The Hinterlands (19 page)

As we come down the ridge toward the fields, Willa tripped over a limb and rolled several times. I run to pick her up, and as I brushed off her coat and hair I seen the sled inside the trees. There the sled set, with several sticks of wood in its bed.

The singletree was hooked to the front of the sled, and the trace chains was still attached. Whoever took the horse had unhooked the chains from the horse collar. The sled was pointed toward the new ground, and the horse tracks went that way. Your Grandpa had sawed wood, and was headed back to the clearing.

We come out of the woods almost at the creek, and looked back toward the cabin. They was some big weeds around the edge of the new ground where your Grandpa hadn't mowed, queen-of-the-meadow and ironweed mostly, but the tops of the corn had been cut, and we could see all the way past the scarecrow to the barn.

“Why's they so many flies around the scarecrow?” Lewis said.

And then we all smelled it. The breeze must have changed, for it hit us suddenly. It was a rich rotten stink, worse than any carrion. It was almost sweet and stifling.

“Shoooo!” Willa said, and held her nose.

“Ugh,” Lewis said.

They is some bad smells people actually like. Everybody likes to cherish their own wind and a baby loves to smell its filth until it's cold. But the stench of rotting flesh everybody hates because it is the stink of death. It's the smell of our end. Preachers would say it's the smell of sickness and our fallen condition. I shuddered at the fetor on the breeze.

I seen they was something wrong with the scarecrow. A scarecrow
is normally sticks holding up old clothes. But this scarecrow was clothes holding up what was inside them. It was like a body crucified in its rags. Flies swelled and shrunk around its head.

“You all stay back,” I said to the children.

“Mama, I'm scared,” Willa said and started crying.

“Lewis, you hold Willa,” I said. I took a step toward the scarecrow, and Wallace followed. “You stay back too,” I said.

I put my apron over my nose the smell was so bad. Somehow I couldn't go up to the scarecrow from behind. It was like slipping up on something. I circled around and edged closer. It was a man all right, put inside the scarecrow's rags and tied to the posts. The body was twisted in the clothes and the straw hat had fell down on the face.

“Get back,” I hollered at Wallace, but he didn't pay no attention. He kept follering me.

I stopped and looked away at the ridge. The sun was gold on the many-colored trees. I couldn't bear to look at the face, but knowed I had to. The body slumped there on the poles with its arms crooked and the legs drawed up. They had took its boots and the legs looked whitish green. I got closer and stooped down. They had killed him and tied him up in the scarecrow's rags.

“Get back,” I said to Wallace, but he come right up and looked too, before he run away and puked among the cornstalks.

I backed away and held my apron over my nose.

“What's wrong?” Lewis said. “Hush up,” I said. “We've got to go back to the cabin.” I led them across the fields and hollered for Wallace. He made like he was going to the woods, and then he follered us at a distance.

When I finally got the younguns back to the cabin I told them to stay there. Willa and Lewis begun to cry, and I set with them a few minutes by the fire. But I had work to do.

“You stay here,” I said to Wallace. Wallace didn't answer. I took a sheet from the shelf. “You stay here with the little uns,” I said. “They's a job you and me will have to do later.”

I got some lime in a gourd from the shed and a hatchet the Indians hadn't found. I took the sheet and marched right out through the field to the new ground. I'd lose my courage if I didn't do it directly. They was no leisure to stop and think.

The body was big and I knowed they was no way I could hold it up while I cut the arms free from the scarecrow frame. I'd either have to chop the frame down or cut the body loose and let it slump down. If I chopped the frame, I'd still have to lift the body to cut the arms free. I stood behind the frame and hacked at the ropes till one arm fell free. The body was stiff and swung over like a side of beef. The hat fell off and I tried not to look at the hollow eyes. When I cut the other hand free, the head fell against me, and I jumped back as the body hit the ground.

Children, I've never worked as hard or as fast. Several times I thought I would black out from the smell. I wished the soldiers would come back and help me. I thought of running back to the settlement and getting my Daddy and Henry to come. But that would take another day at least, with the body exposed above ground. They wasn't nothing to do but what I was doing.

