Church of Christ, the Cumberland Presbyterian, the First Methodist. He had stood so as a child with his father’s hand clasping his own and he had no reason to doubt it would always be so.
The trees had bared and even as he stood listening to the distant sounds of commerce from the town a few last gold maple leaves drifted with the breeze. Winter was coming. He exulted in this knowledge, there was something warm and comforting about it. He’d live in his own cozy rooms, venturing out only when he had to, as comfortable as Badger from Wind in the Willows. He’d see few people, and most of them would not see him back, business was always good in the winter, old folks were always going to sleep and just not waking up.
Here in this land of Duck Head overalls and felt hats he was a model of sartorial elegance. He wore a fawncolored topcoat over a tan gabardine suit with a matching vest buttoned over his wellfed belly and an offwhite shirt with a green tie of iridescent watermarked silk. He wore a brown Stetson with a rolled brim and a flat crown, and he carried an umbrella though there was no cloud in sight.
He looked at his watch. It was time for his morning coffee break. He figured he’d take it at the Bellystretcher Cafe this morning, and he leisurely ambled that way. Townfolk he met nodded formally to him. Sometimes if they were women whoappealed to him in some way and whose death he anticipated with relish he’d tip the Stetson and watch their eyes skitter away to somewhere else and they’d hurriedly walk on.
Folks were always doing that. Their eyes would sidle away to study intently something they hadn’t noticed a moment before. They had been known to cross the street to avoid meeting him. Some loathsome bird. His penguinlike waddle, some dark and unlovely bird of paradise. He’d smile his one-size-fits-all smile. That’s all right, he would think. Laugh at me while you can. The last laugh is mine, for it is my stainless steel table you will lie on. The water that flushes away your blood and offal and the last perspiration you ever perspired will be charged to my bill. We’ll see how you like it then when there’s no one left in the round world to snigger to.
At the Bellystretcher he seated himself next to a pair of oldtimers in overalls and denim jumpers and ordered his coffee. He nodded to the two men and they gave him back little nods so distant as to barely qualify as greetings. A fierce anger perpetually ached in him but he’d learned to bank it. The living are capable of revenge the dead cannot exact. He just went back to sugaring his coffee.
He had a horror of people but he’d learned to control this too. All he had to do was imagine them naked and dead on his table with the pump humming their blood away and he’d be able to hold his own.
But on this morning one of the old men would not let him be. He kept sniffing the air ostentatiously and nudging the other oldtimer in the ribs, and after awhile he said, Somethin sure does smell sweet.
The other nodded. Flowers damn sure in bloom somewhere, he said. Breece pretended he didn’t hear him.
The man said, Somebody sure does smell good in here.
Breece turned to face him. He dreamed the old man’s face ashen and slackjawed, the rheumy eyes dry and staring.
Well, it’s obvious it’s not you, he said conversationally. You smell like cow shit and Sloan’s liniment.
It took all he had to say it. He commenced drinking his coffee though it was so hot it almost scalded his throat. The man next rose with his coffee and moved a few stools down. Breece finished his coffee and set the cup down hard. He laid too much money on the counter and rose and went out. The door closed behind him and the small bell chimed once and ceased.
You best leave him alone, Shorty, one of the men called. He ain’t just right in the head. One of these days he’s going to pull out a sawedoff shotgun about a yard long and put you to sleep. Then he’ll drag you by the hair of the head up the street to his parlor and embalm your dead ass.
Hell, I didn’t do nothin, Shorty said. The truth shall set you free. He did smell good. Put me in mind of an old gal off Tom’s Creek I used to go with.
It rained for four more nights and Tyler and his sister opened as many graves. These were nights of cold winter drizzles and sullen heavens with no one about and they felt perhaps rightly that the dark belonged to them. She seemed possessed by this folly. He’d begun to think her mad. Had begun to accept that this madness had infected him as well. For they both by now moved in a peculiar detachment from reality. Asort of outraged disbelief that such things could be.
She didn’t go to work. He didn’t know if she’d quit her job and he didn’t ask. He didn’t know if she slept during the day or whether she’d reached some curious state of grace in which she was sustained not by food and sleep but by the fixation that drove her. He would lie up and sleep in a dreamless state of exhaustion and awaken in the same position he’d held when sleep took him. He would have expected nightmares but then he came to suspect he was getting his full quota of them during his waking hours and that no more were allotted. His hands were raw with bleeding blisters from the shovel and his fingers felt permanently cupped to fit its handle.
Each day he swore was the last. Each night they’d be abroad with the tools in the bed of the old truck. It was a wide world with no shortage of graveyards, and he began to think of the earth as ripe and fecund with the dead, stick a spade anywhere and you’d strike a corpse. Nor was it lost upon him that they were wresting secrets from the millennia. Burial is sacred. It is secret. When the lid is sealed, it is for all time. For all time. The earth with its cargo of dead shuttles through the black dusty void while empires rise out of nothingness, others fade into the same. Days clock into night and back again and the seasons cycle their endless repetition while the dead repose with their clasped hands and their dreamless sleep and it is all the same to them.
A cold detachment had seized him. He was wrenching open the forbidden with a crowbar and each atrocity he was uncovering seemed worse than the last. An old man in a shirt and tie and a gray suitcoat and no more. He was buried a eunuch though he’d not been one in life. A woman who had been buried with these missing or other similar genitalsbetween her thighs. As if he’d alter these helpless folk to his liking. Or was yet some mad geneticist burying his mistakes and starting anew.
Some of the caskets had garbage in them. He recorded all these minutiae with a spacey disbelief. Coke bottles, candy wrappers, half an apple, old newspapers, emptied ashtrays. The ultimate garbage disposal. Someone had just swept up the trash and disposed of it forevermore.
There was a body with no coffin at all laid a foot or so beneath the earth in windings of stained bedsheet. An old woman shared her resting place with a young man who’d had his throat straightrazored, and he lay humped athwart her thighs as they lay arm in arm in eternal debauchery.
At first she had refused but now she was looking too. Cataloguing these forbidden exhibits. From a carnival freakshow wended here from the windy reaches of dementia praecox. He hadn’t known there were perversions this dark, souls this twisted.
What do you think? Corrie asked.
I think he’s one sick son of a bitch.
We know that. I mean what else do you think?
I think he’s fixing to be sicker.
She sat studying him. By the yellow light her eyes were depthless and opaque. He had never known what she was thinking.
What do you think we ought to do? she asked.
Do? Put his sorry ass away. Tell the law and let them open the graves themselves. Put him away forever in some crazyhouse. They’d have to.
You think they would?
I know they would. What would you do with him? There’s supposed to be respect for the dead. It’s the way we evolved or something. It’s genetic. This man here…he wouldn’t cull anything. He’d do anything.
He’s rich.
I don’t care how rich he is. Rich is no good here. All these dead people’s folks…we just opened up a few of the graves. There’s still worse covered up. Somebody’s husband or son would kill the sorry son of a bitch. It’s more than the craziness. The sick stuff. It’s contempt, just emptying the trashcan into somebody’s casket before you close it and haul it to the graveyard. It’s beneath contempt. Somebody’ll kill him.
He’ll hire a team of sharp Nashville lawyers, she said. There’ll be some publicity about it. He might even lose his license or whatever you have to have to operate. They’ll send him to talk to some psychiatrist for a while; then they’ll say he’s cured, and he’ll be back at the same old stand. We’ve got to get him ourselves. We’ve got to get more evidence.
He thought she’d taken leave of her senses. More? What more do we need? There’s enough now for a lynch mob and enough left over to tar and feather him. Anyway, what’s all this we mess? It’s not our job. Let the law or
