William Gay: Twilight

What?

All this mess. Granville Sutter killin that family back in the Harrikin and slippin through all them laws to Alabama or wherever. Crazy undertakers buryin men and womentogether and such. Did you ever hear of such crazy goins-on?

Tyler said he never had.

And the son of a bitch still alive in a hospital for lunatics in Memphis. Had a dead girl with him, I heard. Least they finally got her in the ground so’s she can rest. Who knows what all he’s done ain’t come to light yet. Son of a bich layin up eatin three meals a day and sleepin good at night. He ever gets out of that asylum and comes back around here, somebody’ll put him out of his misery. I may do it myself if my health holds up. If I’m gone these boys here will. We diggin up Martha to see if anything’s wrong. We supposed to let the state do it, but the way I see it, it ain’t none of the state’s business.

Tyler turned to look. All these latterday Lazaruses, all these tawdry homemade resurrections. One of the young men fixed him with a cold cat’s look and turned his face and spat then went back to work. Tyler turned to go but the old man knotted his fingers in the fabric of Tyler’s coatsleeve and stayed him.

I think we owe em that, don’t you? All we can do for em. I know I’d hate to meet em up yonder and have to explain why they was done so shoddy. Ain’t that the way you think?

What Tyler really thought was that the dead were so absolutely beyond anything the living might do for them it was almost past comprehension and he had no commitment to meet anyone anywhere. He feared that beyond the quilted gray satin of the undertaker’s keep there was only a world of mystery that bypassed the comprehension of men and did not even take them into consideration. A world of utter darkness and the profoundest of silences.

Yet he said none of this. The old man carried death on his breath like a harbinger of the grave and his grip on Tyler’sarm was fierce and clawlike.

Yes, Tyler said, that’s the way I always thought.

Yet if there was only the three score and ten allotted that seemed to him no small thing and it seemed not unfair. He’d used up little of his and the world was wide and its possibilities infinite and all it took to get there was a highway that was free for the taking.

On the slope the two men had ceased their labors and stood peering into the earth. Pa? one of them called.

Tyler turned away from the sudden pain in the old man’s eyes and pulled gently from his grasp and went on to the crossroads. He thought of the old man looking into a face he’d resigned himself to never seeing again in this world. He set the suitcase in a dry spot and seated himself on it and took off one of his new shoes and sat contemplatively rubbing his heel until faroff down the blacktop there was the sound of tires on macadam then the car itself wavering and ephemeral then gaining solidity in a rush.

A black Buick Roadmaster, he didn’t even have to thumb it. It stopped and sat idling and he took up the suitcase and peered through the windowglass and a curious trick of the light behind him rendered the glass opaque and mirrored so that instead of the driver of the car he saw only his own reflection leaning toward itself. In this altered light it was a new Tyler, older, perhaps wiser, more versed in the reckless ways of a reckless world, as if in some way he had hitched a ride with a more sinister self, ten years down the line.

He opened the door and got in.