As I worked I got mad. It kept going through my mind Realus had deserted me and the younguns. After deceiving me for eight years he had left me to raise the children. Blood rushed to my face from exertion and anger. The resentment give me strength. The sudden hatred of your Grandpa allowed me to do that work.

First thing I done was cut all those scarecrow rags off the body. I couldn't let nobody be buried like that. They had took his own clothes and his body was too stiff and drawed up to put more clothes on anyway. I thought it was better to bury him in the sheet, the way he had come into the world.

I tried not to look at the body when I tore all them rags off. It was turning black as a bruise in places and was light green on the limbs. I didn't look at the face where the birds had pecked.

When the body was bare I sprinkled it all over with lime. Lime will sweeten any smell. Don't know how it works, but the white does make things seem cleaner and dryer. I spread the sheet on the ground, knocking down cornstalks to make room.

It must have took me an hour to get the corpse on the sheet, but finally I did. Then I tied it up with the corners of the cloth and the pieces of rope that had been on the scarecrow. While I worked I had been planning. The easiest thing would have been to dig a hole right there in the field. But I knowed it was better to bury the body up on the hill with Little Eller. That was the graveyard and that was where a body ought to be at rest. It wouldn't be right to bury him under no scarecrow. The problem was how to get the corpse up there. I couldn't hardly roll it over, much less carry it to the top of the ridge.

Then it come to me in my anger that the timber sled was still in the woods where it had been cut loose. If I could pull it by myself to the field, then maybe Wallace and me together could drag it up the trail to the top of the ridge with the body on it. We would have to go slow and do it a little at a time.

I run to the woods where the sled was. It was still partly loaded with sticks of firewood. First I throwed out the wood, then gathered up the cold trace chains in both my hands. The sled felt like it was stuck by its sourwood runners to the leaves. I jerked harder and it give a little. Once the runners had moved a little, it got easier. I pulled the sled through the woods, backing as I went. But soon as I got to the field, I put the chains over my shoulder and hauled by leaning way out forward. I drug the sled to the body and left it.

All the younguns was standing at the barn watching me. They
hadn't stayed in the house like I had told them, but they hadn't come out in the field either. They had half-obeyed me, which is what children generally do.

“Lewis,” I said, sounding stern from the work and anger, sounding out of breath. “You stay right here with Willa and don't let me catch you in the field.”

Lewis looked solemn and sorry for hisself. Willa didn't hardly know what was going on.

It took most of the day for Wallace and me to roll the body onto the sled, and then drag it across the field and up the trail. I took one chain and Wallace the other, and we'd pull for a few yards then stop. It was just possible to do on the steep places if we pulled for twenty feet and rested. In one rocky place we had to put sticks crossways for the runners to slide on. It was after dinner before we got to the top of the slope.

Willa and Lewis had stood in the yard watching us a long time. Finally they got bored and went back to the cabin to play in the sand by the front door. They had built all kinds of mounds and tunnels there by the time me and Wallace returned. At least they had kept away from the footlog.

“Ain't we going to have no dinner?” Lewis said.

“We'll have dinner later,” I said. “I'll make us an apple pie.”

I got the shovel and Wallace carried the mattock, and we climbed back up the ridge. The ground there was hard clay. Where Realus had kept the area cleared around Little Eller's grave the dirt was packed hard and baked by the summer heat. I seen it was going to take some mighty work to dig any sort of grave.

Wallace was too little to swing the mattock, so I took it and broke up the ground in a shape as long as a mound and maybe two feet wide. I seen we couldn't dig a proper grave six feet deep.
Besides, we didn't have a casket to go in it. We'd have to dig as deep as we could, enough to be decent, before nightfall, and let it go at that. First thing I hit was a white field rock, and I had to dig around that so we could lift it out. The dirt up there is just red clay. They never is much soil on ridge tops. Maybe that's why graveyards is put on ridges, to keep from taking up good soil. And to keep them away from floods.

