Fred sat motionless on the steps, back against the banister. “So what is there to do?” he asked. He watched the road.
The woman grimaced and rested the back of her head against the swing chain. “Ain’t nothing,” she said. “My boys both worked the tunnel. Muckers. Six months they was in there. And this is where it landed ’em. Ed in yonder will last a few more days maybe. Raymond here, he’s got a couple months if he don’t take the pneumonia.” She patted Raymond’s arm, and he stared unblinking at something across the road. “He knows it, don’t need to hide anything from him. Ain’t that right, Raymond?”
Raymond nodded his head and stared.
“This hit Ed worse than Raymond, for some reason,” the woman continued. “Ain’t no sense to that part, that I can tell, because Raymond was a more sickly youngun than his brother. I hear tell they’s a few fellows been up there right on. Not many, but a few. They’re sick to death but they’re still yet working. Others didn’t last a month. Shack rousters go to rouse them, find them dead in their beds.”
“Why do they keep drilling this tunnel?” Dietrich asked.
She looked at Fred. “Where’s this fellow from? He talks funny.”
“You aren’t supposed to talk,” Fred said to him. Then, “He’s a visitor from Germany.”
“Oh,” she said. “Well, I don’t know about Germany, but here they’ll do anything if they’s money in it. Take this here silica. That’s what that doctor in there calls it. Ain’t sure what that is myself. What I do know is my boys claim they couldn’t hardly get their breath inside there. That right, Raymond?”
“Burns eyes,” Raymond wheezed. “Burns nose.”
The woman said, “Them supervisors know it. They wear masks when they go in, but they ain’t give my boys none.”
“Can’t see for the dust,” said Raymond. “White in there. They want the white. For something. What we haul out, they keep.”
His mother said, “My boys told me when the men come out of there after a shift, everybody’s white as chalk. Even the colored boys is white.”
“How many dead so far?” Fred asked.
“We don’t rightly know. Somebody falls out, they hire on a new one.”
“From where?”
Raymond lifted his hand as though to wave, then dropped it in his lap.
“Walk up yonder. They’re camped out in the bottom. Waiting. Somebody dies, they take their place.”
Dietrich started. “Don’t they know what is happening?”
“Hell yes. Means they don’t wait long for a job.”
“But why in the name of God—”
Raymond had fixed his deathstare on him. “People got to eat. Don’t they eat in Germany?”
“But if they know they will die—” Dietrich began, and stopped, understanding suddenly that the man in front of him would have gone back himself if he had the strength, if there was nothing else. And there was nothing else.
Fred stood and walked to the end of the porch. In the field beyond, black men hunkered in bunches or walked about aimlessly. The grind of a bluesy harmonica sounded faintly.
“Yes,” Fred said. “They’ll make what they can. Send it south. Buys food while it lasts.”
“Won’t send much,” the woman said. “Twenty-five cents a day, but they’re paying scrip up there. Running a commissary, and that don’t leave much to send to your people. They bring in bootleg liquor too, on the weekend. Get them boys drunk on Saturday night, call in the sheriff and keep them in jail until Monday morning, then take the fine out of their pay. Tell you what they’re making up there. Making a bed and beans and cornbread from the cook tent. That’s what they’re making.”
“Least they ain’t no burden,” Raymond said. “Not like me and Ed.”
“No, now.” His mother patted his arm, pulled him closer.
“Wisht we’d got took with this a way far off,” said Raymond. “Mommy wouldn’t work herself to death like she is.”
“I couldn’t stand if you was way far off,” she said.
The harmonica speeded up. Raymond coughed, leaned over, and spat. “Boy ain’t gone in yet,” he said. “Nobody gone in can spare breath for a mouth organ.”
Fred turned. “Let’s take a walk up there.”
“You watch out,” the woman said. “Them shack rousters is mean as striped-ass snakes. And they don’t let white people in the colored camp, or the other way around.”
Fred stood close to Dietrich. “What you say? Pretend like we’re looking for work.”
