The Line That Held Us

by David Joy

  The keys were in the ignition and he pedaled down the clutch with his left boot, then turned the key. The starter whined before the engine caught. The tractor rumbled drowsily, then climbed into a faster groan as Dwayne adjusted the choke to a quickened idle. He toyed with the hydraulic levers till he figured out how to raise the loader and bale spear, and when he understood the controls, he put the tractor in gear and eased forward. The spear climbed until it was aimed at Darl’s chest. The tractor skulked forward, and when he was close, Dwayne dropped the tractor into neutral, cut the engine, and feathered the brake so the machine inched ahead, the spear easing into Darl’s sternum as the tires rolled.

  Dwayne did not wish to impale him and the tractor spear did not break skin. Instead, it pushed into Darl’s chest, the hay cushioning his back, so that he now wheezed for the slightest breaths. There was no sound but that of the engine ticking as it cooled and the asthmatic moans from Darl’s lips. Dwayne climbed off the tractor and kicked at the front tire with his boot. He looked at Darl then and sniffed the air, a mix of gasoline and exhaust now filling the barn.

  “Now we can talk,” Dwayne said.

  Darl had to save up two or three shallow breaths to speak, and when he did, his words were barely more than a whisper. “Are you going to kill me?”

  “Yes,” Dwayne said matter-of-factly, as if giving an answer to whether or not he was hungry.

  Darl started to cry, hardly any breath reaching him now so that he choked as if he were drowning. Dwayne shook his head. He was absolutely disgusted by how a man could sit there with no fight left in him, sit there crying, helpless as a fucking child. There was no room in this world for the weak. He crossed the few feet between them and turned his face close to Darl’s so that he could feel each exhale from Darl’s mouth against his cheek.

  “You know what I’ve seen,” Dwayne said. “You know I know you were there and that you and somebody else carried something out of the woods that night. What I want to know is what was in that tarp?” Darl didn’t speak. Dwayne pressed his finger hard into Darl’s forehead and roared. “Answer me! Was that my brother?”

  “Yes,” Darl whimpered.

  “Who was that with you?”

  Again Darl Moody did not speak.

  “You’re going to tell me or I’m going to take them farrier pliers over there and start taking pieces off of you like a goddamned science experiment. I think you’ll be surprised at how much a man can lose without dying. You’ll pass out, but you’ll come to. You’ll wake up and I’ll keep going.”

  Darl sobbed and blubbered something indiscernible.

  “What was that?” Dwayne asked.

  Darl wept harder, and with every bit of air he had, he groaned his best friend’s name, “Calvin Hooper.”

  Dwayne nodded his head and backed away from Darl’s face. He stepped toward the tractor and rested his right foot on the front tire. “Did y’all bury him or just dump him off in the woods someplace?”

  “Buried,” Darl said.

  “And did Calvin Hooper help you bury him?”

  Darl nodded his head and tried to swallow a mouth filled with spittle and blood.

  That was all Dwayne needed to know. He didn’t much care how it happened, whether it was an accident or on purpose. Either way, his brother was dead, and either way two men had put him in the ground. Two men were what it all boiled down to now. Two men who both knew the same thing. One was no better than the other. Either could take him to the grave. Whittling that number down would make things so much easier.

  Dwayne Brewer took his brother’s knife from his pocket and unfolded the blade. He checked the sharpness against his thumb, the edge shining sheer white in that tiny bit of lamplight. He came forward fast and in one clean motion ran that blade lengthwise against Darl Moody’s neck, his throat opening like lips. Blood shot out in long lines, rushing down the front of him, painting his shirt and that bale spear and his pants, and spilling onto the dirt floor. Darl was choking and his feet stamped violently at the puddle he made. Despite the way movies made things look easy, there was no grace in dying. He was pissing and shitting himself, the sound of him searching for air gurgling like a clogged drain.

