Ann began to weep, though she might flood the room with tears for all I cared.
“Ain’t we friends, Pauline, as well as kin? Didn’t I take you in when you was sick? And now I am most sick to death with worry over all this, and I miss you. I miss having you around.”
“I’ll come with you,” I said. “Let me get my things.” I did not agree to go because I wanted to help either Ann or Tom, or because I cared one whit for her tears and her tribulations. I went because I wanted to watch what was going to happen. I also thought that I might need to be there in order to make sure that it happened.
I went back with them, leaving the cool shade of the mountain groves for the blistering sun on the cornfields of Happy Valley, and many’s the time I cursed myself for a fool for doing it. I settled back in to doing the chores on the farm, tending the Meltons’ girls, and milking the cows, and listening to Ann fret about what would become of them.
Once she said, “Poor Dula. I wonder if he will be hung. Are you a friend of Dula? I am. Are you a friend of mine?”
I thought that worry and eating next to nothing had addled her brain, but I forced myself to smile. “Why we are of the same blood, Ann. I am more than your friend. Did I not come back with you in your time of need?”
She sprang up from her chair, and grabbed my arm. “Come with me now then. I need to see that it’s all right.”
I hung back, knowing what was in her mind. “Come on where?”
She gave me a sullen glare. “Just out to the woods. Not far from here.”
I knew what she meant, but I wouldn’t say it out loud any more than she would. Finally, I said, “You mean… to where the horse was tied up?”
She shook her head, as pale as I’ve ever seen her. “Not there. Just down the Reedy Branch Road a ways and up the ridge.”
I was tempted to ask her how she knew exactly where the horse had been, but she looked in no mood to be trifled with, so I kept on pretending I didn’t know what had happened. She strode to the door and held it open, nodding for me to come with her, but I just blinked at her, like I was slow to understand, and finally she said, “Come on! I need to make sure that the grave has not been disturbed. Animals might have dug her up.”
“But what if one of the neighbors was to see us going there and tell the searchers, Ann? What then?”
“What neighbors? My mama? Wash Anderson and his sister? They won’t think anything is amiss. They haven’t yet, have they? We’re just going out for an afternoon walk.” She tried to laugh and show that she wasn’t a bit afraid. “T’ain’t far. Come on.”
She shooed me out the door like a stray cat, without even giving me time to stir the stew pot or put on a shawl, and a minute later, we were making our way down that steep hill that leads down to the Stony Fork Road just opposite Lotty Foster’s cabin. She wasn’t out in the yard, though-
About two hundred yards past the creek and up the ridge, we had left the open fields of the valley, and now we were stumping along through the woods along the southern slope of the ridge, with Ann forging so purposefully ahead that it was plain she knew the way by heart. I was trailing along after her, dodging briars, trying to keep up with her, and hoping that if one of us trod on a rattlesnake, it would be her.
I stepped on a dead branch once, and the crack it made when it broke under my foot made my heart jump clear up to my throat. I don’t get scared the way other people do, but I can be startled, by sudden moves or loud noises, same as anybody. I was more careful after that, and not so intent on keeping up with Ann. If she wanted to show me something, she could wait for me.
We went a good ways up that ridge. I think that if it had not been high summer, I might have had a good view of the valley below, but the trees hemmed us in, making it as dark as twilight in midafternoon. The scrub oaks and pines made a canopy over the clearing, shading it from the sun. There was a bare patch underneath one of the trees, and around it the grass had been trampled down. The rest of the clearing was covered with grass or leaves, so this one bare patch caught my eye at once.
Ann stood in the middle of the clearing and looked all around her, and I could tell that she was trying to see the woods through somebody else’s eyes-the searchers, like as not. Was there anything out of place that might make them take a closer look?
“There’s newly spaded earth yonder by that bush,” I said, pointing to a bare patch of ground. “Anybody could spot that.”
She gave me a hard, unbroken stare. “What do you know about it, Pauline?”
I shrugged. “More than I care to know. Just that this is as far as our poor cousin Laura got that day. I reckon you’d know the rest, though.”
She turned away without a word, and walked over to the bare patch, which was next to a big bush at the edge of the clearing. Then she knelt down and crawled partway underneath it. I went over there, too, and I got down so I could see what she was looking at. I was more interested in watching Ann than I was in what she was investigating. After all these months of watching her laze in her bed whilst James Melton and I did all the work about the place, it was strange to see her so energetic and determined. Seeing her hunched under that bush in her brown calico dress put me in mind of a fox, trying to dig out a nest of rabbits. I reckoned Ann had already got her prey, though, though I wouldn’t have said so out loud just then. She has a fearsome temper, does Ann.
She crawled back out, dusting her hands on her skirt, and I peered down through the leaves, but there wasn’t much to see: only a line of newly spaded earth, as if someone had dug a four-foot trench and then filled it back in. The lower branches of the bush covered it well enough, if you didn’t know where to look, but we both knew that hunting dogs don’t go by the look of things. I decided not to point this out to Ann, though, for she was in a high- strung state as it was, and if I’d told her that trench might be discovered, I’ll be bound that she’d have tried to make me dig it up with my bare hands.
As it was, she contented herself with picking up a few handfuls of leaves and putting them down over the bare spot. She made me do the same, so I scooped up a pile of wet oak leaves that had been there all winter, and I let them fall on top of the spaded earth.
It seemed funny to think of somebody I knew and was kin to being down there, just a few inches below my fingertips. I reckon if I was to claw at the earth instead of dropping leaves on the spot, I could uncover her face and see her looking up at me.
I would like to have seen what her face looked like, after two months dead, but I had Ann to reckon with, and I knew that if I tried to dig, Ann would either collapse in a screaming heap or else pick up the nearest rock and lay me out where I stood to keep me from telling what I knew. So I contented myself with dumping another handful of leaves on the grave.
We didn’t stay much longer after that. Ann walked twice around the clearing, studying that bush from every possible angle, but she made no move to do anything more. I figured she wouldn’t. Moving the body was not to be thought of, even if her nerves could have stood it, which I doubted. We had brought no tools with us. Besides, I had yet to see Ann lift a finger to do anything.
Finally she sighed and wiped her muddy hands on her skirt. “They won’t see anything. Let’s go back.”
As I followed her out of the clearing, she turned and caught my arm, digging her nails in to my skin. “You know
