Ron Rash - Burning Bright

What kind of answer to give that question is as far beyond me as the moon up above. For a few moments it’s beyond Wesley as well but soon enough he opens his mouth, working up some words like you’d work up a good spit of tobacco.

“We didn’t know there to be a law against it,” Wesley says, which is about the stupidest thing he could have come up with.

The old man chuckles.

“They’s several, and you’re going to be learning all of them soon as I get the sheriff up here.”

I’m thinking to make a run for it before that, take my chances with the dog and the old man’s aim if he decides to shoot, because to my way of thinking time in the jailhouse would be worse than anything that dog or old man could do to me.

“You ain’t needing to call the sheriff,” Wesley says.

Wesley steps out of the two-foot hole we’ve dug, gets up closer to the old man. The dog growls deep down in its throat, a sound that says don’t wander no closer unless you want to limp out of this graveyard. Wesley pays the dog some mind and doesn’t go any nearer.

“Why is that?” the old man says. “What you offering to make me think I don’t need to call the law?”

“I got a ten-dollar bill in my wallet that has your name on it,” Wesley says, and I almost laugh at the sass of him. We have a shotgun leveled at us and Wesley’s trying to lowball the fellow.

“You got to do better than that,” the old man says.

“Twenty then,” Wesley says. “God’s truth that’s all the money I got on me.”

The old man ponders the offer a moment.

“Give me the money,” he says.

Wesley gets his billfold out, tilts it so the old man can’t see nothing but the twenty he pulls out. He reaches the bill to the old man.

“You can’t tell nobody about this,” Wesley says. “None but us three knows a thing of it.”

“Who am I going to spread it to?” the old man says. “In case you’d not noticed, my neighbors ain’t much for conversing.”

The old man looks the twenty over careful, like he’s figuring it to be counterfeit. Then he folds the bill and puts it in his front pocket.

“Course you could double that easy enough,” Wesley says, “not do a thing more than let us dig here a while longer.”

The old man takes in Wesley’s offer but doesn’t commit either way.

“What are you all grubbing for anyways,” he says, “buried treasure?”

“Just Civil War things, buckles and such,” Wesley says. “No money in it, just kind of a sentimental thing. My great-great-granddaddy fought Confederate. I’ve always been one to honor them that come before me.”

“By robbing their graves,” the old man says. “That’s some real honoring you’re doing.”

“I’m wearing what they can’t no longer wear, bringing it out of the ground to the here and now. Look here,” Wesley says. He unknots the bedsheet and hands the buckle to the old man. “I’ll polish it up real good and wear it proud, wear it not just for my great-great-grand-daddy but all them that fought for a noble cause.”

I’ve never even seen a politician lie better, because Wesley lays all of that out there slick, figuring the old man has no knowing of the buckle’s worth. And that seemed a likely enough thing since I hadn’t the least notion myself till Wesley showed me the prices.

The old man fetches a flashlight from his coveralls. He lays its light out on the stone. “North Carolina Sixty-fourth,” he reads off the stone. “My folks sided Union,” the old man says, “in this very county. Lots of people don’t bother to know that anymore, but there was as many in these mountains fought Union as Confederate. The Sixty-fourth done a lot of meanness in this county back then. They’d shoot a unarmed man and wasn’t above whipping women. My grandma told me all about it. One of them women they whipped was her own momma. I read up on it some later. That’s how come me to know it was the Sixty-fourth.”

The old man clicks off his flashlight and stuffs it in his pocket and pulls out an old-timey watch, the kind with a chain on it. He pops it open and reads the hands by moonlight.

“Two-thirty,” he says. “You fellows go ahead and dig him up. The way I figure it, his soul’s a lot deeper, all the way down in hell.”

“Give him his twenty dollars,” Wesley says to me.

I only have sixteen and am about to say so when the old man tells me he don’t want my money.

“I’ll take enough pleasure just in watching you dig this Hutchinson fellow up. He might have been the one what stropped my great-grandma.”

The old man steps back a few feet and perches his backside on a flat-topped stone next to where we’re digging. The shotgun’s settled in the crook of his arm.

“You ain’t needing for that shotgun to be nosed in our direction,” Wesley says. “Them things can go off by accident sometimes.”

The old man keeps the gun barrel where it is.

“I don’t think I’ve heard the truth walk your lips yet,” he tells Wesley. “I’ll trust you better with it pointed your way.”

We start digging again, getting more crowded up to each other as the hole deepens, but leastways we don’t have to worry about noise anymore. We’re a good four foot in when Wesley stops and leans his back against the side of the hole.

“Can’t do no more,” he says, and it takes him three breaths to get just the four words out. “Done something to my arm.”

Sure you did, I’m thinking, but when I look at him I can see he’s hurting. He’s heaving hard and shedding sweat like it’s a July noon.

The old man gets off his perch to check out Wesley as well.

“You look to have had the starch took out of you,” the old man says, but Wesley makes no bother to answer him, just closes his eyes and leans harder against the grave’s side.

“You want to get out,” I say to him. “It might help to breathe some fresher air.”

“No,” he says, opening his eyes some, and I know the why of that answer. He’s not getting out until he’s looked inside the coffin we’re rooting up.

Maybe it’s because Lieutenant Hutchinson was buried in May instead of January, but for whatever reason he looks to have got the full six feet. The hole’s up to my neck and I still haven’t touched wood.

The old man’s still there above me, craning his own wrinkly face over the hole like he’s peering down a well.

“You ain’t much of a talker, are you?” he says to me. “Or is it just your buddy don’t give you a word edgewise.”

“No,” I say, throwing a shovelful of dirt out of the hole.

It’s getting harder now after five hours of digging and shucking it out. My back’s hurting and my arms feel made of syrup.

“Which no you siding with?” the old man says.

“No, I don’t talk much.”

“You wanting one of them buckles to wear or you just along for the pleasure of flinging dirt all night?”

“Just here to dig,” I answer, glad when he don’t say nothing more. I got little enough get-go left to spend it gabbing.

I lift the pickax again and I hit something so solid it almost jars the handle from my hands. That jarring goes up my arms and back down my spine bones like I touched an electric fence. I’m figuring it to be a big rock I’ll have to dig out before I can get to the coffin. The thought of tussling with a rock makes me so tired I just want to lay down and quit.

“What is it?” the old man says, and Wesley opens his eyes, watches me take the shovel and scrape dirt to get a better look.

But it’s no rock. It’s a coffin, a coffin made of cast iron. Wesley crunches up nearer the wall so I can get more dirt out, and what I’m thinking is whoever had to tote that coffin had a time of it, because Momma’s cast-iron cooking stove wouldn’t lift lighter, and it took four grown men to move that stove from one side of the kitchen to the other.