un hunh.…Who’s in the trunk?”

  “What? The trunk?” Raleigh put on his prescription sunglasses in order to look at the driver. The pink sky had now caught fire and the rising sun blazed through thick-grown pines and oaks atop the knoll. “You mean in the back? Mingo Sheffield, a friend of mine.”

  Politesse was not only the Kaiser’s natural inclination, it was a safety screen against actionable knowledge. He rephrased his question. “We fixing to bury that old black trunk too?”

  “Why in the world should we do that? We’re just going to bury my father. Wait. I think this is where the house was. Can you stop here?”

  “Sure can.”

  Hayes jumped out of the hearse and began beating with a stick at the high weeds.

  “He’s pretty upset,” said Mingo Sheffield to Jenkins. The two men stood beside the car door, watching the insurance agent, his arms extended as if he were walking a tightrope, put one foot carefully in front of the other—counting his steps aloud as he tramped toward a bramble hedge. Then he pulled pieces of paper from his pocket and stood there studying them.

  Now, however far the Kaiser believed Hayes to have gone in his obviously persistent messing with trouble, he did not believe him capable of murdering his own father. Consequently, he’d concluded as soon as he saw it, that there was somebody else’s body in the gleaming rosewood casket; and if not more bodies in the steamer trunk, then more stolen money—all of which Hayes planned to bury out here in the middle of nowhere. It was therefore a shock to hear the unmistakable sincerity in the fat white man’s sigh as he repeated, “Boy, Raleigh’s so upset about his daddy’s dying, I’m not sure he hasn’t lost his mind a little bit. Listen, Kaiser Bill, maybe we ought to try to stop him. I mean, gosh, why is he burying Earley out here in the woods, when they’v
e got such a nice family plot just waiting right there at the cemetery in Thermopylae?”

  “What’s he doing now?” asked Bill, squinting his large brown eyes into the sun to follow Hayes as he suddenly spun to the left, ran forward, then dropped to his hands and knees in the underbrush.

  “Well, I guess he thinks he’s looking for some buried treasure from the Civil War. That’s what he was talking about on the plane.”

  “That so? Un hunh.” Jenkins stood still, thoughtfully stroking his white mustache, while he watched the insurance man march in one direction, then wheel about and march in another, then stride over the knoll toward the little ramshackle cabin that was sheltered in willow trees beside the red muddy fishing pond. A new message was coming down to the custodian from the Man Above. Or a new interpretation: Hayes was still obviously a lost soul; but maybe not willfully lost; maybe not a shrewd criminal leading a double life. Maybe Hayes was simply touched in the head. Like that old white fellow that had died years back, the one that used to rob women’s clotheslines, that Elwood Bragg. Maybe all those things he’d heard that the police were so confused about—like pouring paint on the store clothes and robbing cannonballs off the monument—maybe Hayes had done them all for no more reason than Elwood Bragg had stolen girdles. What after all would any sane person want with that big ugly statue belonging to the library that he’d seen Hayes hiding in his office? This new interpretation in no way mitigated the Kaiser’s responsibility. Quite the reverse. He now looked in Sheffield’s eyes for the first time. “You a friend of his?”

  “I’m his best friend,” the fat man replied, breaking into a trot as Raleigh stumbled back over the top of the knoll and yelled, “Mingo, would you mind bringing me that sword out of the trunk?”

  “We don’t want to let him mess with swords,” Bill called after the fat man. “But les’ don’t rile him either. Best thing to do is coax him on home easy like.”

  It was not the fact that Raleigh was looking for treasure, but the fact that he was looking for treasure and burying his father at the same time and in the same place that was bothering Mingo Sheffield. Mingo would not have been as wholly Southern as he was had he discounted out of hand (despite Victoria’s opinion that he and Raleigh were idiots to believe rubbish like the Goodrich Hayes gold story) the possibility of Confederate treasure being buried at Knoll Pond, or, indeed, under any and every old tree below the Mason-Dixon Line. Like a great many people in Thermopylae—all of whose ancestors had been dirt-poor scratch farmers without a single silver candlestick to their names—Mingo had from time to time lamented the fortune his family had lost in the War, and had wondered if some brave Sheffield woman might not have slipped out in the moonlight to save her sterling from Sherman’s whirlwind. He had no idea who such a courageous, small-waisted, fiery-eyed creature might have been—and it appeared that Gates Hayes would not be tracing his genealogy to find out for him anytime soon—but Mingo imagined her as a perfect wife to that gallant officer, St. Hilary George Stonewall Phillippe Sheffield—or something like that—who was always curling his upper lip as he said, “Sirs, we shall never surrender,” and was always gracefully expiring without dropping the banner of the Stars and Bars. Where St. Hilary and his beloved might have lived, and hidden their fortune, Mingo had no idea. He didn’t even know where all of his grandparents had lived. Raleigh was much luckier; at least he knew where to look, for the Hayeses must have somehow managed to keep the old homestead right in the family all these generations.

  Mingo had no idea that there actually had been a Sheffield who had fought for the South, a Private Zachery Sheffield—Zinc to his friends—who had, one June evening in 1864 on Kennesaw Mountain in Georgia, actually had a conversation with a Colonel Goodrich Hale Hayes. But their talk hadn’t been about gold. And Zinc had borne not the slightest resemblance to the imaginary chevalier, St. Hilary George.

  Goodrich Hale Hayes, a longhaired, full-bearded, thin-nosed dandy, and a glory-crazed suicidal maniac, had stopped that hot evening to scrape his knee-high boot against the log on which Zinc Sheffield was sitting, barefooted, in a homemade coat (dyed a butternut yellow with walnut hulls) and a patched pair of pants pulled off a dead gunner from Tennessee. Zinc was eating a cup of watery cornmeal, and with his finger he was following the words in a Phunny Fellow comic book that he’d pasted inside Satan’s Bait—a tract the chaplain had handed out.

