Matthew Null: Allegheny Front

“Yeah. I seen that.”

“You cousins?”

The smile drifted from Carter’s face. “I let you off the hook and now you throw it in my face.” Carter took off his broad-brimmed felt hat, which was greening with moisture. With his bald spot showing, he’d aged ten years in a breath. He used the hat to point at the barn, where the bedraggled eagle was still shedding wing feathers. “Throw it in front of God and everybody.”

Sull scratched the back of his hand, near a russet birthmark. “Nobody comes out here.”

“I ask you to do a simple thing and you lie to me. Lie right into the damn phone,” Carter said, slapping his thigh in cadence each time he said lie.

“I told you not to worry about it.”

“Yeah?”

“I’ll say it again. Don’t worry about it. I know what I done.”

“Well, I’m kindly worried, seeing how it’s kindly my ass you put on the line. You want me to write you up? You really want to go to Anthem? That’s a federal judge. That local boy shit don’t cut it up there. He don’t care who you’re related to. He’s never even pissed on grass.”

Eric had wanted to be a game warden, but he had mild epilepsy, weak eyesight, and couldn’t even pass the pistol test. Sull hated to think about it. His own son. Because of the epilepsy, Eric couldn’t get his CDL, though a hack-and-mend doctor had offered to fix the papers for two hundred dollars. Sull slammed the office door, hard enough to crack the frosted glass.

“I’m not allowed to protect what I got? Just let anything walk in here and take it?”

Carter made a show of sighing. “I don’t make the rules, I just enforce them. I took an oath.”

“Horseshit.”

“I take it serious. You don’t believe it, but I do.”

“You took it real serious when I slid you some of that deer across the table last year. I believe you said it was pretty good.”

Carter blushed. “I didn’t know where it come from. We was drinking.”

“You knew I shot it out of season. Believe you pardoned me in front of the whole table.”

“You know what the trouble is? I let the piddly shit slide, cause I’m from here, I know how it is. Been doing it twenty-six year now. But you know what? That just bites you on the ass. You’re good to people and they go bragging on what they get over on you. But I know the tricks. They don’t get shit over on me. Swear to God, you all think you own the place.”

Sull opened his arms. “We do own the place. Look around you. This is ours,” he said, tapping his sternum with two worn fingers the color of boot leather. “When that judge has come and gone we’ll be here holding the bag. We’re on our own out here, bud.”

“Aw, quit poor-mouthing.”

“They get the timber and the coal and the votes and they wash their hands of us. Law, law, law. Nobody holds them to the law.”

“That’s not how it is,” Carter said, working himself up to his full six feet. He put his hat back on. “That’s not how it is at all.”

Sull didn’t hear him. “Where’s the justice in that? Did you put your hand on the Bible and swear to bother your own people?”

“Look—”

“No, you look. All your eyes behold is God’s and He give it to us so we can scratch our way through. I’m doing it. Damn it, you know I’m right.”

Carter shook his head. “The law is the law. Today. You got to take it down today.”

Boots cocked on the rail, Sull waited an hour. Finally, he traded his shotgun for a spade and hefted the burlap sack. It was bound with baling twine.

Cresting the hill, he happened upon the family cemetery among the trees, where oaks gave way to sullen pines. They had quit the place a generation back because of the encroaching woods and a newfound desire among the more religious ones to rest in churchyards, which would guarantee, they said, the Mercers would be parsed from the heathens in the final reckoning. The Indian tribes knew better than to tend this marginal soil, but these white people had been here a long time, the first to drag up new ground from the Alleghenies. The Mercers stopped here, finally, because it was the first place no one made them leave. Their history was tangible as stone. They could put it in their mouths and break their teeth bloody on it. Sull could kneel and mumble his broken teeth onto the ground.

The gravestones listed toward the horizon and whispered archaic demise: hydrophobia and crib death, scarlatina and Spanish flu. A lone obelisk rose, a bony finger marking the path to heaven. The stones were badly in need of mending, cleft by ice and water and eaten through with the soft persistent teeth of lichen. Some names were beyond weathered, illegible now, never again to bear witness or be muttered aloud. Sull felt guilty for this, yet could think of no solution for the matter of time. Those from the last century lacked any alphabet but the nicks and wormtrails of old letters. Many children, three to an adult. Sull paused to run his fingers over vanishing names of great-aunts and uncles who had returned to the earth. Grievous times. Three gone in 1918, two in 1920, the year between one of respite. Sull remembered a skipping rhyme his mother used to hum around the house: I had a little bird, her name was Enza, I opened up the window, and in-flew-Enza!

He pushed aside thick vines that unfurled from above and drooped late bunches of wild grape the size of single-ought buck. His father wanted to be buried here, but Sull let his half-sisters make the final decision; he reasoned that women brought men into the world and should have the final say in their going. Sull’s father should rest in the Anthem Cemetery, they said, beside their mother, India, his second wife. In this way, Sull let himself defy his father’s wish. It had galled him for a decade now. He promised to return on Memorial Day. Marion would bring flowers. Carter, too. Maybe Reed and Miranda, show them where their people came from.

Sull walked a few paces downhill from the cemetery, figuring this as good a spot as any. His spade rasped in the cold ground. Two feet down, splinters of ice sparkled in the dirt. He turned a good-sized furrow and planted the sack with the eagle in it. Ten pounds of flesh? Twelve? A greasy sweat broke on his brow, and he swabbed it with a bandanna. His father trapped foxes and shot raptors back when you could make a dollar that way, trading pelts and filling bounties for the state. Whole families took part in the commerce, with stiff piles of foxes, hawks, eagles — eagles! — owls, coyotes, raccoons, bears, and bobcats on the fly-swarmed roadside. Government men and fur traders came every other week with a fat wad of bills that bought many a man groceries, even through the Depression, and left in gore-slaked buckboard wagons, the planks leathery with dry blood. Scrawny children clapped and danced and bought oranges at the store. A thick red fox pelt brought the best money, hide stretched like a six-pointed star across the barn siding, a nail in each black-socked foot, the tail, the limp nose, for everyone up and down the road to see. That and the meager ground and the CCC kept them alive.

The hole could use another foot or dogs might get at it. He set the eagle aside and bit into the earth once again. There he turned up a narrow mineral, the color of sun-warmed cream.

He held it to his eye. No rock, no arrowhead. It was a finger-bone, and there another. Sull turned the bone in his hand. The tiny gravestone had rolled downhill, but here was a child’s grave he had opened, the grave of an aunt or uncle or cousin. A shiver climbed him. He stuffed the eagle into the hole with his boot and covered it, packing the mound with harsh slaps of the spade. His throat dry as cinders. He tried not to cry, and failed.

At home that night, he read the Old Testament’s black verses and the red of the New. What does God think of a man who defiles his family’s ground? Would Sull be punished? When he thought of God, he imagined a workingman with callused hands, an eye for detail, and a firm, unyielding love that demanded much. Sull wondered if God thought of him at all.