Dietrich took a deep breath. “All right,” he said.
“Only don’t you say a damn word, you hear?”
“Yes.”
Fred stood for a moment, thinking. Then he went into the house. Dietrich sat on the porch steps and mopped the sweat from his forehead with the red bandanna Doc Booker had provided. Raymond and his mother stayed on the swing, she rocking back and forth and cradling him as if he were a child, despairing and yet somehow satisfied.
Fred returned. “Doc’s going to see some other people up Gauley a few miles from here that worked the tunnel and need a doctor. So he’s giving us twenty-four hours.” He held up the sack of provisions they’d brought. “Doc and Earl will eat where they’re going, so we get the ham biscuits. Let’s go.”
He went down the steps.
“Go?” Things were moving very fast. “Twenty-four hours? What are you thinking we shall do for twenty-four hours?”
Fred stood in the road with his fists on his hips. “You want to stay with Doc and Earl?”
“No.”
“Then come on. And keep your trap shut.”
The men in the field watched them come on, looked away, watched, looked away. They were Negroes who sprawled on the ground beside the morning’s dying cookfires. Wandered aimlessly. Or peeked over the shoulders of other men hoarding crackedgray playing cards, men who flipped the dog-eared cardcorners with ragged fingernails, holding their hands close beneath their chins, fanning themselves with clutches of diamonds and clubs that might win them an extra leaf or twig. Two white men with lank brown hair huddled apart in the shade of a rock on the riverbank and passed the stub of a cigarette back and forth. They watched the Negroes intently, despising them, and longing to join them.
Dietrich followed Fred, who moved toward three men in the shade of a willow near the river’s edge. One was the musician they’d heard. When he saw them, he gave the shiny harmonica a quick, loving rub and slipped it into his shirt pocket.
Fred said, “You waiting to get on up there?”
The man with the hidden harmonica said, “You think of any other reason to wait under this tree?”
“How you get on?” Fred asked.
“Go up there and ask for McCloud.”
“McCloud,” Fred said.
“He the butt kicker,” another man said. “White man who keeps order. Take your name, come down here and call you when they need somebody. But you got to take your turn.”
“Then you go in the tunnel?” Fred asked. “What’s it like in that tunnel?”
They stared at him. They stared at Dietrich.
“Who’s this white man?” said the one with the harmonica.
Dietrich opened his mouth, remembered, and strangled what he was about to say with a vague “Aaaah.”
“My buddy,” said Fred. “Can’t talk. Not real smart, you know. I look after him.”
“How come?”
“Just feel sorry for him,” said Fred.
“Yeah?” said the man with the harmonica.
“Well,” said Fred, “he come in handy when we go asking. You know. Send him to white people’s door with a poke and he stand there holding it open and looking pitiful. They put something in the poke. I stay back. You know.”
The men looked away, which meant Go on and join us. They sat, and Fred opened the faded cotton sack.
“Ham biscuit?” he said. “Cigarettes?”
They leaned forward as Fred took the biscuits from the sack.
“Where you get them?”
“Woman in Boomer fix them for me this morning.”
“Yeah. What you do for her?”
“Said it was best loving she had in a year. Didn’t even charge.”
Dietrich felt as though he had never seen Fred before. Fred handed out biscuits laced with brown salty ham. The men took this offering as though it were sacred, turned the biscuits over, touched the crusty edges, sniffed the meat.
“Damn,” one said.
“Mmm. Good woman,” said another.
“I always been lucky,” said Fred.
When they had eaten, they lay on their backs amid the weeds. The sun was directly above them and they drew close to one another to share the shade. Beyond their tree a greenscum backwater choked with weeds washed back from the river. Dragonflies, spindly black sticks with invisible wings, flitted over the stagnant pool.
“Snake doctors,” Fred said, and pointed at them.
Dietrich tried to ask What by opening his eyes wide.
“He is dumb, ain’t he,” one man said.
Fred showed him dandelion weeds topped by clumps of bubbly spittle. “Snake doctor sign. Means they’s a sick snake around here. Sickness everywhere.”
