“That too,” he said.
“Why would you dig up a dead dog . . . Your daddy’s dead dog?”
“That’s the one. I’m gonna dig it up because it meant so much to him. He cried over that dog. I ain’t never seen him cry over nothin’. He sure ain’t cried over me. I ain’t never seen him like nothin’ enough to even say so ’cept that dog. You know I oncet pulled cotton all day, and I filled bags good as a grown man, and I was only nine, and he didn’t even say good boy, but he always told that dog how damn good it was. He never said nothin’ to me. Not a thing.”
We walked on toward the sawmill. Nub deserted us, ran off into the woods to pursue dog business.
“Sometimes people don’t know how to say those things,” I said.
“He knew how to say it to his dog.”
“What good will digging up the dog do?”
We passed the sawmill, turned in the direction of the Chapman home.
“I want to put that dog on the back porch. Want to dig it up ’cause he cried over it and he ain’t never cried over me. He went to all that trouble to bury it, and I’m going to unbury it.”
“Richard, this is weird.”
“It ain’t weird to me. Now be quiet.”
We were near his house. We stopped for a moment and looked at it, bathed in shadow from the trees that surrounded it.
“Daddy sleeps light. Used to claim he could hear a dog run across the yard, and I reckon he can.”
“That doesn’t sound promising,” I said.
“We’re gonna go out to the barn. There’s a shovel there.”
“I don’t know, Richard.”
“Listen here, Stanley. I didn’t ask you to come. I appreciate you did. But I didn’t ask you.”
“You said we were going to get your bike.”
“I am.”
“You didn’t say anything about this dog business.”
“I didn’t know I was gonna do it till I was standing out there in front of the old sawmill. It just come to me. You want to go home. Go. Ain’t gonna hold it against you. But I’m gonna dig that dog up, and I’m gonna drag it on that screen porch. He’ll know I done it, and that’s enough.”
“How will he know?”
“Because I’ll leave him somethin’ that lets him know.”
“What?”
“Well, I ain’t figured that yet. But I will. And even if he don’t know, I’ll know I done it.”
I sighed. “All right. Let’s do it.”
———
THE BACKYARD WAS BRIGHT with moonlight, so bright you could even see where chickens had been scratching in the dirt. Out by the barn, the hog snorted once at us, then lay down in its wallow and went silent.
Richard and I removed the bar from the barn doors and heaved them open. Inside, the light from the moon was full in the doorway, but the back of the barn was as black as the devil’s thoughts.
I pulled the small flashlight out of my pants pocket, and flashed it around. On the far wall of the barn hung a large cross. It looked to be splashed with dark paint. On either side of the cross were pages torn from the Bible and pinned to the wall. I remembered now what Richard had told me about the barn being a kind of church and Mr. Stilwind thinking he was a preacher.
I pointed my light at the pages on the wall.
“What is that about?” I asked.
“Daddy sticks them on the wall, underlines them, makes me and Mama learn ’em. I had to stand in front of them and memorize them.”
“You never told me that.”
“Would you tell that on purpose? I wouldn’t tell it now, but there it is.”
“Tell me that’s paint on the cross.”
“It’s mostly animal blood.”
“Why? . . . Mostly?”
“He butchered a chicken, hog, anything, he smeared the blood on there, let it dry. Didn’t never clean it.”
“Why?”
“Thought of it as a sacrifice to the Lord. You know, thanks for this here fryin’ hen. This here batch of pork chops. One time, when he whipped me across the back with his belt, he wiped the blood off and rubbed it on that cross, and he didn’t even say thanks. I wasn’t even as good as a fryin’ hen. He said, ‘And here’s the blood of a sinner.’ So it ain’t all animal blood.”
“Tell me what religion he is so I can stay away from it.”
“He says there ain’t none of the religions doin’ what they’re supposed to do. What they’re supposed to do is what he does.”
“I don’t think they’d keep too many in church.”
“Havin’ to hear his preachin’ might run ’em off too,” Richard said. “It’s mostly about dyin’ and goin’ to hell and burnin’ up and stuff. And how we have to serve penance all the time.”
“What’s penance?”
“Kind of sufferin’ and hurtin’ for what you believe, to show how much you believe it.”
I waved the light around. On one side, in a stall, was the mule. Its eyes in the glow of the flashlight looked like huge black buttons. On the other side, on wooden racks, shiny and clean with filing and oiling, hung all manner of tools. Scythe. Axe. Hoe. Posthole diggers. A shovel.
Richard stroked the old mule’s nose. “Hello, boy. How are you? He worked this mule hard as anyone. I ought to let it out, but it wouldn’t have nowhere to go. It’d just come back, or die somewhere.”
“I’m afraid your parents will see us,” I said.
“Yeah,” Richard said. He gave the mule a last pat, took the shovel from the rack on the other side.
We pulled the doors back, slid the bolt across them as silently as possible, headed for the woods where the dog was buried.
———
LEAVES SNAPPED under our feet, and in the woods it was dark. The flashlight batteries became faint, and I had to shake the flashlight to make it work. Finally it quit altogether.
“Hopalong might ride a horse good,” Richard said, “but he makes a shitty flashlight.”
Due to lack of a flashlight, the grave was hard to find. But finally the trail, which was little more than a single footpath, widened and the trees broke, and there in the moonlight, under the sky, was the mound of dirt where Butch lay.
“I’ll do the diggin’,” Richard said.
“Suits me.”
“Figured it would.”
“I feel like someone in one of those monster movies,” I said. “Ones with Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff. The one where they were grave robbers or ghouls.”
“You be Boris, and I’ll be Bela,” Richard said, and he started to dig.
“I wonder what Nub is doing?” I said.
“Chasin’ coons and night birds would be my guess. Or squattin’ behind a bush.”
The dirt was not too hard, but it seemed to me Richard had to dig deeper than before. I suppose that feeling had to do with standing in the middle of the woods while you watched your friend dig up a dead dog in the moonlight.
Before Richard reached the dog, the smell reached us. It was so strong I thought I was going to lose my dinner, but after a moment I became accustomed enough to it to stand it, long as I held one hand over my mouth and nose and didn’t breathe too deeply.
“There he is,” Richard said, scraping the shovel along the length of the grave.
Sure enough. There in the moonlight was the head. No eye visible, because it was gone. Richard cleared the length of the body and you could see it all now, from tip of nose to tip of tail. Head and body had shrunk, as if it were a package from which items had been removed. The dog’s snout had shrunk up so much, the teeth it contained seemed bared.
“It sure stinks,” Richard said.
“How are you going to haul it?”
“Drag it on the blanket.”
“Richard. I think you ought to just cover Butch up and let’s get your bike and go back to the house. All this is going to do is make him angry.”
“He will be mad, won’t he?” Richard grinned big and the moonlight danced off his teeth.