When we dug down about a yard and squared out the corners of the hole, I seen that was as far as we could go. I was running out of strength, and the day was almost gone. Me and Wallace throwed our tools aside and took hold of the sheet around the body. It took several tries to roll the body off the sled and into the hole. I tried to do it so the body was facing up, head to the east, but with the legs drawed up and the sheet twisted around I couldn't really tell. We filled the grave halfway before we went back to the cabin for Willa and Lewis.

I was almost give out by then, but I remembered to get your Grandpa's Bible before climbing back up the hill. It was near sundown, and I lined the younguns up beside the grave. Even Willa stood solemn and quiet in the late sun.

I opened the Bible somewhere—I can't remember where—and read a few verses. It seemed the only thing to do. And then we sung a song. The only one the younguns knowed was a Christmas carol and we sung that. All I remember afterwards is filling in the grave with loose dirt and clods while crows was calling in the pines on the hill and down in the field where the scarecrow was just a frame. You don't often hear crows fussing at the end of the day, but I guess we had disturbed them. It was mostly dark and the moon was coming up over the ridge by the time we walked back down to the cabin.

That night after we finished covering up the grave I still had to
milk and cook supper. I was so tired I felt drunk. When you're that tired it's like somebody else is going through the motions of work. You feel like you're watching yourself. I drug myself back up the hill in the moonlight to milk and then I strained the milk and put it in the spring house.

After we eat I cleared away the supper things and set down by the fire. The younguns was so tired from the long day they was almost asleep before they finished their buttermilk and pie. Wallace and Lewis climbed up to the loft and Willa went right to sleep on our bed in the living room. I figured I'd just let her stay there for the night.

I thought I'd set by the fire and think about things for a while. I wanted to think about what had happened to me in the past two days, and what had happened to Realus. Too many things had come at once and I needed to study on them. I was mad at your Grandpa, and I was afraid of being left alone. And being afraid made me even madder. I kept rehearsing in my mind what I would say if I seen him. At the same time I was bone-chilled thinking of not seeing him no more.

I kept running over the words that I would say: deceive, seduce, cowardly, unforgivable, blackguard, low-down, sinful, sneaking, infidel. It was like I had a fever and was talking to Realus across the top of the mountain, telling him never to come back, and that he better come back. It was like somebody was calling to me in the woods. I went to look, and though it sounded like a person it turned out to be a snake. That snake was looking me right in the eyes.

With a jerk I come awake. I had almost fell out of my chair. It was like something had shouted at me. But the house was quiet.
They wasn't even a clock ticking. The stillness seemed to push against me, like a pressure in the air.

The door had not been latched, and I got up to bolt it for the night. But before I dropped the hickory bar in place I thought I'd look outside. Moonlight was coming through the crack. I stepped out onto the threshold.

The hunter's moon must have been completely full. It filled the creek with light, but hung so high in the sky it seemed unconnected with the light on the earth. The air was so bright you could almost see the fall colors on trees across the creek. The yard and fields looked clean in the blue light.

They was a figure standing in the field beyond the barn. At first I thought it was a stump from the old deadening, but then I seen it was too close. The figure was hunched over a little, and just stood there. I couldn't focus on it because the light was not good enough. A cold pain shot down through my bones. In the moonlight I couldn't even be sure I seen the figure. I shivered and stepped back into the house and bolted the door.

Now I had to think what to do. If it was an Indian, he was just watching for a chance to attack and rob us. I wondered if it was a soldier that was wounded or lost, coming back from the fight with the Tories, or with the Cherokees. It even crossed my mind it could be a ghost, maybe the ghost of the man that was killed and hung on the scarecrow. It also come to me it could be Realus out there. But it didn't seem like him to just stand in the field and watch the place. It didn't make sense that he would stand there and not come in.

I wished they was a gun in the house. But either the Indians had took it, or Realus had took it. They wasn't even a lantern. I set there by the fire trying to make up my mind. First I thought I should just stay there and keep the house locked up and wait for daylight. Wasn't much else I could do.