In a Shallow Grave

a big field of something wavy and green growing, and this Civil War cemetery full of blacks they claim fought on the side of the Confederacy.

Quintus’ mother’s house was the best house of the four. They had black crepe all over the pillars, there was gladi­olus on the front porch in big silver vases, an American flag waving, and inside in the front sitting room was the orange casket, and lots of white-haired black ladies in big hats sit­ting on camp stools.

Quintus didn’t greet anybody, and motioned me to follow him into one of the rooms off the hall. I could see by the way he didn’t speak to anybody what I had feared from the first might happen, that is he would go all to pieces, and I hoped to God I would not have one of my spells and let both of us down. If only he would cry, he might get through the funeral, but no he wouldn’t. So I made him drink some more of the rye right from the bottle, and then we went back to the mourning room and sat down on camp stools.

“Quintus,” I said after having started to speak twenty times, “you have got to go up and look at your ma in the casket, you can’t just sit here with me a stranger.”

“By and by,” he said.

My eye was running over the flowers, which I guess had been mostly sent by white folks his mother had worked for all her life, and all of a sudden I saw this big bouquet of roses and lilies with the card Georgina Rance, with deepest sympathy.

While the choir in the back of the house was singing one of the many hymns they comforted us with, without a word, I sort of lifted Quintus up by his arm pits, and then led him up to his mother’s casket. Everybody else had their eyes closed in prayer, they didn’t appear to notice. Quintus looked down on his mother’s face, but he couldn’t look more than once, and he took hold of my hand as if he was falling from a precipice, it was that kind of grip, and we went back to the camp stools.

I think we was in that room for four hours, only it seemed fifty, but gradually sort of, to my relief, though I knew this augured ill, Quints got just like a rag doll, I never saw anybody change so, and his forehead which had been as smooth as a sheet that morning suddenly was wrinkled and careworn like an old man of eighty. So gradually, but with all kinds of queer feelings, but not knowing what else to do, and afraid he would keel over without I did it, in front of everybody I took his right hand in my right hand and held it tight as I could against my breast and I sensed he appreciated and wanted this, well, after all he had been rubbing my feet and waiting on me and reading to me all these past weeks, and he was the only one who had never cared that I looked like death itself.

But at the graveside, after the Reverend Spinney had read those most terrible words, words I never knew or had forgot that human beings would say to one another in public, such as we are short in time in this life and cut down like grass, are only after all a shadow and dust to dust and ashes to ashes, and then they threw clods of earth on the coffin, and afterwards, Quintus would not get into the car and be driven to my house or his, and I was thinking lucky Quintus, at least they are not going to foreclose on him, when all at once I realized what had happened, the day was coming to a close and the funeral party had finally give up and left us behind in the cemetery because he would not go with the funeral party, and then at last it hap­pened, so I could relax a little myself, he was crying and hollering like a wild man, his spit flying out from his wide-open mouth, kneeling on his mother’s fresh-dug grave, for he could be himself alone with me, he didn’t mind saying or doing anything around me. I let him scream and holler for a long time, and when his tears came, I let them gush and rush and flow for as long as I thought it did him any good. Then I went up to him and kneeled also on the grave, and he tried to turn his face away from me, as if it still had any secret from me, and I slapped him a little, and then harder, I brought his shoulders up square and looked at his closed eyes with the eyelashes as wet as a drowned animal’s fur, and I brought out the bottle of rye which was getting ever so little low, and said, “Come on now, Quints, put this between your teeth now.”

“Oh, Daventry, a heavy blow has fallen upon our house, which nobody could have foresaw!”

I said this upon reading the eviction notice again from the sheriff after we was home from Quints’ ma’s funeral.

“What do you want to call on him for,” Quintus won­dered, “when here he stole your girl from you . . . ?”

“Well, let me see . . . Why do I call on him . . . ? You think he’s a pretty bad character, do you . . . ?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Anyhow he took your girl from you.”

“Well, I pushed him over the precipice though . . . He didn’t want to go to her . . . But the thing I hold against him most is he discovered my secret.”

Quintus watched me from the kitchen where he had sat down by the calendar, one of those big shiny things with pictures of Bible characters in robes which was put out by a company that sells chicken feed.

“We have to have all the furniture out of this house by next Tuesday so that the dispossession can take place,” I reminded him, walking out into the kitchen to say this, and then walking back into the sitting room.

“What secret are you talking about?” Quintus’ voice sounded sort of sly, and I was glad to note he didn’t speak so sobby and bawling anymore. I believe, as a matter of fact, I was feeling worse by now than he, but I always feel worse than anybody else on account of I’m not supposed to be among the living at all, or as the doc always kept harping, “Consider it like this, you were spared by some unexplained breaking of natural laws.”

I could have bitten my tongue off now for ever mentioning it in the first place. The secret, I mean.

“Oh, forget it, Quints,” I flared up as he asked again what it was. “Let’s think about dispossession . . .”

Quintus had changed all right since the funeral. I knew he would never be the same as before with me because something had happened between us from the moment old Reverend Spinney materialized to give us the bad news, and then something had happened as we sat in the little room next to his mother’s coffin. Put it like this, we had a claim on one another from that time on.

“I thought you would want to share everything that bothered you with me,” Quintus said. “That’s what you said when you was so sick one night . . .”

“That so?” I mumbled. Had I been able to blush I would have then.

“O.K. That was in delirium though, I reckon, Quints,” I said after a few moments’ thought.

“What’s the difference, Garnet?” That was the first time he ever called me by my Christian name.

“Well, see here, Quints. If you don’t know the difference between delirium . . . and . . .” But I stopped because I felt he was right, at least in my case there is no difference. I have gone through so many dark valleys there just is no difference . . .

“All right, Quints, now you spill it . . .”

“Just know that I know, Garnet . . .”

“All right, what do you know? . . . That I killed a hun­dred men . . . That I harbor a desperado here under my dispossessed roof, who took my girl . . . That I am a dead man who goes on living . . . Come on, spill my secret . . .”

“Don’t you bait me, Garnet, or I’ll go home for good now . . .”

Of course he was not serious, but what he had said struck me. This Quintus had a roof and a home he could go to, and I would soon be lower than white trash, cer­tainly lower than any black man around here, because my land would be gone . . .

He came over to the chair I was sitting in now and watched me.

“You all right, Garnet?”

“Yeah, Garnet is all right. After all, I can’t die, can I, so how can I be but all right . . . ? If you don’t tell me my secret, though, pretty damn quick you may be my hundred-and-first victim . . .”

He sat down in his old lazy-bones loose-jointed way and began unlacing my shoes.

“Will you let me rub your feet, Quintus, after I am dispossessed?” I inquired.

“Oh, I might oblige you on that score, Garnet.”

Quintus was already rubbing my feet but with an absentminded sober look on his face that was new to him.

I touched the hair of his head for the first time, and he jumped.

“Tell me what you know, Quints.”

“Daventry don’t love the Widow . . .”

“Oh no? But he lays her just the same according to you . . .”