get you some soap and a bucket of water,” he said, and then he turned and walked quickly back toward the orchard.
Within another few thrusts of the shovel, Matthew wished he’d brought a handkerchief and a bottle of vinegar. The smell of corruption was rising from the earth. Matthew had to walk away and breathe fresh air if there was any to be found. He felt sickened and in fear of showing his lunch, but damned if he’d do that in front of Greathouse. He realized he was made stronger by his determination not to appear weak before the man.
Matthew heard the noise of Greathouse’s shovel sliding into something soft. He grimaced and tried mightily to steel his insides. If anything flooded up, he’d be ruined for corn soup and ham for a long time to come.
“You can stay there if you like,” Greathouse said, not unkindly. “I can finish it alone.”
And I’ll never hear the end of it if I stand here, Matthew thought. He said, “No, sir,” and he walked back to the hole and what lay within.
It appeared to be simply a dirty wrapping of bedsheets, without human form. About five feet, five inches in length, Matthew figured. Death and the river would have stolen the young man’s height as well as weight. It came to him that the smell of rot was not unlike that of ancient mud at the river’s bottom, a heavy dark layer of accumulated matter that had settled year after year, covering all secrets with slime. He cursed the day he’d walked up those stairs to McCaggers’ realm.
“All right.” Greathouse put his shovel aside. “Wasn’t buried very deeply, but I suppose he didn’t care. You ready?”
“I am.” Not, Matthew thought.
Greathouse took the knife from its sheath at his back, bent down and began cutting the cloth away from where he thought the head must be. Matthew bent down as well, though his face felt burned by the reek of decay. Shadows passed over him and when he looked up he saw crows circling.
As Greathouse worked with his knife, Matthew noticed something odd about the winding-sheet. In it were perhaps a dozen or more small holes, ragged around the edges as if musket balls had gone through.
One layer was cut away, and then another. At this depth the sheet took on a yellowish-green stain. River stain, Matthew thought. That’s what it was, of course.
Greathouse kept cutting, and then he took hold of the sheet and gave a slow but steady pull. A section of mottled cloth ripped and fell away, and there exposed to the sun was the dead man’s face.
“Ah,” Greathouse said quietly, more of a gasp, or a sickened statement on the cruelty of men.
Matthew’s throat seemed to close up and his heart stuttered, but he forced himself to look and not turn away.
There was no possibility of ascertaining what this man’s features had been in life. Gray flesh still clung to the bone of chin and cheeks, yes, but it was not enough to form a face. The forehead was smashed inward, the nose caved, the eyes pale sockets with some kind of dried yellow matter in their depths. On the scalp was a thatch of light brown hair. As a final mockery of the life that had been, a cowlick stuck up stiff and dry at the back of the head. The mouth was open, showing broken teeth and the interior flesh and tongue that was a bloodless and terrible waxy white, and it was this sight, this last gasp that had pulled in river and mud and the secretive slime, that made Matthew go cold beneath the burning sun and turn his face toward the wilderness.
“I’m going to cut some more of the sheet away,” said Greathouse, his voice strained. He began to work with the knife again, his hand careful and reverent to the deceased.
When the sheet had been cut open and pulled aside, the shriveled victim lay in all the horror of murder, his knees pulled up in a frozen attitude of prayer and his thin arms crossed upon the chest, a gesture of Christian burial that Matthew presumed Zed had done after the cords were cut. The body was dressed in a shirt that might have been white at one time, but was now a miasmic hue of gray, green, and splattered black. The shirt was unbuttoned, probably by McCaggers for inspection, and both Matthew and Greathouse could clearly see four of the stab wounds-three in the chest and one at the base of the neck-which were vivid purple against the spoiled-milk color of the flesh. The body wore breeches whose color and fabric had turned to something nearly like mud, and on the feet were brown boots.
Matthew had to put his hand up to his mouth and nose, for the smell of this was horrendous. He saw movement in a nearby tree; a few of the crows had landed and were waiting.
“There’s part of the cord.” Greathouse carefully pulled at it, finding too late that it was sealed by decomposition to the chest when a long piece of skin peeled off like soft cheese. It was a thin but tough little piece of rope, frayed on both ends. “You see the marks around the wrists where he was bound?”
“Yes,” Matthew said, though he didn’t bend over to look too closely. One thing he did note, however. “The left hand. The thumb’s missing.”
“First joint only. Looks like an old injury because the bone’s grown smooth.” Greathouse dared to touch it, and then his hand went toward one of the stab wounds. At first Matthew thought the man was going to probe one of those purple fissures with his fingers, which would have been the last straw on this hayload, but Greathouse’s hand made a circle in the air. “I see four wounds, but I’m not going to turn him over to find out if your Mr. McCaggers was accurate in his count.” He pulled his hand back and looked up at Matthew. His eyes were red- rimmed, as if hazed by thick and pungent smoke. “I want to tell you,” he said, “that I’ve seen something like this before. I can’t be for certain, and I ought not to speculate, but-”
Matthew gave a cry and stepped back, his eyes the size of one of Stokely’s platters. He thought it must be the shimmer of heat, or the noxious vapors rising from the grave, but he imagined that the corpse had just given a quick tremble.
“What is it?” Instantly Greathouse was on his feet. “What’s wrong with you?”
“He moved,” Matthew whispered.
“He moved?” Greathouse looked back at the corpse to make sure, but a corpse was a corpse. “Are you mad? He’s as dead as King James!”
They both stared at the body, and therefore they both saw the body give another fleeting tremble as if awakening from its Thanatostic slumber. The movement, Matthew realized in his dumbstruck terror, was more of a vibration than an action of muscle and sinew, which in the case of this unfortunate had turned to calf’s-foot jelly.
Greathouse stepped nearer the grave. Matthew did not, but he heard what Greathouse did: a thin, faint chittering noise that made the hairs on the back of his neck prickle.
Even as Greathouse realized what it must be and quickly reached for his shovel, the pale amber-colored roaches boiled from the cavity of the dead man’s nose and out of the open mouth like an indignant army. They rushed back and forth in a frenzy over the eyeless face and more began to stream out of the knife wounds like yellow drops of blood. Matthew thought it must have been a jarring of the body or the unwelcome heat of the sun that had disturbed them from their dank banquet hall, and now he knew what had burrowed all those holes in the winding-sheet.
Greathouse began throwing the dirt back in like a man who has seen the devil’s horns pushing up from the inferno. There was no time nor need for niceties, as the soul that had departed from this husk at the bottom of the hole had to be in a better place. Matthew came forward to help, and together he and Greathouse first covered over the face with its mask of swarming insects and then shoveled dirt upon the body until it was seen no more. When the grave was a mound again, Greathouse threw aside his shovel and without a word walked down the hillside to the river. He got on his knees where earth met water and splashed his face while Matthew sat on a boulder above and let the sun steam away the cold sweat that had burst up from his pores.
When Greathouse came back up the hill, he looked to Matthew to have aged five years in a matter of moments. His eyes were dark-shadowed, his jaw slack, even his gait tired and heavy. He stopped between Matthew and the grave, sliding a sideways glance at the dirt mound to make sure nothing was crawling out. At last he gave an almost imperceptible shudder and sat down on a rock a few feet to Matthew’s left. “You did well,” he said.
“As did you,” Matthew answered.
“I’d have liked to have gone through the pockets.”
“Really?”
“No,” Greathouse said. “Not really. Anyway, I’d bet my horse he was picked clean before his wrists were tied.”
“I’m sure either Zed or Lillehorne inspected the clothes,” Matthew said. “As much as was possible, I mean.”