  Dwayne stood there staring into Darl’s eyes like he was watching the nighttime sky. As a child, he’d been fascinated by the fact that stars could die and there’d been so many nights he and his brother had lain in the woods behind their house, watching through gaps in the trees, waiting for the lights to burn out above them. In all those nights, they did not see one. The stars held on to their shining, all those years, all those years, but in a few short seconds Darl Moody’s eyes did not.

  ELEVEN

  Every night since they buried Carol Brewer in that back pasture, Calvin Hooper woke up every ten minutes from dreams that always ended the same. Sometimes he was on a trackhoe at a jobsite or he could be standing in the batter’s box at a softball game or maybe looking through the kitchen window as he washed dishes, but something would catch his attention out of the corner of his eye, and as he turned to look he’d see patrol cars with deputies stepping out and he knew why they were there, and they were too close for him to run, and that certainty, that overwhelming certainty, would shake him awake and he’d choke for air, his throat dry and aching.

  Once again, he couldn’t sleep. He was halfway through a bottle of Pepto-Bismol, lying flat on his back above the sheets, smoking a cigarette with a glass ashtray resting on his stomach, when he heard a creak from the front porch. The bedroom window was open, and as he peered out, he saw nothing across the moonlit yard. Over the past few weeks an animal had been coming onto the porch at night to steal kibble from a bowl left out for a stray cat. Calvin figured that’s what it was and he went to the front door to run off the scavenger.

  Through the storm door, he couldn’t see anything on the porch, and as he looked to each side the glare on the glass made it impossible to see into the darkened corners. He flicked on the porch light and stepped outside and that quick he saw someone standing to his right. He tried to turn back for the shotgun he kept by the front door, but there was already a pistol aimed between his eyes.

  “Don’t do that,” the man said. “You go on and have a seat over there in that swing.”

  Calvin froze. His heart pounded and he held his breath until he was dizzy. For a split second he looked Dwayne Brewer in the eye, then focused on the end of the pistol Dwayne held, the gun high enough that Calvin could see straight down the barrel. Dwayne was a good foot taller so that Calvin had no choice but to stare upward to meet his eyes.

  “I said have a seat,” Dwayne repeated, motioning with the pistol to a wooden porch swing at Calvin’s back.

  His legs were locked and when he did not move Dwayne came forward and slapped the pistol against the side of Calvin’s face, his left brow ablaze in the wake. Brass gnats swarmed his vision. With both hands cupped to his eye, Calvin stumbled back to the swing and Dwayne came closer with his aim unwavering.

  “You know who I am?”

  Calvin nodded. The side of his eye throbbed and when he moved his hand a trickle of blood ran beneath his beard along his jawline, dripped from his chin onto his bare thigh.

  “Then you know why I’m here.”

  Calvin stared blankly and did not say a word. All of a sudden, he wasn’t feeling sick or tired. His mind was wired like he’d snorted a line of some marvelous drug.

  “I’ve been by Darl’s and we can take a ride over there to see what came of that, or you can save us some time and take me right to where y’all buried my brother.”

  “What did you do to Darl?”

  “I don’t think you’re a dumb man, Calvin.”

  “What happened to Darl?”

  “He got what was coming to him, just as you’ll find yours,” Dwayne Brewer said. His voice was deep and calm, a definitiveness in his words that left little room for wonder. �
��An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. Ain’t that what they say? You know what he did and he paid what he owed.”

  “And what about me?”

  “I ain’t quite figured that out yet.” There was a strange look on Dwayne’s face, a slight curve at one corner of his mouth like he found amusement in what he was thinking. He stepped a bit closer, to where the porch light fastened by the door was right over his shoulder, his figure now a menacing silhouette. “An eye for an eye, Calvin. The rule don’t change.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “You’re going to take me to where the two of y’all buried my brother, and you’re going to give him back to me so that I can make it right.”

  “How?”

  “How ain’t none of your goddamn business. He was my brother,” Dwayne said. He growled that word and Calvin understood what they’d taken and what that meant. “He was the last bit of family I’ll ever have, and I aim to make it right.”

  “And what then?”

  “You’ll find out what happened to Darl soon enough, and you already know why it had to be that way. It had to be that way.” He stressed that sentence as if it were destiny. “As for you, your time will come soon enough. And until then, your burden won’t be light.”