  “I like to see a man preparing his soul for battle,” said Hayes on this occasion. “Sadly, soldier, most of your companions are not so inclined.” And he pointed at the collection of thin rags lying about the camp. He was right. Not a one looked to be preparing his soul. Some were playing chuck-a-luck with homemade dice; some were betting on a louse race; some were toasting grains of corn picked up off roads where Yankees had been carelessly feeding their horses. One was singing “Annie Laurie.” One was writing a letter with blackberry juice. One was standing in tears holding a twenty-pound cannonball attached to a leg chain, and wearing a sign that said, “I STOLE A PIG.” (Colonel Hayes was a strict enforcer of the rules.) And others of the Rebels were only scratching fleas or swatting flies or shaking with malaria or lamenting feet lost to frostbite or arms lost to gangrene.

  “Where are you from, private?” asked Colonel Hayes, and when he learned that Sheffield came from a North Carolina town not many miles from Thermopylae, and had served in Tennessee as well as Georgia, he condescended to ask him how he liked the adventuring life of a soldier.

  “I cain’t to-reckly say, sir. I seen a rite smart of the world since I left home,” replied Zinc, licking with his finger the last grains of meal from the tin cup. “I guess that’s all right. But this army vittles of yourn is woss than horse pittle. Dyerear turned loose on me with the Georgia Shits well nigh going on a week now.”

  “…I see. Well, good luck to you tomorrow, private. The Cause is in God’s hands.” And Hayes strode away, his long curls brushing his shoulders, the filigreed sword he called Orion, the Hunter, brushing his thigh.

  After Atlanta, Private Zachery Sheffield left the Cause in God’s hands, and walked home to North Carolina to harvest his tobacco. He got there long before (now General) G. H. Hayes’s hard-pressed party arrived in Thermopylae with the wagonload of Dahlonega bullion. Despite subsequent rumors to that effect, it had never occurred to General Hayes to embezzle the gold which he secretly (and he assumed, temporarily) buried near the cabin of his wife’s cook, Jess. He simply wanted to keep it safe while he went to do something important before proceeding to Virginia. And so he spent his last afternoon at home with his wife and children, off by himself devising his biblical code, and hiding it under a brick in Jess’s hearth. Then he galloped away with his high boots and his sword Orion to beat the hell out of Sherman at the Battle of Bentonville. It certainly never occurred to Goodrich Hayes that a minié ball could blow a hole through his handsome head in the very first minutes of that engagement. If he’d been the kind of man capable of conceiving such a possibility, he probably never would have been wealthy enough to build Knoll Pond House by the time he was twenty-five, or promoted enough to become a general by the time he was twenty-eight, or crazy enough to have high-jumped his horse over a gully full of Yankees by the time he was twenty-nine.

  It also never occurred to him to tell his wife there were four dozen three-pound bars of gold planted in a wooden crate six feet under a patch of sumac near her willow trees. Consequently, when Kilpatrick’s Federal cavalry questioned her on the matter, she honestly had nothing to tell them. Nor could anything they did (killing her last prize chickens, stealing her jewelry, smashing her piano and pulling out its wires to cook their coffee on), not even vandalizing her house and then burning it down, persuade Mrs. Hayes to confess what she didn’t know. Finally, they decided that the local gold story was just another false rumor, and off they rode, kitchen matches in their saddle bags to set fire to Thermopylae. Mrs. Hayes and her children moved into what was left of the town, and with the money she made by selling to Caroli
na Crockery the clay pits where her husband’s hot springs had once flowed, she built a big house on East Main Street.

  But for the next hundred years the gold story was passed down, mangled this way or that—Hayes had robbed the entire Confederate Treasury, slaves had murdered Hayes and stolen the gold, Mrs. Hayes had murdered Hayes and stolen the gold, Mrs. Hayes had murdered the slaves, Yankees had stolen the gold—and occasionally someone would even go out to Knoll Pond and poke around with a stick. Occasionally, while he was fishing or reading on the pond bank, Earley Hayes would hear the gold seekers wandering about, snapping branches and raking aside leaves back up in the woods near the ruins of his ancestor’s house.

  “All right, rest a minute, Mingo. Climb out. I’ll take another turn.” Raleigh Hayes jumped waist-deep into the hole, and began immediately to shovel out the dark red clay. Sheffield scrambled over the side and lay down panting beside Bill Jenkins, who leaned against the willow tree with his pipe and his pint bottle of cherry brandy. “You want a sip?” he asked the fat man.

  “Oh boy, thank you, yes,” Mingo gasped, accepting the bottle. “I just wish I had a Coca-Cola. I’m hot as fire, and it’s not even eight o’clock.”

  “Digging’s warm work,” the Kaiser commiserated. Because of his withered arm, he’d been able to help only by sympathizing with Sheffield, whose loyal devotion to a crazy person like Hayes—carried even to the extent of helping the poor soul dig a big hole in the ground—he found worthy of admiration.

  Raleigh Hayes was certain the message was real. He was certain as soon as he’d found the dead cedar tree exactly 140 feet from the half-buried gray millstone, as soon as he’d suddenly remembered having seen (engraved in Italianate script on the scrolled hilt of the sword his father had used to slit open the trunk), the word Orion, as soon as he’d walked four feet west from the middle of the willow trees, held out the sword in his extended right arm, looked down and seen that not only was the ground there noticeably lower than its surroundings, but a large stone was sticking out of the earth, into which an “H” had been so deeply scratched that it was still visible. He was certain he was in the right place. He was certain the gold was there.