Dietrich tested the wet white mound with the tip of a finger. It was like human spittle, and yet too thick. He didn’t trust it.
Fred was looking off toward the river. “You sure they ain’t nothing for a man to do here without waiting?” Turned back suddenly. “How you earn them beans?”
“Aw, man. You want to know?”
“I want to know. Ham biscuits gone, we need beans too.”
They rubbed their heads, poked the dirt with sticks.
“You want to know.”
“I said, ain’t I.”
“Ghost shacks up there. Hire you to work them. Nobody does it but once though. So you might get on.”
“Ghost shacks?”
“Mens that’s dying, they keep them in there. Feed them a little. Clean up after them. When they dead, put them on a truck and haul them off somewhere.”
“Where?”
Shrug. “Up the hill. Don’t ask, man.”
Fred said, “This a strange job, I do believe.”
“You right there.”
But they would say nothing more. Fred passed around cigarettes. They smoked and then, dulled by the heat, lay down to rest.
Through the whole of that day Dietrich did not believe he slept. At all times he knew where he was, flat on his back in American weeds and white heat, ants crawling beneath his collar and cuffs. He dug at them and turned his head back and forth. Then he did not move. He dreamed. He saw unspeakable visions. Father walking naked through the house in the Wangenheimstraße. The house aflame and a sister or brother screaming from every window. Himself standing in Unter den Linden calling out in a language no one could understand while he was jostled and spat on by passersby. Snake doctor spittle. Above him loomed the smothering green dome of the willow melting in the heat. He saw it always.
And yet it was sleep. When he woke, he did not know he had rested.
But it was suddenly dark and Fred was shaking him into groggy wakefulness. He shoved a plate of food in Dietrich’s hands and said in his ear, “Eat, but remember—don’t talk.”
Dietrich tried to get his bearings and gestured Spoon.
“Use the corn pone,” Fred whispered, and showed him how to rake clumps of beans into his mouth with torn bits of stale cornbread. The others watched closely.
“Pitiful,” said one, and the others said, “Mmm-mm.”
“He strong in the shoulders?”
“Strong,” Fred said. “Man can move.”
“He be all right,” they said. “They love him in that tunnel.”
Fred looked at Dietrich and smiled, touched his hand. “You hear?” he said, but when he saw Dietrich’s inclination to answer, pinched the skin of his wrist. “You can lift anything, can’t you man?”
Dietrich choked the dry cornbread and beans into an Aaaaah.
So they trudged upriver to the Negro camp. Dietrich kept behind Fred, tried to pretend he wasn’t even there. Fred seemed to like it that way. They came to a rough stand of fence topped by barbed wire. A large white man, bare to the waist, sat on a stool at a gate, two chins resting on his hairy chest, rifle propped against his thigh.
“Yeah?” he said.
“They told us ask for McCloud,” Fred said.
The man didn’t move. “Got a waiting list. And this is Negro camp only.”
“That’s all right,” Fred said. “We want to work while we wait.”
The man curled his lip. “What kind of work you think—”
“We heard tell,” Fred said, his voice low and deliberate, “you need some cleaning and some hauling.”
“That right,” said the man.
Fred gestured toward Dietrich. “This boy here is white but dumb. I look after him. He strong. Do anything you ask and not say a word.”
“Yeah? And what about you?”
“What you think?” Fred said.
He looked them over a moment, then turned and gestured toward a group of white men gathered in front of a makeshift wooden structure. “Call McCloud!” he yelled.
They passed through the ragged gate. Dietrich noticed he was not the only white man in the Negro camp, but the only white man with no authority. They followed kerosene lanterns, festive orange in the bluedark, to a row of wood shacks, where shovels and moldering buckets were thrust into their hands. They were warned to tie bandannas across their face.
The smell hit as soon they stepped inside. They scraped feces, satin in the lantern light, onto their shovels and slipped the dark globs into their pails. Dietrich retched and turned away to grasp the wall but grabbed Fred instead, who had also bolted for the door. They held on to each other and breathed through the open doorway for a moment. Then, knowing what to expect, they returned to their labor. And that was the easy part.
