Tucker’s Grove

Both coffins shifted as the wagon wheels hit a rut in the dirt road. Mr. Deakin, sitting beside his silent passenger, Clancy Tucker, clucked to the horses and steered them to the left.

The rhythmic creak of the wagon and the buzz of flies around the coffin
s were the only sounds in the muggy air. The two men did not engage in conversation; over the past
three days Mr. De
a
kin and Clancy had already said everything that rela
tive strangers could say to each other.

Clancy rocked back and forth to counteract the
motion of the
wagon. An expanse of prairie surrounded them, mile after
mile of green grassland broken only by the ribbonlike track heading
north. Clancy looked at the early afternoon sun, assessed the time of day, and drew a deep, haunted breath. “
Time to
stop.”

Mr. Deakin groaned. “
We
’
ll never get there at this rate. We got hours of daylight left.”

Clancy made his lips thin and white. “
We gotta be sure we get
those graves dug by dark. No way around it.”

“
Do you realize how stupid this is, Clancy? Night aft
er night
—”

“
A promise is a promise.”
Clancy pointed to a patch of thin grass
next to a few drying puddles from the last thunderstorm. “
Looks like
a good place over there.”

With only a grunt for an answer, Mr. Deakin pulled the horses to the side and brough
t them to a stop. The rotting smell settled around them, growing worse day by day as the corpses ripened in the summer heat. Clancy Tucker had insisted on making the journey
at this time of year, because (he said) in winter and spring
the ground was frozen
too hard to keep reburying his Ma and Dad
along the way.

Clancy grabbed a pickax from the wagon bed and sauntered over
to the flat spot. By now they had this ritual down to a science. After his initial complaint, Mr.
Deakin said nothing as he unhitched th
e horses, hobbled them, and
began to rub them down. These horses were the only asset he had
left, and he insisted on tending them before helping Clancy on his
fool
’
s errand.

Clancy swung the pickax and cut into the woven grassroots. His
bright bulging eyes
looked as if someone with big hands had squeezed
him too tightly at the middle. He slipped one suspender off his
shoulder, and a dark, damp shadow of perspiration seeped from his
underarms.

As he worked, Clancy Tucker hummed an endless hymn that Mr. Dea
ki
n recognized as “
Bringing in the Sheaves.”
The chorus went
around and around without ever finding its way to the last verse. Over the hours, between the humming and the stench from the repeatedly
unearthed coffins, Mr. Deakin wanted to shove Clancy
’
s head
under
one of the wheels. But he kept his calm, knowing this was the only way he could get his feet under him again; Mr. Deakin was sure he had done worse jobs, though he couldn
’
t think of specifics at the moment.

When he finished tending the horses, he pul
led a shovel from be
tween the two coffins and went to help Clancy. To make the
daily task more difficult, Clancy insisted on digging two separate
graves, one for his Ma and one for his Dad, instead of a single large pit for both coffins.

They worked for mo
re than an hour in the suffocating heat of
a
f
ternoon, sweating, swatting at flies.
Mr. Deakin had run out of snuff on the first day, and his little pocket jar held only a smear or two of the camphor ointment he
kept for sore muscles, which he now used to burn the putrid smell
from his nostrils.

After so many days of pointless digging and redigging, Mr. De
a
kin
’
s body ached, his hands felt flayed with blisters, but
he did his best to shut off all thought, working
like one of
those slaves from down south, who were forced to labor all day long
in the cotton fields.
A month before, he would never have imagined himself stooping to such a crazy task as digging up coffins and burying them
night after night on a slow jour
ney to Wisconsin, but Cla
n
cy Tucker had hired him for this work, and Mr. Deakin was in no position to be particular.

An Illinois tornado had flattened his house, knocked down the barn, and left him with nothing.
Standing in the aftermath of that storm, un
der a sky that had
cleared to a mocking blue, Mr. Deakin had wanted to shake his fist
at the clouds and shout, but instead he just hung his head in silent despair.
After working his whole life, he had managed to pull together nothing more than an unimpress
ive collection of possessions on a
homestead and some rented cropland. It would be months before his harvest came in, and he had no way to pay the rent in the meantime. The tornado had crushed his harvesting equipment,
smashed his barn. After the storm, hi
s two horses had stood sur
rounded by the wreckage of their small corral, bewildered and as
shocked by the disaster as Mr. Deakin. The storm hadn
’
t left him with anything else.

His life ruined, Mr. Deakin had no choice but to say yes when Clancy Tucker made
his odd proposition.…

“
Make it six feet deep now,”
Clancy said, throwing wet earth
over his shoulder into a mound beside the grave. “
Gotta be six feet.”
Fat earthworms
wriggled in the clods, trying to grope their way back to the shelter of the dirt.

Mr.
Deakin stomped on the shovel
with his boot and hefted up another load of dirt, muttering, “
What difference
does it make if they
’
re six feet under or five and a half?”

Beside him, standing waist-deep in the companion grave, Clancy
gave him a strange look.
The floppy brim of his hat cast a shadow across his face. “
Because if it
’
s
less than six feet, they could dig their way back up by morning!”

Mr. Deakin
’
s skin crawled, and he turned back to his work. Clancy Tucker either had a sick sense of humor, or just
a sick mind.

Only a day after the tornado had struck, when things seemed
bleakest, Mr. Deakin had stood in the ruins of his homestead while
gangly Clancy Tucker walked toward him across the pu
d
dle-dotted
field. “
Good morning, Mr. Deakin.”

“
Morning,”
Mr. D
eakin had said, leaving the “
good”
off.

“
You know my brother Jerome recently founded a town up in
Wisconsin
—
Tucker
’
s Grove. Can I hire you to help me bring the
family up there? You look like you could use a lucky break right
about now.”

Mr. Deakin did not inquire about the particulars of the work, asking only, “
How much is it worth?”

Clancy folded his hands together. “
If you
’
d give us a ride on your wagon up to Wisconsin, my brother will give
you your very own farm, a homestead as big as
this one. And it
’
ll
be yours, not rented. Lots of land to be had up there. In the meantime, we can loan you enough hard currency to take care of your
business here.”
Clancy held out a handful of silver coins.
“
It would be the Chri
s
tian thing to do, Mr. Dea
kin. Neighbor helping neighbor.”

So he had agreed to the deal. Not until they were ready to set
out did Mr. Deakin learn that Clancy wanted to haul the exhumed coffins of his recently deceased mother and father. By the time that part became clear, Clancy
had already paid some of Mr. Deakin
’
s pressing
debts, binding him to his word.…

Now, it was deep twilight by the time they had two graves dug and
both coffins lowered into the ground with thick hemp ropes, and then reburied. The men
finished packing down t
he mounds of earth, leaving the rope ends
aboveground for easy lifting the next morning. Mr. Deakin built a
small fire to make coffee and warm their supper.

He felt sore from the work as he bedded down for the night, ta
k
ing a
blanket from the wagon bed. Now that the cool night air smelled
clean around him, with no corpse odor hanging about, he wished he had saved some of that camphor for his aching mu
s
cles.

Clancy Tucker lay across the fresh earth of the two graves. Mr.
Deakin
grabbed another blanket and tossed it toward him, but the
other man did not look up. Clancy placed his ear against the ground,
listening for something stirring below.