David Markson - The Ballad of Dingus Magee

Three weeks passed before Magee replied, admitting to an obscure relationship with Dilinghaus and authorizing them to send the child, after which the sheriff had to write a second time asking for the fare, and in the interim the boy was being kept in the local jail. But the jailer was a confirmed bachelor, and the sheriff had lost his own childless wife a decade before. They were practical men; after two days the pair of them had marched into the nearest brothel and picked the first whore in sight and arrested her.

She was relatively young, and she did not really seem to mind, but when three more weeks elapsed before Magee next told them to wait, that he would be there eventually in person, she finally said, “Look, it ain’t living in a cell, and it ain’t the kid neither, even though he does crap up his bottom faster’n I can keep count. But I’ve got six of my own up to Vicksburg, you understand? And there’s my old drunk dad to support on top of that.”

So they waited another day and then they solved that too, simply by moving the jailer himself into a cell and giving the woman the rear room in which he normally lived. (The room had a private entrance, and the neighboring madam cooperated by shunting certain of her clients through a back alley from the brothel. Meanwhile the woman had contrived a cradle by filling a drawer from the sheriff’s desk with unginned cotton, and when necessary she simply replaced the drawer in the desk, removing the one above it for ventilation.) As a matter of fact they had become fixtures in the place, whore and orphan both, long before Magee finally did arrive. “It almost seems a shame,” the woman commented at least once, “to go and hand him off to that cousin. A child needs a female’s kind of tender looking after.”

But the cousin felt differently. “I’m his blood kin,” he said, “and I reckon I can do better for him than any prosty.”

“Yair,” the sheriff said, “and you been right anxious to git around to it, seeing as how it were June when I wrote and now it’s October.”

“I been busy,” the cousin said.

He had been, and he continued to be, although five or six years would pass before Dingus understood at what. Where the cousin took him in San Antonio was an impoverished district not far from the ruins of the Alamo. The cousin was in his early thirties then, rheumy and myopic and of solitary habits (a neighboring half breed woman with some dozen youngsters of her own gave him advice or small aid with Dingus when needed). He never sent the boy to school, but he did take time to teach him to read out of an ancient anatomy text, and cope with the rudiments of arithmetic. It developed that the cousin had actually used the text in the study of medicine at one time, and certain of his acquaintances were practicing doctors in fact — several remote, secretive men who would knock on occasion, although never in daylight, and who never entered the shabby house either but would speak briefly and clandestinely with the cousin outside. That was when the cousin would be busy, those same nights. It would take almost until dawn.

And then one evening the cousin took him along. Dingus was eight then, and Magee did not explain. He said merely, “I reckon it’s time you learned to make somewhat of a living.” Dingus followed him for almost two hours along a road which crossed the length of the town before extending into the barren countryside beyond, gradually diminishing to become little more than tamped sand. Then they left the road to enter a once-cultivated but now abandoned field, and at a lightning-gutted hollow tree the cousin told him to wait while he boosted himself up and rooted around within the shell. When the cousin descended again he had two shovels with him, and a bulky folded canvas, apparently once part of the sleeve of a Conestoga wagon, but still he failed to elaborate. “Come on,” was all he said.

But it was not much farther now, and Dingus had come to realize where they were anyway, had recognized the location if only out of recollected hearsay description and so began to comprehend vaguely some of the reasons for the furtiveness of their mission also, if not yet its specific purpose. When they entered the cemetery itself he began to get frightened. He said so. “Lissen,” the cousin told him, “there ain’t no physical thing on this earth a dead man can do, except wait for the worms to gnaw at him. So in a way we’re doing him a kindness by preventing that. Get to digging, now. The dirt’s easy enough, since it were jest put back this morning.”

He was right about the latter part of it. They were finished in less than an hour, although the return trip consumed considerably more time than had the journey out. Dingus waited in an alley while the cousin delivered the improvised sack at the doctor’s rear door. The cousin gave him a dollar, which he said was one third of what he himself was paid.

He went along regularly after that, perhaps once a week and doing more and more of the work as time passed (although he was restricted to digging only; he had always been small for his age, and even at ten could still barely lift, let alone carry). “But you can be grateful you’re learning a trade,” the cousin said, “especially since I been right upset, ‘times, remembering what a unpromising start you had in life, and I weren’t sure a unwedded feller like myself could bring you up Christian and respectable.”

“I appreciate it,” Dingus said.

It was around then that it struck him to ask Magee about his mother also, but Magee could tell him nothing. “I never even heard tell your pa had got spliced,” he said. “But you take a incompetent chap who slips a ace out’n his sleeve without he remembers it’s the same ace of diamonds he’s already got in his hand, I don’t reckon he’ll hold onto a wife any longer’n he’s about to hold onto his money. Or his life. But anyways, I done my best to be a mother to you, likewise.”

“I appreciate that too,” Dingus said.

But then the cousin died. It was rain, an unseasonal downpour which lasted two full nights and those ironically the first two in the cousin’s life on which he had ever had consecutive employment. Dingus had caught a mild sniffle himself. Magee gave him nine dollars cash, and the engraved watch that had belonged to Dilinghaus, and the address of another cousin — a woman this time, in Galveston. “The nine dollars will get you there, I reckon,” Magee said. “But what about burying you?” Dingus asked him. “Now lissen here,” the cousin said, “what’s the use of having a profession in this life if’n you can’t calculate all the merits of it? There’s a good one hundred graves out there with nothing but empty coffins in ‘em, ain’t there? And you’re the sole individual after me knows the whereabouts of the most recent thirty or forty, ain’t you?”

“Oh,” Dingus said, “sure now, I jest weren’t myself fer a minute, is all.”

“Well, I forgive you,” the cousin said, “since it’s probably jest your grief over me has got you a little abstracted. I reckon a tyke would feel stricken at that, watching the demise of a cousin who give him everything he’s got in this world.”

“I appreciate it all,” Dingus told him.

That was about four o’clock on a Tuesday afternoon. The cousin died at sundown, and Dingus borrowed a neighbor’s mule to remove him to the cemetery. He gave the matter considerable thought, finally committing the remains beneath the headstone of someone named McNutt, which seemed the closest he could come to Magee.

Then, when he was about to lead the mule homeward again, it stumbled into a freshly dug grave. Dingus could not get the animal out, nor was there much point in trying, since it had broken a foreleg. He brained it with his shovel. He told the neighbor about the mishap the next morning. “How much cash inheritance you got?” the neighbor asked.