Joe Lansdale - A Fine Dark Line

I pointed my light at the pages on the wall.

“What is that about?” I asked.

“Daddy sticks them on the wall, underlines them, makes me and Mama learn ’em. I had to stand in front of them and memorize them.”

“You never told me that.”

“Would you tell that on purpose? I wouldn’t tell it now, but there it is.”

“Tell me that’s paint on the cross.”

“It’s mostly animal blood.”

“Why? . . . Mostly?”

“He butchered a chicken, hog, anything, he smeared the blood on there, let it dry. Didn’t never clean it.”

“Why?”

“Thought of it as a sacrifice to the Lord. You know, thanks for this here fryin’ hen. This here batch of pork chops. One time, when he whipped me across the back with his belt, he wiped the blood off and rubbed it on that cross, and he didn’t even say thanks. I wasn’t even as good as a fryin’ hen. He said, ‘And here’s the blood of a sinner.’ So it ain’t all animal blood.”

“Tell me what religion he is so I can stay away from it.”

“He says there ain’t none of the religions doin’ what they’re supposed to do. What they’re supposed to do is what he does.”

“I don’t think they’d keep too many in church.”

“Havin’ to hear his preachin’ might run ’em off too,” Richard said. “It’s mostly about dyin’ and goin’ to hell and burnin’ up and stuff. And how we have to serve penance all the time.”

“What’s penance?”

“Kind of sufferin’ and hurtin’ for what you believe, to show how much you believe it.”

I waved the light around. On one side, in a stall, was the mule. Its eyes in the glow of the flashlight looked like huge black buttons. On the other side, on wooden racks, shiny and clean with filing and oiling, hung all manner of tools. Scythe. Axe. Hoe. Posthole diggers. A shovel.

Richard stroked the old mule’s nose. “Hello, boy. How are you? He worked this mule hard as anyone. I ought to let it out, but it wouldn’t have nowhere to go. It’d just come back, or die somewhere.”

“I’m afraid your parents will see us,” I said.

“Yeah,” Richard said. He gave the mule a last pat, took the shovel from the rack on the other side.

We pulled the doors back, slid the bolt across them as silently as possible, headed for the woods where the dog was buried.

———

LEAVES SNAPPED under our feet, and in the woods it was dark. The flashlight batteries became faint, and I had to shake the flashlight to make it work. Finally it quit altogether.

“Hopalong might ride a horse good,” Richard said, “but he makes a shitty flashlight.”

Due to lack of a flashlight, the grave was hard to find. But finally the trail, which was little more than a single footpath, widened and the trees broke, and there in the moonlight, under the sky, was the mound of dirt where Butch lay.

“I’ll do the diggin’,” Richard said.

“Suits me.”

“Figured it would.”

“I feel like someone in one of those monster movies,” I said. “Ones with Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff. The one where they were grave robbers or ghouls.”

“You be Boris, and I’ll be Bela,” Richard said, and he started to dig.

“I wonder what Nub is doing?” I said.

“Chasin’ coons and night birds would be my guess. Or squattin’ behind a bush.”

The dirt was not too hard, but it seemed to me Richard had to dig deeper than before. I suppose that feeling had to do with standing in the middle of the woods while you watched your friend dig up a dead dog in the moonlight.

Before Richard reached the dog, the smell reached us. It was so strong I thought I was going to lose my dinner, but after a moment I became accustomed enough to it to stand it, long as I held one hand over my mouth and nose and didn’t breathe too deeply.

“There he is,” Richard said, scraping the shovel along the length of the grave.

Sure enough. There in the moonlight was the head. No eye visible, because it was gone. Richard cleared the length of the body and you could see it all now, from tip of nose to tip of tail. Head and body had shrunk, as if it were a package from which items had been removed. The dog’s snout had shrunk up so much, the teeth it contained seemed bared.

“It sure stinks,” Richard said.

“How are you going to haul it?”

“Drag it on the blanket.”

“Richard. I think you ought to just cover Butch up and let’s get your bike and go back to the house. All this is going to do is make him angry.”

“He will be mad, won’t he?” Richard grinned big and the moonlight danced off his teeth.

Richard slammed the shovel into the ground next to the dog’s grave, and there was the sound of dirt being parted, then something being cut.

“What was that?” I asked.

Richard pulled the shovel up, went to work digging. After a moment he lifted out something on the shovel. At first it looked like a mound of dirt, but when he dropped it onto the ground, most of the sticky wet dirt shook off of it, and we both knew what it was.

A human skull.

———

WE LOOKED CLOSELY at the skull. The shovel had split the top of it and gone deep. On the side of the skull was a hole, and the far side was shattered, bone poked out as if the brain had turned rabid and kicked its way free.

“That looks way a shotgun blast looks,” Richard said.

Richard dug more, soon uncovered a rib cage from which clung red clay. Then some other bones. And two skulls. He dug around and came up with a bone that he pulled free of some roots, said, “This here bone goes in the neck, the spine. See the way that bone is? That’s from a cut went into it.”

“You don’t know that for sure.”

“I’ve seen plenty of animals butchered. I don’t think people are all that different.”

“We’ve found an old graveyard,” I said.

Richard dug down again, came up with another skull. When he dropped it on the ground the dirt shook loose and I could see the teeth. One of the front teeth was silver.

I had a sinking feeling.

“My God,” I said.

“What?”

I told him about Rosy Mae telling me that Margret Wood had a silver tooth.

“We’ve found her head, Stanley. The one the ghost has been looking for.”

Richard poked around with the shovel some more, unearthed an arm. Meat was still on the bones.

“Jesus,” he said. “This’n is recent.”

Richard poked around some more, uncovered the rest of the body, and finally the head, which was cut free of it, tucked under the corpse’s right arm as if it were a joke. Though much of the flesh was gone, there was enough on the face and enough long black hair there to make out it had been a woman.

“That there is the Mexican woman Daddy hired to do some house- and fieldwork. I think her name was Normaleen. She didn’t speak much English. Daddy told me she run off. It was maybe a month before we seen him buryin’ Butch out here.”

Richard sat down as if someone had kicked his legs out from under him. “I think these here are all people worked for my daddy. I think . . .”

“I think so too,” I said.

“He said they quit or run off or he fired ’em. God, Stanley, he was murderin’ them people.”

“I wasn’t murderin’.”

Richard jumped to his feet and I spun. Mr. Chapman was standing at the mouth of the trail, where the woods cleared, and he was holding the scythe I had seen on the rack. He had his overalls on with no shirt. He had his shoes on without socks. His hair was like an explosion of dark sprouts. The wind moved it like it was alive. His face was sallow and wrinkled; I couldn’t imagine the handsome man that had once been there, the one Rosy talked about.

I realized that Richard’s remarks about his father being able to hear a dog run across the yard had not been exaggerated. Mr. Chapman had heard us, gone out to the barn to get the scythe, and followed us.