“I figure luck is either a plan or an accident,” I said. “What we have is a plan.”
We went over to see Jinx and helped her finish up her chores. She got us some boiled eggs and wrapped them in a black-and-white checkered cloth and put them in a syrup bucket. We borrowed one of her daddy’s shovels and she told her mama we was going digging for fishing worms, and the three of us lit out. We used the leaky boat again and paddled across the river, not too far down from May Lynn’s house.
Following the map the way we had gone before, we got to where the graveyard was, stopped, and took a breather. Underneath the trees there were shadows, and the shadows lay where the graveyard was said to be. It was supposed to be haunted by the ghosts of those buried there. Some said it was a graveyard full of slaves, others said it was the graveyard of a family long forgotten. Some claimed Christian Cherokees had been buried there.
It was cooler in the shadows and the trees dripping cool water from the rain of last night made it even cooler. There were no gravestones visible, but there were slumps in the ground where aged graves might have been. There were no fresh diggings, however, and after poking around with the shovel, we finally wore out looking, stopped, and sat down on the ground under the pines. Jinx pulled the eggs in the cloth from the bucket, and we took one apiece and started peeling. We ate and thought and listened to birds.
The boiled egg was good but dry, and I was wishing for some water, when Terry said, “Look here.”
He pushed the rest of the egg into his mouth and stood up, talking around his chewing. “I’m sitting on an old gravestone.”
Me and Jinx got up and took a look. It was a rock that had a name carved on it, and some dates. It had fallen over, or maybe had been placed flat to begin with. The name on it wasn’t Malcolm Cuzins, but still, my heart beat faster.
We went back to looking around with a new fire in our bellies, and before long, Jinx said, “You gonna like this.”
Me and Terry went for a look-see, followed Jinx’s pointing finger. Near a crop of poison ivy there was a slight slope, and through a split in the pines above there was so much sunshine coming in it looked as if it was being poured from a bucket. What it was pouring on was a stone. It had fallen over but was supported by a mound of dirt. It was easy to miss and had near-blended into the pine needles on the forest bed. There was a name on the stone, and the sunlight made the name stand out.
It read: MALCOLM CUZINS.
“Ain’t that something?” Jinx said. “Here we was just looking and looking, and we sat down to have a boiled egg and we found it.”
“It’s God’s will,” Terry said.
“Or we found it because we had a map and was looking around,” Jinx said.
I grabbed up the shovel, knocked the poison ivy back, and started digging. I could tell pretty quick that the dirt had been moved and not too long ago. My first thought was May Lynn might have got to the money already, but then the shovel clicked on something; I dropped it, got down on my hands and knees. So did Jinx and Terry. We all started scraping the dirt back with our hands.
As we dug, the day slipped away, and I heard a whip-poor-will call from somewhere over the hill. We kept digging.
My fingers wrapped around something solid, and I called out. Terry and Jinx started helping me dig there, and in no time at all we came upon a large piece of crockery. It had a tight cover on it, and when we felt around the lid, we realized it had been sealed with wax.
We dug more, knocked away the dirt around it, and lifted it out. It was a small crockery pot, but heavy enough. Terry pulled out his pocketknife and trimmed around the waxed-on lid until the wax was loose enough we could get the lid off. There was a bag inside with a blue-and-white flower pattern on it. I pulled it out. I recognized it as a match to the pillowcases and curtains and May Lynn’s dress. It was pretty heavy. It was tied shut with a string. Before I could loose the string, Terry went at it with his pocketknife. We opened the bag and looked inside.
It was full of greenbacks, and even a bit of change. There was a daddy longlegs in there, too. He was dead and dried up, like a salesman’s heart.
“Oh, hellfires,” Jinx said.
“That’s a lot of money,” I said.
“I don’t mean that,” Jinx said. “Looky there.”
She was pointing at something in the grave. It was right under where the crockery had been. We had been so excited we hadn’t noticed. It was a row of teeth, and they was partly coated in clay.
“Well,” Terry said. “It is a graveyard. You are going to find bones.”
“Yeah, but look there,” Jinx said, and pointed again.
Down a ways was a hand. The hand still had some flesh on it, and there were worms digging into it.
“Them worms would have done chewed up anyone buried long ago,” Jinx said. “This fella may not be fresh as this morning’s milk, but he’s fairly new to the ground.”
“She’s right,” Terry said. He stood up, got the shovel, and started gently digging around the body. It took a long while, but in time it was uncovered. It was a man in a brown-and-white pin-stripe suit, lying slightly on his side with his knees pushed up toward his middle. The teeth we had seen was in a skull. A lot of him was missing, but he didn’t need any of it back.
The white stripes on his suit had turned the color of the red clay, and there wasn’t any shoes on the feet, just brown silk socks with blue clocks on them. There were still strips of flesh where the face had been, and on the skull was a brown narrow-brimmed hat. It was crushed up, but it was easy to see that, like the suit, it had been something that cost money and most likely went with a new cigar and gold watch chain.
Terry got down on his hands and knees and looked the body over. He said, “It still has an odor about it. You’re right, Jinx. He hasn’t been in the ground all that long.”
Terry opened the man’s clay-caked coat. When he did, way it stuck to the rotting body, it made a sound like something ripping. He reached inside the man’s coat pockets, but there wasn’t anything in them. He fumbled through the outside pockets and found some threads and a button. He pulled off the hat, and when he did the man’s skull crumbled somewhat. You could see that the back of his head had been crushed. Terry took the hat, which was dark in the back, and shook it into some kind of shape. He looked inside of it and let out his breath.
“It has his name stenciled on the inside band,” he said. “Warren Cain.”
He showed it to us. I let out my breath.
“Wasn’t that name in May Lynn’s book?” I said.
“That was the man her brother was running with,” Terry said. “The one who helped him rob the bank. Now we know what happened to their partnership.”
“And if that ain’t enough, they took his dadburn shoes,” Jinx said.
“Jake would be my guess,” Terry said. “It would make sense they came here to bury the money, and an argument ensued-”
“Ensued?” Jinx said.
“Started,” Terry said. “And when it did, it turned ugly, and Jake killed him, buried him, and put the money on top of him. My assumption is they had already dug the hole for the money, and Jake didn’t want to dig another. Probably caught him from behind with the shovel.”
“Maybe there wasn’t an argument, and he planned to kill him all along,” I said.
“Either way makes sense,” Terry said. “He killed him, hid the money on top of him, and took his shoes because he liked them. He’d have probably taken the hat and the suit, too, if he hadn’t covered them in blood by hitting Warren with that shovel.”
“That’s all tough on the dead man and all,” Jinx said, “but maybe we ought to count the money. Ain’t like he’s gonna get any deader.”
We counted it twice. There was close to a thousand dollars. When we put the money back in the bag, it was on the edge of night.
“It’s like we done dug up a pirate’s chest,” Jinx said.