Because the waste seemed living matter, but it had issued from dead men.
They left the bodies on their rough pine bunks draped with stained tattered cotton while they scraped with their shovels, then threw buckets of water against the walls of the windowless shacks. Finally they grasped corpses by the wrist. These came flopping from the bunks with such an unexpected heaviness that Fred toppled to the floor. Dietrich helped him up. The leg of Fred’s overalls was stained dark where he fell.
Outside a truck with a wood-frame bed had drawn up and the driver sat smoking in the open cab door. His face was hidden by shadow. Perhaps, Dietrich thought, the man had no features at all. He didn’t move as they carried the corpses between them, one at a time, and laid them in the back of the truck. There were five bodies in all, three rigid and unyielding, two that sagged when lifted as though they were turning to liquid, so that Dietrich feared they would pour from their clothes.
“That it?” said a voice from the truck cab as they hoisted the last one. It flopped onto its stomach, one dead hand flung palm-up across its buttocks.
“Yes sir,” said Fred.
The truck door slammed, the engine rumbled and caught, and the wheels skewed with a scraping noise in the dry dirt.
“Come on,” Fred said and ran after the truck.
Dietrich was too startled to protest and thought only of keeping up so as not to be left alone. They just managed to clamber aboard as the truck, bouncing along the rutted dirt track, picked up speed, and they fell forward, their fall broken by the nest of corpses. Dietrich lay still, trying to catch his breath despite the rank smell, his cheek pressed against the dusty hair of the dead Negro beneath him.
“Where are we going?” he gasped.
“What they do with them.” Fred moved close to him. “I have to know what they do with them.”
“And then?”
Fred turned away and hid his face in his sleeve. The truck paused, then pulled with a final lurch onto pavement and picked up speed, its engine whinin
g with relief. Dietrich twisted around to stare up at a blurred wedge of moon moving away from black shreds of cloud. The truck was soon climbing steeply, gears slipping and then catching with a low grind. Tentatively Dietrich moved his hand along the cheekbone of the dead man who cushioned him, and over to his forehead. He drew an invisible cross on the man’s forehead with the tip of his finger and whispered a prayer. Felt this to be ludicrously inadequate, and yet Dietrich reached for another of the dead to bless. Instead he touched living flesh.
“It’s me,” Fred said.
Dietrich’s hand rested at the base of Fred’s neck, glad of the warmth. “Where do you think we are going?” he said.
“Bury them someplace out of the way, I guess. In the woods. I find out where, maybe I can report it.” He raised up and peered between the wood slats. Then he said, “Way we turned, I’d say we’re going up the big mountain behind the camp. Same mountain they’re drilling the tunnel through. Only the one paved road up here.”
“Take care the driver doesn’t see you.”
Fred craned his neck to look into the cab, then lay back down. “No problem. He’s got a flask in there. Big worry may be he doesn’t take us over the side of the mountain here. Doc says it’s cliffs. Straight down.”
And that was no small concern. For the man drove fast and twice edged onto dirt before skittering back to the pavement. Dietrich fished for his glasses in the pocket of his shirt and wrapped them across his face. Beyond the wooden fence he glimpsed silver flashes of river far far below.
“Best not to look,” said Fred.
Rather than fear, it was peace Dietrich felt as he stared into that abyss. To plummet to his death while riding upon a pile of murdered corpses (it was quite clear they were dealing with nothing less than murder) seemed either so absurd as to be impossible, or fate. Either prospect was strangely comforting. He relaxed back upon his unquiet bed, felt anonymous bone slip beneath skin thick as rubber each time the truck lurched around a bend in the road.
They turned at last up a sharply climbing dirt track. Atop their shifting load, they slid to the back of the truck, feet pressed to the gate. Then the truck leveled abruptly, lurched and relaxed, its engine cut. They pitched forward, sprawled across the dead.
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