Joe Lansdale - A Fine Dark Line

“Never heard of him.”

“He’s quite the big dog at the high school. He’s a year ahead of me. He’s handsome. On the football team. Very popular. Of course, I hate football. Even if I want to be a cheerleader.”

“You haven’t even started to school and you know all that?”

“Yes. Unlike you, I’m not obnoxious. People like me. Well, most of them. I guess I’d have to mark Jane Jersey off the list.”

Since Callie was so forthcoming with information, I thought I’d slip in a question that had been bothering me.

“Callie?”

“Yeah.”

“Daddy says Rosy Mae is a nigger. Is she?”

“That’s a terrible word,” Callie said. “Mom says never to use it. Daddy shouldn’t say it. Rosy Mae is a Negro. Or colored.”

“He says we shouldn’t be around Rosy Mae unless she’s working here.”

“It shouldn’t be that way, Stanley, but I guess it is. I haven’t a thing against coloreds, but I doubt I’d be very popular hanging around Negroes.”

“Is that why they don’t go to our school? Because they’re niggers?”

“Stanley, I’m going to spank you myself if you say that terrible word again. Coloreds do not like being called niggers. I may not be brave enough to spend time with Negroes, but I know it’s wrong, and I know calling them nigger is wrong. And you should too. The world just hasn’t caught up with the way we ought to be treating people, Stanley . . . What’s that?”

“What’s what?”

“That rusty old box poking out from under your bed.”

“I found it.”

Callie pulled the box out. “What’s in it?”

“Just some letters.”

“Where did you find it?”

Callie opened the box.

“It was buried in the backyard. Me and Nub found it.”

“Buried? Wow.”

I sat on the edge of the bed and watched Callie take out the bag, remove the letters, and untie the ribbon.

“Those are mine,” I said.

“They belong to whoever wrote them. You just found them, you little goober.”

“They’re just love letters.”

Callie read the first letter. When she finished, there were tears in her eyes. “That is so sweet.”

“I thought it was mushy.”

“It’s very sweet. And so old-fashioned. Did you see the date?”

I shook my head.

“It was written during the war. First year of it.”

“That’s a long time ago.”

“I was born during the war. Nineteen forty-two. So it’s not so long ago. It reads like a woman writing to her lover.”

“You saying a guy kept those letters?”

“Well, it reads that way. I suppose they could be letters from a guy to a girl. Initials are used. M to J, so I don’t know for sure. Maybe if I read more.”

“How did it end up buried out there?”

“I don’t know.”

Callie pulled out another envelope, removed a letter. “It’s signed M as well. I guess it was a pet thing with them. Just using the initials. Did you notice there are no stamps or addresses on the envelopes?”

“What does that mean?”

“To me it means these were probably not mailed, but hand-delivered.”

Callie began looking through the entire bundle. “Hey, not all of these are letters. Just the top four. The rest of these are torn-out journal pages, written on the back and front. And written crosswise too.”

“Crosswise.”

“They are written the way you normally write, front and back, then the pages are turned and written across. See?”

I took a look. Sure enough. I said, “How can you read something like that?”

“People used to do this to save paper, especially way back. You get used to reading it, I suppose. Where exactly did you find this?”

I told her.

“Let’s go look.”

I didn’t have anything else to do, so I agreed. Callie put the letters and the journal pages back, pushed the box under the bed.

She put on shoes and we went outside. Out back I showed her where I had found the box. Nub dug at the hole as if something might still be in it, then quit suddenly, charged into the woods, after who knows what.

Shortly thereafter, we heard Nub barking.

I called him, but he didn’t come.

“It is strange that it would be buried right here,” Callie said, “at the edge of the woods . . . Nub, shut up.”

“Don’t talk to Nub like that.”

“He’s giving me a headache.”

I called him again, but he still didn’t come. “Let’s look,” I said.

The woods were thick with pine trees and brambles. It was hard to follow Nub, but shortly we found him. He had his front feet against an old oak, his head thrown back, barking at a squirrel. All you could see of the squirrel was its tail blowing in the breeze.

I grabbed Nub by his collar, pulled him off the tree. His sharp little barks were making my back teeth hurt.

I said, “Hush, Nub.”

“My goodness, Stanley, look.”

I turned, didn’t see anything other than Callie, but as I looked closer, I realized there were some old porch steps half submerged in the earth. Then I saw the outline of a house, a large house.

Looking closer yet, I saw where lumber had rotted and fallen to the ground and was mostly covered with pine straw and oak leaves.

Callie glanced up. “My God.”

I looked. Shredded, rotted lumber hung from limbs like ugly Christmas decorations. There was a window frame with a broken piece of glass still in it, supported by a pine limb. A large piece of the roof frame was up there too. Even a blackened door where a limb had grown through where the doorknob had been.

Most peculiar was a circular iron staircase that began at the earth between two pines and wound upward to a height of thirty feet, intercepting pine boughs along the way, mixing between the railings until trees and stairs were one.

I examined the rusted stairway, saw that it was not actually touching the ground. It had been lifted several inches from the earth. I took hold of it and tugged.

“Don’t,” Callie said. “You’ll pull it down on your head.”

I climbed up a couple steps. “It’s firm, Callie. I could go all the way to the top.”

“Well, don’t.”

“You think a tornado got the house?”

“I don’t know. This didn’t happen a short time ago, but not a long time ago either. That big oak has been here for no telling how long, but those pines are young. The oak was probably in the side yard, but the pines, they’ve grown up since. Look.”

Callie bent, picked up a fragment of lumber that had been partially hidden under the pine straw.

She handed it to me. It was less than a foot of jagged, blackened board. It crumbled in my hand, leaving my fingers black.

“A fire, Stanley. The house burned down, and pieces of the house were slowly pushed up by the trees as they grew. Isn’t it amazing?”

“It’s creepy.”

“It was a big house, Stanley. I bet this is the center of it. The heart of the house.”

“You mean it was a mansion?”

“Seems that way. If it was, could be the box wasn’t buried at all. But in the fire it dropped through the burning floorboards and in time got covered. Grass grew up around it, water washed dirt over it. Everything shifted. And there it lay until you and Nub found it.”

Nub had fixed his mind on the squirrel again. It was running along a limb, looking down at Nub, making that peculiar chattering noise they make, slashing with its tail.

Nub managed to run up the slight slant of the oak’s trunk, and was now perched on a low-hanging limb barking at the squirrel.

Callie laughed, said, “Get that fool mutt down from there before he falls on his head.”

I called Nub, but he wouldn’t come. I finally climbed up and got him, swinging by my feet from the limb and handing Nub to Callie. I squirmed back onto the limb and climbed down.