  Dwayne Brewer had a strange way of speaking, what he meant slowly coming to rest in Calvin’s mind so that the sheer weight of it made the world spin so much faster. Calvin’s vision closed in and for a second he had to clench his thighs as tight as he could to keep his head from swimming. Everyone is scared of dying, but having it held over you like some unflinching shadow, a darkness neither growing nor receding, always there, that was enough to drive a man mad.

  “A man’s mind is its own kind of hell,” Dwayne said.

  Calvin watched, vacuous and silent.

  “Enough time passes and I figure you might wind up doing it yourself,” Dwayne said. “Save me the trouble. If not, we’ll find some other way. Now let’s get on with it.”

  “I need to put some clothes on,” Calvin said. All he wore was a pair of plaid boxer shorts.

  “I think all you’ll be needing are them boots right there.” Dwayne nodded to a pair of muddy logging boots by the door. He stooped to grab them, never once taking the pistol off of Calvin. He tossed the boots over so that their soles clopped against the porch planks. “And a shovel.”

  “There’s one in the back of my truck.”

  “All right, then,” Dwayne said.

  Calvin Hooper pulled the boots onto his feet, the insides cool and sticky against his skin. He tightened the leather shoestrings in their eyelets and laced them back and forth around the speed hooks, pulling them taut, and wrapping them once around his ankles before whipping each boot into a double knot. When he stood from the swing, Dwayne Brewer motioned down the stairs and Calvin walked into the yard with his head hung low. The night air was cold around him but its temperature was no longer comforting. Now it was something else altogether, something utterly lonesome. He had no words to describe what he felt inside.

  * * *

  • • •

  THROUGH THE FIELD, Calvin Hooper walked at gunpoint, the nighttime sounds quieting around them as if silence were their passenger. Calvin’s legs were slick and itchy with dew from grass that rose waist-high in the first field. The cattle followed them, expecting to be fed, then gathered at the gate into the middle field and bawled as the two men went farther into the dark.

  The night smelled wet with hay and manure, a sweet, earthy tang that was so familiar Calvin barely noticed it at all. They crossed over the small hill in the middle field and dropped down to the last pasture: a long, narrow pass edged on one side by creek and cut at hard angles into the tree lines. The trackhoe was right where he and Darl had left it, its mechanical arm turned away from the scab of fresh red clay.

  Dwayne Brewer had carried the shovel from the house to keep Calvin from doing anything stupid, and when Calvin stopped where the dirt crumbled into the grass Dwayne threw the shovel at his feet.

  “Dig,” Dwayne said.

  “It’d be faster if you let me on that machine.”

  “Yeah, it would,” Dwayne said. “And you might tear into my brother’s body and I’d have to cut you up into pieces.”

  Calvin bent over and took the shovel from the ground. He didn’t have any gloves and the wooden handle was slick with dew. He knew his callused hands would be blistered in minutes, but he stabbed the spade into the ground, pressed it deeper with his boot, then loosened and tossed the first shovelful of clay from the grave. The ground was bony with rocks and roots, but the trackhoe had broken most of that up so digging out the refilled hole was much easier than it would’ve been the first time.

  Mud slopped his shins and calves, splotches of clay climbing to his thighs, as he worked his way around and dug a foot down, then two, then three. Muscles burned and sweat ran over him so that if he stopped digging, even for a minute, the night air froze him solid. Calvin imagined he was somewhere close to halfway when his body started to give. He speared the shovel into the ground so that it stood on its own, then sat at the edge of the hole, his boxers and hamstrings slick with dirt.

  “I need a cigarette,” Calvin said, without turning to look to where Dwayne hovered in shadow. He heard something pat the ground behind him and as he looked over his shoulder he saw a soft pack of Doral 100s with a book of matches shoved behind the cellophane. Calvin slipped a cigarette out of the pack and struck a match.

  “Them right there belong to the man you’re digging up.”

  Calvin stuck the matches back where he’d found them and set the pack on the ground. There was a surreal calmness over him now, his mind slowing as his body neared exhaustion. “You know it was an accident,” Calvin said.

  Dwayne didn’t answer. The only sound was a screech owl shrieking every now and again from somewhere far in the timbers.

  “Darl didn’t mean to shoot your brother, Dwayne. He was out there in the woods trying to kill a deer, and he saw what he thought was a pig rooting around.”

  “Thought he was a pig, huh?”

  Calvin wasn’t sure how to answer.

  “I think you ought to get back in that hole,” Dwayne said.

  Calvin dropped back into the grave and rolled his head in circles, lifting his shoulders to try and work the tightness from his muscles. The cigarette dangled from his lips and he ran his fingers through his hair, his palms raw and burning. There was still a good ways to go and Calvin tried to remember how Carol Brewer’s body had lain at the bottom so that he could be sure not to dig into him. He hadn’t wanted to look at all, but for a second he had. His mind flashed back to that image he couldn’t stop seeing and in that memory his thoughts quaked with an unsettling volatility. Scared to let his mind wander, he gripped the shovel’s handle, speared into the ground, and dug deeper because that was easier, and in a few minutes his mind dissolved into the work.

  Carol Brewer’s left boot found air first. When he saw it, Calvin rested the shovel against the side of the grave and fell to his knees. His hands were bloody and busted and he clawed the soft clay with his fingers and tossed it aside. For hours there’d been the repetitive chomp of the shovel biting into the ground, the soft tumble as what was dug was thrown from the hole. But now there was silence and Calvin saw a shadow grow over his shoulder.

  The smell of rot mixed with that of turned soil, but it was not nearly as overwhelming as he expected. Carol Brewer’s boots and legs came out of the dirt. His camouflage pants were caked red with mud. When Calvin reached Carol’s waist, he saw skin darkened an unnatural hue lightened only by the color of clay. The body was still stiff, the same as it was when they buried him, the ground having preserved him in some way, slowing what would have come quickly if left aboveground. At the head, the ground was sticky with some sort of fluid, only that dark birthmark offering any
proof at all that this was Sissy Brewer. Calvin stopped once the body was exposed and he gaped at the dark figure above him.

  “Even a dog you’d wrap in a blanket,” Dwayne said, disgusted. Calvin knew he was right, that perhaps this was the most shameful part: He and Darl hadn’t even treated Carol Brewer as human.

  Dwayne passed down into the grave a sheet he’d taken from the trunk of his car and told Calvin to wrap it under his brother’s body. Slowly Calvin worked Carol’s feet then his legs then his torso and arms until the thin cotton sheet was completely beneath the body, the fabric lit blue by moon like a puddle of water. When it was done, Calvin pulled the corners together and tied them into a knot, and lying on his stomach, Dwayne took this thing from him in his fist, with his other hand still clenching his pistol. He grunted above and the body rose. The ground was slopped and soft now and Calvin leaned against the grave’s wall until Dwayne had his brother somewhere he could not see from where he stood.

  His arms and shoulders were stiff as wrung cloth and the arches of his feet were sore from kicking down onto the shovel’s step. All over he was slicked with mud and sweat. Taking the shovel in his hands, he tossed it out of the hole and readied himself to climb out. He kicked up the wall as he jumped and caught the edge at his chest and pushed up with all his might, his face kissing the ground. Something hammered into the back of his head at that moment, the sound of metal clanking against skull, and his eyes lit white as if by a camera’s flash, a sweeping blackness thereafter.

  Calvin crumbled into the grave, his arms spread wide, with one leg tucked beneath him. The ground was cold and wet against his back, but he did not feel it. He saw and heard nothing. It would be daylight before he woke frozen to the bone. For the first time in days, he slept.

  TWELVE

  Dwayne Brewer carried his brother’s body in a knotted sheet over his shoulder as if he was toting a sack of potatoes. And though he was freakishly strong, the weight sanded him down so that as he traversed a small hill and dropped over the other side he had to stop and rest with his hands on his knees until he’d caught his breath.